Page 74 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
I am led, still cuffed, to the table and told to sit down next to a man who introduces himself, in thickly accented English, as my lawyer. He explains what the procedure today will be. In front of him are documents he has just been provided with by the prosecution, he explains.
“Where is the prosecutor?” I ask, looking around. He points toward one of the men sitting on the judge’s bench. I am asked to stand and confirm my name and nationality.
It is all over in five minutes. The whole thing takes place in Arabic, and there is no translator. When I am asked a question, my lawyer offers a paraphrase of it, then does the same for my answer. I catch Harry’s name. The name of the hotel. The name of my gallery. The prosecutor says something to the judge, who says something to my lawyer.
My lawyer opens the folder of documents in front of him. I turn my head away but not quickly enough. The first document in the folder is a photograph, on glossy paper, of a broken champagne flute. Its jagged edges are brown with blood; spatter marks dot the stem and base.
“This object was recovered from Harry Willoughby’s hotel room,” he tells me.
I feel like I am going to be sick.
Behind me I can hear chairs shifting around, their occupants trying to catch a glimpse of the pictures. The judge asks my lawyer something, then my lawyer asks me if I recognize this object. “I do not,” I address the judge directly. My lawyer translates. Both the judge and the prosecutor look openly annoyed.
The judge tells my lawyer to turn to the next document. It is another photograph, a close-up of the stem, dusted and showing two partial fingerprints. The judge instructs my lawyer to turn to the next document. It is a photocopy of the piece of paper on which the police took my fingerprints when they arrested me. Next to the fingerprints is my signature. The judge asks my lawyer to ask me to identify my signature.
“That is my signature, yes,” I respond, enunciating clearly, trying to appear as open and helpful as possible. I ask him to tell the judge I don’t understand how my fingerprints ended up on that champagne glass. I ask him to make sure that is formally recorded. He shakes his head.
“At this stage, we just answer the questions they ask me,” he says.
The next document is a frozen image from the CCTV of the elevator as I am entering it. The prosecutor discusses this image at some length. He draws our attention to the time stamp in the bottom corner of the image. It is just before midnight. I am alone in the elevator. I am standing with my hands folded in front of me, head down.
The judge instructs my lawyer to ask me to identify myself. “That’s me, yes.”
The last document in the file is another CCTV image. The stamp on this one is 3:17 a.m., and I am on my way back down to the hotel lobby. I’m looking distinctly disheveled—hair mussed, shirt half untucked, no tie. The judge instructs my lawyer to ask me to confirm that the man in the image is me.
I say nothing. I am incapable of saying anything. My lawyer nudges me slightly. I ignore him.
“Mr. Lambert,” he says, louder this time. “Do you remember getting into that elevator?”
I do. I remember it vividly. I had just spoken to Harry and was grappling with the knowledge that my oldest friend had basically admitted to pushing his own cousin to his death off three stories of scaffolding and then had covered it up by driving his car into a river. I was trying to work out who knew all of this—who was blackmailing Harry for millions armed with that knowledge.
Understandably preoccupied, I hadn’t noticed the man in dark glasses and a sport jacket getting into the elevator as I got out. A man whose face is reflected in the smoky glass of the elevator’s mirror.
Suddenly I am on my feet. Shouting at the top of my voice. Jabbing with my finger at the picture in front of me. Trying to hold the picture up in my cuffed hands and show the people sitting behind me. Being barked at by the judge. Being screamed at by the prosecutor. Ignoring him. Ignoring my lawyer trying to pull me back down into my seat. Sarah is out of her chair too, unsure what is going on, unable to hear what I am trying to say, leaning forward, frowning.
The judge says something in a sharp voice, and men in khaki uniforms begin clearing the courtroom with shouts and shoves.
I am still shouting too, even if there is no real prospect of anyone hearing me in the general pandemonium, still waving the photograph as best my cuffs will allow.
The judge is reprimanding my lawyer, my lawyer is apologizing, hands clasped, on my behalf. The court stenographer has stopped typing and is just staring at me.
That man in the picture, I am trying to tell them. The other man in the elevator, I am trying to explain.
The man getting into the elevator is Freddie Talbot.
ALICE LONG, CAMBRIDGE, 1990
I should have known from the start it would be a mistake to attend that retrospective. A whole show at the Tate, the first ever dedicated to Oskar Erlich. For months, it felt like every time I opened a newspaper or listened to Radio 4, someone would be talking about his life and legacy. Juliette Willoughby was mentioned in passing, if at all: a tragic muse, a poetic footnote. If an art critic raised the subject of his temper, detailed in countless biographies, or his treatment of women—his abandoned wife, for instance—what followed was a dismissive reminder to separate art from artist, flawed character from febrile genius.
If we were to start judging great artists by their treatment of the women in their lives...
From time to time, I still came into town, was invited to show my work at some photographic gallery in East London, my wartime pictures or some of the things I shot for Vogue in the 1960s, the Sunday Times in the seventies. Occasionally I was invited to give a guest lecture at UCL or Kings about my career.
That day, I was in Holborn for lunch with an old friend, another photographer. We met at an Italian place, somewhere that had hardly changed in decades, an easy cab ride from King’s Cross, where the Cambridge train arrived (after the war, that had seemed like a sensible place to settle, calm and quiet but close enough to London for when I had work booked). These days, there was little risk that anyone seeing Alice Long in the street would recognize Juliette Willoughby. Not with my silver hair pinned up in a neat bun. Not in these glasses, not with the walking stick and back hunched from decades carrying camera equipment up and down the country.
Every bloody bus in London seemed to have Oskar’s face on the side of it. His face in a photograph I had taken, had carried in my suitcase from Paris, had sold for far too little to a newspaper. I remember carefully framing that shot so that his nose, his brow, one lock of falling hair, cast one whole side of his face in shadow. Nowhere on any of the posters was my name credited.
My friend and I talked about old times, old friends, over lunch. We hugged goodbye, promised each other not to leave it so long next time, then somehow there I was—wine from lunch still in my system—paying for my ticket to the exhibition. And then I was inside, and all around me were Oskar’s paintings, some that had been in the exhibition where we met in 1936, at the New Burlington Galleries. The same physical objects, some in the same frames, as I had stood in front of that night. There were photographs of him next to them, frowning with concentration, paint in his hair.
