Chapter 8

CAROLINE, LONGHURST, 1991

I was standing alone and shivering outside the tent, wondering where I could hide for the rest of the night, when I heard a cough. There was a pause, then another cough, slightly louder, definitely deliberate. I turned to see one of those boys from the table of nerds to which Patrick had directed my attention with a nudge and a wry smile earlier. He held one hand aloft, like I was a skittish animal who might bolt if he got too close.

"Are you okay, Caroline? You forgot this," he said, holding up my shawl with the other hand. "It's a little cold out here. I thought you might need it."

Only when he took another step forward to hand it to me did I recognize him—it was Terry, the quiet computer science kid from the room next to Patrick's in college. Next-Door Terry, we sometimes called him. It was a bit of a surprise he knew my name, to be honest. I think the most he and I had ever spoken was to say hello to each other as we passed on the stairs, a little awkward conversation in the kitchen as we waited for the kettle to boil.

He was wearing a dinner jacket with a wide velvet collar, much too large in the shoulders and short in the sleeves.

"Thank you," I said, taking my shawl. "That's very kind."

"You're welcome. Would you like a tissue?"

I nodded, having not realized until then that my face was damp, my eye makeup presumably smudged with tears.

We stood there a moment or two in silence. It dawned on me that if Terry had heard the row from all the way over at his table, pretty much the whole tent must have too.

"There's going to be dancing in a minute, I think," he said eventually.

"I'd better pop back to the house for a moment to change my shoes, then," I smiled, pointing at my mud-caked stilettos. "If you'll excuse me..."

The rear of the property was a confusing collection of doors and porches, flights of stepped and layered terraces, all overlooking a large ornamental pond. I climbed a set of steps in the moonlight and found myself at the back of the house. I stopped for a second to get my bearings.

The only light visible here was coming from an open window on the ground floor, a few feet away from where I was standing. I could hear voices inside: one was that of Harry's father and the other—high, strained, still distinctly querulous—was Granny Violet.

"I should have known. I should have known not to believe your father. He said he had destroyed that awful painting years ago. He told me he had burned it."

Harry's father was trying to soothe her, or shush her, or a bit of both. Unsure what I would say if anyone caught me, I held my breath.

"Promise me," she was saying again and again. "Philip, promise me. You have to find it. You have to destroy it. It's not art. It's an abomination. She was not well when she painted it. She was not well when she allowed it to be shown. The whole thing was a deliberate attempt to cause this family—her own family, our family—as much hurt and harm as possible."

"Please calm down, Mummy," he begged. "Come back out to the party, have a dance with the birthday boy. He'll want to see his granny enjoy herself. I'll look for the painting in the morning and if I do find it, I'll chuck the thing on a bonfire myself."

His footsteps got closer and suddenly the window shut with a bang and the curtains were drawn.

My heart was thumping. My brain was whizzing. God, what a mess. Because of my clumsy attempts to learn more about Juliette, Self-Portrait as Sphinx, if it had survived the Paris fire and been brought back here, would tomorrow be found and burned. I could not let that happen.

There was only one thing to do.

I made my way over to where I could see waiters filing in and out. The kitchen door was open. With dinner finished and the bustle of cooking over, there were only a few people left in there now, clearing and stacking plates. I shrugged and gestured at the shoes in my hand.

"Going to have to admit defeat on these," I announced, a bit stagily, perhaps, as I made my way through the kitchen, up the back stairs, and up to our bedroom. Instead of fumbling for the lamp, I sat on the bed in the dark, taking a moment to gather myself. I put my hand to my chest, feeling my heart thumping. Breathe, Caroline, I told myself.

Suddenly, joltingly, there came a loud bang from the next-door bedroom. Something heavy thrown against the wall, perhaps. Raised voices. Athena and Freddie. It sounded like their usual argument. As usual, neither was holding back.

"What is this?" she was shouting, before something else landed with a thud against the wall. "What is going on with you? Why are you like this?"

There was no audible reply from Freddie. A door slammed. Swift angry steps could be heard from the corridor. A minute passed. A lighter set of footsteps followed. "Freddie? Freddie, come back!" I could hear Athena calling from the top of the stairs, her voice plaintive. I sat in the dark in my room and waited until she went downstairs too.

I swallowed down the nausea that always washed over me at the sound of fighting, a cold mouthful of spit. I told myself that Athena would be fine, that the clunk had just been her launching something at Freddie and missing. A thick-soled shoe, a hairbrush. Freddie was a prick, but not a violent one. Not all men were like my father. Not all arguments ended in a shower of punches and kicks.

I put on my flat shoes and made my way back to the door that Patrick had shown me earlier, the one that led to the east wing. When I got there I found the door still open just a crack—Patrick must not have shut it properly—and I gave it a gentle push, reasoning that if anyone saw me I could start to sway and slur, a drunk girl looking for a loo to throw up in or a place to lie down.

The door opened. I stepped through, closed it again behind me, and waited for my eyes to adjust. This part of the house had a different feel than the rest—eerier, more ornate, more oppressive. The corridors smaller, narrower, darker. Directly ahead—visible through an open doorway, drenched in moonlight—was the library, a long room, two stories high, each story lined with case after case of leather-bound books. No art in there except for one massive painting over the fireplace of a plucky Irish setter, no doubt the work of Austen Willoughby. I ran up the curved staircase, taking the steps two at a time. At the top, I pushed open a door and stumbled into the room that must have been Austen Willoughby's studio, with an enormous skylight above. Ghostly white canvas dust sheets covered what looked from their outlines like stacks of furniture and paintings, throwing monstrous shadows onto the walls. I lifted one of the sheets, tentatively. A cloud of dust rose swirling into the air.

Slowly, methodically, telling myself that nobody at the party apart from Patrick and Athena would miss me, I began sorting, item by item, through the contents of the room. It was a somewhat heart-sinking prospect. Locating anything in here was going to be no small task. The room was like a cross between the world's poshest jumble sale and the dumpster behind an auction house. There were chipped glass chandeliers, dented furniture, cracked mirrors, threadbare sofas. A box of copies of Country Life from the 1950s. An open black plastic bag full of fur stoles. And under every other sheet, stacked canvases, some half-finished, some blank but in ornate frames. Others, clearly deemed not of sufficient quality either to hang or sell, falling apart. The canvas sheets were heavy to lift and the jumble awkward to navigate around, especially with only the moonlight from overhead illuminating the room. I was starting to worry I might not be able to sift through it all in a single night when suddenly, there it was. A little smaller than I had been expecting, tucked at the end of a run of much larger canvases.

I was literally holding in my shaking hands Juliette Willoughby's Self-Portrait as Sphinx.

A bright flash of light illuminated the room. Startled, I let out a cry and stumbled backward, tripping as I did so over a group of stacked paintings that fell, domino-like, with a loud clatter. For a moment, I thought I was going to go sprawling after them.

The room was dark again. I stood there blinking, my heart thumping in my ears, trying to work out what had happened, where the flash had come from. The room was silent. As far as I could tell I was the only person in there. The door behind me was still shut. I had the painting so tightly grasped I could feel it digging into my arms.

Directly overhead a loud thump was followed a second later by a burst of green and pink across the sky. Fireworks! That was what the flash must have been. The start of the fireworks display.

Pull yourself together, Caroline, I thought.

I knew what I had to do.

Everyone would be on the back lawn watching the display. If this was going to work, it would have to be now. Small enough to be portable but still pretty unwieldy, the painting just about fit under my arm. I draped my shawl over the top, a half-hearted attempt to disguise the theft as I made my way back through the house. No. This wasn't a theft—it was a rescue. I was saving this painting. On behalf of art history. On behalf of Juliette. On behalf of my mother.

I could still hear oohs and aahs from the other side of the house as I located Patrick's car key with its red-and-gold logo fob in the drawer in the hall with all the other keys. I pocketed it. I took a deep breath. Then I made my way down the steps in front of the house, two at a time, crunching quickly across the drive over to where we had parked that afternoon. All was still and sharply shadowed in the moonlight. Patrick's car was exactly where we had left it. More fireworks popped and crackled on the other side of the house. I slipped the painting into the trunk and covered it with a picnic blanket.

PATRICK, LONGHURST, 1991

Caroline seemed simply to have vanished. She wasn't in the tent or on the front lawn. She wasn't in the rose garden or on the terrace. I even checked the women's toilets when I heard a scream—and found Freddie, disposable camera in hand, being admonished by an irate blonde for taking a photo over the top of her locked stall.

I marched off to the house to check our bedroom, but there was no sign of her there either. I peered into some of the other rooms on our corridor too, disturbing in one a couple under the duvet who screamed and threw an alarm clock at me. I checked all the rooms on the ground floor, even poking my head into the dark east wing and discreetly calling her name. Nothing.

By the time I got back to the tent, the band had started up and the dance floor was packed. Heels had been discarded, jackets were off, shirts had been sweated through already. Even Harry, unusually for him, was on the dance floor, flushed and tieless.

As I passed the bar, Ivo grabbed my arm and handed me a brimful glass of red wine, into which Douglas Burn immediately chucked a penny. The rest of Osiris then surrounded me—Toby Gough, Ivo Strang, all the boys—chanting, "Down it. Down it."

"Christ's sake, lads, grow up a bit, yeah?"

Eric Lam made a mock-sympathetic face. Benjy Taylor tittered. I grimaced and threw my wine back in one go. Pennying was one of the more irritating Cambridge traditions—the challenge being to drink up before the coin hit the bottom of the glass, supposedly to save the queen from drowning—and these lads never left college without a pocket full of coppers.

"Coming for a dance, old boy?" Douglas asked, clapping me on the shoulder.

"Soon. I've just got to find Caroline and check that she's okay. You haven't seen her, have you?"

He shook his head. "She can't have gotten far."

He had a point. Even if Caroline had decided to leave, she had no car. Had she tried to walk all the way to the gate and make her own way home? That was a mile's hike, then another half hour along an unlit road with no pavement to the nearest bus stop, and the next bus wouldn't be along until Monday. Might someone have given her a lift to the train station? It was possible, but she would have a long, chilly night in the waiting room ahead of her, if it was even unlocked.

I was beginning to feel increasingly worried about her.

After all the drama today, after everything Caroline had shared with me, I felt I should be with her, making sure she was okay. Instead, I had let her wander off into the night alone.

There was still no sign of her at midnight, when everyone gathered on the lawn for the fireworks. I asked around as the rockets popped overhead. Toby had not seen her. Ivo said he had no idea whom I was talking about. It was Giles Pemberton who pointed out Terry, said Caroline had been talking to him outside the marquee. To me that seemed unlikely.

I was wrong.

"Are you looking for Caroline?" Terry asked bluntly as I approached, his face illuminated in flickering shades of orange by the bonfire, around which people were toasting marshmallows.

I nodded. "Have you seen her?"

"She went back to your room, I think. She seemed pretty upset."

I did not blame her. I had warned Caroline that the Willoughbys could be touchy, but I had never anticipated anything like this. Every time I crossed paths with Philip, he gave me the same aggrieved stare, as if amazed I had the gall still to be here. Was he going to tell my father about all this? I really hoped not.

I checked our room again—on the floor by the bed were Caroline's muddy stilettos. Thank God for that, I thought. I'd been starting to panic that she had gotten lost in the dark and fallen in the lake.

By the time I got back downstairs, it had begun to drizzle, and guests—shivering girls wearing boyfriends' tailcoats, boys in damp shirts—were filtering into the house.

Making her way along the ground-floor corridor in my direction, peering expectantly into each room she passed, was Caroline.

I called her name and she broke into a relieved smile.

"Patrick! Where have you been?" she asked.

"Looking for you, mainly. Are you okay? Have you been hiding out in the house the whole time?"

She nodded, looked like she was about to say something, then thought better of it. She gave an exaggerated yawn. I glanced at my watch.

"Are you tired? I'm sure nobody would notice if we slipped off to bed..."

She shook her head.

"I'm going to turn in," she said. "But please don't feel you have to call it a night because of me."

"But I..."

"Patrick," she said gently, "it's your oldest friend's twenty-first. Go and find him, have a drink. Maybe if anyone is still upset, apologize to them on my behalf."

She leaned in and pressed her lips gently against my cheek. "Let's talk about all that tomorrow."

As I watched her climb the stairs, it occurred to me that I hadn't seen Harry for a while.

It being his twenty-first, the other Osiris boys had been talking big about staying up all night. Douglas and Benjy were easily wired enough to do it. Most of the others had passed out around the place already—in the main entrance hall, Ivo was on his back on the couch, snoring. Nearby, Hugo had plonked himself on an armchair by a fireplace and had his eyes closed, glass of whiskey still clutched in his hand. As I was looking around for something with which to refill my own glass, Toby sidled up to me, sniffing and rubbing his nose, and asked if I knew where Freddie was. I shook my head.

At around three a.m. coffee, hot toddies, and hog roast rolls were served from trestle tables next to the kitchen. Georgina, in a green raincoat over her pajamas, was in charge of one of the urns. Arno von Westernhagen, the only person still awake who wasn't wild-eyed or slurring, came over with a steaming mug of black coffee in his hands. "So what do you think, Lambert. Reckon you'll make it all the way through to dawn?"

"I don't think I've got it in me," I admitted. All around us, people seemed to be making the same decision, or at least to be wavering.

Arno stifled a yawn.

"I'm not sure I am going to make it myself without another pack of cigarettes. There's supposed to be a twenty-four-hour petrol station with a convenience store not too far away..."

He was giving me a meaningful look.

"Sorry, I've had far too much to drink tonight. I'm not driving anyone anywhere, no matter how noble the cause."

"I could borrow your car."

"Um..."

"I'm stone-cold sober, Patrick. I can't drink, you know that. Doctor's orders."

I made an apologetic gesture.

"Come on, Patrick. I promised Harry I would stay up, and I'm pretty sure Eric and Hugo have a bet on I won't make it. Do me a favor."

I could feel myself wavering. It did not feel like a great idea. On the other hand, Arno was sober, of that I was confident. I also knew the petrol station he was talking about—it was a straight run, left out of the drive. It was not like there would be anyone else on the road this time of night.

"Okay. Careful with her, though. Easy on the accelerator, until you get a sense of what she can do. The keys are in the hallway dresser—MG fob. Just put them back there after."

Arno was so grateful he literally hugged me.

"Don't make me regret this," were the last words I called after him.

Wearily, blearily, I made my way upstairs to our room. Caroline muttered something indistinct as I climbed into bed next to her. I slipped an arm around her waist, kissed her on the back of the neck and—with a feeling like I was actually falling—immediately passed out.

The next thing I knew, morning sun was streaming through the window and someone was hammering on the door urgently. Caroline muttered something and shifted on the mattress. I swung myself out of bed, checked I had underwear on, and crossed the room to see what was going on.

"Caroline?" Athena said, looking over my shoulder into the room.

"Yes, she's here. What's wrong, Athena?"

"Has either of you seen Freddie?"

I shook my head. "Not for hours," I said. From under the blankets, Caroline could be heard saying the same.

Athena's shoulders sank. For a moment, I thought she was about to burst into tears. I turned to see Caroline sitting up in bed, sheet clutched around her.

"Come in, babe," she called. "Is everything alright?"

I stepped out of the doorway so Athena could squeeze past me. She ran to Caroline, who was already half out of bed, and they hugged. "I'm sure he's around somewhere," said Caroline. Her voice was croaky. She rubbed Athena's shoulder, patting her arm. "We'll help you look for him."

"I've looked everywhere," said Athena. "I've been looking for hours. We had a row and he stormed off." Caroline made sympathetic noises. "I thought after he had cooled down a little he'd come back and we could talk, but he never did. Then about two hours ago I woke up and thought I would go down and maybe persuade him to get some sleep just so he wouldn't feel too terrible, but I still couldn't find him. Not in the house. Not in his room. Not in the tent. Not in the summerhouse. Not on either of the lawns. I went down to the lake, even, to see if he was watching the sunrise from the jetty. There's no sign of him anywhere."

Here she broke off to stifle a sob with the palm of her hand. As she did so, I noticed a dark smear on her forearm.

"Athena, what's that? Are you okay?"

She dabbed at it with a finger and sighed.

"I must have cut myself and not even noticed. I took a tumble coming up the steps from the lawn."

I turned to look for a towel or a cloth to offer her. When I turned back, her face had crumpled.

"Oh God," she said. "He was so angry. He was so drunk. I honestly think something awful might have happened."