Chapter 21

CAROLINE, DUBAI, FORTY-TWO HOURS AFTER HARRY'S DEATH

The drive back to my hotel from the polo club feels so fast—the city rising out of the sand like a shimmering mirage—that I barely have time to process what I've just seen. Could Harry have been embroiled in some sort of scheme with Athena? If he had, it backfired badly.

I've agreed to meet Dave at a rooftop bar next to my hotel and I arrive first, expecting a long wait—from up on the twenty-seventh floor I can see traffic snaking all the way down to the Palm, where Patrick said Dave lives. I take a seat and watch a DJ being ignored by everyone except the pouting model types in his immediate vicinity, who are self-consciously hand-waving and hair-flicking. I am so fascinated by the scene I don't notice when Dave walks in.

He plonks himself down in the seat opposite me. "Alright?"

"Jesus, how did you get here? Helicopter?"

He smiles, shrugs.

"You didn't actually?" I ask. He seems remarkably chipper for a man who may have just been scammed for tens of millions.

"Well, we have quite a lot to talk about," he says.

"That's definitely true. If you don't mind, can we start with how you got hold of the CCTV footage of Athena's fake buyer so quickly? I don't understand..."

"It's my business," he says matter-of-factly. "Well, part of it. We develop and operate extremely sophisticated surveillance technology. My systems capture and identify people and track them as they move from place to place. Even if attempts have been made to conceal their identity. Even as their appearance changes with age."

I was poised to interject. He lifted a finger.

"I think I know what you're going to say. Like most people, the first thing that occurs to you is all the uses an authoritarian state could put this stuff to. I understand those concerns, and I share them. But don't forget all the extraordinary, positive things it can achieve. Combating child trafficking. Helping find missing persons."

"So you can search for a single face?" I ask, unsettled by the implications despite his well-rehearsed defense, unnerved by the damage this sort of tech could do in the hands of the wrong people. "So we can use your systems to search for Athena Galanis? We can see who else she has been meeting with, speaking to?"

"Can is a funny word, in this context. As is we," he says, eyebrow raised. "Because there's can in the sense of is it technologically possible, and there's can in the sense of is it legal, even in this relatively permissive jurisdiction. We would need to access a lot of very highly restricted data, which we are not cleared to access."

"But it's access that you have?" I ask

"Access I have, yes, because my company harvests and guards that data, on behalf of my clients. But it's not access I can just grant on a whim. I've already helped you out. I'm sorry not to be able to assist more, and I am very sorry for Patrick, but I'm afraid that's as far as this goes. Morally and legally, my hands are tied."

His face is regretful, apologetic. Then—it might just be a trick of the light—one side of his mouth seems to turn up a little. I narrow my eyes. He has to work a little harder to keep a straight face. "Oh come on," Dave chuckles. "Do you really think I didn't run a search for Athena as soon as I realized what she'd done? I think you'll be very interested in what I came up with, actually," he says, gesturing to someone sitting at another table, who brings over a laptop.

"Is he your helicopter pilot?" I ask, half joking.

"No, I fly my own helicopter," Dave says with a straight face.

One of the unsettling things about trying to have a conversation with a very rich person, it turns out, is that you never quite know where their sense of what is absurd ends and yours begins.

"Okay," he says. "Here we go." He gestures for me to move my chair around and flips open the laptop, clicking through a series of photos of Athena going back years. Athena in a nail salon, Athena on the beach, Athena at Dubai airport. It's unsettling to watch her grow increasingly youthful as Dave rewinds time. He stops on a picture of Athena driving into a gated compound.

"It wasn't hard to find photos of her with the art-collecting valet," Dave says, showing me several of the pair talking outside the polo club. "But there are also many, many pictures of her with someone else you might recognize."

"Oh God, oh no, I knew it." I feel a sharp stab of pity for Harry, a heavy sadness that he had been desperate enough to get involved in whatever this was.

Dave looks puzzled. "I don't know what you think I'm about to say, but I'm pretty sure you're wrong."

He taps a key, and someone I haven't seen in years fills the screen. Someone nobody has seen in years. My brain takes a few seconds to catch up with my eyes, but it's unmistakable: the man in the picture is a middle-aged Freddie Talbot.

"I don't believe it," I say. "This is some sort of sick joke, isn't it? Something you've faked, or had your people fake. Your belated revenge for my not being nicer to you thirty years ago."

Dave turns to me, his face illuminated by the computer screen. He seems genuinely hurt by the insinuation. "Caroline, I promise you these are real—I wouldn't joke about something like that. You're stuck in a foreign country without a passport, your ex-husband is in jail accused of a murder in which your former best friend looks like she's somehow involved. I'd be a bit of a dick if I didn't try to help you, wouldn't I? And this"—he gestures to his laptop—"happens to be a way in which I am very well equipped to assist."

"Freddie died thirty years ago. The police were certain of it. The pool of blood. The abandoned car in the river. He can't have been hiding out here since he disappeared, surely?" I sound like I am trying to convince myself, and not doing a very good job of it. "He had a mother who missed him, a family who never declared him dead because they hoped he would walk back through the front door. Nobody is that cruel."

"My systems are almost one hundred percent accurate, with a decent dataset for comparison. Usually, we would scrape pictures from social media, but because Freddie is ‘dead'"—Dave curls his fingers into quote marks—"he's not a big Instagrammer. There was enough to work from, though—Freddie's face was plastered all over the media for months after he disappeared."

I remember it well. You couldn't open a newspaper or turn on the TV without seeing—with a jolt—a picture of Freddie in a dinner jacket, his expression that familiar mocking half smile. Dave began to scroll through more photos: Freddie having dinner on a terrace with Athena here in the DIFC. Freddie and Athena strolling together hand in hand along a marina.

"This is Freddie in Starbucks, eighteen months ago," Dave says. He taps the trackpad. "This is him collecting his dry cleaning downtown. Three weeks earlier here he is, getting a haircut."

"How much of this stuff is there?"

"How much do you want? Here he is arriving at the Burj Al Arab in 2017. Here he is on the Palm at the start of last year. Here he is driving to Abu Dhabi in 2015."

"He's been in the UAE the whole time?" I ask.

"Since 2011 definitely. I can also tell you with absolute certainty that in those twelve years he has never flown into or out of the international airport here. But that's as far back as my data goes."

"And he's been with Athena all that time too?"

"It certainly appears so. I've got one more thing to show you," he says. "This is footage from the night that Harry died, from the hotel."

"Which you have access to how?"

"We work with quite a few of the big hotels and malls."

"And you're telling me that Freddie was at our hotel?"

"He was," Dave confirms. "Several times over an eighteen-hour period, in fact. We only have footage from the public areas, obviously, so we have him in the lobby, we have him in the gym, and we have this."

He presses play on a video, although I have to ask him to run it twice before I believe what I'm seeing. As Patrick exits the elevator on the ground floor, Freddie enters, cap pulled down low, eyes to the floor. Patrick, seemingly lost in his thoughts, barely notices there is even another person there. The time stamp at the start of the video is 3:17 a.m.

"Do you have any idea what room Harry was staying in?" Dave asks, clearly enjoying playing detective. "Presumably because of the way the camera on his corridor was angled, there is no footage of Harry Willoughby going into or out of a bedroom. There are always blind spots—it's something we are trying to correct."

"His room was a few doors down from me, on the seventh floor."

"Interesting. Well, Freddie exits the elevator on the fifth, lets himself into a room using a key card, and does not leave until nine the next morning."

"You've got to take me to them," I say. "Athena and Freddie. You must be able to find out where they live?"

"Give me until tomorrow morning," Dave promises. "And I'll have an address."

PATRICK, DUBAI, FIFTY HOURS AFTER HARRY'S DEATH

My lawyer refuses to hazard a guess at how long I'll be detained before trial. Six weeks? Six months? It is impossible to say, he tells me sternly, and my outburst will not have helped.

It is a different driver, a different van into which I am herded after the hearing—although the journey that follows is just as terrifying. Even more frightening is the realization that we are not being driven back to the police station but to prison, real prison, behind barbed-wire-topped walls. After we drive through them, I can hear the gates shut heavily behind us. A few seconds later, we stop again and there follows the screech of a second set of gates.

Out of the van we are herded. Into the prison we are led. Down one icy-cold air-conditioned corridor after another. Through door after door. Past cell after cell. There seem to be at least ten men in every one we pass. Sitting on bunks, sleeping or playing cards or just huddled under a blanket. The prison officer ahead of us stops every so often to explain, in Arabic, how everything works. Local inmates translate for the rest of us. We will be locked in our cells from 8:00 p.m. until 8:00a.m. There are no washing facilities. Each shared cell has one sink and a squat toilet with a pitcher of water to flush it with. Nobody shows much interest in me when I am led into mine, except for some shifting around to show which bunks are already taken.

There is a single pay phone on the wall in the communal area, with twenty men in a line next to it. Six weeks, I think. Six months. I need to call Caroline. I need to get a phone card. The trouble is that the prison shop is open for only one hour in the morning and one hour in the afternoon, but that hour is not fixed. So everyone loiters, and when the shutter goes up, there is a scrum. After an hour of pushing and jostling, I only just make it to the front before the shutter comes down.

The line for the phone is even longer than the line for the shop.

I wait for almost three hours, aware that we will all be herded back and locked in for the night at eight. Just as I finally get to the front of the line, a buzzer goes off and the guards start shouting. It is ten minutes to eight, and those who are not back in their cells already rush off in that direction. The phone rings perhaps thirty times before Caroline answers. Just at that moment, a second buzzer goes off.

"I have seconds before I need to get back to my cell. I need to tell you something," I say quickly.

There is music playing in the background on her end. "Patrick, I can barely hear you. I'll just—"

"No, there's no time. Caroline, Freddie is alive. Freddie Talbot is alive and in Dubai. He was at the hotel the night Harry was murdered."

"I know," she says. "We're on it. Dave and I. We're going to get you out of there, I promise."

Dave White? I think, wondering if I'm hearing things. "And my dad, was he okay?"

"He was fine. But he said something strange." She is talking fast, infected by my panic. "Is there any way he might have known there was a Self-Portrait as Sphinx at Longhurst all along?"

A guard snatches the phone out of my hand and slams it down onto the receiver. I am the last man left in the corridor, and I practically fall over myself running back to the cell. Imitating the others, I stand by the bed, arms at my side, for the head count. The guard eyes me narrowly. The door is closed and locked, and we all fold ourselves into our beds, each of us with one thin pillow and one scratchy blanket, which reaches mid-shin.

All night, someone on the bunk below me weeps. I can hear things skittering around on the concrete floor. Lights pan across the cell at intervals: guards patrolling with their flashlights. Unable to sleep, I ponder Caroline's question, and why she asked it. It was certainly possible my father had stumbled across either version of Juliette's painting at Longhurst, in Austen's former studio or in the Green Room, but what I could not imagine was that back in 1991—without the clues and supporting evidence we had found in the Willoughby Bequest and the Witt—he would have known what he was looking at if he had.

There was something I had long wanted to ask him, though.

Quite often at my gallery, people tried to sell us works we were pretty sure were fakes. Picassos with dodgy paperwork. Subpar works attributed to, say, Miró, that nevertheless had excellent documentary credentials. Often I would discuss these with my father, ask his opinion. Like a lot of dealers, he was interested in the motivations and mechanics of forgery. He delighted in the details of a successful art fraud—one in the eye for the establishment, and all that. He could recount how each of the great fakers had gone about it, and how much they had made, and how they had gotten away with it. Films and books, he insisted, placed too much emphasis on the practical business of imitating a painter's style. What mattered was the provenance. The story of the thing. A plausible account of its journey through time.

The question that I had never quite worked up the nerve to ask him was whether he had been tempted to fake a painting himself. He had school fees to pay, blondes to woo, sports cars to buy, after all. I am sure after the Raphael episode, he would have been thrilled at the idea of getting one over on the experts.

His position as the Willoughbys' favored dealer, as they gradually sold off Longhurst's collection, must surely have put him in a very tempting position. Austen Willoughby was a forger's dream—prolific and formulaic, with a steady global market for his work. If there was a painting on photographic record in the Witt Library but no sign of it in Longhurst, and no extant record of its having been sold, how irresistible it would have been to pay someone competent to paint a replacement. Philip—always looking for new revenue streams—could well have had a hand in it.

And if you could find someone to do that, then reversing the process, taking a photograph of a forged painting—using vintage film stock, an appropriate camera—and slipping it into the Witt's Longhurst Hall file would be a fairly straightforward matter too. It had been done before: I remembered the art world being aghast when a con man was caught inserting papers into the Tate's archives corroborating the existence of fake works by the painter Ben Nicholson that he had commissioned and then sold as the real thing.

The question now floating around my head was this: If I believed my father could be complicit in faking work by Austen Willoughby, was it possible he had been involved in the forgery of a work by Austen's niece?

After breakfast—a pot of yogurt, no spoon; sweet milky tea—I join the phone line once more, determined to ask my father, who is at his most lucid in the morning, straight out. I dial the care home's number, and after a long wait, someone picks up.

"May I speak to Quentin Lambert, please?" I ask. "Usually he is awake at this time, I think?"

"Could you just hold for a second?" the woman on the line asks. I can hear an extended indistinct discussion and I am conscious of the seconds ticking away, of the men in line behind me beginning to bristle.

"Hello. Mr. Lambert?" It is a different woman's voice.

"This is Patrick Lambert, yes. Is my father there?"

"I am so sorry, Mr. Lambert," she says. "We have been trying to get in contact. I regret to tell you like this, but I am afraid your father passed away in his sleep during the night."

ALICE LONG, CAMbrIDGE, 1991

When I was eight years old, my cat disappeared. Which would have upset most children, I suppose, but I was very close to that cat. Whenever I came back from boarding school at the end of term, she was always the inhabitant of the house I looked forward to seeing most.

Being sent off like that was something of a relief, really—certainly preferable to being in that house with my mother and father, constantly feeling as if I was blunderingly trespassing on their loss. I once came running up the lawn and stopped face-to-face with my father on the steps of the terrace. For a moment, a look came across his face that I still struggle to describe: startled amazement, almost deranged joy. Then the sun passed behind a cloud and he saw that it was me and stalked off, scowling and muttering to himself.

Nor would I miss the rambling Egyptological disquisitions he would launch into, unprompted, at mealtimes, and that we would be expected to follow attentively. At dinner one night, I remember Uncle Osbert got caught pulling faces and pretending to nod off during my father's impromptu lecture on the correct ancient pronunciation of Osiris and it almost ended in blows. We did not see Osbert at Longhurst for a long time after that—a shame, as he had always been my favorite uncle, with his startling blue eyes, bristly blond mustache, and slightly flushed complexion. "A faint whiff of the hip flask about him always" was my mother's observation. My main memory of him was as the only adult who ever seemed to actually listen to what you were saying.

I missed Uncle Osbert, but it was Cat's disappearance that really upset me. She never had a proper name, and she was certainly not acquired as a pet for me. She was a tortoiseshell, tiny, brought in to keep the mouse population down, except that she much preferred eating scraps I stole from the kitchen and fed her by hand. She made my mother sneeze violently, and when my father crossed paths with that creature, as he called her, he would usually swing and try to kick her, or, if he was in an especially bad mood, threaten to drown her.

And so that summer, when I arrived home from school for the holidays and she did not slink immediately down the steps to greet me, I assumed my father had finally done what he had so often threatened to. I did ask where she was, but my mother looked at me so blankly I thought she might pretend she did not remember the animal to which I was referring at all.

"What did you do?" I asked my father.

He turned and looked at me coldly. "I have no idea what you are talking about," he said, and that got me, a little, because I had never known my father to tell an untruth before, mostly because he did not care enough what anyone else thought of him to lie.

I started searching the house, checking every corridor. I looked into every room. I peered up chimneys. I inspected behind curtains. I asked every maid when they had last seen her. A week ago, someone thought, at the far end of the lawn. Friday afternoon, someone else offered, hanging around the kitchen. It was one of the girls who worked in the scullery who said she thought she had seen my father carrying Cat in his arms, scooped up, in the direction of the island. My first thought was he had rowed her across and left her there to get her out from under his feet.

I was very strictly forbidden from going anywhere near the lake, and I had not dared to since my sister's accident. The thought of doing so now filled my heart with lead, but I had to know.

Down by the jetty was a boathouse in which three little sculls lay on their backs. I dragged the lightest down to the water and gathered my nerve to step into it. The boat wobbled and I sat abruptly down, settling the oars in their rowlocks and starting to pull. The lake was low, and at first the boat dragged slowly across the underwater foliage, oars catching. Then I was away, pulling into the bright morning sunlight, every detail of the lake bed visible through the water. I tried not to think about my poor sister. I tried not to think about that day at all.

When I reached the other side, I tied up the boat with extravagant care and then followed the narrow path up a low slope to the tree line. At the far end of the island was the pyramid. I continued on the path until I reached it. If anyone saw the boat, if anyone noticed I was missing and guessed where I was, it was almost impossible to imagine how much trouble I would be in.

"Oh, Cat," I called softly. "Psst, psst. Where are you, Cat?"

I had reached the far end of the island. No sign of Cat. At the end of the path in a glade of trees stood the pyramid. At its base, there was a door that had a bar across it with a padlock, dangling open. Never before had I seen that door unsecured. I lifted the padlock and let it drop in the grass. I found a handle, pulled the door open a crack, and squeezed inside, feeling the stone scraping against the skin of my shoulders. Steps led downward between damp-smelling walls.

There was not enough light to see the walls of the room at the bottom of the stairs, which in a way was a blessing—I kept my eyes averted from the gloomy corner in which I supposed Lucy's sarcophagus sat, swallowing the impulse to apologize to her for barging in unannounced. Somehow the cold air felt infused with her presence.

In the middle of the room there was a stone table, about three quarters of it illuminated by the trapezoid of falling light from the doorway, my own dark silhouette partially obscuring what was on it: a bundle, something small and oblong and tightly wrapped.

Bandages. That was what I thought, when eventually I gathered the courage to reach out and touch it. It was some sort of package, about the size of a cat. Something that was damp, the dampness of which had soaked through the cloth.

Then I realized what I was touching and ran.

When I was sixteen years old, one of the maids disappeared.