Page 73 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
Quentin has apparently forgotten I am there. I can see a close-up of his crotch as he gets up, then hear the scuff of slipper on carpet as he starts pacing the room. He continues to chatter away to the nurse, going on about his long friendship with Philip, and it occurs to me that Patrick told me his father had stayed at Longhurst, in the Green Room, just a few weeks before the party. That it was Quentin sending Patrick off to the Witt Library to look through the photographs there of paintings from Longhurst, among which we had found one of Self-Portrait as Sphinx.
One of the things I had always found unsettling about Juliette’s painting is the way that all the scenes within it seem to be part of some larger, interlocked narrative. That there is a bigger story to be wrestled from it if you just look carefully enough. Yet those connections remained always tantalizingly on the cusp of reach, touchable with my mind’s fingers but impossible to get a firm grip on. A closer analogy, knowing what I now did about Austen’s overpainting of it, would be doing a jigsaw puzzle without knowing some of the pieces are missing.
I am getting the exact same unsettling feeling now, as I listen to Quentin.
He reminds the nurse what Patrick has sold Self-Portrait as Sphinx for. She comments on how amazing it is that someone found a lost masterpiece like that, just lying around the house.
“Well, it took them long enough,” says Quentin.
The nurse bustles back over to the iPad and, realizing that the Zoom call is still running, fumbles with the screen to end it. I am still trying to understand what I have just heard, whether perhaps I had misheard, when, with a chuckle, as if to himself, he says it again: “It took certainly them long enough.”
Then I am the only person left on the call, the only face on the screen mine, suddenly magnified, wholly bewildered. What did he mean by that? I find the number of the care home, phone the front desk. No answer. There is an email address on the website, so I fire off a message, asking the nurse to call me back urgently. I am about to flip my laptop shut when an email lands in my inbox from a protonmail.com address I don’t recognize—the name a seemingly random sequence of letters.
The subject line is “As Requested: Athena’s Mystery Client.”
When I click through, there is no message, just ten or so attachments, all grainy CCTV captures. The man in the pictures is recognizably the man from the VIP dinner, although in none of these images is he wearing the same pristine long white tunic and headdress. Instead, he is dressed down in the same nondescript billionaire super-casual style as Dave White had been. He’s slim, with a muscular build and a mop of thick, shiny dark hair. There are pictures of him at a mall, others of him outside his mega-mansion. Mainly, though, there are photos of him driving his astonishing collection of cars. Window down, elbow resting on the frame, aviator sunglasses on. Here he is in a turquoise Porsche. In this one, a gold Tesla. In another, a white BMW with the license plate R1CH. There’s a Bugatti, a Lamborghini, a Ferrari...
I text Dave—although the email address is unrecognizable, and presumably therefore untraceable, these must have come from him. Thank you for the photographs. Can you tell me who this guy actually is?
I can do better, he replies immediately. My driver is downstairs, waiting to take you to him.
The car is ready, engine revving, outside the hotel lobby, the sly smile on the driver’s face suggesting that whatever Dave is about to unveil has tickled him. “A/C okay, madam?” he asks as we pull away.
It took them long enough. As we drive, I am trying to unpack Quentin’s words. Had he somehow known that the painting Patrick and I had found still existed, and that it was at Longhurst, all along? It was possible, I supposed. But why would he have kept it quiet? It was very unlike him to miss an opportunity for adulation or a quick buck.
Then another possibility occurs to me—perhaps it was the painting that Harry eventually found in the Green Room, the second Self-Portrait as Sphinx that Patrick just sold, which Quentin had stumbled across. That was the room he always stayed in, after all. But still the same question reared its head: If he knew it was there, why had he not claimed the credit and the commission for selling it himself?
He’s a very old man, I reminded myself. A very old show-off with dementia. Perhaps he didn’t know what he was saying.
After maybe half an hour, we pull off the scrubby motorway and into an oasis of frangipani and bougainvillea: the Desert Palm Polo Club.
“Here we are,” Dave’s chauffeur announces, pointing to the low-rise ocher clubhouse up ahead. As we pull up at the Valet Parking sign, my phone rings.
“Keep your eyes on the car in front,” Dave says, without preamble.
I train my eyes on the driver’s side, but instead of Athena’s client, a squat, balding man in a pistachio linen suit emerges, slams the door, and places a panama hat on his head.
“That’s not him,” I tell Dave.
“I know. Just keep watching,” he says.
The man in pistachio hands his keys to the valet attendant, and I realize that Athena’s client, in a nondescript T-shirt and shorts, is the valet.
“That man was a fake buyer,” says Dave. “Athena played me—deliberately pushed the bidding for Self-Portrait as Sphinx sky-high with a stooge.”
“But why would she do that? I ask incredulously. “What on earth does she stand to gain?”
“I have no idea. But if we can work that out, I’m guessing it might lead us to Harry’s murderer.”
PATRICK, DUBAI, THIRTY-EIGHT HOURS AFTER HARRY’S DEATH
Six of us are sweltering knee-to-knee in the back of a VW van. We are all in wrist and ankle cuffs, none of us in seat belts, all being thrown into each other every time we shift lanes. The van speeds the whole way, tires screeching on the turns, and I become convinced the driver is swerving deliberately to shake us up. I can all too easily imagine this resulting in a high-speed collision, all of us shackled in the back incinerated in a highway fireball.
The van skids to a halt and the back doors are thrown open. We are all bundled out, lined up, marched down concrete steps into a basement, along a corridor, and into a cell. A guard barks at us to sit down on a bench along the far wall. There is no water. No daylight. None of us has yet met an Emirati lawyer or been told exactly what the charges against us will be. We wait.
One by one, names are called. Eventually, the name called is mine.
The court is smaller and far less imposing than I was expecting. At one end of the low-ceilinged room sit two men in robes, neither looking up from his paperwork as I am led in. There is another robed man at a table in front of them. He glances over but not for long enough to catch my eye. At the other end of the room are three rows of chairs, all occupied. In the front row is Sarah, flanked by Tom and Sumira. Sarah gives me a tight smile I guess is meant to look reassuring. Tom and Sumira, understanding more about the situation, both look deeply concerned.
