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He did not answer.
“What was you, Harry?”
“The car. I moved the car.”
“You moved Freddie’s car?”
In a way, I was even more horrified by that than I was by the revelation that Harry had killed Freddie. That had been an accident, at least according to Harry. I could imagine the panic and fear he must have felt when he realized what he had done. What I could not imagine was doing what he had done next. The coldness of it. The callousness.
“So let me get this straight, Harry. You left Freddie’s body—his dead body—just lying there, you went to find his car keys, and you plowed his car into the River Ouse on purpose. So that it would look like he had driven off. So that everyone would assume what they mostly did assume, that he had driven it into the river himself and been swept away.”
Harry nodded, just one nod, no eye contact.
“It makes no sense,” I said. He glanced over at me. He looked angry.
“That plan makes no sense to me,” I repeated. “How did you get back? His car was found a few miles from the station—it would have taken you hours to walk back to Longhurst, with the body just lying there waiting for someone to find it. There’s something you’re not telling me. Someone else must have helped you, driven with you, driven you back.”
For a moment, Harry hesitated. Then, confirming this, he spoke.
“You remember Arno von Westernhagen?”
I nodded. Of course I remembered Arno. The last time I had seen him was at his farewell drinks perhaps twenty years ago, all the Osiris boys there, as he left for a job at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong. Arno drunk, hugging everybody, reminiscing about the old days. Harry there too. Both of them looking pensive and somber and sad when someone—it might even have been me—proposed a toast to Freddie.
“You bastards,” I said.
“It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know. I told him we were playing a prank. It wasn’t hard to convince him. Freddie had been winding him up all night, about Arno being sober. And of course he was the only person at the party I knew was safe to drive, because he wasn’t drinking.”
I was puzzled, briefly. Arno might not have been drinking, but I could also not remember him having a car at the party. In fact, I knew he had not had a car that night because...
“Wait a minute. He was driving my car, wasn’t he? He was driving you around in my fucking car. That was why the seat was wet, wasn’t it? You were soaking when you climbed out of the river. But he must have realized at that point that this was no prank, that something serious had happened. How did you persuade him to keep it quiet?”
“Because I knew his secret. I’d looked him up, his family. I was in the university library one day and I thought it would be funny to find out a bit more about them, maybe find a picture of this castle of his. It turned out there are no counts von Westernhagen, and there is no castle associated with that family name in Bavaria. It was all a fabrication. When I confronted him about it he confessed the whole thing, that it was all stuff he had concocted to make himself more popular at school which got out of hand. His father was just a perfectly normal banker, his mother a corporate lawyer.”
“And that was all it took, to stop him going to the police? The threat that you would tell everyone he was not really a German count?”
Harry looked at me as if I was being very slow.
“By the time he worked out what was going on, Patrick, he was already an accessory. I told him it was an accident. I tried to convey to him everything that was at stake. Freddie was dead and there was nothing either of us could do to help him, but there were things to do to manage the fallout from his death...”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, the body. You are going to tell me you did something to the body too, aren’t you?”
“I never got the chance. All the way to the river, all the way back, I was panicking, trying to think with Arno screaming at me, trying to work out what I was going to do. Where I was going to hide it. But when I got back the body was gone.”
“Gone? What the fuck do you mean, gone?”
“Vanished. Disappeared. Everyone was still partying. Everyone was still over on the other side of the house. The pool of blood was still there. No Freddie.”
“Someone else must have moved the body. But who?”
“That’s what I don’t know. That’s what I have spent the last thirty years wondering. Knowing all that time that somewhere out there, there was someone who knew what had happened to Freddie, and that same person probably had the camera—which was nowhere to be seen either—and they were probably saving it all up to really fuck me over. Waiting to expose me, destroy me, anytime they felt like it. Perhaps they thought one day I’d be prime minster—I certainly bloody did—and then they’d really have a payday. Well, evidently they got bored waiting and decided now is the time. I received an envelope through the mail a few weeks ago, Patrick, with that photograph inside it and a demand for money. A huge amount of money.”
It was the little whine in his voice as he said this that tipped me over the edge. That little whine at the unfairness of it, that Freddie had slipped, that Freddie had died, and Harry finally had to deal with the consequences of that. He had spent thirty years feeling sorry for himself, irritated by the position Freddie had put him in. Not a thought for Arno or me, or the way he had used both of us. Not a thought for Athena. Not a thought for poor fucking Freddie.
I have never felt rage like it. I have never despised another human being so completely as I did Harry in that instant. If I hadn’t been willing myself not to, I would have literally leapt across the room and taken his throat in my hands.
“There’s something else,” he said.
“Something else?” I said, unable to swallow an incredulous laugh. “How can there possibly be something else?”