Page 59 of The Blue Hour

‘Helena.’ He wants to pitch himself forward, into the sea. ‘Don’t … please don’t say that—’

‘Us living at Fairburn, Beck,that’snot working. Not you and me. And you see, this is exactly what I mean,’ she rushes on, ‘you’re not sure of me! I want you to be sure of me. I need you to be. And you should be. But you’re not, and it’s not all that surprising, because he’s around all the time, and Emmeline’s doing her best to make us all miserable. It was a nice idea, the three of us being all civilized and grown up andFrenchabout everything, but it’s just too hard …’

Becker lies back on the rock, squinting up at the sky. The sun is warm on his face, he can taste salt on his lips. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘We’ll go.’

‘We don’t have to cut all ties, you can still work at Fairburn. Seb and I agreed that—’

‘Seb and you?’

‘I wanted us to be able to present you with a united front,’ she says.

Becker laughs again. ‘You’re such a schemer,’ he says. He listens to her breath, and to the sea, and for a while neither of them speaks.

‘Please come home,’ she says at last. ‘I need you here. We need you.’

He feels light when he crawls away from the edge of the rock. He feels as though if he jumped up into the air the wind rushing up the cliff would catch him, blow him clean away. A gull swoops overhead, he ducks and laughs, he wishes Helena were here, to see this, to see him, on Vanessa’s island, on her sacred rock. He starts to take photographs again, knowing as he does that they won’t come close to conveying the majesty of the place, but he persists anyway, taking dozens of pictures before it occurs to him that he never finished listening to all of his messages.

He dials into his voicemail again. ‘Becker? Are you there?’ It’s Sebastian this time, calling early this morning. He sounds distracted and slightly out of breath. ‘Yeah, listen … I assume Hels has filled you in on all this, but we’ve had quite the weekend here. Lady Em’s in hospital – on the mend I think, but … we had quite a scare. I’m just waiting for the doc now … but I thought I’d give you a call, because the lab doing the testing sent an email on Friday – with all the drama yesterday I missed it – I’m going to forward it on to you in a minute, but the headline is that this bone, this rib, it comes from a man, they estimate his age to be late twenties, though there’s apparently a window of error on that – seven or eight years or something, so … yeah …’ There’s apause. Becker can hear Sebastian speaking to someone else in the background, and then he hears something else, something close, and he turns to see Grace, grim-faced, hauling herself up on to the rock. He takes a step back.

On the phone, Sebastian is still talking. ‘Uh … yeah, sorry … they can also tell that it isn’t an old bone – they haven’t done the full range of tests yet but they can tell frommineralization, I think? Something like that anyway, they can tell that the bone hasn’t been in the ground for hundreds of years, it’s much less than that, possibly even less than a decade … They’re going to do carbon dating, which will give us a more accurate picture of when the person died, and they’re also going to extract DNA so they can do a comparison with the sample they have from Chapman’s sister. So that’s where we are. Look, all in all I would say there’s a strong chance we’ve found Julian Chapman. Things could move pretty quickly from here on in, and if I’m right, this is going to be a very big story. We need to get ready, and we need to do it soon. Give me a call when you can, yeah?’

Becker puts his phone back into his pocket. He is standing in the middle of the rock, around three feet from the cliff, five feet from its opposite edge, where Grace now stands, red-faced, panting like a dog. ‘I couldn’t leave you to come up here alone,’ she says, wiping the sweat from her face with the palms of her hands. ‘I’d never forgive myself if something happened.’ What, Becker wonders, could happen? He could slip and fall, he supposes, but what on earth would Grace do about that?

Now, far from being helpful, she is in his way, blocking the only safe route down from the rock. She peers at him intently. ‘Is everything all right?’ she asks. ‘You’re not still angry about Emmeline, are you? I was only thinking of you, you and Helena.’

Becker says nothing, but she must read something in his eyes,or perhaps the colour has leached from his face, because he sees it dawn on her. Sheknows. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘The bone, then?’

He nods. ‘Yes.’

‘It’s not Julian,’ Grace says right away.

Becker exhales slowly through pursed lips. ‘Itis, Grace. They haven’t done the DNA testing yet, but they’ve established that the rib comes from a man, a man who died young, in his twenties or thirties.’ Just then, he sees something, or thinks he sees something – a flicker of fear crosses her face. ‘And he didn’t die hundreds of years ago, he died in the past few decades.’ Grace covers her mouth with her hand. ‘So, it seems pretty likely that it is Julian Chapman.’

He steps to one side, gesturing with one arm, mimingexcuse me. ‘I need to get going,’ he says. ‘I need to get back – there’s going to be a lot to sort out. As soon as they get a DNA match, the lab will have to tell the police, and the police will inform Chapman’s sister, and once that happens …’ He spreads his palms wide. Who knows?

‘It’s not Julian,’ Grace says again. She no longer looks afraid, she looks sad –resignedalmost. Defeated. ‘They won’t get a match,’ she says softly. She takes a step towards him, and then another.

Becker shuffles backwards. ‘You can’t say that for sure,’ he says, glancing quickly over his shoulder and taking another step back. She’s too close to him, much too close, and she keeps coming.

‘I can,’ she says, and she raises her hands, palms facing towards him. Becker shrinks back –what is she doing?– he thinks for a moment that she is going to push him, but instead she brings her hands to her lips, pressing her palms together in front of her mouth as though she were praying. ‘I can say that,’ she says, ‘I can say that, you see, because I know where Julian is, and he’s not in the wood.’

42

Eris, 2002

On her hands and knees on the grass outside the studio, Grace leaned towards Julian’s body, trying not to look at him as she paced her forefinger and middle finger on the side of his throat to feel for a pulse. His head was completely caved in on the other side, so a pulse wasn’tlikely, but you never knew. You couldn’t be too careful.

There was no pulse and yet, as she crouched there on the grass, she thought she could feel his heartbeat through the earth, feel the blood throbbing out of him, soaking into the soil. She closed her eyes and breathed in the rich ferric smell of it, in and out, in and out, in and out, she breathed, waiting for her own heartbeat to slow.

When she opened her eyes again, when she felt strong enough to get to her feet, she saw that the tide was coming in. It was almost too late to cross over. She allowed herself a moment of relief. No one was coming. No one would catch her with blood on her hands. She had time now, a full six hours, and by then it would be the middle of the night.

She touched him. She slid her hand down the side of his body and into his trouser pocket. Then she leaned over him and searched the other pocket, her hand closing around his car key.He’d left the sports car at the bottom of the track. She needed to move it as soon as possible.

As she walked down the hill, she felt a moment of elation: the hills opposite were velveted in lush, dark greens, the gorse had been burnished by the sun to a faded gold, the sea was glittering and glorious and Julian was dead. She wanted to sing, to proclaim her victory to someone, to say,Look! Look what I have done!

Just a moment, and then the giddy feeling passed, and she came down to earth, to face the practicality of her situation. She opened his car, recoiling from the heat and cigarette stink, and drove it up the track, parking it on the blind side of the house.

She went inside and washed her hands, splashed cold water on her face, poured herself a glass to drink. She considered her options. The sensible thing would be to wait in the house until nightfall in order to avoid being seen, but she found herself suddenly seized by an irrational fear that the next time she looked up the hill he would be gone, or the next time she looked up at the window, there he would be, his head stoved in and that terrible smile on his face.

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