Chapter 20

CAROLINE, DUBAI, THIRTY-EIGHT HOURS AFTER HARRY'S DEATH

Dave's Rolls-Royce is pulling up outside my hotel when Patrick calls.

"Thank God you answered. I'm about to be charged. There's a hearing today when they'll either grant bail or transfer me to a different jail to await trial."

He is speaking fast, so fast I am having to struggle to keep up.

"Will you have a lawyer with you? A translator? Is there anything I can do?" I take a deep breath. "Listen, there's something I need to tell you. I'm in the car on the way back from—"

"I can't speak long, my phone is almost dead and once that happens, that's it," he says. "Sarah is coming to the hearing. My lawyer says the optics of that are important for the judge. I am so sorry to ask, but I didn't even know what day it was until they confirmed the hearing... I need someone to speak to Dad."

"Your father? Sure thing. I can call him and explain what's going on," I said, although I was puzzled why he was asking me.

"Jesus Christ, no. Don't tell him anything. He knows I was selling a painting for Harry, but he has no idea what's happened since. Dad doesn't read the news. He watches black-and-white films all day and tells the nurses the same three stories on repeat. I'm accused of the murder of his late best friend's son and if I'm convicted he'll never see me again. He screams the care home down when someone moves his slippers. He can't know about all this, until he absolutely has to. It would probably kill him, and I'm honestly not exaggerating."

"Tell me how I can help."

"We speak at the same time every Sunday. Dad really isn't well now. The dementia is quite advanced. He remembers things from decades ago, but he couldn't tell you what happened yesterday. He also gets extremely agitated if anything doesn't run the way he expects it to, and then he kicks off and lashes out and sometimes has to be sedated. If I'd remembered earlier, the nurses could have distracted him, but Sundays are a whole performance, getting him dressed and into his chair, setting up the iPad. He'll be sitting there right now on Zoom, waiting for me."

"Alright," I say, walking through the hotel lobby, wondering if Patrick's dad was not going to find it a bit confusing when his son's ex-wife popped up on the screen. "Send me the link."

My heart aches at the thought of Patrick, alone and scared in a prison cell and yet still so worried about upsetting a man who had never put his own son first. Their relationship had always been like this—Patrick's desperate desire to earn his father's love and approval, his obvious adulation and attempts at emulation. Quentin uncomfortably invested in Patrick's career but taking little interest in his son's personal life unless it involved a country house or a public-school friend.

I race up to the seventh floor to set up the call in the quiet of my room, logging on to find Quentin waiting. A nurse leans over the screen, fiddling with the volume, jaw clenching in irritation as he barks orders at her. "Oh look, Quentin! You have a different virtual visitor today," she says.

He shoos her out of the way, adjusts the angle of his screen, and runs a slightly shaky hand over his silver hair. I fiddle with the contrast on my laptop before realizing that it is Quentin himself who is ghostly pale. He seems to have aged two decades in the five years since I last saw him.

"Hello, Quentin. It's Caroline. Do you remember me?"

"Of course I remember you," he says defensively. "You're Patrick's wife."

"Well, I was," I say, although I am not sure this registers. The room looks cozy, comfortable. Behind him, I can see a window with a view of trees and a reproduction of Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. The nurse suggests he tell me all about what he has been up to this week. He shoos her away.

"Tell me about the painting, Sarah. I want to hear about Harry's painting." I talk him through the details of the sale as he leans in excitedly, nose almost touching the screen.

"They sold it," he is telling the nurse. "My son—he's an art dealer, you know—just sold a very valuable painting. Chip off the old block."

He turns his attention back to me. "For how much?"

"Forty-two million pounds," I tell him.

"I expect he'll be able to afford to come and visit you now," says the nurse to Quentin.

"Visit? He'll be able to move back. He'll be able to set up a gallery over here again. That will be the plan, won't it, Sarah? You don't want to be in that awful place forever, eh?"

"This is Caroline," the nurse corrects Quentin gently. "Caroline, not Sarah."

"Nonsense," he says, sharply. "Caroline was Patrick's first wife." He rolls his eyes conspiratorially at the screen. He claps his hands and then rubs them together.

"Tell me again," he says. "How did Harry find the painting?"

"Well," I say. "Harry found it in a wardrobe, in a bedroom at Longhurst—"

He turns to the nurse, starts to tell her at length about Longhurst, how often he stayed there, in the Green Room, describing the four-poster bed, the hand-painted wallpaper, reveling in all the details.

And I can picture it exactly, too, because I suddenly realize he is describing the room that Harry showed me, with its peeling leaf-print walls. And suddenly I remember, crystal clear, Harry's mother apologizing that Patrick couldn't stay there as usual on the night of the party because of a burst pipe.

Quentin has apparently forgotten I am there. I can see a close-up of his crotch as he gets up, then hear the scuff of slipper on carpet as he starts pacing the room. He continues to chatter away to the nurse, going on about his long friendship with Philip, and it occurs to me that Patrick told me his father had stayed at Longhurst, in the Green Room, just a few weeks before the party. That it was Quentin sending Patrick off to the Witt Library to look through the photographs there of paintings from Longhurst, among which we had found one of Self-Portrait as Sphinx.

One of the things I had always found unsettling about Juliette's painting is the way that all the scenes within it seem to be part of some larger, interlocked narrative. That there is a bigger story to be wrestled from it if you just look carefully enough. Yet those connections remained always tantalizingly on the cusp of reach, touchable with my mind's fingers but impossible to get a firm grip on. A closer analogy, knowing what I now did about Austen's overpainting of it, would be doing a jigsaw puzzle without knowing some of the pieces are missing.

I am getting the exact same unsettling feeling now, as I listen to Quentin.

He reminds the nurse what Patrick has sold Self-Portrait as Sphinx for. She comments on how amazing it is that someone found a lost masterpiece like that, just lying around the house.

"Well, it took them long enough," says Quentin.

The nurse bustles back over to the iPad and, realizing that the Zoom call is still running, fumbles with the screen to end it. I am still trying to understand what I have just heard, whether perhaps I had misheard, when, with a chuckle, as if to himself, he says it again: "It took certainly them long enough."

Then I am the only person left on the call, the only face on the screen mine, suddenly magnified, wholly bewildered. What did he mean by that? I find the number of the care home, phone the front desk. No answer. There is an email address on the website, so I fire off a message, asking the nurse to call me back urgently. I am about to flip my laptop shut when an email lands in my inbox from a protonmail.com address I don't recognize—the name a seemingly random sequence of letters.

The subject line is "As Requested: Athena's Mystery Client."

When I click through, there is no message, just ten or so attachments, all grainy CCTV captures. The man in the pictures is recognizably the man from the VIP dinner, although in none of these images is he wearing the same pristine long white tunic and headdress. Instead, he is dressed down in the same nondescript billionaire super-casual style as Dave White had been. He's slim, with a muscular build and a mop of thick, shiny dark hair. There are pictures of him at a mall, others of him outside his mega-mansion. Mainly, though, there are photos of him driving his astonishing collection of cars. Window down, elbow resting on the frame, aviator sunglasses on. Here he is in a turquoise Porsche. In this one, a gold Tesla. In another, a white BMW with the license plate R1CH. There's a Bugatti, a Lamborghini, a Ferrari...

I text Dave—although the email address is unrecognizable, and presumably therefore untraceable, these must have come from him. Thank you for the photographs. Can you tell me who this guy actually is?

I can do better, he replies immediately. My driver is downstairs, waiting to take you to him.

The car is ready, engine revving, outside the hotel lobby, the sly smile on the driver's face suggesting that whatever Dave is about to unveil has tickled him. "A/C okay, madam?" he asks as we pull away.

It took them long enough. As we drive, I am trying to unpack Quentin's words. Had he somehow known that the painting Patrick and I had found still existed, and that it was at Longhurst, all along? It was possible, I supposed. But why would he have kept it quiet? It was very unlike him to miss an opportunity for adulation or a quick buck.

Then another possibility occurs to me—perhaps it was the painting that Harry eventually found in the Green Room, the second Self-Portrait as Sphinx that Patrick just sold, which Quentin had stumbled across. That was the room he always stayed in, after all. But still the same question reared its head: If he knew it was there, why had he not claimed the credit and the commission for selling it himself?

He's a very old man, I reminded myself. A very old show-off with dementia. Perhaps he didn't know what he was saying.

After maybe half an hour, we pull off the scrubby motorway and into an oasis of frangipani and bougainvillea: the Desert Palm Polo Club.

"Here we are," Dave's chauffeur announces, pointing to the low-rise ocher clubhouse up ahead. As we pull up at the Valet Parking sign, my phone rings.

"Keep your eyes on the car in front," Dave says, without preamble.

I train my eyes on the driver's side, but instead of Athena's client, a squat, balding man in a pistachio linen suit emerges, slams the door, and places a panama hat on his head.

"That's not him," I tell Dave.

"I know. Just keep watching," he says.

The man in pistachio hands his keys to the valet attendant, and I realize that Athena's client, in a nondescript T-shirt and shorts, is the valet.

"That man was a fake buyer," says Dave. "Athena played me—deliberately pushed the bidding for Self-Portrait as Sphinx sky-high with a stooge."

"But why would she do that? I ask incredulously. "What on earth does she stand to gain?"

"I have no idea. But if we can work that out, I'm guessing it might lead us to Harry's murderer."

PATRICK, DUBAI, THIRTY-EIGHT HOURS AFTER HARRY'S DEATH

Six of us are sweltering knee-to-knee in the back of a VW van. We are all in wrist and ankle cuffs, none of us in seat belts, all being thrown into each other every time we shift lanes. The van speeds the whole way, tires screeching on the turns, and I become convinced the driver is swerving deliberately to shake us up. I can all too easily imagine this resulting in a high-speed collision, all of us shackled in the back incinerated in a highway fireball.

The van skids to a halt and the back doors are thrown open. We are all bundled out, lined up, marched down concrete steps into a basement, along a corridor, and into a cell. A guard barks at us to sit down on a bench along the far wall. There is no water. No daylight. None of us has yet met an Emirati lawyer or been told exactly what the charges against us will be. We wait.

One by one, names are called. Eventually, the name called is mine.

The court is smaller and far less imposing than I was expecting. At one end of the low-ceilinged room sit two men in robes, neither looking up from his paperwork as I am led in. There is another robed man at a table in front of them. He glances over but not for long enough to catch my eye. At the other end of the room are three rows of chairs, all occupied. In the front row is Sarah, flanked by Tom and Sumira. Sarah gives me a tight smile I guess is meant to look reassuring. Tom and Sumira, understanding more about the situation, both look deeply concerned.

I am led, still cuffed, to the table and told to sit down next to a man who introduces himself, in thickly accented English, as my lawyer. He explains what the procedure today will be. In front of him are documents he has just been provided with by the prosecution, he explains.

"Where is the prosecutor?" I ask, looking around. He points toward one of the men sitting on the judge's bench. I am asked to stand and confirm my name and nationality.

It is all over in five minutes. The whole thing takes place in Arabic, and there is no translator. When I am asked a question, my lawyer offers a paraphrase of it, then does the same for my answer. I catch Harry's name. The name of the hotel. The name of my gallery. The prosecutor says something to the judge, who says something to my lawyer.

My lawyer opens the folder of documents in front of him. I turn my head away but not quickly enough. The first document in the folder is a photograph, on glossy paper, of a broken champagne flute. Its jagged edges are brown with blood; spatter marks dot the stem and base.

"This object was recovered from Harry Willoughby's hotel room," he tells me.

I feel like I am going to be sick.

Behind me I can hear chairs shifting around, their occupants trying to catch a glimpse of the pictures. The judge asks my lawyer something, then my lawyer asks me if I recognize this object. "I do not," I address the judge directly. My lawyer translates. Both the judge and the prosecutor look openly annoyed.

The judge tells my lawyer to turn to the next document. It is another photograph, a close-up of the stem, dusted and showing two partial fingerprints. The judge instructs my lawyer to turn to the next document. It is a photocopy of the piece of paper on which the police took my fingerprints when they arrested me. Next to the fingerprints is my signature. The judge asks my lawyer to ask me to identify my signature.

"That is my signature, yes," I respond, enunciating clearly, trying to appear as open and helpful as possible. I ask him to tell the judge I don't understand how my fingerprints ended up on that champagne glass. I ask him to make sure that is formally recorded. He shakes his head.

"At this stage, we just answer the questions they ask me," he says.

The next document is a frozen image from the CCTV of the elevator as I am entering it. The prosecutor discusses this image at some length. He draws our attention to the time stamp in the bottom corner of the image. It is just before midnight. I am alone in the elevator. I am standing with my hands folded in front of me, head down.

The judge instructs my lawyer to ask me to identify myself. "That's me, yes."

The last document in the file is another CCTV image. The stamp on this one is 3:17 a.m., and I am on my way back down to the hotel lobby. I'm looking distinctly disheveled—hair mussed, shirt half untucked, no tie. The judge instructs my lawyer to ask me to confirm that the man in the image is me.

I say nothing. I am incapable of saying anything. My lawyer nudges me slightly. I ignore him.

"Mr. Lambert," he says, louder this time. "Do you remember getting into that elevator?"

I do. I remember it vividly. I had just spoken to Harry and was grappling with the knowledge that my oldest friend had basically admitted to pushing his own cousin to his death off three stories of scaffolding and then had covered it up by driving his car into a river. I was trying to work out who knew all of this—who was blackmailing Harry for millions armed with that knowledge.

Understandably preoccupied, I hadn't noticed the man in dark glasses and a sport jacket getting into the elevator as I got out. A man whose face is reflected in the smoky glass of the elevator's mirror.

Suddenly I am on my feet. Shouting at the top of my voice. Jabbing with my finger at the picture in front of me. Trying to hold the picture up in my cuffed hands and show the people sitting behind me. Being barked at by the judge. Being screamed at by the prosecutor. Ignoring him. Ignoring my lawyer trying to pull me back down into my seat. Sarah is out of her chair too, unsure what is going on, unable to hear what I am trying to say, leaning forward, frowning.

The judge says something in a sharp voice, and men in khaki uniforms begin clearing the courtroom with shouts and shoves.

I am still shouting too, even if there is no real prospect of anyone hearing me in the general pandemonium, still waving the photograph as best my cuffs will allow.

The judge is reprimanding my lawyer, my lawyer is apologizing, hands clasped, on my behalf. The court stenographer has stopped typing and is just staring at me.

That man in the picture, I am trying to tell them. The other man in the elevator, I am trying to explain.

The man getting into the elevator is Freddie Talbot.

ALICE LONG, CAMbrIDGE, 1990

I should have known from the start it would be a mistake to attend that retrospective. A whole show at the Tate, the first ever dedicated to Oskar Erlich. For months, it felt like every time I opened a newspaper or listened to Radio 4, someone would be talking about his life and legacy. Juliette Willoughby was mentioned in passing, if at all: a tragic muse, a poetic footnote. If an art critic raised the subject of his temper, detailed in countless biographies, or his treatment of women—his abandoned wife, for instance—what followed was a dismissive reminder to separate art from artist, flawed character from febrile genius.

If we were to start judging great artists by their treatment of the women in their lives...

From time to time, I still came into town, was invited to show my work at some photographic gallery in East London, my wartime pictures or some of the things I shot for Vogue in the 1960s, the Sunday Times in the seventies. Occasionally I was invited to give a guest lecture at UCL or Kings about my career.

That day, I was in Holborn for lunch with an old friend, another photographer. We met at an Italian place, somewhere that had hardly changed in decades, an easy cab ride from King's Cross, where the Cambridge train arrived (after the war, that had seemed like a sensible place to settle, calm and quiet but close enough to London for when I had work booked). These days, there was little risk that anyone seeing Alice Long in the street would recognize Juliette Willoughby. Not with my silver hair pinned up in a neat bun. Not in these glasses, not with the walking stick and back hunched from decades carrying camera equipment up and down the country.

Every bloody bus in London seemed to have Oskar's face on the side of it. His face in a photograph I had taken, had carried in my suitcase from Paris, had sold for far too little to a newspaper. I remember carefully framing that shot so that his nose, his brow, one lock of falling hair, cast one whole side of his face in shadow. Nowhere on any of the posters was my name credited.

My friend and I talked about old times, old friends, over lunch. We hugged goodbye, promised each other not to leave it so long next time, then somehow there I was—wine from lunch still in my system—paying for my ticket to the exhibition. And then I was inside, and all around me were Oskar's paintings, some that had been in the exhibition where we met in 1936, at the New Burlington Galleries. The same physical objects, some in the same frames, as I had stood in front of that night. There were photographs of him next to them, frowning with concentration, paint in his hair.

Then there I was, too. A photograph I had never seen before—marked as on loan from the estate of Man Ray, the little description naming me as "Jules" Willoughby—that Oskar must have taken when I was asleep, my hair flowing over the heavy bed frame, a thin sheet barely concealing the curves of my naked body. That Oskar had taken with my own bloody camera, without my permission, and given to his friend.

There was no mention of the fact that I too was an artist, just a somber few sentences identifying this as the iron bedstead in which Oskar Erlich and his young lover, a runaway heiress, had perished.

On the shelves in the gift shop were all the biographies of all the men. All the histories, all written by men. All the memoirs, by men. The influence of André Breton on Oskar's thinking was discussed, in the catalogue I angrily flicked through but did not buy. Oskar's work was compared to Dalí's. His friendship with Man Ray was detailed at length, his rivalry with Max Ernst unpacked. There was no mention of any impact I—or any of the other women working and talking about their work all around us—may have had on the men. The one picture in the catalogue of the female Surrealists—of Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini—was one I had taken of them strolling arm in arm on the banks of the Seine. This is how we get painted out of history, I thought.

All these years, I had told myself that it did not matter, that Juliette Willoughby had been laid to rest and forgotten about. That things were better and safer for me that way. Even after I learned that my father had died—the obituary suddenly springing up from the Times one morning, with the strange news that it was Uncle Austen and not Uncle Osbert who had inherited Longhurst—I did not make myself known. Even though it should have been me that the house was passed down to.

I had no desire to inherit Longhurst, knowing what had happened there. I had no desire to go near the place ever again. I had a life; Alice Long had her career. I was proud of my photographs, proud of what I had achieved. I had made a name for myself, a new one. Nevertheless, there was something about that picture of me that I could not get out of my head.

Two weeks later, on a gray Thursday afternoon, a very young, very serious doctor told me it would appear from my test results that I had less than a year to live.

That was when it came to me. I might only have a year left, but I still had time to set the record straight, in all sorts of ways. It should have been up there, on the walls of the Tate, my Self-Portrait as Sphinx, along with the Erlichs, the Dalís, the Ernsts, the Man Rays.

I was the only person in the world who knew that the painting believed burned in Paris in 1938—or at least a version of that painting, painstakingly repainted by the artist herself—existed. In fact, it had been hanging on my bedroom wall in Cambridge for the past fifty years.

Yet if it were simply found on my bedroom wall by whoever came to clear my cottage, nobody would have a clue what on earth they were looking at. I had the only surviving photographs of the original tucked away in the now tatty suitcase I brought back from Paris. Without those, the only description of Juliette Willoughby's Self-Portrait as Sphinx was a single line in a 1938 exhibition catalogue, a couple of mentions in contemporary newspaper reviews.

I let the problem percolate, hoping the solution would present itself. Coincidence multiplies when we pay attention, Oskar had once said, probably parroting Breton. So I pottered about. Took my medicine. Attended my appointments. Supervised the occasional Cambridge student. Intermittently accepted invitations to private views, a guest lecture or two, a funeral.

Then something happened that changed everything.

It was in a window on Cork Street that I saw it, right there in a big fancy gallery. An Austen Willoughby, supposedly. An obvious forgery—at least to me. I came to a dead stop right there in the middle of the pavement. It was a greyhound in a wooded landscape, a decent enough attempt to the untrained eye, but the angle of the head was completely off—no greyhound ever held its head like that. Nor were those a greyhound's eyes. If anything, they were the eyes of a terrier. It was a painting by someone who had studied a lot of paintings of dogs, and not a lot of actual dogs.

I went inside, and I asked about the work. Humoring the old lady, they explained all about Austen Willoughby, his career, his life.

"The provenance is impeccable," I was assured by the gallerist. "This piece comes from Longhurst Hall, the artist's home. There was a complete photographic survey of the estate's art collection made by the Witt Library in 1961, in which this painting was included. It's held at the Courtauld—"

"I know where the Witt Library is," I said curtly.

I also knew that this was not an authentic work. Which meant the photographic records at the Witt had been falsified. What I wanted to know was who had falsified them. Who was bringing paintings in and out of Longhurst. Who was selling them on behalf of the family to galleries like this one.

The answer, it seemed, was a man named Quentin Lambert.