Chapter 10

CAROLINE, CAMbrIDGE, 1991

I prodded Patrick gently on the arm, then sat up slowly, silently, in his narrow single bed. The alarm clock read 4:00 a.m. The only sound was the throaty rumble and occasional snort of Next-Door Terry's snores through the walls.

Patrick didn't stir as I put on my coat and boots, pocketed his keys, and closed the door quietly behind me. On the nights I stayed in his room, this had become my little ritual—sneaking out to wherever Patrick had parked to examine Self-Portrait as Sphinx. Once or twice, when I was sure there was nobody around, I had lifted the painting out entirely, examining the back of the age-blackened canvas and what looked like a pair of thumbprints on the stretchers, where someone—most likely Juliette herself!—had moved it with paint-covered hands.

It was an extraordinary work. Complex. Intricate. Unsettling. A painting you could get lost in, that you could spend a lifetime looking at. There was always some new detail to absorb, something strange and unexpected and intriguing which seemed to possess some very precise symbolic significance, if you could just work it out. Like the golden feathered wings neatly folded on the Juliette-Sphinx's back. The wings being what made her a Greek Sphinx, like the one that pounced on travelers on the road to Thebes and asked them to solve a riddle, and if they couldn't, gobbled them up.

I felt a bit like that traveler myself.

The Juliette-Sphinx occupied a clearing, in the middle of the painting, a patch of open ground studded with boulders in a landscape overgrown with fantastically entangled vegetation—great drooping flowers, sinister coils of thorns. In the gaps in the trees, all around the painting's central figure, strange little scenes were taking place. Near the top of the painting, running down a narrow path through dark, tangled woods, was a girl with flowing auburn hair, resembling Juliette herself. What she was fleeing, whatever was pursuing her, the painting did not show. What was unmistakable was her expression: one of wild, blind terror.

Prominent in the bottom left corner stood the figure that Harry's grandmother had reacted so strongly to: Juliette's sister, Lucy, in a long white dress, soaking and translucent, with wet hair partly covering her face. Her feet were bare, in a shimmering puddle. Her arms and legs were pale and mottled. Her toenails, her fingernails, had a hint of purple to them. Knowing what I did about who this was, knowing the lengths to which Juliette had gone to get the detail right, only added to the impact. It felt like something you were not sure you should look at. It felt like something that demanded you did so regardless.

This was clearly a world in which time worked strangely. On the left of the painting it looked to be late afternoon, a storm gathering. On the right, the moon was shining and it was already night. Across the top was a pattern of dark clouds. Everywhere you looked, in every nook and cranny, were the sort of sinister flights of fancy so familiar from the doodles in Juliette's journal, every bole on every tree, every shadowed stone or wizened branch holding at least the suggestion of something else: a leering face, a pair of eyes, a beckoning finger, something scuttling and many-legged. In the bottom right was that strange hooded figure in their boat, the same boat and figure as on the fragment of ancient papyrus I had seen in the Osiris clubhouse.

I could see why it had appealed to Breton. I could also see why it had upset the family. What I could not do was make heads or tails of it.

I had hoped that when Self-Portrait as Sphinx was in front of me, Juliette's secrets would reveal themselves. Why she had withdrawn it from the exhibition after a single night. Why her family had been determined to destroy it. What the terrible accusations were that led to her incarceration in a mental institution. I could find none. Clearly, her sister was an important figure in the painting, but I had searched it in vain for any reference to the Missing Maid, whose disappearance must have further shadowed her childhood. Or to Oskar and his wife, who she thought was following her. Or to her father.

I was not so much disappointed by the painting—it was truly remarkable—as frustrated by it. Could it be that it contained no coherent meaning, no mysterious message to decode? Perhaps I was trying to make the wrong kind of sense out of it, and it was just a nightmarish attempt to capture on canvas the jumble of Juliette's subconscious.

Then I would remind myself of her deliberate decision to paint herself as a Sphinx with a secret. How Harry's grandmother had reacted to the discovery that the painting might still exist. How Juliette talked about the painting in her journal.

I only had one final entry left to read now, a few pages long, dated January 25, 1938.

Trying to decipher Juliette's handwriting had always been a challenge, but these four pages were so cramped and jagged as to be almost illegible. If they did not divulge anything illuminating, then that was it: the remaining pages were blank.

One full day in the library. That was all it would take to finish my transcription. First thing in the morning I would be there once again, to take my place at my usual desk by the window, my enthusiasm for the task, my consciousness of the enormous stroke of good fortune I'd had in stumbling across her journal at all, haunted always by the painful thought that within just a few weeks of writing that final entry's last full stop, Juliette would be dead.

The college chapel clock clunked five, and, realizing the library would open in just a few hours, I reluctantly covered the painting back up and closed the trunk. As I turned the corner toward the college front gate, a bright sweep of headlights momentarily blinded me. A car pulled up across the road. Its door opened and then slammed. I stood there for a moment, partially concealed by Patrick's car, hoping that nobody had seen me.

Even though the figure across the road had her back to me, I recognized that dark tumble of hair, the elegant camel coat: it was Athena, being dropped off outside her house by the same silver Rolls-Royce that had driven her to Longhurst. I couldn't imagine what she was doing at this hour—never an early riser, she only ever saw dawn if she hadn't been to bed, and given what was going on with Freddie, it hardly seemed likely she had been out partying.

For a moment, I genuinely did not know how to react.

Athena had barely said a word to me since she'd stormed off at Longhurst. She hadn't turned up for lectures, wasn't answering her phone or her door, had not replied to a single one of my messages. I felt horrible for having doubted her intuition that something had happened to Freddie, for not having acknowledged from the start the seriousness of the situation and of her feelings about it. I felt hurt and baffled by how she had been acting since.

I crossed the road, and only when I was close enough to her that ignoring me would be impossible did I make my presence known. "Athena, where have you been?" I asked, meaning tonight but also the past week, trying to sound concerned rather than accusatory.

She gave a start. Once she had established who was addressing her, she focused on fumbling for her keys in her pocket.

"London," she said, curtly, over her shoulder.

"Are you okay? Look, I'm sorry if some of what I said the other day came across wrong. You're my best friend. I'm here, please talk to me. Let me help. I've been taking lecture notes, you can have them, it's an important term and you won't want to get behind, not with just months to go before finals."

I wanted to let her know that I was sorry, that I was here for her.

"I don't know what you're doing, hanging around outside my house at five in the morning, spying on me. You've made it perfectly plain how you feel about Freddie, you literally told me I would be better off without him in my life, so there's no point pretending to be worried about him now."

"I am worried about Freddie. And I'm worried about you."

Of course I was. This whole situation was a nightmare for everyone, and a special kind of nightmare for Athena, but none of that changed the fact that he had treated her terribly and whether he was alive or dead, throwing everything away because of him was a mistake she would surely come to regret. Someone needed to say that to her, even if this was not the most sensitive time to say it, and if no one else was going to, then perhaps I should. Only I didn't get a chance.

Athena had her key in the lock now and turned it, stepping into her darkened hallway. She flicked a switch. She turned to face me and I thought she was about to invite me in. In that moment I was sure I detected a brief wobble of her lower lip, as if she was about to start crying. Instead, her expression hardened.

"I don't need you to worry about me, Caroline. I don't need your pity, and I don't need your sympathy. I don't need your lecture notes and I actually don't need your friendship. I just need you to leave me alone."

PATRICK, CAMbrIDGE, 1991

All around us, as if nothing had happened, the term continued. People had essays to write, lectures to attend, exams to revise for. Even though it had only been a few weeks, Freddie Talbot's disappearance had become little more than Cambridge gossip for most students—something to idly speculate about in the lunch line or library.

Although Caroline had made me promise we would take things slowly, we were now spending much more time with each other than we did apart. We worked together, we ate together, we slept together, and we panicked together over the work in progress Alice Long had asked to see before our next supervision. Our two-thousand-word samples were due on Monday afternoon, and only on Saturday did either of us really start writing, Caroline sitting at my desk with her notepad and pen, me hunched over a lined legal pad on my scratchy armchair.

By the time we finally finished on Monday morning, after two near all-nighters fueled by biscuits and tea, my spine felt like it might never unfurl. "I'll drive them over to Alice Long's house this afternoon," I told her, tucking both stapled manuscripts into my messenger bag.

"Just post them through the door, though, right? Otherwise she'll ask about our trip to Longhurst," Caroline said as we crossed the quad. "And about the painting..."

"The painting? You mean the stolen painting?" I said, only half joking. "The painting you stole, from the home of one of my best friends..."

"I didn't steal the painting, Patrick," she said once again, a little wearily this time. "I rescued it."

I doubted Harry or his parents would see things that way. Might Alice Long?

Something Caroline and I went back and forth about a lot, late at night in my room, was the rights and wrongs of what she had done—and what on earth we were supposed to do with the painting now.

Keeping the thing in the trunk of the MG was obviously not a long-term solution, but at least there it would not be discovered by a bedder when they came to clean one of our rooms or spotted by a police officer come to ask some follow-up questions about Freddie.

Returning Self-Portrait as Sphinx with apologies to the Willoughbys was an option Caroline had overruled out of hand. "They didn't even know it was there, until we told them," she reminded me. "If I hadn't taken it, they would have burned the thing."

It was also specifically by burning the painting, Caroline kept reminding me, that Austen Willoughby had told Granny Violet he had destroyed it. A weird coincidence, didn't that seem, given how Oskar and Juliette had died?

What Caroline did not have was any explanation yet of how the painting had survived that fire, or how it had made its way to Longhurst—or how we could share our discovery with the world. And she was adamant that it was a discovery that should be shared.

The central practical problem was this: as far as the art world was concerned, the painting was ash, and without solid provenance, there was no way to convince anyone that what we had in our possession was Juliette's great lost work. But in order to establish it as genuine, we had to connect it to Longhurst, and in doing so identify it as stolen property, and therefore announce ourselves as its burglars.

This was a loop we had gone around time and time again, lying in bed, neither of us able to work out a solution. The only person I could think of who might be able to help was my father, but confessing we'd pinched a painting from his best friend and longest-standing client seemed unwise at best. Nor could I think of any way of explaining what had happened without telling Dad all about the argument with Philip, and how upset Granny Violet had been—and I was pretty sure I could imagine how that would go down. Fortunately, so far, for whatever reason, Philip did not seem to have said anything about it to him either.

IT WAS ABOUT FOUR in the afternoon, already getting dark, when I got to Elm Lane. Outside number 32, Alice Long's place, was a house clearance truck. I parked behind it. The back was open, and inside I could see furniture, tables and chairs, carefully stacked. The metal frame of a disassembled bed. The little two-person couch that Caroline and I had sat on in that first supervision.

The door of the house was open too. Down the front path, two men in overalls were carrying a small glass-topped table. I stepped aside on the pavement to let them pass. It was a bit odd that Alice Long was moving and had not mentioned it. What if we had just turned up for our supervision and there was someone else living there? Then it hit me.

"Everything alright, son?" asked one of the men in overalls, from the back of the truck.

"Sorry," I said, pointing to the truck, pointing at the house. "Is this...? Is she...?"

"House clearance," he told me. "Old girl passed away about a fortnight ago."

Just after our last supervision, I thought. I assumed no one had thought to inform the university.

"What's happening to all this stuff?" I asked.

"Going to auction, the lot of it. Ely Auction Rooms, just down the road. All profits going to some cat sanctuary, probably. Always the way."

I knew those auction rooms well, having visited them many times with my father. I made a mental note of the name of the removal company. I felt a strange impulse to ask if they were totally sure that Alice Long was dead, that they had gotten the right house. I stared up to the open doorway, the shabby front hall, the walls empty now of the pictures that had hung there. It was a poignant sight in itself. The thought that we would never get to tell her what we had discovered at Longhurst was heartbreaking.

"The milkman raised the alarm," the other man in overalls told me. "Noticed no one had taken the bottles in for a while, could see through the glass in the front door a couple of days' mail piled up. Someone called the landlord, and he let the police in. In bed, she was. Peaceful, at least."

They had positioned her desk in the back of the van and laid a thick blanket over it for protection. I stepped out of the way to let them back up the path. I could make out the silhouettes of propped-up framed pictures, armchairs, side tables.

I could hear the two men loudly discussing what they should try moving next, where it would fit in the truck, whether they would need to shuffle things around. That was when it came to me. My brilliant idea. I still do not know where it came from. Perhaps it was having witnessed similar house clearances with my father, observing at close hand his carefully honed ability to identify the one or two genuinely valuable items among a lifetime's accumulated detritus.

What I do know is that as soon as the idea came to me I knew immediately—without hesitation—that I was going to put it into action, and that I did not have much time. I looked up and down the empty street. It was a gloomy afternoon. I walked to the car, opened the trunk, and removed the blanket from Self-Portrait as Sphinx. I gave it what I very much hoped was not going to be one last look, tucked it under my arm, and walked around to the open back of the truck. Then I hopped up into the truck and lifted up the blanket with Alice Long's other pictures under it and squeezed it in alongside. I let the blanket drop. I hopped back out of the truck again. Without looking back, keeping my head down, I walked very quickly back to my car.

It was only after I had jumped back into the front seat of the MG, as I revved the engine to pull away and drive off, that it hit me I might just have made a terrible mistake. That I was going to have to drive back now and explain to Caroline what I had done and why I had done it. That I was either a bloody genius or a complete idiot.