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“It would have been impossible not to eavesdrop, actually. Given the thinness of the walls. Given that it never seemed to occur to Patrick to moderate his volume, that there might be someone trying to get some studying done just a few feet away from you. I knew you were looking for a painting at Longhurst. I knew you found it and took it. I heard you fight endlessly about what to do with it. I listened when Patrick told you how he planted the painting in the back of a removal truck, and I heard him explain his whole marvelously stupid plan, and I wrote down the name of the auction house. And I just thought, what a way to pay him back. Because he was so clearly in love with you, and when his scheme backfired, I was certain you would dump him. I still can’t quite believe you didn’t, to be honest.”
I am staring at the painting from the Tate, trying to take this all in.
“I heard him say when the sale was, what your budget was. I had some cash—from share trading. I used to dabble back then, late at night, as you know—you could probably hear me tapping away, turning years of saved-up birthday money into a nice little pot to play with.”
“But if you wanted to screw Patrick over, why not crow about the painting once you’d bought it—at least to him?” I ask, astonished he could keep a secret like that for so long, resist the temptation to advertise his own cleverness.
He squirms a little under my gaze. “I wanted you to dump Patrick, not to hate me. To think he was a dick, not that I was. I am sorry if I hurt you in the process. I know that you’ve been through some... stuff in your life,” he says, at least having the decency to look apologetic.
I feel a sudden wave of revulsion. If he had been listening through the wall all that time, he probably knew things about me that I had never told anyone apart from Patrick. Some of which my grandmother had not even told me until I left for Cambridge.
Such as that until my eighteenth birthday, when I reached the age of majority, my father had remained in a position of legal authority over me. That when I had gone on a school trip to France, it was his permission that had to be sought. That if I had fallen seriously ill, he would have had a say in my medical treatment. Perhaps Dave had also heard me describe the devastation I felt when my grandmother explained that a life sentence does not mean the rest of a person’s life, no matter how terrible the crime they had committed. That I had to learn to live with the knowledge that someday, my father might try to find me.
I was twenty-six when he was released.
Cooper is my mother’s maiden name, and Caroline is my middle name, which perhaps made me slightly trickier to track down. Still, I knew that if he put his mind to it, it would not be hard. He had done so before, after all. But years passed, and nothing. I could not fathom why this silence upset me so much, and then eventually the penny dropped: the only circumstance in which my father would not try to reinsert himself into my life was if he had a new family now. And that was the most horrifying thought of all.
There is a simple reason why I tell no one about my childhood. From the snatches of my story he heard through a wall, Dave might think he knows me, but there is no way he could begin to understand all the ways in which my father’s crime has shadowed my life—nor my determination not to let it define me.
Abruptly I get up and cross the room to where the paintings are hanging, to inspect first one and then the other, and to hide the tears of fury collecting at the corners of my eyes.
“What made you decide to loan your painting to the Tate?” I said, trying to smooth over the catch in my voice. “Was that just to rub Patrick’s nose in it?”
Dave White frowns and shakes his head. “I did it for you, Caroline. I must admit, when I first bought Self-Portrait as Sphinx at that auction, I had no idea what it was. I didn’t even really look at it for years—I wasn’t much of an art fan back then, let alone a collector. Then I read your book. You’d done incredible research, written a brilliant biography, but as far as anyone knew Juliette’s painting no longer existed, so only a few other art historians cared. Who wants to buy a book about a painter with no paintings? I felt bad, and I was in a position to do something about it.”
He pauses a moment, smiling to himself. “And having the painting turn up like that did wonders for your book sales, didn’t it? Of course, having Self-Portrait as Sphinx accepted into a national institution also increased the painting’s value exponentially. And now with the publicity around there being two genuine, near-identical works, authenticated by the world expert, the value of both is bound to soar further...”
“You wanted me to authenticate the second painting?” I ask incredulously. I had assumed that whoever owned the original would be hoping the opposite.
“Yes. Although I’d rather not have spent quite as much on it,” he concedes. “I was a little annoyed that Athena’s client was so lavish in his offer. I thought I knew all of the serious Surrealist collectors, but that guy came out of nowhere.”
“So it was you. You sent me those photos. You tried to blackmail me!” I said slowly, searching his face for a reaction.
He looked genuinely confused. “I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You were the only one apart from Patrick who knew I was looking for Self-Portrait as Sphinx at Harry’s party. You must have heard us talking about it through that wall,” I say, processing it aloud. “You followed me to see whether I found it, didn’t you? You were there, with my shawl, after Harry’s Granny got upset. You were there the morning after, by Patrick’s car. You kept tabs on me the whole time. You took those photos. I saw the flashes, but I didn’t realize what they were until a set of pictures arrived in the mail last week. You made a deliberate attempt to influence my professional opinion with a threat to expose me.”
He laughs. It starts as a giggle and turns into huge, shoulder-shaking guffaws. Tears roll down his face.
“My God, you have no idea how rich I actually am, do you? People as wealthy as me don’t need to extort art historians. Or anyone else, for that matter. Only desperate people blackmail. I could have paid three times what I did for that painting without even blinking,” he says matter-of-factly.
“This, all of this,” he says, gesturing around the room, “is a hobby. A passion project. And besides, your authentication was never, strictly speaking, necessary. Do you know how I made my money, Caroline? My business is training computer systems—it’s what I’d have told you I was working on at Cambridge, had you ever asked. I was based in the Vision Lab, programming neural networks to identify patterns and recognize images.”
It must be clear from my face that I am not quite grasping all the connections here. Dave smiles patiently, perhaps a little patronizingly.
“I make systems that can identify faces, even when they are partly obscured—say if someone is wearing dark glasses or a burqa. For my own interest—a sort of hobby, if you will, albeit quite a lucrative one—I’ve also created systems that identify a particular painter’s technique, flagging when the imprimatur of the artist on one work aligns exactly with another. So I know with close to one hundred percent certainty that these two paintings were undertaken by the same hand. Juliette Willoughby’s.”
I had heard about tech like this—although it was viewed with condescension and suspicion by the art world. What I had never heard of was the person who invented the tech being the collector who used it.
“I am not dismissing your expertise, Caroline, but with this AI I can do exactly the same thing faster and more objectively than any art historian.”
“So why am I here, then?” I say, finding it hard to stay entirely composed. “So you can show me all the art you can afford to buy because a computer tells you to?”
He looks pained. “Of course not. It was your book that got me interested in Surrealist art in the first place. The reason I’ve brought you here is because I own both these paintings and you are the only person in the world who can explain how they are both genuine works by the same artist. Because if anyone is ever going to know why there are four differences between them and what those differences mean, it is you.”
There is a moment of silence, both of us looking up at the paintings. “You spotted all four?”
“Of course. I may not have studied art history, but I do look at the paintings I own. I noticed all four of them right away. The hieroglyphics. The mummified body in the boat. The boatman’s beak. The pyramid on the island. All visible in the painting I have just bought, all overpainted in the one you stole from Longhurst.”