Page 67 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
The officer shakes his head, making it clear the matter is closed. “I cannot help you, madam.”
Outside the station, I climb back into my taxi and the driver asks me where I want to go. “The hotel, I suppose,” I tell him. “Mandarin Oriental, DIFC, please.” I don’t think there is anything to be achieved by returning to the gallery, and at any rate I need to change out of these clothes, the creased and sweltering trouser suit I have been wearing all day.
When we pull up outside the hotel, all is complete pandemonium.
Uniformed men everywhere. Multiple police cars parked out front. Guests standing around outside and in the lobby, waiting to get back into their rooms. Long lines at the front desk—people wanting to check in, to check out, find out what is going on, complain. Businessmen in suits talking loudly about missing their flights. The staff trying to mollify people, explaining that the hotel remains an active crime scene.
I take a seat in the lobby with my phone in my hand in case Patrick calls. After several hours, during which all I can think to do is obsessively check the news feeds, scouring the internet desperately for any fresh information about what is going on, we are allowed upstairs to our rooms. There is much grumbling in the elevator from other guests, some lurid speculation about what has happened. I try not to think about Harry, and remind myself it has not yet been officially confirmed it is Harry who is dead.
The elevator stops at my floor and I can see, halfway down the corridor, three policemen standing around, talking. It is Harry’s room they are standing outside. As I approach them, on legs that suddenly feel reluctant to carry me, one asks my room number and directs me around the long way to get there. A few minutes after I close my door—I have just kicked off my shoes and started a cold shower running—there is a knock. A policeman. One of his colleagues is waiting at the door opposite.
“You were staying here last night?” he asks, without introducing himself. I confirm this. He asks to see my passport, which I retrieve from the safe in my closet, handing it to him. He jots down my details and asks if I saw anything or anyone suspicious, or heard any disturbance.
“I’m afraid not,” I say.
He does not write anything down in his notebook. Nor does he return my passport. He is not really looking at me but over my shoulder, into my room. He asks what time I went to bed, then where I was before that. I tell him I got in around midnight, having attended an event at the Lambert Gallery. His eyes narrow.
“We will need to talk to you further, madam. Until then, you must remain in Dubai, so I will take this with me.” He holds up my passport, then opens the back page for his colleague to log the details in a pink receipt book. He tears off the duplicate and hands it to me, and they both start off down the corridor.
My mobile rings. I answer it, fumbling to swipe. My heart is pounding so loudly that it feels like it must be audible over the phone line. “Caroline, thank God.” Patrick’s voice is very faint. I can hear other voices in the background.
“Where are you?”
“I’m in a cell, at a police station near the airport,” he says, sounding exhausted. “They keep offering me things to sign. Things I can’t read, in Arabic. I have a lawyer friend trying to find out where I am exactly, to get hold of someone from the British embassy.”
“I can help too,” I say. “I’m your alibi. You were with me last night, I’ll tell them—”
The reaction from the other end of the line is immediate and sharp. “Don’t tell them that, for Christ’s sake,” Patrick hisses.
At first I assume it is Sarah he is thinking of, his marriage he is concerned about. Despite everything else going on, I feel a twinge of sadness at this.
“You have to remember where we are,” says Patrick, his voice insistent. “Do you not remember what I told you last night, about adultery being illegal? People have gone to prison for it. You can’t provide me with an alibi. You can’t help me. You can only make things worse and land yourself in trouble too.”
“But did you see Harry last night? If you went to Harry’s room after you left mine, you might have been the last person to see him alive.”
“I can’t talk about that now. Not on the phone. Caroline, I’m calling because you need to leave. Something is going on and I don’t want you getting entangled in it. Get on a plane. Get out of the country. Do it now.”
“I can’t, Patrick.” He continues talking for a second, telling me to pack and call a taxi right away, before what I have said registers.
“Patrick, the police have just taken my passport.”
ALICE, LONDON, 1938
Alice Long. Alice Evelyn Maud Long. I repeated the name silently throughout the journey. As I lay on the top bunk while the ferry crossed the channel, listening to the woman below me snoring. As I lined up to disembark at Dover. I showed my passport to the man in his booth, who barely glanced at it before waving me through. For a while I shuffled along with the crowd, soaking in the English voices, eyes adjusting to English signs and advertisements, my nose picking up English scents I had forgotten: damp woolen coats, hair oil, fish and chips.
Not until I was actually standing at the train station ticket office did I realize I had no idea where to go. With Oskar at my side, the plan had been America, with England a brief stop-off. Only now did it strike me how half-formed our vision of what would happen next had been. Once in New York, had Oskar believed he would be able to normalize his visa arrangements, resume his old identity, relaunch his career? There were certainly dealers over there who admired his work. Buyers with money. Other Surrealist artists, native and imported. Were his visions of long evenings in Manhattan bars, parties at which everyone spoke French, our life in Paris reconstructed across the Atlantic? The thought of being in a city where so many of our friends and acquaintances had already assembled, where so many people knew and would recognize us, had been very appealing when Oskar and I had been planning to go there together. Now New York felt impossible, for precisely the same reason.
Los Angeles? San Francisco? I knew no one in either city. I knew nothing about either city. If Los Angeles or San Francisco, why not Mexico City, why not Peking, why not Casablanca? I was very aware how fortunate I was, to be faced with such choices. I had enough money, from Oskar’s sale of my painting, to get me anywhere. The trouble was, it would not last forever—I would need to earn a living soon enough, and I had not exactly been brought up to do so. I did not have the skills for clerical or teaching or nursing work. I could not bear the thought of picking up a paintbrush again, not yet. I thought of the photographs I had taken in Paris of Oskar and his friends. I had those rolls of film with me. I had my camera.
The first train that arrived at the platform was going to London, which felt to me like a sign. I paid for a first-class ticket, then panicked and instead sat in second class, where I was far less likely to know anyone. I took a room in the first hotel I passed in Charing Cross. The lobby was gloomy, the elevator tiny, the bellboy sullen. The room smelled close and dusty, and when I tried to open the window, I found it painted shut. In the middle of the night, I heard footsteps in the corridor and was sure I saw the door handle turn, so I barricaded myself in with the dressing table. I put my clothes and boots on and spent the rest of the night dozing on top of the covers, fully dressed.
The following morning, I moved to a hostel for women on Gower Street. While it was marginally more salubrious, I was confident nobody I knew in England would ever come near the place. I could tell that the other women living there were puzzled by me. Who I was. What had brought me there. I did not blame them. I was wrestling with the same questions myself. At first I spoke as little as possible, conscious of my accent attracting attention, inviting curiosity. Once, I heard someone in the corridor outside my room make a joke about “her ladyship,” and I was sure the object of their mockery was me. Instead of speaking I listened, to the words the women around me used, the way they said things, and practiced copying them.
I bought myself a suit, chopped off my curls so that my hair was barely long enough to tuck behind my ears, and turned my auburn dark brown with chemist-bought dye. Now that even I barely recognized the girl I kept catching sight of in shop windows, it felt safe enough for me to start traipsing up and down Fleet Street, doing the rounds of newspaper and magazine offices with my modest folder of photographs. Pictures of André Breton with his hands crossed on his chest, fingers splayed, trying to look imposing. Of Man Ray, deeply engrossed in a game of chess. Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, pulling faces.
I developed them in the sink in my room at the hostel, a blanket draped over the curtain rail to block out the light. Every time I developed a photo of Oskar, every time his face emerged beneath my hands, I felt my heart leap up into my throat. Oskar, smiling. Oskar lying on the grass, wearing sunglasses, pretending to sleep. Oskar inspecting his own painting on the wall of our apartment. Every time one took shape before me, I felt a split second of happiness before grief took its place. Each time, I forced myself to picture the way he had looked as he came at me, his face contorted. It was an accident, I told myself. I had been terrified. I had not meant to kill him. He was the one who had struck me first.
On the third day, someone finally agreed to look at my photographs. At the Telegraph office, a man with gray sideburns and the sluggish air of someone who had been drinking at lunch flicked through them, making me flinch at how carelessly he shuffled each to the back. At one point, when it looked like one might fall to the floor, I almost lunged to grab it.
