Page 62 of The Blue Hour

Becker’s phone, tucked snugly into his inside jacket pocket, vibrates gently and he allows himself a small smile of victory as he moves towards the door. A crease appears between Grace’s brows. ‘You’re not going right now?’ she says. ‘There’s still water over the causeway in the middle, you’ll get wet.’

He turns his back on her. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘I’m going outside to smoke a cigarette.’

He retrieves one of the cigarettes he’d made earlier and lights it while walking over towards the bench he sat on that morning. Checking his phone to see if he still has wifi, he sees that Sebastian has messaged:CALL ME.

The phone rings just once before Sebastian answers. ‘It’s not Julian Chapman.’

‘O-kay,’ Becker says. His heart is beating oddly fast; he feels light-headed, as dizzy as he did on the rock. He drops his barely smoked cigarette and puts his boot on it.

‘You don’t sound very surprised,’ Sebastian says.

Becker hesitates, perplexed. She was telling the truth. ‘I … Iamsurprised.’ Grace was telling the truth. ‘I suppose this is good news,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ Sebastian says, although he sounds disappointed, his hopes of front-page stories about the museum crushed. ‘They’ve found a familial match on the DNA database, some guy who went missing in the nineties, he’d had mental health issues, drug problems. He was last seen in the Lake District.’ There’s a pause. ‘Did Vanessa ever spend time in the Lake District?’

‘I … not that I know of,’ Becker says. He hears a noise and turns to see Grace coming out of the house, carrying something in her hand. She sees him and stops, raising her other hand to shield her eyes from the sun. He cannot see her expression, but dread courses through him, ice cold. ‘Is Emmeline all right, Seb? Is she going to be OK?’

‘Yeah, I think so. She’s stable, in any case. Thank you for asking. I can fill you in on all the details when you get back, but the immediate takeaway from this bone business is that we can no longer displayDivisionII. Not as it is, not until we’ve spoken to the Rileys, but I can’t really see them giving us permission.’

Becker takes a couple of steps towards the bench; he wants tosit down, he is feeling quite unwell. ‘Sorry, who?Whodo we need to speak to?’

‘The family,’ Sebastian says, ‘the Rileys. The man who went missing, the chap whose rib ended up in this sculpture, his name was Nicholas Riley.’

Becker vomits all over his shoes.

46

Carrachan, 1993

Grace was at the surgery in Carrachan – it had been a busy day, there had been a cold snap, it was the start of the flu season. At the end of a grinding shift, just as she was shutting down her computer, getting ready to leave, the practice nurse popped her head around the door. ‘Dr Haswell, there’s a young man in the waiting room, says he knows you. He says he’s not ill, though if you ask me he doesn’t look too clever. Nick, from London.’London, said as though it were an especially virulent STD.

Walking down the hallway from her office to the waiting room, Grace was trying to think whether there could be a different Nick from London, because it couldn’t beherNick, could it? How could he be here?

And yet there, sitting in one of the bright yellow moulded plastic chairs against the opposite wall, he was. He looked up but she couldn’t meet his eye; instead she looked down at her feet. Her face was burning, she felt as though she might fall if she took another step.

When she raised her eyes at last, he was on his feet, holding out his arms. ‘Hi, Grace.’

Hedidlook ill – scrawny and whey-faced, his pretty face pimpled with spots – but there was still plenty of the Nick she knew a decade earlier: the light in his soft hazel eyes, the deep dimplejust to the left side of his mouth. She didn’t hug him but she smiled, and his own grin widened in response and she felt … notelation, because that would be less complicated, that would be purer. What she felt was pride, the absence of shame.

That is what the end of loneliness feels like, she thought. It felt like the end of hostilities: with the world, with herself. It felt like the beginning of possibility. The hard edges of her world began to soften, the boundary dividing her from everyone else began to break.

Nick stayed. He slept on her couch. He’d be there when she left for work and when she returned, the duvet pulled up to his chin. He rarely ventured out. He was cold, always cold, he couldn’t warm up though he’d had her heating turned up high all day long. She made him soup, persuaded him to eat, to wash; eventually to talk.

He was sorry, he said, just showing up like this, he didn’t deserve her kindness. He’d been going through a bad patch. He and Audrey had got themselves into trouble – with drugs, then with money. He’d nowhere else to go.

‘Where is Audrey now?’ Grace asked. ‘Do you know?’

He shook his head. They’d lived for a time with Audrey’s sister in Manchester, but they argued constantly and the sister threw them out. Nick crashed with friends, sleeping on sofas until they tired of him, too. When Audrey got a job at a pub in Kendal, in the Lakes, he followed, but there was someone else on the scene by then, some other guy, so that didn’t work out either.

‘I think she’s probably back in Manchester. But …’ he sighed, heavily, ‘I think she’s lost to me. I only dabbled with the gear, but Audrey reallyinvested. I love her,’ he said sadly, ‘but I knew in the end I’d have to make a choice: I could be with her, or I could get clean, and I chose to get clean.’

‘You always were canny,’ Grace said.

He shook his head, looked up at her from his nest on the couch. He was so sorry, he said, so sorry for leaving the way they had. It was unfair. It was cruel. He hadn’t meant to be cruel at the time, hadn’t meant anything at all. Audrey had wanted to go and he’d just followed her out the door.

‘It was a long time ago,’ Grace said, though when she thought about it the hurt was just as fresh as if it had happened yesterday. ‘Bygones,’ she lied, smiling, ‘water under the bridge.’

She told him he could stay for as long as he liked. It would be just like the old days.

---