Page 34 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
It was not Patrick at the door but two uniformed police officers, accompanied by one of the college porters.
“Caroline Cooper?”
I nodded mutely.
“Are we correct in thinking you were at Longhurst Hall last night?”
My mind was racing. What could they know, how could they know, about the missing painting already? I had righted everything I knocked over, placed all the canvas dust sheets back. Even if Philip Willoughby had gone looking for Juliette’s painting and failed to find it, what evidence could there be that I was the one who had taken it? There was a horrible moment when it occurred to me that perhaps Patrick had turned me in....
They asked if they could come in, explaining that they were trying to talk to everyone who had been at the party, that there was someone they had concerns about, someone whose location they were attempting to establish.
“You want to talk to me about Freddie Talbot,” I said, trying not to sound too relieved about this.
“We want to talk to you about Freddie Talbot,” one of the officers confirmed.
PATRICK, CAMBRIDGE, 1991
“He’ll be enjoying this, you know,” Harry said, unconvincingly, kicking his heels against the wall of the master’s lodge. “It’s classic Freddie. That fucker. That joker. He used to love doing this when we were kids playing hide-and-seek, freaking everyone out, hiding for so long that everyone started getting genuinely worried. He’ll turn up. He’ll probably come strolling in halfway through the next Osiris dinner, ask what we’re all looking so surprised about, what he’s missed. That will be the punch line, the look on our faces.”
Eric Lam gave a half-hearted chuckle. Benjy Taylor smiled faintly. I think we were all aware that forty-eight hours after Freddie had last been seen, especially given what the police had found at Longhurst, things were starting to look very worrying indeed.
The only person who did not seem to have picked up on this was that idiot Ivo Strang, who kept making the same joke about how much money he owed Freddie for drugs and how he hoped he would never show up again. The third time he made it, just as Athena joined us, I told him quite firmly to shut up.
We had all been asked to be here to meet Freddie’s mother and her husband, who had flown in from South Africa. Having arrived directly from a briefing by the police at Longhurst, they were being shown around Freddie’s room while we waited outside the master’s lodge. Arno von Westernhagen made it back from lectures just as we were being ushered inside, and I realized I hadn’t actually seen him since he borrowed my car.
I hung back and tapped him on the shoulder as we walked single file into the wood-paneled drawing room. “I’ve a little bone to pick with you,” I said.
“Oh yes?” he whispered, only barely turning his head, but visibly tensing up.
“What the fuck happened to my front seat?”
“The passenger seat? Oh, right, yes,” he said, his shoulders dropping half an inch. “Sorry about that. I bought a big bottle of water from the service station and it leaked on the way back. If there’s been any damage...”
He trailed off as the master—silver-haired, a world-famous economist, standing behind his desk in an olive tweed suit—cleared his throat. There weren’t enough chairs for everyone, so some people had to hover awkwardly around the fireplace or by the window. No one seemed to know quite where to look or what to say. I kept trying to give Athena, who had staked a spot close to the door, an empathetic smile, but she was not making eye contact with anyone.
This must have been so much harder, more complicated, for her than for the rest of us. Caroline had tried to reach out—with notes in her cubby, phone calls, ringing her doorbell—but the response had been complete, stony silence.
“Thank you all for coming,” said the master. “As you can all imagine, there are some questions that Freddie’s mother would like to ask you about the events of last weekend.”
It was his mother’s husband, Cameron, who posed the first one. Freddie had once described Cameron to me as looking “like a tennis instructor,” and I could see what he meant. Tall, slim, very tanned, somewhat younger than Freddie’s mother, he actually owned a private game reserve a couple of hours outside Cape Town, where he and Arabella had been living for about the last decade.
His question was whether Freddie had been behaving oddly in the weeks running up to the party.
“I didn’t notice anything,” I said, mainly to break the silence. “Freddie seemed very much his usual self to me.”
I was close enough to Cameron to hear him snort softly.
It was hard to know what to say, really. Caroline had already described to the police the argument she had seen Freddie having in the car a few weeks earlier. They had not seemed especially surprised by what she was saying, although they had seemed interested. What she had not mentioned was having seen Freddie sneaking around the Osiris clubhouse the morning of the party. I was sure that didn’t matter, I told her. Harry had already discovered—and informed us all—that several very valuable items that had been in the society’s possession since it was founded had gone missing at some point over the last few weeks, and it seemed pretty clear who the main suspect was.
“Has any of you ever seen Freddie use... drugs?” asked Arabella.
“Oh no,” we all said at once, practically in unison.
She arched a plucked eyebrow. Her long blond hair—now with streaks of silver and white—was tucked up in a bun. I could not help but notice she was dressed all in black, as if for a funeral.
“What I can’t understand,” she said, shaking her head, “was where on earth Freddie thought he was driving to, at that time of night.”
Neither could I, to be honest. The last reported sighting of Freddie at Harry’s party had been around 1:00 a.m. Freddie’s car had been found around midday on Sunday, halfway between Longhurst and the train station. It had skidded completely off the road and down a sharp slope into a swiftly flowing stretch of the River Ouse. The driver’s door was open. The car had been abandoned.
