Chapter 15

CAROLINE, DUBAI, 2023, TWO DAYS BEFORE HARRY'S DEATH

"Someone knows."

That was the first thing I said to Patrick, at the airport. There was a moment's pause before we awkwardly air-kissed, one of my bags getting sandwiched between us.

"Someone knows what?" he asked, confused. To be fair, it was probably not the opening line he had been expecting, after so long, under the circumstances.

"Take me to the gallery," I said. "Let's see this painting of yours. I'll tell you on the way there."

He picked my suitcase up with a grunt. "Jesus Christ, Caroline, what have you got in here? Bricks?"

"Books," I said. "Tools of the trade, Patrick."

With some remark about getting me a Kindle, he pointed in the direction of the airport exit. All the way here, on the plane, I had been turning it over in my mind. Those four photographs, the message that had accompanied them: Authenticate the painting. There was an initial instant when I had suspected Patrick or Harry of sending them, felt a rush of rage that one or both thought I could be bullied. Then I thought things through more carefully. It could not be Harry or Patrick behind this.

The first picture—I remembered that flash just before the first loud thump of fireworks—was of me in my evening dress, outlined against the white dust sheets in Austen's studio. It must have been taken through a window, from outside, at the very moment I discovered Self-Portrait as Sphinx. The second showed me in the process of trying to work out if I could fit it under my shawl. Presumably, amid the fizz and pop of the rockets, I missed a second flash, and the third and fourth, as I crossed the drive with the painting under my arm and stood in front of the open trunk of Patrick's car.

The fact it was his car made it unlikely he was the one trying to use these photographs to blackmail me. Likewise, if Harry knew I had stolen his family's painting, why keep it a secret until now?

The doors of the terminal silently parted, the evening air still warm outside. Patrick pointed out a battered Jeep, parked at a sloppy angle in what was clearly marked as a no parking zone. "I was sort of expecting the MG," I said.

Patrick laughed. "Not very elegant, I know. But it does mean you can just chuck whatever you need in the back—camping stuff, kitesurfing gear."

"That must be very convenient," I said with a laugh, assuming that he was joking.

Patrick looked a bit hurt.

"Sorry. I just never had you down as the outdoorsy type."

I'll say this for his new lifestyle: he looked a lot healthier than the pale, puffy Patrick I had run into a few times back in London. He was tanned. He was toned. He was slender.

Some things never changed, though. No sooner had I clicked my seat belt than we were off, Patrick pulling out with barely a glance over his shoulder into a solid stream of taxis. The main difference from being in a car with Patrick in England was that in Dubai everyone else seemed to be driving in a similar fashion.

He glanced over at me. "Someone knows, you said?" he asked, before suddenly swerving across three lanes of traffic so we didn't miss our exit. I told him about the photographs, the note. He looked as mystified as I had been and I could see him working through the same panicked sequence of suspicions I had done.

"This could ruin me professionally, you know that, don't you, Patrick?"

"Of course I understand what's at stake, for both of us. It's my car you're stashing your stolen goods in."

We turned off the highway. We turned again.

"This is the DIFC, the financial district. My gallery is here, as is your hotel."

On either side of us rose office buildings, black and glittering. The cars we were gliding among were shinier here too. Every so often I could feel Patrick's eyes on me, a sidelong glance, trying to read my expression. How I was reacting. Whether I was impressed. I was, despite myself, strangely touched that he cared.

There was an attendant in a booth at the entrance to the parking garage. Recognizing us, or the car, he pressed a button to raise the barrier. Patrick led me to the elevator. From it, we emerged into a shopping precinct. The Lambert Gallery occupied the bottom two floors of an office building, its windows shuttered. Patrick typed a code, and after a moment the door beeped unlocked.

"So the idea was that for tomorrow night's private view we'd re-create Dalí's Rainy Taxi right here outside. Just like the 1938 exhibition: a whole car, trailed with ivy, with a shark-headed mannequin chauffeur and a mannequin in evening dress in it, fixed up so it's raining inside the vehicle, snails crawling over everything. Which I think would have been even more dramatic in this climate. We managed to find an actual 1933 Rolls-Royce, the mannequins, got in contact with a guy who breeds snails, but when we looked into how many permits we'd need..."

He stepped into the gallery, reached into his pocket, and brought out his phone. He pressed the flashlight button and handed it to me. "My gosh, Patrick," I said.

"You'll get the idea, I think. We did our best."

It was like stepping back in time, to what I knew of that first night of the International Surrealist exhibition in Paris. From the ceiling of the gallery hung sacks, hundreds of sacks. More sacks blocked out any light from the windows. A lot of effort had gone into this. For just a moment, one strange moment, I did wonder if all this was for my benefit, some sort of weird romantic gesture.

"Oh, hold on," said Patrick. He pressed a button and a soundtrack of vintage street noise came on—a few shouted French swear words, a car horn honking, a dog insistently barking. As I stepped tentatively into the room, the phone's flashlight picked out the mannequins arranged around it, copies of the originals—by Dalí, Man Ray, éluard, Erlich, Willoughby—each one designed to startle and unsettle the viewer. Here was one gagged and bound with a single flower on her mouth. Another was naked save a chain mail headdress.

"Are they going to let you get away with this here?" I asked him. "Not big on nudity, surely, are they?"

"I guess we'll find out tomorrow," he said. "We've got some pretty important people coming, so I can't imagine we're going to get raided. It's going to be a bit of a Cambridge reunion, too. Giles Pemberton is coming over, for the Sunday Times. Dave White—you might remember him better as Next-Door Terry—has been invited. Harry, of course. Oh, and I suppose I better warn you, Athena Galanis is going to be here too. She's an art consultant in Dubai now. I only found out recently. And that's not all..."

Patrick saw my expression and stopped himself. I had often wondered how I would react if I crossed paths with Athena one day—had imagined what I wanted to say to her, what I wanted to ask. Given everything else that was going on, this really didn't feel like the time. It had been hard enough bracing myself to see Patrick.

Flashlight in one hand, I began making my way through the darkness.

"You'll find a door at the far end of the room," Patrick told me. "Careful not to trip over anything. I hope you're not too disappointed that the sacks aren't actually dripping coal dust, but you can take authenticity too far. I can't afford the dry cleaning for everyone's sooty Dior."

I shuffled forward until my flashlight picked out the metallic glint of a door handle. There was another keypad next to the door, faintly glowing orange. Patrick typed in a code. It beeped.

"There you go. All yours. You can spend some time here first with the painting, if you'd like, then I'll drive you to the hotel, get you checked in."

Despite his best efforts to conceal it, Patrick sounded nervous. How much all this had cost him I dreaded to think, and besides that was precisely the sort of thing—like those photographs, the implications of the message that had accompanied them—I could not allow to influence my opinion. I had a responsibility to get this right. A responsibility to history, to Juliette.

I took a deep breath and reached for the door handle.

PATRICK, DUBAI, 2023, TWO DAYS BEFORE HARRY'S DEATH

"Patrick, you know I won't necessarily be able to give you an answer this evening, don't you? That there may be things I need to read up on, or think about," said Caroline, before she stepped into the room that held the painting.

I said I was sorry all this had to be so rushed. It was very much Harry who wanted it done at a breakneck pace, who was desperate...

"Patrick," Caroline said softly. "This is going to take a while and I am going to need to concentrate."

I said I would just be upstairs, in my office. I texted Sarah—away working on a three-day wedding she couldn't get out of, in Abu Dhabi—to say that Caroline had arrived safely, knowing that I would not get an answer immediately.

I texted Harry, to check that he was boarding his flight, letting him know about the interest the painting was generating. I started going through the mail on my desk—bill after bill after bill. I checked the time. Caroline had been in there for about ten minutes. I could have sworn it was at least an hour.

My God, those photographs. Who on earth apart from Harry and me had anything to gain from blackmail? I drank a glass of water, willing myself to calm down. Whoever had taken those photos had been in possession of them for close to three decades. Clearly, they bore Caroline and me no particular grudge, or they would have gone public with the pictures already. If her professional opinion was that this painting was genuine, there might be nothing to worry about.

What if Caroline was not convinced? The sale would still go ahead, of course. All the time, all around the world, people sold paintings over which there hung a cloud of doubt. Sometimes in the hope that the expert would change their mind, or that a later expert would be of a different opinion, or because having a painting from the school of Rubens was a lot more affordable than one from the catalogue raisonné. The difference being that the former might sell for tens of thousands, the latter for tens of millions. Tens of thousands would not even cover my expenses. The scientific analysis, the extra security, the insurance. Caroline's flights and hotel, Harry's. The private view. I was trying very hard not to think about my father and his Raphael. How much he had spent on that. How confident he had been that it would transform his life, all our lives.

After an hour and a half, Caroline finally emerged from the room with the painting in it. She cleared her throat. "Patrick?" she called. I was already halfway down the stairs when I saw her expression. My heart sank as she shook her head.

"It's impossible," she said. "There just wasn't time for her to paint two versions of the same painting. The logistics, the practicalities, the chronology make no sense."

She was right. Of course she was right. At some level perhaps I had always known she was right.

"It's impossible," she said. "But I also believe it to be genuine. That is my sincere and settled professional opinion."

"And you're willing to attest to that publicly?" I asked.

"It's the truth," she confirmed.

"And what does this mean for the painting in Tate Modern? That it's fake?"

Caroline shook her head, shrugged. "I think things are more complicated than that. The best way to explain it is this, I think. If I were forging a letter by Juliette, and I wanted to replicate a word she used in the journal, I would copy it curve for curve, exactly, maybe even trace it. So it would be an exact match. But if she herself wrote that same word again, she wouldn't get an exact match. You'd get something very similar, that was recognizably from the same hand, but with slight and almost unnoticeable variations."

"And that's what you think is going on here?" I asked.

"Well, there are also those obvious differences in the content of the painting, which we've both noticed, but at a brushstroke level, that's what I think is going on, yes. I can't explain how, but I am willing to stake my reputation on my belief that both these pictures were painted by Juliette Willoughby."

For a moment, I did not know how to react, how to thank her. Then I took her into my arms and hugged her. After a moment's hesitation, she hugged me back. "Patrick, there's something else," she said. We disentangled from each other, separated.

"Something else?"

"I've spotted another difference between the paintings. The strangest one yet."

"Go on, then," I said with a smile. "Show me."

We headed back into the room where the painting was hanging. She beckoned me over to it.

"Have a closer look down there in that corner," she said. "Tell me what you see."

I leaned in close. I screwed up my eyes.

"Oh my God," I said.

There it was, on the bottom right, on the island the boat was headed to, perspective rendering it easy to miss...

"It's a pyramid. A white pyramid on an island, just like the one at Longhurst."

"That is Longhurst," Caroline replied. "It's not some mythical or symbolic stretch of water that boat is crossing. It is the actual lake at Longhurst and it is Cyril's pyramid the boat is headed for."

Her eyes were bright with excitement.

"But what does that mean?" I asked her.

"The drowned sister. Juliette fleeing. The same inscription as appears over the door to the east wing and the entrance to the pyramid. What I think it means, Patrick, is that these aren't just dreams or flights of fancy. Each individual element of this version of Self-Portrait as Sphinx appears to refer directly to some real-life incident, something that happened, thinly disguised. What the painting is asking us to do is to fit them all together, in narrative sequence."

Her smile faltered.

"What is it?" I asked her.

"Look at the expression on her face, the Juliette in the corner, running through the woods. I have always found it so unsettling, her expression."

"She looks scared."

"She looks terrified," agreed Caroline. "Patrick, I have a strong feeling that the secret this Sphinx is telling us to piece together is something truly unspeakable."

JULIETTE, PARIS, 1938

It felt like stepping back into a dream. The familiarity of it all. The cloud of laundry steam. The smell of disinfectant. An air of enforced hush, broken only by the sound of rubber soles squeaking on the polished floor, the rattle of gurney wheels, distant doors on distant corridors swinging.

As I had been hoping, when I reached the right floor, there were wheelchairs with canvas seats and backrests at the foot of the stairs. I took one. The sound of my frantic footsteps clacking in my ears, I steadied my pace down the corridor. I was relieved to find there was no porter waiting at the door of the morgue.

When I reached it I turned the handle and stepped inside, pushing the wheelchair in front of me. I closed the heavy door gently behind me and flicked the light switch. It was an uncanny feeling, being the only living person in a room full of dead ones. It was every bit as cold as I remembered. The bright lights flickered on, out of sequence.

All along one wall there were handles, three rows of them, at knee height, at waist height, at shoulder height. On the outside, handwritten tags with names and dates—men, women, and children. I located a drawer labeled Femme, Inconnue—woman, unknown—just as the young woman I painted weeks before had been. The date was a week or two before—I knew from Oskar this meant her limbs would be past the point of rigid stiffness.

The drawer opened soundlessly. This woman inside was older than me, smaller and slighter, another wraith recovered from the Seine, perhaps. Her hair, tied back, was darker than mine by a shade or two. She was naked on the cold metal, and even though I knew she was dead, my brain flinched from the thought of it, chilled steel against flesh. I stepped back to allow the drawer to open fully.

Her face, absolutely white, eyes closed, was expressionless. For the second time that day I found myself apologizing to a dead person. For the second time that day, I found myself horrified at what I seemed so calmly capable of.

"I'm sorry," I said, my voice sounding cracked and echoey in the empty room. "I'm so sorry."

I tried to tell myself that if she knew the circumstances she would understand. I tried to persuade myself that the woman I was looking down upon was beyond any possible further injury or insult now.

I cracked the door open an inch and checked the corridor. No one to be seen. Then I returned to the body. Onto the end of the drawer, I dumped the bundle of clothes I had brought with me, untying the string, unrolling the dress, separating from it a pair of stockings and a cardigan, revealing in the middle of it a pair of shoes. I dragged the dress over her head. Onto her still-stiff feet I worked the shoes. Then, gritting my teeth, I took her in my arms and tumbled her off the drawer and into the wheelchair. I tried as best I could to straighten her up. I threw the blanket in which my bundle of clothes had been wrapped over her legs. I removed the label from the drawer, closed it, then pushed the wheelchair to the door and flicked the lights off once more.

I retraced my route to the entrance. The lights in the corridors were dim, some of the hallways darkened almost completely. It was well past midnight. Any second, I was expecting to run into someone and for them to spot something amiss and sound the alarm. I pictured myself wrestled to the ground by uniformed orderlies, horrified at what I had done.

I heard doors swing open up ahead and dragged the wheelchair to a sudden halt. At the end of the corridor, a white-coated doctor passed, deep in conversation with a nurse in a complicated hat. I held my breath. They did not look up. I kept as still and silent as I could, listening as their voices retreated. Only daring to breathe again when I heard them pass through another set of doors.

With every step I dreaded the next a little more, knowing I would have to bump the wheelchair up a flight of stairs, steer it out of the hospital, down along the alley.

The streets outside were dark and empty. I pulled my hat down on my forehead, my scarf up over my chin and mouth. I arranged the blanket around the body in the wheelchair. I stepped back to survey the effect. We did not have to cross any of the open, well-lit bridges, and we could avoid the main thoroughfares. With her hat pulled down, her head leaning forward, in the dark, I was confident she would pass and we could be back at the apartment in under an hour.

Then it would be time for the hard part.