Chapter 17

CAROLINE, DUBAI, 2023, THE NIGHT OF HARRY'S DEATH

I had to admit the view from my balcony was impressive at night. The illuminated pools and fountains down below. The Burj Khalifa in the distance, its tip piercing the clouds. The oddity of looking down at the city from this high up and being able to see where the lights come to a halt, where the darkness of the desert began on one side, the sea on the other.

What are you doing here, Patrick?I thought. Meaning in this country. Meaning on this balcony, too, perhaps. With me.

It was nearly midnight, but the air was still warm on our faces. We had drunk the first bottle of champagne fast, both of us talking a lot. He pointed out other hotels, other towers, his hand once or twice brushing against my bare arm. We looked for his gallery, standing on tiptoes; he pointed out his Jumeirah villa, clearly proud of its proximity to the coastline. Every so often, he would repeat the amount the painting had sold for, in an incredulous voice.

"Will it be enough?" I asked.

He looked puzzled.

"For Harry, I mean."

"Enough to keep Longhurst? Probably. Enough to stop it crumbling?" Patrick shrugged. "Who knows? It's funny, I used to think it would be exciting and glamorous to inherit a house like that. Now I think it would be a pretty dreadful fate. Never knowing what's going to go wrong next, or how much it'll cost to fix. I'm not surprised Juliette ran away."

We watched a distant plane cross the skyline. I felt the tingle of the champagne in my veins.

"I'm sorry, Patrick, about the way things ended between us. It was a horrible thing I did to you."

He thought about this for a while. "I am sure I have plenty of things to apologize for too," he said. "I mean, I can understand why you did it, I think. I do remember what it was like, that whole period. We weren't exactly getting along."

That was an understatement. They were so many evenings that would start well enough, dinner in a restaurant, a pint at a pub by the river, and then some offhand comment would get taken the wrong way, and by the time we got home we would not have spoken for half an hour, would go to bed fuming and spend the whole night resenting every time the other person rolled over or tugged on the blankets.

We had sometimes discussed having a child, but there was no way I wanted to bring a baby into the world with someone that angry, that unhappy, that fragile. Someone obsessed, even if he wouldn't admit it, with the idea that he had failed to live up to expectations—his own, his father's, whatever they had drilled into him at school about the way his life would turn out. Patrick refusing ever to admit he found it difficult, dealing with my success, my being the star of the relationship. My resentment silently growing at pouring our savings, my book's royalties, into Patrick's failing gallery. Watching each disappointment gnaw away at him and seemingly being able to do nothing about it.

Toward the end, it was almost impossible to think of the Patrick I was married to and the Patrick I had fallen in love with as the same person at all. Now it felt like it was the old Patrick I was with, on this balcony.

This was, I knew, a dangerous feeling. He had a wife. He had a house, a business, a whole life here in Dubai, one that he had worked hard to build. I had my career, in Cambridge.

"Patrick," I said. "What are we doing?"

He took my champagne glass from my hand and put it on the table. I heard the clink as he put his own glass down too. Then I turned to him. Then he kissed me, just as I knew he would, just as I had been waiting for him to. And I can't explain how it felt, except to say that it did not just feel natural, it felt inevitable. He kissed me and in that moment it all melted away—the sadness and shame and regret. We were two twenty-one-year-olds with no idea of what was to come. I was reminded too of his gentleness, his patience, in those early days. When I pulled away. When he felt me suddenly clam up. Not at physical intimacy but—unexpectedly, uncontrollably—at any hint of emotional intimacy, domesticity. Sleeping together, that was fine. Staying overnight was a habit we slipped into. But it was months before I would let him leave a toothbrush or a change of clothes in my room, years before I introduced him to my grandmother. It can't have been easy for him, yet again and again I was amazed at the sensitivity with which he would grasp the right thing to say, the right thing to do. All the things not to say and do.

"Maybe we should go inside," he said, taking my hand.

Afterward, lying in bed, Patrick and I found ourselves talking about the past, our past, specifically our first night together. Did I remember the first thing I ever said to him? Did he remember what song was playing? I remembered his shirt. He remembered the dress I had on. How strange it was to exist in someone else's head like that, fixed forever, unchanging. I wished there was some way in which we could start it all again from that moment, live the whole thing once more and not let it go wrong, not lose sight of each other this time around.

"I think I fell in love with you that night," he said. "That very first night I met you."

"I'm pretty sure I did not fall in love with you until later," I said. "I did quite like your shirt, though."

Patrick turned to face me again, propping himself up on his elbow. His face grew serious.

"I have never stopped loving you, you know. I thought I had, until I saw you again, but..."

"You don't need to say things like that, Patrick. Honestly. This is nice, this was lovely, please don't feel it's necessary to say things you don't mean."

"I'm serious."

He stroked my hand.

"You should probably go," I said.

But he didn't move. For a long time he said nothing and neither did I. Eventually, reluctantly, Patrick checked the time on his phone and groaned. I asked him if he was sure he was safe to drive, and he said he thought so. He asked if I thought it was too late to knock and tell Harry the good news about the painting's sale, and we decided it was never too late to find out you were somewhere in the region of thirty million pounds better off. He knew Harry's room was on the same floor as mine because he had booked and paid for it, and that he would be passing it on his way to the elevator.

I pulled on the hotel bathrobe as Patrick got dressed and kissed him goodbye at the door. Despite everything, there was a longing in that kiss, a tenderness.

Perhaps even some kind of promise.

PATRICK, DUBAI, 2023, THE NIGHT OF HARRY'S DEATH

I was going to tell her. That was what I had promised myself on that balcony, before I kissed Caroline. I was going to tell Sarah. I would tell her what had happened and I would tell her why. There would be no attempt at concealment. I was not a man like my father, with his affairs, his assignations, his endless indiscretions. I could not be.

Room 712, Harry's room, was halfway between Caroline's and the elevator. I paused outside it, listened for sounds of life, leaned down to check under the door for lights, then knocked. No answer.

After a minute or two, I knocked again. This time I could hear a faint groan. "Who is it?" Harry croaked through the door.

"Me," I said, my voice low, urgent. "Harry, it's Patrick."

There was a thump, as if someone had just rolled heavily out of bed. A pause. Harry opened the door, just a crack, chain taut across it. "What do you want?" he said.

"Are you not going to let me in?" I asked. The door did not open wider. "How are you feeling?"

He shrugged, grunted. He looked terrible.

"Well, this might cheer you up: your painting sold tonight, Harry. For forty-two million pounds."

He nodded, mumbled something, noisily took off the chain and let the door swing open.

His room was an absolute mess. There was half-eaten room service on the bedside table, wet towels on the floor. The balcony door was open, a thin white curtain billowing inward. Every lampshade looked askew.

"Excuse all this," he said.

"Harry Willoughby, what on earth is going on? I have just told you that your money troubles are over. That thanks to the tremendous amount of work and effort I have put in, the auction tonight I organized and bankrolled, you are going back to Longhurst—which you now won't need to sell—with tens of millions in your back pocket." I placed my hands on both his shoulders and looked him straight in the eye. "I don't mean to be needy, mate, but could you at least fucking react?"

A thank-you would have been nice, for instance. It had been my gallery on the line as well as his house. It had been Harry who had come close to fucking the whole thing up. Still his face was sullenly blank. It was like I was telling him he had just put a winning lottery ticket in the wash. I could feel myself growing increasingly angry now.

"Harry, tell me what's wrong?"

"It's the photographs," he said.

"The photographs? What photographs?

Then I didn't need him to answer that question, because the answer had suddenly dawned on me. If someone was sneaking about taking pictures of Caroline at his twenty-first, maybe they had something on Harry from that night too. Maybe he had received an envelope of pictures, just as she had.

"Is someone trying to blackmail you, Harry?"

Harry let out a deep sigh, and nodded. "And whoever it is, they want serious money."

At last it began to make sense, how strangely he had been acting. How frazzled and erratic he had seemed. Despite the mess of the rest of the room, I noted that Harry's bed had not been slept in. He looked like a man who had not slept properly for months. The question was...

"Harry, what on earth have they got pictures of you doing?"

There was almost a laugh in my voice as I said it, so hard was it to imagine Harry as a straitlaced twenty-one-year-old doing anything worth blackmailing him about more than thirty years later.

Harry sank onto a corner of the bed. He ran his hands over his face, through his tufts of hair. He looked up at me. He indicated with a gesture that I should find somewhere to sit down too.

Then it all came spilling out, in the way secrets will when they have been bottled up and churning around inside someone for decades. "Slow down, Harry," I kept saying. "Harry, what are you telling me?"

They had been up high on the scaffolding that night, he said, after the fireworks. He and Freddie, smoking, swigging champagne straight from the bottle. They had both been drinking enthusiastically since before dinner. Freddie kept pestering him to do a line of coke.

"It's your twenty-first, live a little, that sort of thing," Harry explained. "Don't be such a boring prick. Eventually I said yes mostly just to see the look on his face."

Freddie had chopped out the line on the wooden planks, by the light of the flashlight Harry was holding. He had passed Harry a rolled-up five-pound note, mimed what to do next. Harry had hunched to snort the line—and that was when Freddie had whipped out his camera and taken pictures. Flash-flash-flash.

"Of you and the coke?" I asked. Harry nodded.

"And that was the photo someone sent you? A—what—thirty-year-old picture of you with a line of coke at a party when you were twenty-one? You can't be serious—you're letting someone extort a fortune from you with that? You're not even an MP anymore! Who cares?"

Harry shook his head, face ashen. "There was an argument," he said. "I was furious. He kept laughing. It turned into a proper fight, like when we were kids. You know how he could be, Patrick. You must remember. I was trying to take the camera from Freddie. He kept teasing me with it, waving it above his head, talking about selling the pictures to the papers. Telling me my political career was over before it had begun. Student politician's drug shame. MP's son in cocaine scandal."

"He was just winding you up," I said.

"No. It was more than that. It was always more than that with Freddie and me because of Longhurst. Because he was bitter, resentful. Because in the normal order of things, the house should have gone to his grandfather, not mine. I didn't doubt for a minute he was serious about planning to sell that photograph. Not for a minute. And I knew how badly he needed money, because he was always begging to borrow it."

"What did you do?" I asked him softly.

"I was trying to grab him and his shirt got torn and he lost his temper. He punched me on the side of my head, hard. We started grappling. He got me in a headlock. I kept trying to trip him over, get him down so I could get that camera."

I asked what had happened next.

"He fell," said Harry, not looking at me. "I tried to snatch the camera again and he stumbled backward and caught his heel and he tumbled off the scaffolding. We were three stories up. He didn't even have time to scream, but I could hear the crunch as he landed. We were on the opposite side of the house to the tent, so nobody saw it but me. Or so I thought."

I did not say anything.

"I scrambled down as fast as I could, but when I got there he wasn't moving. And there was blood, so much blood, on the paving stones. I could see it spreading, thick and dark and shiny. His eyes were closed. His mouth was open. He wasn't breathing. I looked around for the camera, feeling around in the bushes behind him, but it must have been thrown from his hand."

"Jesus Christ! Your cousin was lying dead or dying on the ground and the first thing you thought to do was to look for the fucking camera? It didn't occur to you to call an ambulance?"

"I panicked. I was drunk, I had done a line of cocaine, and I wasn't thinking straight. And I did run off toward the tent to get help. Then I stopped running and started thinking. About what was going to happen to me. About the inevitable scandal. About the impact this would have on my parents, the family's reputation. He was already dead. It was an accident, but he was dead, and there was nothing I could do about it."

"I don't understand," I said, trying to get all this to fit together with what I already knew. "They never found a body. The police found the blood, but they never found his body. And his car—if he was already dead, the police's theory that he drove off drunk and drowned..."

Harry shook his head. "That was me," he said, barely audibly.

"What was you?"

He did not answer.

"What was you, Harry?"

"The car. I moved the car."

"You moved Freddie's car?"

In a way, I was even more horrified by that than I was by the revelation that Harry had killed Freddie. That had been an accident, at least according to Harry. I could imagine the panic and fear he must have felt when he realized what he had done. What I could not imagine was doing what he had done next. The coldness of it. The callousness.

"So let me get this straight, Harry. You left Freddie's body—his dead body—just lying there, you went to find his car keys, and you plowed his car into the River Ouse on purpose. So that it would look like he had driven off. So that everyone would assume what they mostly did assume, that he had driven it into the river himself and been swept away."

Harry nodded, just one nod, no eye contact.

"It makes no sense," I said. He glanced over at me. He looked angry.

"That plan makes no sense to me," I repeated. "How did you get back? His car was found a few miles from the station—it would have taken you hours to walk back to Longhurst, with the body just lying there waiting for someone to find it. There's something you're not telling me. Someone else must have helped you, driven with you, driven you back."

For a moment, Harry hesitated. Then, confirming this, he spoke.

"You remember Arno von Westernhagen?"

I nodded. Of course I remembered Arno. The last time I had seen him was at his farewell drinks perhaps twenty years ago, all the Osiris boys there, as he left for a job at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong. Arno drunk, hugging everybody, reminiscing about the old days. Harry there too. Both of them looking pensive and somber and sad when someone—it might even have been me—proposed a toast to Freddie.

"You bastards," I said.

"It wasn't his fault. He didn't know. I told him we were playing a prank. It wasn't hard to convince him. Freddie had been winding him up all night, about Arno being sober. And of course he was the only person at the party I knew was safe to drive, because he wasn't drinking."

I was puzzled, briefly. Arno might not have been drinking, but I could also not remember him having a car at the party. In fact, I knew he had not had a car that night because...

"Wait a minute. He was driving my car, wasn't he? He was driving you around in my fucking car. That was why the seat was wet, wasn't it? You were soaking when you climbed out of the river. But he must have realized at that point that this was no prank, that something serious had happened. How did you persuade him to keep it quiet?"

"Because I knew his secret. I'd looked him up, his family. I was in the university library one day and I thought it would be funny to find out a bit more about them, maybe find a picture of this castle of his. It turned out there are no counts von Westernhagen, and there is no castle associated with that family name in Bavaria. It was all a fabrication. When I confronted him about it he confessed the whole thing, that it was all stuff he had concocted to make himself more popular at school which got out of hand. His father was just a perfectly normal banker, his mother a corporate lawyer."

"And that was all it took, to stop him going to the police? The threat that you would tell everyone he was not really a German count?"

Harry looked at me as if I was being very slow.

"By the time he worked out what was going on, Patrick, he was already an accessory. I told him it was an accident. I tried to convey to him everything that was at stake. Freddie was dead and there was nothing either of us could do to help him, but there were things to do to manage the fallout from his death..."

"Oh, Jesus Christ, the body. You are going to tell me you did something to the body too, aren't you?"

"I never got the chance. All the way to the river, all the way back, I was panicking, trying to think with Arno screaming at me, trying to work out what I was going to do. Where I was going to hide it. But when I got back the body was gone."

"Gone? What the fuck do you mean, gone?"

"Vanished. Disappeared. Everyone was still partying. Everyone was still over on the other side of the house. The pool of blood was still there. No Freddie."

"Someone else must have moved the body. But who?"

"That's what I don't know. That's what I have spent the last thirty years wondering. Knowing all that time that somewhere out there, there was someone who knew what had happened to Freddie, and that same person probably had the camera—which was nowhere to be seen either—and they were probably saving it all up to really fuck me over. Waiting to expose me, destroy me, anytime they felt like it. Perhaps they thought one day I'd be prime minster—I certainly bloody did—and then they'd really have a payday. Well, evidently they got bored waiting and decided now is the time. I received an envelope through the mail a few weeks ago, Patrick, with that photograph inside it and a demand for money. A huge amount of money."

It was the little whine in his voice as he said this that tipped me over the edge. That little whine at the unfairness of it, that Freddie had slipped, that Freddie had died, and Harry finally had to deal with the consequences of that. He had spent thirty years feeling sorry for himself, irritated by the position Freddie had put him in. Not a thought for Arno or me, or the way he had used both of us. Not a thought for Athena. Not a thought for poor fucking Freddie.

I have never felt rage like it. I have never despised another human being so completely as I did Harry in that instant. If I hadn't been willing myself not to, I would have literally leapt across the room and taken his throat in my hands.

"There's something else," he said.

"Something else?" I said, unable to swallow an incredulous laugh. "How can there possibly be something else?"

"I got a note under the door this evening, while I was out at the gallery with you," he told me. "A sheet of legal paper, folded in half, with a message typed on it."

"And what did this message say?"

"I'm sorry, Patrick. They want all of it."

"The money? After my commission and the expenses of the show have been deducted, that's still well over thirty million pounds, Harry. You can't possibly be suggesting you're going to just hand all that money to some..."

I trailed off. Harry was shaking his head. His face was solemn. "They've told me they want all the money, Patrick. The entire sale price of the painting. And we're going to give it to them."

JULIETTE, PARIS, 1938

The facts of the matter were simple enough, reported in the newspapers at the time. A family tragedy. A boating expedition across the lake. The two Willoughby girls, Juliette, aged six, and Lucy, ten, sneaking off unnoticed on a sunny afternoon, with a small parcel of sandwiches and cake pilfered from the kitchen, to row over to the island. What was not recorded was the fact that it was all my idea, all my fault. That I had badgered my sister, cried and stomped and sulked since breakfast, until she finally rolled her eyes and relented.

The island itself was a long, thin squiggle surrounded by reeds, one path leading from the little wooden jetty through the knee-high grass up to the pyramid that my father had built as his future mausoleum. Next to it, a little circle of stamped-down grass where we had unpacked our picnic baskets with Nanny so many times before.

We never made it. Not that afternoon, that calm, sunny afternoon.

I saw something glint in the water and then dart under the boat, and we both scrambled across to one side to lean over and see what it was. The boat tipped. We both fell. As we were falling, the boat came down on top of us.

I lived. Lucy did not.

The water was not deep, but it was cold, and neither of us were strong swimmers and we were some way from shore.

I can still taste that lake water. The feeling of being sucked down into darkness, freezing cold, the weight of my clothes growing, nobody in earshot. I remember scrabbling at the side of the upside-down boat, trying to pull myself up on it, failing, trying again, failing, trying again. In the distance, golden sunlight was falling across the still, peaceful lawn.

It was one of the gardeners who spotted me clinging desperately to the hull, threw himself into the water, and swam across. He dragged me to the shallows, my feeble kicks doing little to help, my limbs so chilled from the water I could feel nothing, desperately struggling to tell him through chattering teeth that my sister was still out there.

He pulled me up onto the bank and laid me on my side and I threw up brown water.

By the time he turned back to get Lucy, the lake's surface was still and unbroken.

He lunged in, lurching around in the water, calling her name, struggling to take his jacket off and free his arms, his shirt clinging to him as he ducked under the water again and again. I shivered violently, thinking if I was this cold how freezing poor Lucy must be. A housekeeper carried me inside, and I sat alone wrapped in a blanket on a bench in the front hall and waited for the inevitable news.

It was the only time I ever saw my mother cry.

Several times that afternoon my father asked me to explain again what had happened, whose idea it had been, how the boat had capsized. Even as a child I knew what he was really asking: who can I blame? The answer was: me. It might have been both of us who tipped the boat. But I had seen the flash in the water. I had begged Lucy for an island picnic.

My mother hugged me briefly and asked the housekeeper to put me to bed, even though it was only late afternoon. On the other side of the room my sister's bed was empty. I lay there with the light coming in still around the curtains, thinking about Lucy lying somewhere else in the house, cold and wet and alone, and I was unable to bear it, the ache in my throat sharp as daggers. A sob that would not come.

She was dead, and it was my fault. My beloved older sister. My father's obvious favorite. Everyone's favorite, really. The sister all the servants doted on. The sister who tried to take the blame for me so many times when I had done something naughty—broken something precious, torn my dress again. The sister who begged my father for months until he gave us those matching pendants—wedjat eyes to protect their wearer from harm—the only time he ever parted with any of his collection for anyone. The sister whose example, even when she was alive, I never seemed able to live up to. To whom I had always been compared and found wanting.

My mother had always been chilly and distant and my father eccentric, but after Lucy's death she froze completely and his behavior became increasingly bizarre.

By the time I reached the Gare du Nord, it was almost morning. It was hard to believe that life was carrying on as normal, the porters shouting, whistles blowing, a man mopping down one of the platforms and whistling tunelessly to himself. I took a seat at a table and ordered a croissant and black coffee, surprised to see that my hands were not shaking as I lifted the cup to my lips. Shock, I told myself. That is why none of this feels quite real yet. That is why it was so hard to believe that somewhere, on the other side of the city, two burned bodies were being removed from a charred apartment, the sapeurs-pompiers stomping around amid the ashes of my life with Oskar in their blackened boots. The landlord and his wife, watching it all. Around my neck was the pendant I found under my sister's pillow after she died—I always wondered if it might have protected her, had she worn it that day on the lake, had she not taken it off for safekeeping—with mine now resting around the neck of a dead stranger.

On the left side of my jaw, hidden by hair worn loose, was a single long bruise. The ache was steady and continuous. Every time I took a sip of coffee I had to suppress a wince as the hot liquid came into contact with the cut on the inside of my cheek. The croissant I pulled to tiny pieces and soaked in the coffee before slipping it into my mouth, and still it was painful to chew. Every time my jaw throbbed, I thought of Oskar, could see once more that look in his eyes. I had to force myself to finish the croissant. I ended up leaving most of the coffee.

It was time for my train.

As we were pulling out of the station, the sun appeared over the rooftops, setting the windows glinting. A woman and her husband belatedly found their way to my carriage and sat down. I smiled at her, looked back out the window. Did I mind if he put one of their suitcases up over my head, she asked? Bien s?r, I replied. I only had one small case, inside it everything I now owned in the world.

In my lap, gripped tightly in my gloved hands, was my new passport, the one with my face in it and someone else's name. No, not someone else's. That was what I had to learn to accept. My name was not Juliette Willoughby any longer, and never would be again. If this was to work, if all of this was to be worth it, I had to be the woman in that passport. A new name. A new life. That was what stretched out in front of me. To myself, not moving my lips, I practiced saying it, my new name, my only name.

Alice Long.