Page 38 of The Blue Hour

‘Just about?’ the detective repeated.

‘Well,’ Grace said, ‘if you were in a four-by-four and you knew what you’re doing, you could have made it …’

‘The island isn’t private property, you know,’ Vanessa said, suddenly rejoining the conversation. ‘Anyonecould have come across. People do, especially in summer, to walk up to the rock.’

‘Atnight?’ the detective asked.

‘In theevening,’ Vanessa replied pointedly. ‘Depending on the weather, the sunset can be breathtaking.’

Grace frowned, chewing her lower lip. ‘Vanessa,’ she said quietly, ‘you don’t think … he wouldn’t have tried to get back over, would he? When the tide was coming in?’

Vanessa raised her hand to her mouth, eyes suddenly bright with tears. The detective, though, was shaking his head. ‘That can’t be it, our witness would have seen that, wouldn’t they? And in any case, his car would have been found by now.’

Vanessa scraped her teeth over her lower lip. ‘There was an incident a while ago – six, maybe seven years?’ She looked to Grace for confirmation; Grace nodded. ‘It was before I lived here. Someone got into trouble on the causeway, their car was washed away and it was weeks before it was found.’

‘But there was a storm then,’ Grace said. ‘There was a terrible storm.’

The detective looked at her for a long while. ‘And the day we’re talking about?’

‘Calm,’ Grace replied. ‘It’s summer. Most of the time this bay is dead calm.’

The detective nodded slowly, looking back at his notes. He turned once more to Vanessa. ‘Can you give me the name of the hotel you were staying in while you were in Glasgow?’ he asked.

Vanessa tipped her head back, sighed. ‘I wasn’t in a hotel,’ she said, looking him dead in the eye. ‘I was staying in Douglas Lennox’spied-à-terreon Blythswood Square. If you ask him, he’ll probably deny it. He’s frightened of his wife. He thinks if she leaves him, she’ll take him to the cleaners.’

The detective looked from Vanessa to Grace and back to Vanessa again. ‘You have a sexual relationship with Mr Lennox?’

Vanessa pressed her lips together, as though to stifle a smile. ‘He’s a gallerist who shows my work. We sleep together occasionally.’

The detective pushed back his chair and got to his feet. ‘All right if I take a look around, Mrs Chapman?’

Two days later, more police came, a dozen of them, roaming all over the island just as Vanessa feared they would. They searched the house, they went up to the rock and looked over the edge, they hunted through the wood. They found nothing save, in the studio, traces of blood. ‘Mine,’ Vanessa told the detective. ‘Idropped a vase and cut myself picking up the pieces.’ She held up her still-bandaged hand.

In the house, the phone kept ringing, and Vanessa couldn’t afford to ignore it any longer, not with the police hanging around; she had to field angry calls from Douglas, hysterical ones from Isobel.

She glided through it all, glacially detached, her face a mask. She answered all their questions: was he depressed (a little, sometimes, he was grieving, his girlfriend died in an accident six months ago), did he have money problems (yes, yes, yes, I’ve told you, yes), do you think he might have taken his own life (—).

The blood turned out to be Vanessa’s, just as she’d said it was.

A month or so after the police visited, a fisherman in a boat a couple of miles south-west of Sheepshead Island found a black wallet in his nets; it had Julian Chapman’s credit cards inside it.

They found no other trace of him, or of his car.

He was gone.

25

‘He just … he destroyed everything?’ Becker has repeated this a few times, he can’t seem to take it in. The details of Julian’s disappearance – the missing car, the wallet – all of these were reported at the time, butthis? This act of vandalism? He has never heard mention of it. ‘He destroyed everything she’d made, everything she’d been working on? And that’s why she pulled out of the show?’ Grace nods. She is sitting opposite him with her hands in her lap and her head bent almost to her chest. She brushes the back of her hand against a cheek. ‘But … why didn’t she explain to Douglas, at least? She could have saved herself so much pain andexpense– God, the court case, years of recriminations …’

Grace looks up, moves her head gently from side to side. ‘Douglas would have wanted to go to the police, she knew that. He would have wanted her to claim on insurance, or to appeal for criminal compensation, and she … justwouldn’t. Believe me, I tried to persuade her, but she was afraid …’ She tails off, bends her head again.

‘Afraid? Of the police, you mean, that they would suspect her?’

When she looks up again, there is a guardedness in Grace’s expression. ‘Ye-es,’ she says warily. ‘She was afraid they wouldsuspect her, she was afraid of what it would do to her sanctuary, to Eris, if people thought Julian was somewhere out here. But more than that … I think that she was also just heartbroken. And in shock. She didn’t want to face up to what had happened, to the violence of it.’

She pours herself a little more wine; as she refills his glass, he can see her hand is trembling.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘this must be very upsetting to talk about.’

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