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“Do you have any idea what room Harry was staying in?” Dave asks, clearly enjoying playing detective. “Presumably because of the way the camera on his corridor was angled, there is no footage of Harry Willoughby going into or out of a bedroom. There are always blind spots—it’s something we are trying to correct.”
“His room was a few doors down from me, on the seventh floor.”
“Interesting. Well, Freddie exits the elevator on the fifth, lets himself into a room using a key card, and does not leave until nine the next morning.”
“You’ve got to take me to them,” I say. “Athena and Freddie. You must be able to find out where they live?”
“Give me until tomorrow morning,” Dave promises. “And I’ll have an address.”
PATRICK, DUBAI, FIFTY HOURS AFTER HARRY’S DEATH
My lawyer refuses to hazard a guess at how long I’ll be detained before trial. Six weeks? Six months? It is impossible to say, he tells me sternly, and my outburst will not have helped.
It is a different driver, a different van into which I am herded after the hearing—although the journey that follows is just as terrifying. Even more frightening is the realization that we are not being driven back to the police station but to prison, real prison, behind barbed-wire-topped walls. After we drive through them, I can hear the gates shut heavily behind us. A few seconds later, we stop again and there follows the screech of a second set of gates.
Out of the van we are herded. Into the prison we are led. Down one icy-cold air-conditioned corridor after another. Through door after door. Past cell after cell. There seem to be at least ten men in every one we pass. Sitting on bunks, sleeping or playing cards or just huddled under a blanket. The prison officer ahead of us stops every so often to explain, in Arabic, how everything works. Local inmates translate for the rest of us. We will be locked in our cells from 8:00 p.m. until 8:00a.m. There are no washing facilities. Each shared cell has one sink and a squat toilet with a pitcher of water to flush it with. Nobody shows much interest in me when I am led into mine, except for some shifting around to show which bunks are already taken.
There is a single pay phone on the wall in the communal area, with twenty men in a line next to it. Six weeks, I think. Six months. I need to call Caroline. I need to get a phone card. The trouble is that the prison shop is open for only one hour in the morning and one hour in the afternoon, but that hour is not fixed. So everyone loiters, and when the shutter goes up, there is a scrum. After an hour of pushing and jostling, I only just make it to the front before the shutter comes down.
The line for the phone is even longer than the line for the shop.
I wait for almost three hours, aware that we will all be herded back and locked in for the night at eight. Just as I finally get to the front of the line, a buzzer goes off and the guards start shouting. It is ten minutes to eight, and those who are not back in their cells already rush off in that direction. The phone rings perhaps thirty times before Caroline answers. Just at that moment, a second buzzer goes off.
“I have seconds before I need to get back to my cell. I need to tell you something,” I say quickly.
There is music playing in the background on her end. “Patrick, I can barely hear you. I’ll just—”
“No, there’s no time. Caroline, Freddie is alive. Freddie Talbot is alive and in Dubai. He was at the hotel the night Harry was murdered.”
“I know,” she says. “We’re on it. Dave and I. We’re going to get you out of there, I promise.”
Dave White? I think, wondering if I’m hearing things. “And my dad, was he okay?”
“He was fine. But he said something strange.” She is talking fast, infected by my panic. “Is there any way he might have known there was a Self-Portrait as Sphinx at Longhurst all along?”
A guard snatches the phone out of my hand and slams it down onto the receiver. I am the last man left in the corridor, and I practically fall over myself running back to the cell. Imitating the others, I stand by the bed, arms at my side, for the head count. The guard eyes me narrowly. The door is closed and locked, and we all fold ourselves into our beds, each of us with one thin pillow and one scratchy blanket, which reaches mid-shin.
All night, someone on the bunk below me weeps. I can hear things skittering around on the concrete floor. Lights pan across the cell at intervals: guards patrolling with their flashlights. Unable to sleep, I ponder Caroline’s question, and why she asked it. It was certainly possible my father had stumbled across either version of Juliette’s painting at Longhurst, in Austen’s former studio or in the Green Room, but what I could not imagine was that back in 1991—without the clues and supporting evidence we had found in the Willoughby Bequest and the Witt—he would have known what he was looking at if he had.
There was something I had long wanted to ask him, though.
Quite often at my gallery, people tried to sell us works we were pretty sure were fakes. Picassos with dodgy paperwork. Subpar works attributed to, say, Miró, that nevertheless had excellent documentary credentials. Often I would discuss these with my father, ask his opinion. Like a lot of dealers, he was interested in the motivations and mechanics of forgery. He delighted in the details of a successful art fraud—one in the eye for the establishment, and all that. He could recount how each of the great fakers had gone about it, and how much they had made, and how they had gotten away with it. Films and books, he insisted, placed too much emphasis on the practical business of imitating a painter’s style. What mattered was the provenance. The story of the thing. A plausible account of its journey through time.
The question that I had never quite worked up the nerve to ask him was whether he had been tempted to fake a painting himself. He had school fees to pay, blondes to woo, sports cars to buy, after all. I am sure after the Raphael episode, he would have been thrilled at the idea of getting one over on the experts.
His position as the Willoughbys’ favored dealer, as they gradually sold off Longhurst’s collection, must surely have put him in a very tempting position. Austen Willoughby was a forger’s dream—prolific and formulaic, with a steady global market for his work. If there was a painting on photographic record in the Witt Library but no sign of it in Longhurst, and no extant record of its having been sold, how irresistible it would have been to pay someone competent to paint a replacement. Philip—always looking for new revenue streams—could well have had a hand in it.
And if you could find someone to do that, then reversing the process, taking a photograph of a forged painting—using vintage film stock, an appropriate camera—and slipping it into the Witt’s Longhurst Hall file would be a fairly straightforward matter too. It had been done before: I remembered the art world being aghast when a con man was caught inserting papers into the Tate’s archives corroborating the existence of fake works by the painter Ben Nicholson that he had commissioned and then sold as the real thing.
The question now floating around my head was this: If I believed my father could be complicit in faking work by Austen Willoughby, was it possible he had been involved in the forgery of a work by Austen’s niece?
After breakfast—a pot of yogurt, no spoon; sweet milky tea—I join the phone line once more, determined to ask my father, who is at his most lucid in the morning, straight out. I dial the care home’s number, and after a long wait, someone picks up.
“May I speak to Quentin Lambert, please?” I ask. “Usually he is awake at this time, I think?”
“Could you just hold for a second?” the woman on the line asks. I can hear an extended indistinct discussion and I am conscious of the seconds ticking away, of the men in line behind me beginning to bristle.
“Hello. Mr. Lambert?” It is a different woman’s voice.