Page 56 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
Her smile faltered.
“What is it?” I asked her.
“Look at the expression on her face, the Juliette in the corner, running through the woods. I have always found it so unsettling, her expression.”
“She looks scared.”
“She looks terrified,” agreed Caroline. “Patrick, I have a strong feeling that the secret this Sphinx is telling us to piece together is something truly unspeakable.”
JULIETTE, PARIS, 1938
It felt like stepping back into a dream. The familiarity of it all. The cloud of laundry steam. The smell of disinfectant. An air of enforced hush, broken only by the sound of rubber soles squeaking on the polished floor, the rattle of gurney wheels, distant doors on distant corridors swinging.
As I had been hoping, when I reached the right floor, there were wheelchairs with canvas seats and backrests at the foot of the stairs. I took one. The sound of my frantic footsteps clacking in my ears, I steadied my pace down the corridor. I was relieved to find there was no porter waiting at the door of the morgue.
When I reached it I turned the handle and stepped inside, pushing the wheelchair in front of me. I closed the heavy door gently behind me and flicked the light switch. It was an uncanny feeling, being the only living person in a room full of dead ones. It was every bit as cold as I remembered. The bright lights flickered on, out of sequence.
All along one wall there were handles, three rows of them, at knee height, at waist height, at shoulder height. On the outside, handwritten tags with names and dates—men, women, and children. I located a drawer labeled Femme, Inconnue—woman, unknown—just as the young woman I painted weeks before had been. The date was a week or two before—I knew from Oskar this meant her limbs would be past the point of rigid stiffness.
The drawer opened soundlessly. This woman inside was older than me, smaller and slighter, another wraith recovered from the Seine, perhaps. Her hair, tied back, was darker than mine by a shade or two. She was naked on the cold metal, and even though I knew she was dead, my brain flinched from the thought of it, chilled steel against flesh. I stepped back to allow the drawer to open fully.
Her face, absolutely white, eyes closed, was expressionless. For the second time that day I found myself apologizing to a dead person. For the second time that day, I found myself horrified at what I seemed so calmly capable of.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice sounding cracked and echoey in the empty room. “I’m so sorry.”
I tried to tell myself that if she knew the circumstances she would understand. I tried to persuade myself that the woman I was looking down upon was beyond any possible further injury or insult now.
I cracked the door open an inch and checked the corridor. No one to be seen. Then I returned to the body. Onto the end of the drawer, I dumped the bundle of clothes I had brought with me, untying the string, unrolling the dress, separating from it a pair of stockings and a cardigan, revealing in the middle of it a pair of shoes. I dragged the dress over her head. Onto her still-stiff feet I worked the shoes. Then, gritting my teeth, I took her in my arms and tumbled her off the drawer and into the wheelchair. I tried as best I could to straighten her up. I threw the blanket in which my bundle of clothes had been wrapped over her legs. I removed the label from the drawer, closed it, then pushed the wheelchair to the door and flicked the lights off once more.
I retraced my route to the entrance. The lights in the corridors were dim, some of the hallways darkened almost completely. It was well past midnight. Any second, I was expecting to run into someone and for them to spot something amiss and sound the alarm. I pictured myself wrestled to the ground by uniformed orderlies, horrified at what I had done.
I heard doors swing open up ahead and dragged the wheelchair to a sudden halt. At the end of the corridor, a white-coated doctor passed, deep in conversation with a nurse in a complicated hat. I held my breath. They did not look up. I kept as still and silent as I could, listening as their voices retreated. Only daring to breathe again when I heard them pass through another set of doors.
With every step I dreaded the next a little more, knowing I would have to bump the wheelchair up a flight of stairs, steer it out of the hospital, down along the alley.
The streets outside were dark and empty. I pulled my hat down on my forehead, my scarf up over my chin and mouth. I arranged the blanket around the body in the wheelchair. I stepped back to survey the effect. We did not have to cross any of the open, well-lit bridges, and we could avoid the main thoroughfares. With her hat pulled down, her head leaning forward, in the dark, I was confident she would pass and we could be back at the apartment in under an hour.
Then it would be time for the hard part.
Chapter 16
CAROLINE, DUBAI, 2023, THE NIGHT OF HARRY’S DEATH
Surveying myself in the hotel room mirror, I smoothed my hair, then dabbed more concealer under my eyes to hide how little I had slept the night before, tossing and turning in an unfamiliar bed, freezing under air-conditioning I couldn’t work out how to turn off.
Was my dress too low-key? I had wandered out of the hotel briefly that afternoon to see whether the nearby boutiques had anything more obviously glamorous, but everything was well out of my price range: Gucci. Prada. Dolce & Gabbana.
Relax, Caroline, I told myself. Everyone there is going to be interested in what you have to say, not what you are wearing.
Give me a lecture hall, give me a seminar room, even a live TV studio and I’m fine. It was events like this one that always gave me the social jitters.
The butterflies in my stomach, the sense of being rooted to the spot even though there was somewhere I absolutely had to be, reminded me a little of the day Patrick and I got married, of staring at myself in the bathroom mirror and telling myself that I could do this, I could make myself do this, for Patrick’s sake. That love could overcome my fear of loss. That hope could overcome dread.
It did not help knowing that Athena was going to be there, that tonight would be the first time we had seen each other in thirty years.
I slipped my feet into my shoes and tucked the invitation into my clutch bag.
“Caroline Cooper!” a voice boomed from across the courtyard outside the Lambert Gallery, where the party had gathered. It was Giles Pemberton, his face shiny above a silk cravat, his white linen jacket already showing signs of being sweated through.
