Chapter 9

CAROLINE, LONGHURST, 1991

Athena chewed on her bottom lip, oversized sunglasses hiding her reddened eyes. It was almost ten in the morning. We had knocked on every bedroom door. We had checked the summerhouse and the long-unused stable block. We wandered the gardens calling Freddie's name, peered up trees, rattled bushes. I had even walked to the end of the lawn and looked back to see if he had curled up and fallen asleep on the scaffolding. Nobody we spoke to could remember having seen him for hours—although neither did anyone apart from Athena seem at all worried about that.

The longer we searched, the more annoyed with Freddie I felt—and the more anxious I was to get away. From this house, this family. Any minute, Granny Violet might emerge and start screeching at me again. Philip Willoughby could already be sifting through Austen's studio looking for Self-Portrait as Sphinx to throw on last night's still-smoldering bonfire.

"Look, Athena, why don't you call Karl and get him to take you home? Or Patrick can drop you at the station and then come back for me. I promise, Freddie will turn up soon enough."

Athena was adamant she had to stay until he returned. "Something's happened, I can just feel it. It was a silly fight. But I went too far. I said things I shouldn't have. I upset him and maybe he's done something stupid," she said ruefully.

"It didn't sound so different," I said, without thinking.

"Excuse me?" she said sharply.

Oh damn, I thought, mentally kicking myself.

"Sorry, Athena. It's just that I was in my room last night, changing shoes, and, well, I could hear you two through the wall. Shouting. And—obviously I didn't catch everything and I don't know the whole story, but from the sound of it, it didn't seem that unusual for you..."

"So you were eavesdropping on us."

"I couldn't really help it, could I?" I said, irritated by her tone, especially after the hours I'd just spent scouring Longhurst with her. "Look, we both know he'll turn up soon enough, having spent the night in a laundry basket or a cupboard or somewhere else ridiculous enough for him to make a story out of it. And either he won't remember there was an argument or he'll claim not to remember what he said, or anything he's done, and he certainly won't apologize, and honestly, Athena, I don't know why you put up with it, I really don't. He made you beg for an invitation to come to this party, refused to give you a lift, hasn't introduced you as his girlfriend to anyone in the family, and now he's ruined the whole night with his disappearing act. Just call Karl and get him to pick you up in your dad's car and drive you back to Cambridge. Please. This doesn't need to be your problem. Freddie doesn't have to be your problem."

Athena said something I did not catch.

"Excuse me?"

"I said look who's an expert on relationships all of a sudden."

I decided not to rise to this.

"Look, have you eaten anything, at least?" I asked, changing the subject as I cautiously opened the trunk of Patrick's car, just enough to put my bag inside. As I did so, I could not resist checking to make sure the picnic blanket was where I had left it. I pressed it with my hand and could feel one hard corner of the painting underneath. I placed my overnight bag carefully next to it, then closed and locked the trunk again.

"It looks like they're handing out breakfast somewhere," I said, jerking my head toward Terry, Patrick's neighbor from college, who was silently standing next to a little wheely suitcase staring at us and eating a bacon sandwich, dripping ketchup onto the gravel. Seeing us look over, he raised a hand abruptly in greeting, losing several slices of bacon as a result.

"I can't possibly eat right now," Athena told me, irritated.

Something suddenly occurred to me. "Have you checked where Freddie's car is?" I asked her. "He drove himself up here, didn't he?"

"My God, you're right. The car. What if he sped off somewhere, drunk?"

"He's more likely to be asleep in the back seat with an empty wine bottle," I said, meaning to sound reassuring. Athena did not take it that way, letting out an angry little humph and setting off at a clip in search of Freddie's car.

"See you back in Cambridge, okay?" I shouted.

Head down, Athena ignored me. She'll be fine once he turns up again, I told myself. Right now I had bigger things to worry about. This was the last possible point that I could change my mind about taking the painting, and even then it would be practically impossible to return it without alerting anyone. I had tossed and turned all night in that creaky iron bed, trying to come up with a plan, waiting for Patrick to stumble back, my triumph at having found the painting, saved it from destruction, slowly curdling as a series of realizations hit. I couldn't keep the painting, couldn't sell it or donate it to any institution. I couldn't tell anyone what had happened, or how I had come into possession of it. I wasn't even sure yet how I would confess to Patrick what I had done.

Terry, having finished his breakfast, ambled over. "I don't suppose you can give me a lift?" he asked, eying the car. "I need to get back to college and everyone else I know seems to have left without me."

"I'm really sorry," I told him. "It's not my car and there really isn't room. Perhaps one of the Willoughbys could call you a taxi to the station?"

I called a further apology after him as he shuffled back toward the house.

A few minutes later, Patrick emerged from the front door and made his way down the steps juggling two coffees in white Styrofoam cups and his suit carrier. He opened the passenger door for me, and I sat down—before leaping out again immediately.

"Urgh, God, what's that?" I squealed, touching the seat. "It's soaking."

Patrick shook his head. "Fuck's sake. I told Arno he could borrow the car to go get cigarettes. What's he done?"

A frown creased his forehead. He knelt to inspect the seat more closely. After a moment, he gave it a sniff.

"Just water," he said, straightening up, obviously relieved. "Here, there's some tissues in the glove compartment we can mop it up with, and I'm pretty sure this is waterproof."

After Patrick had sponged the seat as dry as he could, he laid his suit carrier out for me to sit on. Then we drove off, turning on the gravel and speeding toward the gate.

"What was all that about, with Terry?" he asked me. I told him, still feeling a bit guilty about not being able to offer him a lift.

"I'm sure he'll be fine," said Patrick. "The person I feel sorry for is whoever had to share a bedroom with him last night."

Before I had begun regularly spending the night in Patrick's room, I thought he was joking about his neighbor's snoring. On the top floor of a nineteenth-century college building, overlooking one of the quads, Patrick's room occupied one corner of what had originally been a much larger living space, subdivided to fit in more students, with only one thin internal wall separating it from Terry's room. As a result, when Terry was in, which was always, we could hear every snore, burp, and fart, every scrinch of his bedsprings, the whir of his computer fan, and Terry tapping away in urgent bursts at his keyboard, half the night through. Patrick had once asked him what all the clattering in the small hours was about—Terry turned out to be trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

It was about midday by the time we got back to Cambridge. Most of the journey had been spent in hungover silence, both of us deep in thought. We parked in college, pulling up into a corner of my quad. There were only a couple of other cars in there for once, and nobody around. A radio blared from the windows of the college kitchen. We both climbed out of the car, unfolded ourselves, stretched, and groaned. Several things in my back popped. Patrick yawned so widely I could hear his jaw crack.

The moment I had been silently dreading had arrived. "Patrick," I said. "There's something I need to tell you."

I beckoned him around to the back of the car. Looking a bit puzzled, he followed. I opened the trunk. I lifted my bag out and put it down on the cobbles at my feet. I flipped back a corner of the picnic blanket.

"Jesus," he said.

I returned the blanket to its place. He closed the trunk.

"Jesus," he said again. "That's Self-Portrait as Sphinx, isn't it?"

"Yes. I think so."

"Are you going to tell me what it's doing in the trunk of my car?" Patrick said, frowning.

"I took it," I said.

Patrick's frown deepened until his eyebrows were practically touching.

"Just wait," I said. "Before you react, wait until you've heard everything. They were going to destroy it. I overheard them, Violet and Philip, last night, at the house. I heard him promise her he would find this painting and burn it. You understand, don't you, why I can't let that happen? I didn't steal it, Patrick. I saved it."

I was talking too quickly, gabbling really, trying to get it all out before he had a chance to interrupt.

Patrick closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. Then he looked around us, up at the windows. None were open. Even this late in the day, quite a few of the rooms still had their curtains drawn.

"That's not all," I said.

"Oh God. How can that possibly not be all?" he said, his voice cracking slightly.

"Violet said that Austen promised her years ago that he had destroyed the canvas with his own hands. I know this sounds crazy, but I think Juliette put a message in the painting, and it's something the Willoughby family are desperate to keep hidden. An awful secret."

I could see Patrick trying to process all this. "What exactly are you saying, Caroline?"

I took a deep breath.

"I don't think it was Oskar's ex-wife. I think Austen Willoughby set the fire that killed Juliette and Oskar. I think he did it to destroy that painting, but somehow it survived. And when he did manage to get his hands on it, he brought it back to Longhurst," I said, realizing how ludicrous it all sounded now that the words hung in the air between us, how many steps in the logic of this sequence were wobbly or missing.

"But why? Why not just destroy the thing, if it has a great and terrible family secret hidden in it?"

"Maybe he couldn't bring himself to destroy it. He was an artist himself, after all, and it is an undeniably extraordinary painting."

"But he could bring himself to murder his own niece, and her lover?"

I thought about this. "Maybe it was an accident. Maybe the fire was supposed to destroy the painting but not kill Oskar and Juliette. I don't know. But if you've got a better explanation of how it ended up at Longhurst, I'd like to hear it."

Patrick looked at me sideways and locked the trunk. "I need some time to think. I'm going for a walk."

It was only a few minutes after I had gone upstairs that I heard a light tap at the door. Dragging myself out of the armchair into which I had collapsed, I made my way over to open it.

Now listen, Patrick, I silently rehearsed. I know this is a lot to take in...

It was not Patrick at the door but two uniformed police officers, accompanied by one of the college porters.

"Caroline Cooper?"

I nodded mutely.

"Are we correct in thinking you were at Longhurst Hall last night?"

My mind was racing. What could they know, how could they know, about the missing painting already? I had righted everything I knocked over, placed all the canvas dust sheets back. Even if Philip Willoughby had gone looking for Juliette's painting and failed to find it, what evidence could there be that I was the one who had taken it? There was a horrible moment when it occurred to me that perhaps Patrick had turned me in....

They asked if they could come in, explaining that they were trying to talk to everyone who had been at the party, that there was someone they had concerns about, someone whose location they were attempting to establish.

"You want to talk to me about Freddie Talbot," I said, trying not to sound too relieved about this.

"We want to talk to you about Freddie Talbot," one of the officers confirmed.

PATRICK, CAMbrIDGE, 1991

"He'll be enjoying this, you know," Harry said, unconvincingly, kicking his heels against the wall of the master's lodge. "It's classic Freddie. That fucker. That joker. He used to love doing this when we were kids playing hide-and-seek, freaking everyone out, hiding for so long that everyone started getting genuinely worried. He'll turn up. He'll probably come strolling in halfway through the next Osiris dinner, ask what we're all looking so surprised about, what he's missed. That will be the punch line, the look on our faces."

Eric Lam gave a half-hearted chuckle. Benjy Taylor smiled faintly. I think we were all aware that forty-eight hours after Freddie had last been seen, especially given what the police had found at Longhurst, things were starting to look very worrying indeed.

The only person who did not seem to have picked up on this was that idiot Ivo Strang, who kept making the same joke about how much money he owed Freddie for drugs and how he hoped he would never show up again. The third time he made it, just as Athena joined us, I told him quite firmly to shut up.

We had all been asked to be here to meet Freddie's mother and her husband, who had flown in from South Africa. Having arrived directly from a briefing by the police at Longhurst, they were being shown around Freddie's room while we waited outside the master's lodge. Arno von Westernhagen made it back from lectures just as we were being ushered inside, and I realized I hadn't actually seen him since he borrowed my car.

I hung back and tapped him on the shoulder as we walked single file into the wood-paneled drawing room. "I've a little bone to pick with you," I said.

"Oh yes?" he whispered, only barely turning his head, but visibly tensing up.

"What the fuck happened to my front seat?"

"The passenger seat? Oh, right, yes," he said, his shoulders dropping half an inch. "Sorry about that. I bought a big bottle of water from the service station and it leaked on the way back. If there's been any damage..."

He trailed off as the master—silver-haired, a world-famous economist, standing behind his desk in an olive tweed suit—cleared his throat. There weren't enough chairs for everyone, so some people had to hover awkwardly around the fireplace or by the window. No one seemed to know quite where to look or what to say. I kept trying to give Athena, who had staked a spot close to the door, an empathetic smile, but she was not making eye contact with anyone.

This must have been so much harder, more complicated, for her than for the rest of us. Caroline had tried to reach out—with notes in her cubby, phone calls, ringing her doorbell—but the response had been complete, stony silence.

"Thank you all for coming," said the master. "As you can all imagine, there are some questions that Freddie's mother would like to ask you about the events of last weekend."

It was his mother's husband, Cameron, who posed the first one. Freddie had once described Cameron to me as looking "like a tennis instructor," and I could see what he meant. Tall, slim, very tanned, somewhat younger than Freddie's mother, he actually owned a private game reserve a couple of hours outside Cape Town, where he and Arabella had been living for about the last decade.

His question was whether Freddie had been behaving oddly in the weeks running up to the party.

"I didn't notice anything," I said, mainly to break the silence. "Freddie seemed very much his usual self to me."

I was close enough to Cameron to hear him snort softly.

It was hard to know what to say, really. Caroline had already described to the police the argument she had seen Freddie having in the car a few weeks earlier. They had not seemed especially surprised by what she was saying, although they had seemed interested. What she had not mentioned was having seen Freddie sneaking around the Osiris clubhouse the morning of the party. I was sure that didn't matter, I told her. Harry had already discovered—and informed us all—that several very valuable items that had been in the society's possession since it was founded had gone missing at some point over the last few weeks, and it seemed pretty clear who the main suspect was.

"Has any of you ever seen Freddie use... drugs?" asked Arabella.

"Oh no," we all said at once, practically in unison.

She arched a plucked eyebrow. Her long blond hair—now with streaks of silver and white—was tucked up in a bun. I could not help but notice she was dressed all in black, as if for a funeral.

"What I can't understand," she said, shaking her head, "was where on earth Freddie thought he was driving to, at that time of night."

Neither could I, to be honest. The last reported sighting of Freddie at Harry's party had been around 1:00 a.m. Freddie's car had been found around midday on Sunday, halfway between Longhurst and the train station. It had skidded completely off the road and down a sharp slope into a swiftly flowing stretch of the River Ouse. The driver's door was open. The car had been abandoned.

The house and its gardens had been searched by the police, as had the woods beyond. Alarmingly, on the flagstones at one side of the house, at the foot of the scaffolding, they had found a large puddle of blood, which was later confirmed as matching Freddie's blood type. That was the point at which people had started taking things a lot more seriously. Everywhere you went in college, the past couple of days, you could hear people discussing what had happened, sharing the latest developments, exchanging theories.

One of the scenarios the police were considering, we were told, was that Freddie had climbed up the scaffolding and fallen—and then, injured and possibly concussed, had attempted to drive himself to the hospital, only to veer off the road and into the water. They were exploring the possibility that injured, and impaired by the alcohol and other intoxicants he had consumed, he had then exited his vehicle and been carried away by the current.

"If any of you know anything which would help the police with their investigation," the master interjected, "we would encourage you to inform them as soon as possible."

I tried not to look at Athena. Eric Lam stared very hard down at one of his shoes. Ivo Strang was gazing out the window. The truth was, we had all heard the rumors swirling—that the vet school was investigating a large quantity of missing tranquilizers, that Freddie was on course to fail his final year.

After an uncomfortable half hour of further interrogation, we were told we were free to leave. Athena was out of the door almost before the master had finished opening it.

Harry and I walked Arabella and Cameron to their waiting taxi. When we got to the car, Cameron paused for a moment, then turned to us.

"If you boys know anything about what's going on, you need to tell us. For Frederick's own good," he said sharply.

Harry stiffened. "I think you'll find we are all very concerned about Freddie," he said.

"I think you'll find," Cameron said, in a mock-British accent. "Well, I think you'll find we already know you're lying about his drug use," he added. "That's not news to us—we got a letter home from his house master when he was thirteen to say Freddie was smoking pot. Did you know he was also selling drugs? Were you boys buying from him? Because some of your lot evidently were. His college friends. Your party guests. The police have told us that when they pulled Freddie's car from the river, they found a black carryall in the trunk containing a kilo of cocaine, the same of ketamine, and hundreds of Ecstasy pills."

"Bloody hell," I said. Of course I had known Freddie was dealing, but not on that scale. Harry said nothing. I looked at him. It was then I realized how angry he was.

"How dare you," he said, his pink cheeks mottled with fury. "How dare you come here and lecture me about Frederick's best interests. As if either of you has ever shown any interest in his best interests, or in him, before now."

Arabella flinched.

"Do you know how much it would have meant to him, if you had both invited him to stay with you over there in South Africa just one summer, one Christmas, instead of palming him off on us at Longhurst? Did it ever strike you as a funny coincidence that he was studying to be a vet, and you run a game reserve? Did you never think that all those times he got in trouble at school, and you had to engage with his existence, might have been an attempt to get your attention?"

The taxi driver, looking over his shoulder to see what was going on, asked how many of us were getting in.

Arabella climbed into the back. Cameron followed, slamming the door behind him. It took him a couple of experimental fumbles before he got the window down. He met Harry's glare steadily.

"Perhaps," he said, "if Freddie and his mother hadn't been cheated out of what should have been rightfully theirs, if Arabella's father hadn't been passed over in the order of inheritance and drunk himself to death trying to work out why, then a lot of things might have been different. But that's not something we talk about ever, is it, Harry, eh? That's not a thread anyone in your family wants to start pulling at."

Arabella leaned forward to say something and then thought better of it.

Cameron was not quite finished: "Here's something else for you both to chew on: according to what the police have told us, in the glove compartment of Freddie's car was a notebook. Full of names, phone numbers, addresses. All the people he was selling to. The people he was buying from. All of it in his own handwriting. And from what I understand it makes very interesting reading indeed."