Chapter 22

CAROLINE, DUBAI, FIFTY HOURS AFTER HARRY'S DEATH

"Double espresso, please," Dave calls to a waiter without looking up from his laptop. I glance around the hotel restaurant, wondering how many guests know that his surveillance systems are capturing them at this breakfast buffet. That if Dave decided to, he could follow them on that laptop right around the city.

Athena and Freddie's comings and goings have certainly been easy for him to track. He shows me the route Freddie takes for his daily run, the supermarket where they do their weekly shopping, Athena's preferred lunch spot—sometimes dining with Freddie, often with companions Dave recognizes as art collectors.

"That guy is from Saudi Arabia." He points to a picture on his screen of a young man. "He just bought a Klimt for eighty million, which I'd considered but my software says is fake. And she"—Dave flicks to a picture of an older blond woman—"is married to an oligarch, buys Manet mostly. I don't employ advisors like Athena because I don't need the help, but for people who do, it's useful that she comes from their world, speaks their language, literally and metaphorically. She's comfortable advising wealthy people, and they're comfortable listening, because she was one of them."

"Was?" I ask. Athena had certainly looked sleek and rich enough when I saw her at Patrick's private view.

"Well, this surveillance suggests that her money is pretty much gone. Look." Dave first pulls up a picture of Athena with designer shopping bags swinging from her wrists in front of a huge white wedding cake of a mansion, then another of her outside the same house, getting into a limousine with a well-dressed older man.

"That's her father," I say.

"Yes, that's the home they shared in Emirates Hills, and Freddie lived in too. A very nice neighborhood. Very different from Deira, the oldest part of Dubai and very much not the nicest, which is where Athena and Freddie moved recently."

From the photos, it was quite a contrast. No more mansion and Range Rover—instead, Athena is hailing taxis outside a concrete apartment block with washing flapping from the balconies.

"You found the address," I say.

Dave passes me a scrap of paper across the breakfast table.

"She should be in, although Freddie hasn't been around for a few days now," he tells me. "I could come with you, if you like."

"No. Thank you, but I'll be fine," I say, unable to imagine myself in any real danger visiting my former friend, whatever she was embroiled in. "If you're there, she'll think it's about the fake sheikh thing, and the money."

"Well, I hope that at least you know this isn't about the money, for me. I paid Patrick what I think the painting is worth, and I'm not sad that I did. Right now, I just want to help you unravel what the hell's going on. I'll wait for you here, as I've got a few things to do, so please at least take my driver," he says, loudly enough for his chauffeur at the next table to hear. The driver nods.

"Thank you, I'd like that," I concede, feeling grateful for Dave's concern.

"Athena should be at home now—from what we can tell, she never seems to leave the apartment before ten in the morning."

I remember how Athena felt about mornings, so this isn't a shock. I look at my watch—it's already nine.

"If anything feels off, promise me you'll leave immediately. My driver will be waiting outside the door, listening, just in case."

"What is he going to do if—"

"You'll be fine. He can't pilot a helicopter, but he has other useful skills," Dave says reassuringly.

Keeping to the speed limit is clearly not one of them. As we race up the eight-lane highway, Dubai's skyscrapers and malls pass in a blur. The farther we get from the hotel, the less imposing the buildings become, until we eventually reach street after street of chaotic corner shops, shawarma cafés, and dimly lit barbers. So numerous and similar are the grimy apartment blocks here that I don't realize we have reached Athena's until the driver pulls up and steps out to open my door for me.

"This is the place," he says, leading me over and pressing a random number on the intercom. "Delivery," he says breezily, holding the door open for me once it clicks unlocked.

We take the elevator together, but he hangs back farther down the corridor as I knock. Athena opens the door in silk pajamas, looking momentarily shocked before composing herself. "Caroline! I was hoping I'd see you before you left, but this is a surprise. I wasn't aware that anyone knew I'd moved—do come in."

"Thank you. We have a lot to catch up on," I remark.

She gives me an unconvincing smile, then leads me down a corridor stacked with packing boxes to a living room with a white leather sofa, a too-large TV, and very little else. She excuses herself to fetch some water for us both. While she's gone, I look out between the blinds onto the balcony, where several sets of weights, a selection of men's sneakers, and assorted sports equipment are scattered.

"He's gone," Athena says to my back, as she walks into the room.

"So Freddie has been living here?" I ask, meaning in Dubai, but also here, in this shabby apartment that they are clearly in the process of moving out of. She says nothing, lips pursed.

"All those years, he let his family mourn. Patrick used to meet the Osiris boys every year for a memorial. You pushed me away and let me feel guilty for decades that I wasn't a good enough friend. And the whole time it's been a lie? He's been here, with you?"

Athena sighs, places two full glasses on a coffee table. "Take a seat, Caroline. You know, it's funny. Whenever I've imagined explaining all this to anyone, it has always for some reason been you."

I lower myself onto the sagging sofa. Athena settles down cross-legged onto the floor. She takes a sip of water.

"Do you remember, a few weeks before Harry's party, you saw Freddie arguing with someone in a car? Well, it was someone Freddie owed money to."

"A drug dealer?" I ask, even though I know the answer.

She nods. "From the very start of university, Freddie had always sold drugs. His dealer encouraged him to do it so Freddie could pay for what he was using—and he was using a lot. At Harry's party, he had a car trunk full of Ecstasy pills and cocaine that he'd just driven to London to collect, to supply the Osiris boys. Look, I know you two never got on, but Freddie is a good person. He was just struggling back then, numbing himself with drink and drugs, and it got out of control."

She delivers this with such conviction, manicured hands gesticulating, that if I didn't know Freddie Talbot, I'd have bought it. Instead, the description of him as a poor, tortured soul made the bile in my stomach rise.

"But he never quite managed to sell enough to cover what he was using, or he gave too much away to his friends when he was drunk or high. The debt piled up. By his fourth year, he owed a lot of money. The interest just kept rising, and the dealer started to make threats about hurting him. Killing him. The only person Freddie thought might be able to come up with that sort of cash quickly, and who would care about him enough to do it, was Harry. Freddie asked him for it a few days before the party."

"But Harry spent his whole life complaining about not having any money. Why didn't Freddie just ask you?"

"He was too proud to tell me any of this. And anyway, he knew I had no access to that sort of money. My father was wealthy, sure. If it had been a handbag or a trip to Paris, I could have asked one of his personal assistants to buy it or book it. But clearing my boyfriend's drug debt? In cash? Impossible. Daddy countersigned any amount over five hundred pounds, and Freddie owed a lot more than that. He knew there were things in Longhurst that nobody would miss for months, if ever—jewelry, silverware, first editions—and Harry knew where to look for it all. He could have helped his cousin come up with the money easily, had he wanted to, but—"

"Harry said no, obviously." I am astonished Freddie thought the answer might ever have been yes. "He was asking Harry to steal from his own family."

Athena snorts. "Seriously? It's not like that generation of Willoughbys bought any of the valuable things they owned, or earned any of their money for themselves. Freddie needed help, and it would have been easy for Harry to give it, but he refused. So Freddie decided that at the party, while everyone was drinking and dancing and distracted, he would go on a treasure hunt."

Exactly what I was doing, at almost exactly the same time, I realize with a flush of shame. I wonder if she knew that Freddie had also been looting the Osiris clubhouse earlier that day.

"I found him in my bedroom, hiding what he'd taken in my suitcase. I was so furious that I threw the bronze statuette he'd wrapped in my shawl so hard it bounced off the wall."

I distinctly remember the clunk it made, their raised voices, the thumping of my heart in my chest as I sat on the bed in the room next door.

"Then it all came out, what trouble he was in," she continues. "We fought, he apologized for not telling me about it all sooner. Then as we talked it through, it dawned on him that there might be a better way to get what he needed that night. If he could goad his cousin—upstanding, stuffy, future prime minister Harry—into taking a birthday line of cocaine and snatch a photo of it on one of those disposable cameras, Freddie could use it to blackmail him. But the instant that flash went off, Harry lost it. There was a scuffle. Freddie fell off the scaffolding and hit his head, hard, on the flagstones below. Knocked himself out. Split his scalp. Harry must have panicked, I suppose. He ran off, assuming Freddie was either dead or dying, presumably planning to come back and deal with the body and cover his tracks later. That was when I found Freddie."

"The blood," I say. "That morning, when you came to tell Patrick and me that you couldn't find Freddie. You had blood on your arm. You said you must have cut yourself and not noticed."

"Freddie's blood." She nods. "It was everywhere, but he didn't want me to take him to the hospital—he had so much cocaine in his system, he was concussed, ranting about being expelled from university, about his mother disowning him. I called Dad's driver—you might remember Karl—and told him to take Freddie straight to our private doctor in London. I said he was a friend who'd had a bad fall, drunk, and was too embarrassed to tell his parents. That he would be staying with us to recuperate," she explains.

"While you stayed at Longhurst and pretended to look for him, so that nobody would suspect you were involved in his disappearance. But why not just let him recover, and then both come back to Cambridge?" I ask.

"Because of what was in Freddie's car, Caroline—the car that Harry must have driven into the river to make it look like Freddie drowned. Freddie—like a fool—had written down the names and numbers and addresses of his main suppliers, the big guys, in that notebook in his glove compartment, along with all sorts of other incriminating and easy-to-decode information about what he had bought from whom and when, and knew it would lead the police straight to them. Can you imagine? He had no choice but to disappear—he needed all those people to believe that he was dead."

"Why didn't you at least tell me the truth?" I demand.

"Freddie and I made a pact not to tell anyone at all, but you knew me so well and could read me so easily I was worried you would work it out. So I did the only thing I could think of to stop you from suspecting—I stopped talking to you. For which I am sorry," she says, with what seems like a genuine note of regret in her voice. "Freddie stayed in one of our houses in London until I graduated, and then we left for Dubai together."

"But how did you even leave the country? Surely at the airport—"

"We flew privately," she says. "I often did, so I knew how relaxed they could be about passports. I also know there are quite a lot of people in Dubai lying low, for one reason or another."

"And he never knew? Your father?"

"Oh, once Freddie arrived, it all came out. There were rows. But Freddie won him over. And Dad was polo-mad, so it helped that Freddie was a nearly-qualified vet."

I could just imagine Freddie turning on the megawatt charm I had always been immune to but which seemed to work like magic on other people.

"Didn't Freddie ever want to come home?" I ask, trying to put myself in his shoes. I had spent most of my life wishing I could have just one more day, one more hour, with my mother—the thought of choosing to cut her off entirely was unimaginable.

She shakes her head. "What for? His mother was in South Africa and didn't want him. When he left England he was in debt, an addict, about to fail his degree. He could have a new start here, but the deal we made was that once he was in Dubai, he stayed in Dubai, and he stayed clean. There's no place better to do that than here, because the penalties are so harsh if you're caught."

I let this sink in—I always thought Freddie was the master manipulator, but it was Athena who had turned the situation to her advantage, getting the man she had always wanted all to herself.

"But you're clearly leaving now," I say, gesturing to the packing boxes. "What's changed?

"My dad died," she says simply.

"I'm sorry for your loss."

"Oh, so am I," she says, her voice dripping bitterness. "And it was more of a loss than we'd ever imagined, because when we came to try to make sense of his will, we discovered all he had left us was a mountain of debt. The whole thing had been a charade for years. Endless financial subterfuge. When people think you're rich, they're happy to lend you money, or extend your credit. And then when they find out you're not..."

"You end up here."

"Quite. This was actually our housekeeper's place at one point—a housekeeper we had to lay off because there was no longer a house to keep. It was the only thing Dad still owned outright, oddly enough. I didn't own anything at all, and I had never needed to make any real money myself. Freddie has never earned or had the capacity to. So we were broke. But Freddie has always kept an eye on what was going on back home—he had Google alerts set up, read the papers. Keeping track as over the years all the people he still owed money to, all the people he had named and incriminated in his notebook, all the people he had fled the country to escape, ended up dead or in prison for decades. We talked about it, but he still didn't want to go back, even with that threat gone. That's also how we knew that Longhurst Hall had been put up for sale."

I tried to imagine feeling so envious of an inheritance that you scoured newspapers for stories about it.

"And he wanted that money?"

"We had lived off my father for years until it all came tumbling down. Freddie wanted to do something for me, to lift us out of this horrible situation," she says defensively, gesturing around the shabby apartment. "And if Longhurst sold, he had a right to benefit from that. The house really should have passed to his grandfather and then down to him, after all."

"So he decided to get what he wanted by blackmailing Harry."

She nodded. "Freddie always held on to the pictures that he took at the party as an insurance policy. He decided to use them to demand his share. He did it anonymously—Harry had no idea his cousin was still alive. Freddie sent the photos along with a note saying he knew what had happened that night, that Harry was a murderer and had driven Freddie's car into a river to cover it up, threatening to tell the world if Harry didn't pay up."

"Then when he heard that Harry had found Self-Portrait as Sphinx, Freddie thought he had a right to whatever the painting sold for too," I say. Everything was starting to fit together now. "And with your phony buyer and his fake bid, you ensured that was an extraordinary amount."

"An artwork is only worth what someone will pay for it," she says with a shrug. "I didn't force Dave White to up his offer."

"But you did try to force me to authenticate," I say.

"Yes. Freddie took those pictures while he was on the scaffolding, waiting for Harry. He took a lot of photographs that night. When he had them developed, most were of people snogging in bushes or the Osiris boys passed out on the lawn, but a few of them came in useful," she admits.

"Had Harry figured out Freddie was the blackmailer?" I ask, remembering the haunted look in his eyes the night he died. "Because I had no idea who sent me those pictures."

"No, and the plan was that he would never find out. But when Freddie heard that his cousin was in town, he couldn't resist. He just wanted to scare Harry, demand one big payment to set us up for life." She looks down at her hands, shrugs. "But Harry's temper—"

"What a load of absolute rubbish." I am half shouting, unable to help myself. "You can't actually believe that? You don't accidentally slit a man's throat, using a champagne glass with someone else's fingerprints on it. I always knew Freddie was a terrible person, but I never thought you were an idiot."

Athena's face hardens. "Believe what you like, Caroline. I really don't care. But for the record, I've been with Freddie Talbot since I was eighteen years old. How's your great Cambridge love story working out for you?"

"How dare you." I stand up so quickly I upend the coffee table, shattering the water glasses on the tiled floor. "We might not still be together, but Patrick Lambert is the kindest, most loyal human being I've ever met, and right now, he is in prison for something Freddie did. I'll go to the police. I'll tell them what you've just told me."

She shakes her head. "They'll ignore you. Understand that I am only telling you all of this because Freddie has already gotten away with it. The Dubai police think they have their man, so they won't cast their net wider. That's simply not how it works here. And it wouldn't matter anyway. Freddie is in the air on a private jet with a fake passport as we speak."

"Heading where?"

"Longhurst, of course. The drug dealers he was so afraid of are all dead or banged up in prison, so that threat's disappeared. The chances of Freddie himself being charged with any offenses are slim, because who is left to give evidence? Freddie has never officially been declared dead, so with Harry gone and no other living relatives, the house will pass down to the next of kin. Freddie will get what's rightfully his—and once everything has died down, I will join him."

Although I have never hit anyone in my life before, it takes all my willpower not to slap her across her smug face.

Instead, I half run out of the apartment, slamming the door behind me.

PATRICK, DUBAI, SIXTY HOURS AFTER HARRY'S DEATH

When the guard calls my name, I assume something bad is coming. An interrogation. An admonishment. A punishment. He asks, in Arabic, if I would like to bring anything with me—a cellmate translates, and I shake my head. We seem to be heading out of the prison, not deeper into it. For a second, I allow myself to hope.

Then we stop, and I am led into a room where there are several men sitting, heads down, on a bench, all handcuffed, all looking as confused and concerned as I feel. Some seem to be in the clothes they were arrested in, instead of the prison's white tunic and trousers. Nobody makes eye contact.

The guard behind a desk calls a name, and the man at the end of the bench takes a seat in front of him, placing a blue plastic bag on the table. The guard pulls out a selection of pitiful items one by one, listing them as he goes. A belt. An ancient Nokia phone. A plastic bottle of water. When he is finished, the man is roughly escorted out the door. I slump forward, head in hands. They are taking us all to another prison. I am being digested even deeper into the system.

I can't even bear to look, but I hear more men being marched into the room and shuffling out, the rustle of plastic bags, the scratch of pencil on paper, more names called. Eventually, the guard barks my name and I take a seat in front of him. He places a clear ziplock bag in front of me, with my phone, my belt, my keys, and the clothes I arrived in.

"Goodbye, Mr. Lambert, you are free to leave," he says matter-of-factly, and directs me to a different door than the other inmates have been shoved through. Although I can just about stand, my legs can't seem to figure out how to move toward it. I am still rooted to the spot when the next name is called.

Frederick Talbot.

My mind must be playing tricks. I haven't slept in days, I've barely eaten. My brain has conjured the man walking toward me, a bundle of possessions under his arm. We lock eyes and he nods.

It is him. It is Freddie.

Even in handcuffs, he still has some of that old insouciance in the way he carries himself, that cocky confidence. After a little start of surprise, a wry smile spreads across his lips. As he approaches, I can feel him studying me closely. Perhaps he is assessing the ways in which I have changed over the past three decades, the past three days. Perhaps he's wondering what it feels like to be in my shoes.

"Hello, Patrick," he says. We are barely two feet from each other now, each with a guard close behind us.

"You killed him," I say. "You bastard, you killed Harry."

He does not deny it.

"He killed me first," he says.

Then a door slams somewhere and Freddie flinches, and in that moment I see the smile falter, the false bravado waver. Before I really have time to process any of this, I am being walked down the corridor and through a door, and through another, and then I am outside, blinking in sun so powerful it feels like it is literally beating down on my face. On the barbed wire along the perimeter fence, the sunlight glitters. On the tarmac, the air shimmers.

For a moment, I genuinely feel like I might fall to my knees and kiss the ground. There is a gleaming silver Rolls-Royce in the middle of the car park. Standing next to it is Caroline. I have never been so glad to see anyone in all my life. Somehow, I make it halfway to the car before my knees start to buckle. Caroline reaches me just before I topple.

Together we stagger to the car, her maneuvering me into the back seat. In my hands, I find a cold bottle of water and I drink from it greedily. From the way Caroline and the driver are looking at me, I know I must look even worse than I feel. I can see tears collecting in the corners of her eyes.

"Let's go," Caroline says. The locks of the doors automatically click, and I flinch. I see that Dave White is sitting next to the driver, and I start to think this is all a mirage.

"What is going on? I don't understand. I've just seen Freddie being processed into the prison. How did you—"

The desert is rolling past the window. For whole stretches of time, the view is so undifferentiated we hardly seem to be moving at all. Caroline and Dave share a glance, and he gives a nod.

"After we get out of this car, we can never discuss this in front of anyone else, ever again," she says. "There is what I am about to tell you, and then there is what everyone else thinks happened."

"I still don't understand, and I am not convinced you aren't a dream, but yes, fine," I say, and I want to weep when she puts her hand in mine, looks me in the eye, and confirms that she is here, with me.

"It was a tourist's phone," she says. "Logged into the Wi-Fi at the hotel opposite, filming the view. Their camera caught him, Freddie, climbing from one balcony to another. You recall how Freddie always loved to climb?" she says.

"How could I forget?"

"Climbing up onto my balcony, after I had gone to bed. Taking a glass. Your glass. The one without lipstick on it. Climbing across onto Harry's. He planned it—booked a room two floors down and checked in with a fake passport. Harry must have thought he was hallucinating when Freddie walked in through the balcony doors. Like seeing a ghost."

I try to picture it: staring at you through your own reflection in glass, someone you have assumed is dead for thirty years. A man you have always believed you murdered.

"And they shared it with the police? That's why I'm here?"

"Well, no," Dave White interjects. "Not quite. There are parts of my business that are rather less... publicized than others. Because CCTV cameras never have full coverage, we have developed ways to fill the blind spots. So we've been trialing, through offering free Wi-Fi for hotel guests, the ability to access self-created content. It gives us a broader range of data points, time, location, and date stamped—"

"He rifles remotely through the photos and videos on people's phones," Caroline says bluntly. "Accesses their camera rolls and pretty much anything else he can find on there and uses it to spy on them—"

"That is not quite right. And we never use what we harvest nefariously, or rather we don't let bad actors do so. But that is how we located the footage that exonerated you, searching within specific time and location parameters. And once we had that, it was easy to seed it out to social media at scale. Newspapers didn't take long to pick up on it."

"It was on the Daily Mail website within hours," Caroline confirms. "The police here picked Freddie up at a private airfield as he was just about to get on a private jet to the UK."

Caroline winces, and I see that I am gripping her hand so tightly my knuckles have gone white. Our eyes meet and she looks away. "They gave me my passport back," she says. "The police. I am free to leave the country."

I nod dumbly. "Of course," I say. "Of course."

"There is a flight at eight tonight."

"Right. Yes."

As the euphoria of freedom starts to wear off, it dawns on me that I have no idea what to do now, or even where I am going to go. My marriage is over, and I have no doubt whose sides our friends will be on. I am still holding Caroline's hand tight.

"My dad died," I say, a sharp pain in my throat as I realize this is the first time I've said it out loud.

"There's something I need to say about—"

We are both speaking at once. Then we both fall silent.

Caroline seems to be figuring out the best way of putting something. "I don't know why, or what was in it for him, but I think he set us up to find Self-Portrait as Sphinx at Harry's twenty-first," she says. "Looking back, it feels as if we were left a trail of breadcrumbs to a painting but we accidentally stumbled across the wrong one. You always stayed in the Green Room, right? Well, that was where Harry discovered the second Self-Portrait as Sphinx—and I think that was where your father left it for us to find."

I try to map this out in my mind. It does sound plausible.

"The painting we found in 1991," Caroline tells me, "had several key details overpainted. According to Dave's analysis, it was Austen Willoughby who did the overpainting."

"That would make sense, if that was the version in his possession," I say.

"Do you remember at Harry's party, his grandmother said Austen promised her he had destroyed it? Here's my hypothesis. Somehow in Paris, before the fire, Austen acquired Self-Portrait as Sphinx. Juliette's diary says he was there, at the opening night. That was why she removed it from the show. She would never have sold it to him, but maybe he stole it. Maybe he murdered Juliette and Oskar to get it, then set the fire to cover that up. And what happens next?"

"Do you know how many nights it is since I've had a decent night's sleep?" I say, scratching my head.

"For no reason anyone can explain, when Cyril passes away with two daughters dead and no heir, instead of Longhurst passing to the second-oldest brother, Osbert, he leaves it to the youngest, Austen."

"Yes, that's what happened," I say. "But why is that relevant?"

"I think when Austen got his hands on the painting in Paris, he worked out what the hidden meaning concealed in it was, and he used that knowledge to coerce Cyril into changing his will."

"Jesus, that family loves blackmail." A thought occurred to me. "What that must also mean is that the painting implicates Cyril in something."

"Exactly. Also meaning that when Austen promised his wife he had destroyed the painting, what he was destroying was evidence of how he twisted his brother's arm into leaving him the house. But for whatever reason—perhaps because he was a painter too, and understood the aesthetic value of what he had in his possession—he couldn't do it. He just painted over the bits that made its accusation legible, to those who knew what they were looking for."

We are nearly at Caroline's hotel now, and the traffic is thickening around us. I love this, I realize, being with her, watching her brain work, admiring the elegance with which her mind unpicks a problem.

"That's why I believe both those paintings must be genuine, both Juliette's," she says. "Because hidden beneath Austen's expert overpainting, both works are identical, and until now, nobody apart from her would have known that."

She is smiling, waiting for one of us to click the last part of the puzzle into place.

Dave White has turned around in his seat now to face her. He is grinning.

"You've worked it out, haven't you?" he says. "What it all means. The secret of the Sphinx."

"Maybe. The details Austen overpainted must all be vital in some way. Clearly, Cyril had concealed something in the pyramid on the island at Longhurst," she says.

"Something like... a body?" I suggest. "Something like, the body of the Missing Maid?"

"That would be the obvious assumption, yes."

"You think Cyril killed her—that she is the bandaged figure in the boat in the painting?" asks Dave.

"That's my theory. But that's not all. Think about the face of the boatman, his beak," she says.

"Thoth, you told me?" I say.

"Yes. God of knowledge. God of magic. And the hieroglyphics: the same phrase that appeared in the painting and over the entrance to the east wing at Longhurst. I am Yesterday, To-Day and To-morrow, and I have the power to be born a second time. The painting is not just telling us that Cyril killed Jane Herries and where she is buried. It's telling us why he killed her."

"It is?" I ask, baffled. Dave is frowning in confusion also.

"He killed her so he could try to bring her back," says Caroline. "He killed her so he could try and bring them both back. That's why his daughter Lucy—the bedraggled, damp girl—is so prominent in the painting. Because she's the key to the whole thing."

Then suddenly it all fits together. My initiation into Osiris, reading from Cyril's old parchment. Freddie's prank with the cat. Cyril Willoughby had founded the Osiris Society. He was not just obsessed with ancient Egypt. He was specifically obsessed with the idea of resurrection. No, not just the idea of resurrection. The practicalities of it. An obsession that must have taken him to even darker places when his own daughter died so young.

"Of course," she says, conspiratorially. "There is only one way of proving it. We need to confirm that Jane Herries's body is buried where the painting says it is. We have to go back to Longhurst."

The car pulls up outside Caroline's hotel. "This is your stop, I think," Dave says to her, appearing surprisingly sad at the thought of saying goodbye.

And I suppose I knew then that I was not going back to the house I had shared with Sarah, that I was never going back to that house. That this was the end of my marriage, my gallery, of whatever the last years of my life had been. That I was leaving and I would not return. There is a weight, a sadness, to that. An awareness of the hurt that has been done that cannot be undone.

Five hours later, holding hands again, Caroline and I are tilting back into the sky together. Ten hours later, we are in a car up to Longhurst.

ALICE LONG, CAMbrIDGE, 1991

Nobody saw him take her out on the lake, but I can picture how it must have happened.

I remember Jane well. How young she seemed, even to me. How shy. The way she said good morning without ever meeting your eye. Could somehow, when you passed her in the hallway, bob her head and curtsy without breaking stride. Oh, how carefully he must have picked her, his victim. Someone meek, unsure of herself. A girl who had never been taught to swim.

It would not have been hard to persuade her into the boat. He was, after all, her employer. She would have expected just to row around the island, I imagine, perhaps disembark to look at the pyramid. Even if she had intimations of danger, how could she have refused?

She had not seen what happened to the cat. She had not felt it, damp within its cocoon of bandages, and guessed how it had died, and why, and what my father had been hoping to achieve with that tiny waterlogged body. Why it was so important the cat had died the same way as my sister had done.

Once they were out on the lake, Jane in that buttoned-up jacket the younger maids wore, all those skirts, how easy it must have been to give her a shove, tip her over the side of the boat. Once she was in that cold water, she would have been heavy and floundering. Did he speed things up, hold her head under? Did she even get a chance to scream? Not that it could have been heard, from the house, from the lawn, from the gardens.

My mother and I both knew he had done it. She would never have admitted it to anyone. But she knew. What I have never known is whether she understood why.

That he was trying to bring them back. That he was trying to bring them all back. The maid. The cat. My sister. That the mad old fool, with his mummies, with his hieroglyphics, had convinced himself that the ancient Egyptians really had found a way of dragging people back from the dead. He believed the reason that the descriptions of the afterlife in the spells of The Book of the Dead are so realistic is because what is being described is actually a set of rituals to ensure your resurrection and survival in this life.

That was what his collecting was for. He founded the Osiris Society as a community of scholars who would work toward recovering that magic. Whether or not anyone else at Cambridge took it as seriously as my father, it's impossible to say. Perhaps he did not take it all as seriously then as he would go on to in later life. What I am sure of is that the death of my sister turned an eccentric interest into a macabre obsession. Because, he believed, if only he could establish the authentic, uncorrupted, original version of the correct ritual, the right way of saying those words, he could bring her back. He could row my sister back across the river of the dead and restore her to us.

Poor, sweet Jane had not run away. There had been no affair. He had drowned her and taken her body to his mausoleum and done to her exactly what he'd done to the cat and I fear many other creatures.

It was not a story you could tell and expect to be believed. My experiences in the asylum had taught me that.

That was why I painted the truth. If I hadn't, I think I really might have gone mad.

So many secrets. So many deaths. And now I am dying. The time has ticked on, and I have six months left, the doctors say. My lungs. My liver. My heart. All riddled. The other day I joked with my oncologist that it would be easier to list the parts of me that are not cancerous. Sometimes at night I wake and my sodden, gasping lungs make it feel like I am drowning.

Quentin Lambert—listed in the phone book as an expert in antiques and estate sales—was not a difficult man to find. He was one of those charming, slightly flashy types who turns up at elderly women's houses when their eyes are failing, undervalues their art and antiques, and offers to take it all off their hands. A spiv, we called them in my day. A spiv who thinks he is a gentleman. When he turned up at mine, he started sniffing around, telling me what this little Arts and Crafts chair and that little chipped Clarice Cliff vase might be worth.

I was the one who brought up Austen Willoughby. Immediately he became effusive. "Austen Willoughby?" he said with delighted pride. He had sold more of his paintings than he could count. He was a close friend of the artist's son, in fact, and had been a frequent visitor to Longhurst for decades.

"I know," I said. "Except some of the paintings you have been selling have not actually been by Austen, have they?"

All at once, his manner changed. He became defensive, started blustering about the Witt, how I could check the records there. I said I was sure the photographic records did match the paintings he had sold, probably because he had also been falsifying those records. His bluster died on his lips.

"What do you want?" he said.

All I wanted, I explained, was a little favor. Or perhaps a small series of favors.

First, I needed him to take a photograph of my Self-Portrait as Sphinx on whatever camera and film stock he had been using, and place it in the Witt with the other photographs from Longhurst.

He agreed without hesitation.

"Is that all?" he said.

"No," I replied.

I had already been supervising students for several years at Cambridge. This year, I just had to make sure I got the right ones, to make it clear I was only interested in students studying the Surrealist 1930s.

It is three thirty on Thursday, October 3, 1991. A red sports car has just pulled up on the road outside my house. From an upstairs window, through a gap in the curtains, I watch as the handsome young man driving gets out, scurrying swiftly around it to catch up with the pretty girl who is already making her way up the drive. They are peering up at the house, exchanging comments, perhaps trying to decide if they have been given the right address. They look young. They look eager. They look perfect.

Their names are Patrick Lambert and Caroline Cooper. One of them comes very highly recommended by her director of studies. The other is Quentin's son.

"Does he know?" I had asked Quentin suspiciously on the telephone.

"He has no idea. All I've done is suggest Surrealism as a dissertation topic. The rest is up to him."

I will send Caroline to examine the materials in the Willoughby Bequest, where I have hidden my journal, along with the pendant and passport that came back with me from Paris—enough, I think, to convince them the journal is genuine. Quentin will find a way of persuading Patrick to look through the Longhurst photographs at the Witt. Which should, with luck, lead them to my painting, carefully planted in the Green Room at Longhurst, where Quentin is staying right now and where his son will no doubt be for Harry Willoughby's twenty-first birthday in a few weeks' time.

That was Quentin's flourish. "There is a stack of paintings at the bottom of the wardrobe. If he has any suspicion this Self-Portrait as Sphinx might be at Longhurst, he's bound to look through them. He wouldn't be my son if he didn't."

It will be a gift, the painting, from father to son. The kind of gift that must remain unacknowledged, unacknowledgeable. The gift of a discovery that might launch a career. Just as I shall be passing on my journal to Caroline, a journal full of my sketches and studies for the painting, a journal that tells part of the story of its creation, hoping she knows what to make of it, hoping she understands the importance of what she has been given.

I have not told Quentin who I am. Who I was. Why I am doing this, and why I am so determined it not be a Willoughby who finds this painting. Perhaps he has his suspicions, but I have him in too much of a bind for him to inquire. He knows I could ruin him, so he does what he's told.

I do wonder if I shall live to see my scheme's fruition. The final act of a long and surreal life.

Patrick Lambert rings the doorbell, stands back, frowns as if he is not quite sure whether the doorbell is working, whether there is anyone home.

As I am making my way to the door, I catch sight of myself in the mirror, of Alice Long, of Juliette Willoughby. I turn down a corner of my collar, smooth it out, brush a strand of silver hair from my forehead.

It is all about to begin.

I am about to achieve what my father spent his whole life and sent himself mad trying to do.

I am about to bring a woman back to life.