Page 37 of The Blue Hour

‘You saw his car?’

‘Yes, it’s bright red, a sports car – you don’t see many of those round here. And he drives like a lunatic, so he stands out.’

The second policeman, the younger of the two, smirked. ‘Like a lunatic? He was driving fast, you mean?’

Grace nodded.

The older one turned to Vanessa. ‘And there was nothing … odd about your husband’s visit, no quarrels, nothing like that?’

Vanessa frowned. ‘Well … you know that we’re separated? We’re getting a divorce. But it’s fairly amicable. He came to see me to talk about some money things, and—’

‘He came all the way up here?’ The younger one again. ‘From Oxford? He couldn’t just have called?’

‘We’re still friends,’ Vanessa said, her soft, gravelly tones turned hard as glass, ‘as I said. You do understand what amicable means?’The policeman turned pink to the tops of his ears. Vanessa directed her attention to the other one. ‘It’s strange, as I said, that he missed his sister’s birthday, but it’s not completely out of character for Julian to go awol. He has … lots of friends, usually a few girlfriends, no end of creditors and he drinks quite a bit. He’s not here, as you can see.’ She wafted a hand in the air. ‘Do feel free to take a look around if you wish. As far as I know, he left on Thursday, like Grace just told you, not long after I drove to Glasgow. When I came back here on Sunday around midday, his car was gone, so I assumed he’d driven back south.’

They didn’t look around. They just took her word for it, gave her a card and the usual spiel aboutif you remember anything, and off they went.

As soon as the police officers were in their car and heading back to the mainland, Vanessa got up and left the kitchen. She walked outside and up the hill, with Grace trailing after her. ‘Why didn’t you tell them?’ Grace called out.

Vanessa ignored her, and when Grace called out again, she whirled around, her expression furious. ‘Tell themwhat, Grace? That he destroyed all my work? What if something’s happened to him? If I tell them what he did, they’ll thinkIdid something to him. The press will find out, they’ll be camping on the beach, crawling all over my island. They’ll never leave me alone.’

‘But … how could they think you had anything to do with it?’ Grace protested. ‘You were in Glasgow, Vanessa, you were at the gallery, how could you have done anything to him?’

Vanessa said nothing; she just stood there, biting her lip, her gaze shifting off to one side. She blinked furiously and then, tossing her hair over her shoulder, she turned and marched off towards the studio.

The phone rang and rang; Grace was forbidden to answer it.

Another policeman came back a few days later, a different one, a man in plain clothes, from down south, who insisted on talking to Vanessa alone. Grace lingered in the hallway; she heard him pose the same questions the other police officers had put to her, plus a few more besides.

What is theprecisenature of your relationship to Mrs Haswell? he asked Vanessa. Where does she sleep? How did Mrs Haswell and Mr Chapman get on? Didtheyargue at all? At the end of the interview, the detective told Vanessa that while a number of people could confirm that the red sports car had been seen driving through the village that Thursday lunchtime, one witness claimed to have seen it heading back across the causeway later on that day, in the evening.

‘I wasn’t here!’ Vanessa snapped at him. ‘How many fucking times?’

Grace re-entered the room then, quickly stepping in to defuse the situation before Vanessa got herself into trouble. ‘Thursday evening, did you say?’ she asked. ‘What time on Thursday evening?’

The detective peered at her, eyes narrowed. ‘Where wereyouon Thursday evening?’

‘Well, I … I was at work on Thursday,’ Grace said. ‘I was in the surgery until six, I suppose, or maybe a little after. We’ve got a review coming up and there’s a lot of paperwork, and after that I took Marguerite her Diovan because she forgot to pick it up again, and—’

‘Marguerite?’

‘She’s a patient.’

‘Is it usual for you to make house calls?’

‘Not really, no, but Marguerite lives just around the corner from the surgery, in one of the harbour cottages, and she’s … well, she’s rather lonely so I try to drop in on her from time totime. As I say, she’d not picked up her blood pressure medication, so I took that round and then she offered me some supper, which was very welcome as I’d been rushed off my feet and hadn’t got round to doing any shopping, so we ate, and—’

‘What did you eat?’

Grace shrugged. ‘Um … French onion soup. Salad. We each had a glass of red wine, and then coffee.’

‘What time did you leave?’

‘I stayed a little while, because, as I say, she’s lonely. It was still light, though. Still light, but the water was over the causeway, so …’ Grace looked at the tide chart on the kitchen wall. ‘Some time between 8.30 and 9.30 it must have been.’

‘The tide was in?’

‘It was coming in.’ Grace glanced at Vanessa, who was staring out of the window, didn’t appear to be listening at all. ‘It was just about too late to cross over.’

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