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“This is Patrick Lambert, yes. Is my father there?”
“I am so sorry, Mr. Lambert,” she says. “We have been trying to get in contact. I regret to tell you like this, but I am afraid your father passed away in his sleep during the night.”
ALICE LONG, CAMBRIDGE, 1991
When I was eight years old, my cat disappeared. Which would have upset most children, I suppose, but I was very close to that cat. Whenever I came back from boarding school at the end of term, she was always the inhabitant of the house I looked forward to seeing most.
Being sent off like that was something of a relief, really—certainly preferable to being in that house with my mother and father, constantly feeling as if I was blunderingly trespassing on their loss. I once came running up the lawn and stopped face-to-face with my father on the steps of the terrace. For a moment, a look came across his face that I still struggle to describe: startled amazement, almost deranged joy. Then the sun passed behind a cloud and he saw that it was me and stalked off, scowling and muttering to himself.
Nor would I miss the rambling Egyptological disquisitions he would launch into, unprompted, at mealtimes, and that we would be expected to follow attentively. At dinner one night, I remember Uncle Osbert got caught pulling faces and pretending to nod off during my father’s impromptu lecture on the correct ancient pronunciation of Osiris and it almost ended in blows. We did not see Osbert at Longhurst for a long time after that—a shame, as he had always been my favorite uncle, with his startling blue eyes, bristly blond mustache, and slightly flushed complexion. “A faint whiff of the hip flask about him always” was my mother’s observation. My main memory of him was as the only adult who ever seemed to actually listen to what you were saying.
I missed Uncle Osbert, but it was Cat’s disappearance that really upset me. She never had a proper name, and she was certainly not acquired as a pet for me. She was a tortoiseshell, tiny, brought in to keep the mouse population down, except that she much preferred eating scraps I stole from the kitchen and fed her by hand. She made my mother sneeze violently, and when my father crossed paths with that creature, as he called her, he would usually swing and try to kick her, or, if he was in an especially bad mood, threaten to drown her.
And so that summer, when I arrived home from school for the holidays and she did not slink immediately down the steps to greet me, I assumed my father had finally done what he had so often threatened to. I did ask where she was, but my mother looked at me so blankly I thought she might pretend she did not remember the animal to which I was referring at all.
“What did you do?” I asked my father.
He turned and looked at me coldly. “I have no idea what you are talking about,” he said, and that got me, a little, because I had never known my father to tell an untruth before, mostly because he did not care enough what anyone else thought of him to lie.
I started searching the house, checking every corridor. I looked into every room. I peered up chimneys. I inspected behind curtains. I asked every maid when they had last seen her. A week ago, someone thought, at the far end of the lawn. Friday afternoon, someone else offered, hanging around the kitchen. It was one of the girls who worked in the scullery who said she thought she had seen my father carrying Cat in his arms, scooped up, in the direction of the island. My first thought was he had rowed her across and left her there to get her out from under his feet.
I was very strictly forbidden from going anywhere near the lake, and I had not dared to since my sister’s accident. The thought of doing so now filled my heart with lead, but I had to know.
Down by the jetty was a boathouse in which three little sculls lay on their backs. I dragged the lightest down to the water and gathered my nerve to step into it. The boat wobbled and I sat abruptly down, settling the oars in their rowlocks and starting to pull. The lake was low, and at first the boat dragged slowly across the underwater foliage, oars catching. Then I was away, pulling into the bright morning sunlight, every detail of the lake bed visible through the water. I tried not to think about my poor sister. I tried not to think about that day at all.
When I reached the other side, I tied up the boat with extravagant care and then followed the narrow path up a low slope to the tree line. At the far end of the island was the pyramid. I continued on the path until I reached it. If anyone saw the boat, if anyone noticed I was missing and guessed where I was, it was almost impossible to imagine how much trouble I would be in.
“Oh, Cat,” I called softly. “Psst, psst. Where are you, Cat?”
I had reached the far end of the island. No sign of Cat. At the end of the path in a glade of trees stood the pyramid. At its base, there was a door that had a bar across it with a padlock, dangling open. Never before had I seen that door unsecured. I lifted the padlock and let it drop in the grass. I found a handle, pulled the door open a crack, and squeezed inside, feeling the stone scraping against the skin of my shoulders. Steps led downward between damp-smelling walls.
There was not enough light to see the walls of the room at the bottom of the stairs, which in a way was a blessing—I kept my eyes averted from the gloomy corner in which I supposed Lucy’s sarcophagus sat, swallowing the impulse to apologize to her for barging in unannounced. Somehow the cold air felt infused with her presence.
In the middle of the room there was a stone table, about three quarters of it illuminated by the trapezoid of falling light from the doorway, my own dark silhouette partially obscuring what was on it: a bundle, something small and oblong and tightly wrapped.
Bandages. That was what I thought, when eventually I gathered the courage to reach out and touch it. It was some sort of package, about the size of a cat. Something that was damp, the dampness of which had soaked through the cloth.
Then I realized what I was touching and ran.
When I was sixteen years old, one of the maids disappeared.
Chapter 22
CAROLINE, DUBAI, FIFTY HOURS AFTER HARRY’S DEATH
“Double espresso, please,” Dave calls to a waiter without looking up from his laptop. I glance around the hotel restaurant, wondering how many guests know that his surveillance systems are capturing them at this breakfast buffet. That if Dave decided to, he could follow them on that laptop right around the city.
Athena and Freddie’s comings and goings have certainly been easy for him to track. He shows me the route Freddie takes for his daily run, the supermarket where they do their weekly shopping, Athena’s preferred lunch spot—sometimes dining with Freddie, often with companions Dave recognizes as art collectors.
“That guy is from Saudi Arabia.” He points to a picture on his screen of a young man. “He just bought a Klimt for eighty million, which I’d considered but my software says is fake. And she”—Dave flicks to a picture of an older blond woman—“is married to an oligarch, buys Manet mostly. I don’t employ advisors like Athena because I don’t need the help, but for people who do, it’s useful that she comes from their world, speaks their language, literally and metaphorically. She’s comfortable advising wealthy people, and they’re comfortable listening, because she was one of them.”
“Was?” I ask. Athena had certainly looked sleek and rich enough when I saw her at Patrick’s private view.
“Well, this surveillance suggests that her money is pretty much gone. Look.” Dave first pulls up a picture of Athena with designer shopping bags swinging from her wrists in front of a huge white wedding cake of a mansion, then another of her outside the same house, getting into a limousine with a well-dressed older man.
“That’s her father,” I say.
“Yes, that’s the home they shared in Emirates Hills, and Freddie lived in too. A very nice neighborhood. Very different from Deira, the oldest part of Dubai and very much not the nicest, which is where Athena and Freddie moved recently.”