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“‘Oh God’?” I ask.
“It’s nothing,” said Tom. “The TV’s on.”
“It’s on the news,” Sumira says. “It’s on BBC News 24.”
“What is it, Tom?” I ask.
His voice sounds strained, distracted. “They’re reporting that a British man has been found murdered, Patrick. At a hotel in the DIFC. They’re not naming him yet, but they are showing footage of the hotel, cordoned off. The police have confirmed they have someone in custody.”
The blood in my ears is roaring. My fingers can barely grip the phone. The fact that the police have released a statement about my arrest is not good news at all. The slim chance I might still have had of persuading them they’ve got the wrong man has already evaporated. Tom and Sumira know that. I know that. What they do not know, what I have not yet told Tom because I cannot bring myself to say it aloud, is why the police are convinced I’m Harry’s killer.
Because according to the officer who interrogated me, they have identified the murder weapon, the implement that was used to brutally slash his throat. It was a broken champagne glass.
A broken champagne glass with my fingerprints all over it.
CAROLINE, DUBAI, TWELVE HOURS AFTER HARRY’S DEATH
The taxi driver looks concerned as he stops outside the police station, the building’s blue-tinted windows reflecting an enormous, almost empty parking lot. I open the car door and the heat instantly fogs my sunglasses.
“Are you sure this is where you want to go, madam?” he asks.
“I’m sure,” I tell him. As the closest police station to the DIFC, this is the one to which everyone at the gallery seemed confident Patrick will have been taken. The best place to go for answers about what is going on.
For hours I had been hanging around at the gallery, waiting for news. The police told us nothing as they marched Patrick to the patrol car. Neither Patrick’s bewildered employees nor the journalists, obviously excited by the prospect of a much bigger story than the one they’d arrived at the press conference to report, had any sense of what was actually happening. It was unclear at that stage what Patrick had even been arrested for.
One of the local journalists was the first to hear that a British man in his fifties had been found dead in his suite at the Mandarin Oriental. My hotel. I thought immediately of Harry, staying on the same floor, how terrible he had looked last night. Please God, don’t let it be him, I silently prayed.
“Was it a heart attack?” I had asked. “A stroke?”
The journalist shook his head. “We’ve been ordered not to report this yet, but he was murdered.” He ran a finger across his throat. “There was a lot of blood in the room.”
Giles Pemberton, there at the press conference to report for the Times, visibly paled. Should he come with me to the police station to inquire about Patrick, he had asked. I would be fine, I told him.
I am starting to regret that decision a little now.
I ask the taxi driver to wait, not quite sure how I will get back to my hotel otherwise.
Inside the white-tiled lobby of the police station there is a water dispenser, several rows of chairs, a laminated notice in English and Arabic about the procedure for paying a traffic fine. I have been standing in front of the reception counter for several minutes before the man behind it looks up. He raises an eyebrow, which shifts his gold-badged beret up a quarter inch.
“Patrick Lambert,” I say. “I am looking for Patrick Lambert.”
He has me spell the name, types it noisily into the keyboard in front of him. His expression does not change. He scratches his nose. He shakes his head. “No Lambert,” he says.
“Can you tell me which of the other stations Patrick Lambert is being held at? He went with the police,” I say. “I saw him getting into the car—the blue lights were flashing.” For some reason, I feel the need to mime this.
“You are his wife?” he asks.
“Friend,” I confirm.
“Then we cannot share this information anyway, madam,” he says.
“His wife, Sarah, is out of town, working. Not contactable. Please, is there anyone else here you could ask?” I plead.
It feels strange, saying her name aloud. Sarah. Patrick’s wife.
All night after Patrick left I had been lying there in bed, mentally lambasting myself for what had happened, horrified at what a mistake he and I had made, swept up in nostalgia and the excitement of events like a pair of middle-aged idiots. This morning, as he introduced me to the assembled press with that dimpled smile, that discreet wink, I was forced to admit to myself that I would never feel about anyone else the way I felt about Patrick Lambert.
And now this. Now all of this.