Page 69 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
What I want to say is whatever will hurt Sarah the least, something about how it is possible to stop loving someone, or to persuade yourself you have stopped, and then start again without meaning to. That to have loved the same person twice at two different points in time does not mean that everything you felt in between was invalid. I want to tell her that I know loving someone, anyone, is no excuse for the damage I have done.
“All I want is the truth, Patrick.”
As I am thinking about all the many things I want to say, I see that they are all just different ways of saying the same thing. That I am still in love with Caroline Cooper. I look into Sarah’s eyes and my own start to swim a little. Even though I know it means the end of my marriage, my second marriage, I nod once, giving Sarah the answer she already knows is coming.
CAROLINE, DUBAI, THIRTY-SIX HOURS AFTER HARRY’S DEATH
It is now a full twenty-four hours since Patrick was arrested. I have left the hotel just once since yesterday afternoon, to buy painkillers for the headache lodged between my temples.
I have the unshakable feeling that if I just think about everything hard enough, an explanation will present itself. Pacing the room, raking over the past few days’ events in my mind, what I can’t figure out is who would want Harry dead—and who might benefit from framing Patrick for it. Nor have I fathomed how there can be two equally authentic versions of the same painting, and how this and Harry’s death might be related.
All my books and papers are on the desk in the corner of the room—my original, lovingly transcribed version of Juliette’s journal, my pictures of both paintings, a copy of my biography of Juliette, feathered with sticky notes. From time to time I pick one of them up as if the answer might lie there. The sudden loud ringing of the telephone next to the bed is so unexpected it startles me.
“There is a gentleman for you at reception,” a voice brightly informs me. Presuming it’s the police with more questions, I reluctantly head downstairs, taking the long way around to avoid Harry’s room. In the lobby, a tall man in a dark suit and mirrored sunglasses is waiting for me.
“I’ve been instructed to take you to the Airport Freezone, madam. Mr. White will be meeting us there,” he says, before ushering me outside to a silver Rolls-Royce Phantom. So he is not a policeman. He has been sent by Dave White—someone I still can’t help but think of as Terry—to fetch me, as we had previously discussed but I had subsequently forgotten, to come and spend some more time with the painting he had bought.
I suppose it should not surprise or irritate me as much as it does that Dave White plans to store it in a Freezone. Such designated districts around the world are often where billionaires stash their assets, places where business can be conducted untroubled by taxes, customs duties, or VAT. Their impenetrable chambers can hold everything from vintage cars to fine wine to watches in temperature-controlled secrecy. I do sometimes wonder what those artists in their freezing cold Paris studios would think if they could see where their work had ended up all these decades later.
The drive does not take long.
From the road, the Freezone looks like a security installation, with its barbed-wire-topped fences, its floodlights, its sequence of gates and sentry boxes, the absence of windows on the concrete buildings themselves. The driver presses a buzzer and announces our arrival, then parks outside a nondescript door. I’m led into a marble foyer and from across her desk—enormously long, like the control panel of a spaceship—a woman gestures for me to sit, and makes a brief phone call.
After a few moments, a door at the far end of the room swings open and Dave White walks out.
Patrick had told me that when they met for lunch, Dave was wearing boardshorts. At the gallery dinner, he was in an immaculately cut navy suit. Today he is in a nondescript T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. The only thing about him that suggests his wealth is the enormous Rolex on his wrist.
“Thank you so much for coming, especially under the circumstances,” he says, holding out a hand for me to shake, then leads me along the corridor of numbered doors. “I was so shocked to hear about Harry, and about Patrick,” Dave says, without turning. “If there is anything I can do...”
He stops, and the chauffeur, who has been following discreetly behind us, overtakes us to tap in a keycode. The door slides open, and inside is a gallery-like space with a white leather sofa in the middle. Hanging around us, carefully spaced and beautifully lit, are paintings by the best-known names in twentieth-century art. I can see a Chagall, a Duchamp, a couple of Erlichs, and several Picassos. And there, on the far wall of the room: Self-Portrait as Sphinx.
Then I realize what is hanging next to it, and gasp. I turn to see Dave, amused by my shock, grinning.
“That’s the painting from Tate Modern. The other Self-Portrait as Sphinx.”
“The painting that is usually in Tate Modern, yes. Except that last week, given the confusion about the existence of two seemingly genuine versions of the same work—which I am quite aware is a chronological impossibility, by the way—its anonymous owner decided to withdraw it from public display pending further analysis,” he says. He is now grinning very widely indeed.
“You? You’re its anonymous owner?” I say. I had always imagined the person who outbid us for the painting in Ely to be someone older, an amateur art-lover with a little money saved up or a connoisseur who got lucky. Not some teenage nerd. Not Terry.
“I am. I own both these paintings. One of them I bought from Patrick Lambert for forty-two million, forty-eight hours ago. The other I bought from under his nose, for quite a lot less, in 1991.”
“You were the telephone bidder at the auction? How?” Even as I say this, I know that we must have somehow led him to it. “Also: Why?”
I stumble over to the sofa as Dave pours a glass of water, places it gently onto the coffee table in front of me, and takes a seat himself.
“To be perfectly honest, I bought it to fuck with Patrick, because I hated him.”
“You hated Patrick? You hardly knew Patrick.”
“That was the worst of it. I hardly knew him, he hardly knew me, and still I could hear him through the wall, making fun of me.”
“Dave, I’m sure you’re imagining—”
“No, I’m not imagining anything. You know I’m not. Patrick used to joke about me all the time. About my snoring. About what I was doing in my room late at night. About me being your boyfriend. I would be in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil, you would come in to grab something, say hello, and the rest of the evening I could hear him teasing you about your boyfriend Terry. It was a running joke, that someone like you would ever consider going out with someone like me.”
That did all sound vaguely familiar, now that he mentioned it.
“And that was how you knew we had the painting? That Patrick put it up for auction? You were listening through the wall?” My heart racing, I am trying to work out all the other things he might have heard.
