Page 33 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
After Patrick had sponged the seat as dry as he could, he laid his suit carrier out for me to sit on. Then we drove off, turning on the gravel and speeding toward the gate.
“What was all that about, with Terry?” he asked me. I told him, still feeling a bit guilty about not being able to offer him a lift.
“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” said Patrick. “The person I feel sorry for is whoever had to share a bedroom with him last night.”
Before I had begun regularly spending the night in Patrick’s room, I thought he was joking about his neighbor’s snoring. On the top floor of a nineteenth-century college building, overlooking one of the quads, Patrick’s room occupied one corner of what had originally been a much larger living space, subdivided to fit in more students, with only one thin internal wall separating it from Terry’s room. As a result, when Terry was in, which was always, we could hear every snore, burp, and fart, every scrinch of his bedsprings, the whir of his computer fan, and Terry tapping away in urgent bursts at his keyboard, half the night through. Patrick had once asked him what all the clattering in the small hours was about—Terry turned out to be trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
It was about midday by the time we got back to Cambridge. Most of the journey had been spent in hungover silence, both of us deep in thought. We parked in college, pulling up into a corner of my quad. There were only a couple of other cars in there for once, and nobody around. A radio blared from the windows of the college kitchen. We both climbed out of the car, unfolded ourselves, stretched, and groaned. Several things in my back popped. Patrick yawned so widely I could hear his jaw crack.
The moment I had been silently dreading had arrived. “Patrick,” I said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
I beckoned him around to the back of the car. Looking a bit puzzled, he followed. I opened the trunk. I lifted my bag out and put it down on the cobbles at my feet. I flipped back a corner of the picnic blanket.
“Jesus,” he said.
I returned the blanket to its place. He closed the trunk.
“Jesus,” he said again. “That’s Self-Portrait as Sphinx, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“Are you going to tell me what it’s doing in the trunk of my car?” Patrick said, frowning.
“I took it,” I said.
Patrick’s frown deepened until his eyebrows were practically touching.
“Just wait,” I said. “Before you react, wait until you’ve heard everything. They were going to destroy it. I overheard them, Violet and Philip, last night, at the house. I heard him promise her he would find this painting and burn it. You understand, don’t you, why I can’t let that happen? I didn’t steal it, Patrick. I saved it.”
I was talking too quickly, gabbling really, trying to get it all out before he had a chance to interrupt.
Patrick closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. Then he looked around us, up at the windows. None were open. Even this late in the day, quite a few of the rooms still had their curtains drawn.
“That’s not all,” I said.
“Oh God. How can that possibly not be all?” he said, his voice cracking slightly.
“Violet said that Austen promised her years ago that he had destroyed the canvas with his own hands. I know this sounds crazy, but I think Juliette put a message in the painting, and it’s something the Willoughby family are desperate to keep hidden. An awful secret.”
I could see Patrick trying to process all this. “What exactly are you saying, Caroline?”
I took a deep breath.
“I don’t think it was Oskar’s ex-wife. I think Austen Willoughby set the fire that killed Juliette and Oskar. I think he did it to destroy that painting, but somehow it survived. And when he did manage to get his hands on it, he brought it back to Longhurst,” I said, realizing how ludicrous it all sounded now that the words hung in the air between us, how many steps in the logic of this sequence were wobbly or missing.
“But why? Why not just destroy the thing, if it has a great and terrible family secret hidden in it?”
“Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to destroy it. He was an artist himself, after all, and it is an undeniably extraordinary painting.”
“But he could bring himself to murder his own niece, and her lover?”
I thought about this. “Maybe it was an accident. Maybe the fire was supposed to destroy the painting but not kill Oskar and Juliette. I don’t know. But if you’ve got a better explanation of how it ended up at Longhurst, I’d like to hear it.”
Patrick looked at me sideways and locked the trunk. “I need some time to think. I’m going for a walk.”
It was only a few minutes after I had gone upstairs that I heard a light tap at the door. Dragging myself out of the armchair into which I had collapsed, I made my way over to open it.
Now listen, Patrick, I silently rehearsed. I know this is a lot to take in...
