questions the solicitor asked.’
‘You never think about things like that, do you?’ asked Deira.
Grace shook her head. ‘It was all horrible, to be honest. In some ways, that’s what made me more angry than anything else. That he’d left me to sort it all out.’
‘You’ve done brilliantly.’ Deira gave her a comforting smile. ‘I admire you, Grace. A terrible thing happened in your life. Both with the professor getting sick and then how it all ended. And yet here you are, driving through France and Spain and being . . . oh, I don’t know . . . so unflappable about it.’
‘I’m not unflappable,’ protested Grace. ‘I was practically catatonic when I had to identify his body.’
Which was true. The sequence of events was blurred in her mind and the memory of her time both identifying Ken and staying with him later had jumbled together, but she could still clearly picture the moment when she saw him lying in front of her at the hospital mortuary. There was a large bruise on his forehead and she’d wondered if the airbag hadn’t worked properly and if he’d slammed into the steering wheel, but she’d been afraid to ask. He’d looked older and thinner beneath the sheet that covered him, and although she’d heard many people say in the past that dead relatives looked as though they were sleeping, it was very clear to her that Ken wasn’t. The muscles on his face had slackened and he was paler than she had ever seen him before. When she went to touch him, she was shocked at how cold he was. It was him being cold that made it seem real. And yet she’d struggled to take it in. That he’d been alive and talking to her that morning. That he was dead now. That he must have, might have, could have planned this. She didn’t want to say anything in case she incriminated him, although she knew that suicide wasn’t a crime any more.
She’d asked if there was anything she could do. But of course there wasn’t. The truth was that she was in the way.
The next time she’d seen him was at the funeral home. She and Aline had selected a suit for him to wear, and the undertakers had toned down the bruise on his face. But even though she knew it was her husband in front of her, it was obvious to her that the living Ken was gone and had left nothing more than a shell behind.
She’d never said this to the children.
Fionn had said that his dad looked peaceful.
Aline and Regan agreed.
All of them assured each other that it was probably very fast and that he wouldn’t have suffered.
Grace had wanted to say that he must have suffered, that he’d drowned, that his last moments couldn’t have been easy. But then she thought that perhaps they’d been easier for him than many of his living moments since his diagnosis, and she felt horribly guilty for still being angry with him.
She wondered whether the guilt and the anger would ever leave her.
Deira watched Grace, seeing how her jaw tightened and how she was holding her breath. She felt guilty for having brought back memories that Grace clearly wanted to forget.
‘Did you take the photo of Cervantes?’ She knew she was changing the subject abruptly, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
‘I . . . Yes. Yes, I did,’ said Grace. ‘And I checked out the answers to El Greco.’
‘Well done you! Did you upload them?’
‘No,’ said Grace. ‘I was waiting to do it with you.’
‘You waited for me last time too. But it’s your treasure hunt, Grace. You can upload the answers whenever you want.’
‘We’ve been in this together the whole time,’ said Grace. ‘I wasn’t going to do it without you.’
‘Do you have the laptop?’
Grace nodded and took it out of the tote bag slung over her shoulder.
‘Let me nab some of the breakfast buffet first,’ she said to Deira.
She returned to the table a few minutes later with a selection of fruit and pastries, and then opened the laptop and uploaded the photo of Cervantes. As always, there was a nervous moment before it was accepted and she was given the extra number, which this time was 3.
‘There’s an El Greco museum in the city, but by the time I’d walked to the Cervantes statue, I wasn’t in the mood for a museum, especially when Google is around,’ said Grace. ‘So the answer is