Page 76 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
“So you can search for a single face?” I ask, unsettled by the implications despite his well-rehearsed defense, unnerved by the damage this sort of tech could do in the hands of the wrong people. “So we can use your systems to search for Athena Galanis? We can see who else she has been meeting with, speaking to?”
“Can is a funny word, in this context. As is we,” he says, eyebrow raised. “Because there’s can in the sense of is it technologically possible, and there’s can in the sense of is it legal, even in this relatively permissive jurisdiction. We would need to access a lot of very highly restricted data, which we are not cleared to access.”
“But it’s access that you have?” I ask
“Access I have, yes, because my company harvests and guards that data, on behalf of my clients. But it’s not access I can just grant on a whim. I’ve already helped you out. I’m sorry not to be able to assist more, and I am very sorry for Patrick, but I’m afraid that’s as far as this goes. Morally and legally, my hands are tied.”
His face is regretful, apologetic. Then—it might just be a trick of the light—one side of his mouth seems to turn up a little. I narrow my eyes. He has to work a little harder to keep a straight face. “Oh come on,” Dave chuckles. “Do you really think I didn’t run a search for Athena as soon as I realized what she’d done? I think you’ll be very interested in what I came up with, actually,” he says, gesturing to someone sitting at another table, who brings over a laptop.
“Is he your helicopter pilot?” I ask, half joking.
“No, I fly my own helicopter,” Dave says with a straight face.
One of the unsettling things about trying to have a conversation with a very rich person, it turns out, is that you never quite know where their sense of what is absurd ends and yours begins.
“Okay,” he says. “Here we go.” He gestures for me to move my chair around and flips open the laptop, clicking through a series of photos of Athena going back years. Athena in a nail salon, Athena on the beach, Athena at Dubai airport. It’s unsettling to watch her grow increasingly youthful as Dave rewinds time. He stops on a picture of Athena driving into a gated compound.
“It wasn’t hard to find photos of her with the art-collecting valet,” Dave says, showing me several of the pair talking outside the polo club. “But there are also many, many pictures of her with someone else you might recognize.”
“Oh God, oh no, I knew it.” I feel a sharp stab of pity for Harry, a heavy sadness that he had been desperate enough to get involved in whatever this was.
Dave looks puzzled. “I don’t know what you think I’m about to say, but I’m pretty sure you’re wrong.”
He taps a key, and someone I haven’t seen in years fills the screen. Someone nobody has seen in years. My brain takes a few seconds to catch up with my eyes, but it’s unmistakable: the man in the picture is a middle-aged Freddie Talbot.
“I don’t believe it,” I say. “This is some sort of sick joke, isn’t it? Something you’ve faked, or had your people fake. Your belated revenge for my not being nicer to you thirty years ago.”
Dave turns to me, his face illuminated by the computer screen. He seems genuinely hurt by the insinuation. “Caroline, I promise you these are real—I wouldn’t joke about something like that. You’re stuck in a foreign country without a passport, your ex-husband is in jail accused of a murder in which your former best friend looks like she’s somehow involved. I’d be a bit of a dick if I didn’t try to help you, wouldn’t I? And this”—he gestures to his laptop—“happens to be a way in which I am very well equipped to assist.”
“Freddie died thirty years ago. The police were certain of it. The pool of blood. The abandoned car in the river. He can’t have been hiding out here since he disappeared, surely?” I sound like I am trying to convince myself, and not doing a very good job of it. “He had a mother who missed him, a family who never declared him dead because they hoped he would walk back through the front door. Nobody is that cruel.”
“My systems are almost one hundred percent accurate, with a decent dataset for comparison. Usually, we would scrape pictures from social media, but because Freddie is ‘dead’”—Dave curls his fingers into quote marks—“he’s not a big Instagrammer. There was enough to work from, though—Freddie’s face was plastered all over the media for months after he disappeared.”
I remember it well. You couldn’t open a newspaper or turn on the TV without seeing—with a jolt—a picture of Freddie in a dinner jacket, his expression that familiar mocking half smile. Dave began to scroll through more photos: Freddie having dinner on a terrace with Athena here in the DIFC. Freddie and Athena strolling together hand in hand along a marina.
“This is Freddie in Starbucks, eighteen months ago,” Dave says. He taps the trackpad. “This is him collecting his dry cleaning downtown. Three weeks earlier here he is, getting a haircut.”
“How much of this stuff is there?”
“How much do you want? Here he is arriving at the Burj Al Arab in 2017. Here he is on the Palm at the start of last year. Here he is driving to Abu Dhabi in 2015.”
“He’s been in the UAE the whole time?” I ask.
“Since 2011 definitely. I can also tell you with absolute certainty that in those twelve years he has never flown into or out of the international airport here. But that’s as far back as my data goes.”
“And he’s been with Athena all that time too?”
“It certainly appears so. I’ve got one more thing to show you,” he says. “This is footage from the night that Harry died, from the hotel.”
“Which you have access to how?”
“We work with quite a few of the big hotels and malls.”
“And you’re telling me that Freddie was at our hotel?”
“He was,” Dave confirms. “Several times over an eighteen-hour period, in fact. We only have footage from the public areas, obviously, so we have him in the lobby, we have him in the gym, and we have this.”
He presses play on a video, although I have to ask him to run it twice before I believe what I’m seeing. As Patrick exits the elevator on the ground floor, Freddie enters, cap pulled down low, eyes to the floor. Patrick, seemingly lost in his thoughts, barely notices there is even another person there. The time stamp at the start of the video is 3:17 a.m.
