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Athena snorts. “Seriously? It’s not like that generation of Willoughbys bought any of the valuable things they owned, or earned any of their money for themselves. Freddie needed help, and it would have been easy for Harry to give it, but he refused. So Freddie decided that at the party, while everyone was drinking and dancing and distracted, he would go on a treasure hunt.”
Exactly what I was doing, at almost exactly the same time, I realize with a flush of shame. I wonder if she knew that Freddie had also been looting the Osiris clubhouse earlier that day.
“I found him in my bedroom, hiding what he’d taken in my suitcase. I was so furious that I threw the bronze statuette he’d wrapped in my shawl so hard it bounced off the wall.”
I distinctly remember the clunk it made, their raised voices, the thumping of my heart in my chest as I sat on the bed in the room next door.
“Then it all came out, what trouble he was in,” she continues. “We fought, he apologized for not telling me about it all sooner. Then as we talked it through, it dawned on him that there might be a better way to get what he needed that night. If he could goad his cousin—upstanding, stuffy, future prime minister Harry—into taking a birthday line of cocaine and snatch a photo of it on one of those disposable cameras, Freddie could use it to blackmail him. But the instant that flash went off, Harry lost it. There was a scuffle. Freddie fell off the scaffolding and hit his head, hard, on the flagstones below. Knocked himself out. Split his scalp. Harry must have panicked, I suppose. He ran off, assuming Freddie was either dead or dying, presumably planning to come back and deal with the body and cover his tracks later. That was when I found Freddie.”
“The blood,” I say. “That morning, when you came to tell Patrick and me that you couldn’t find Freddie. You had blood on your arm. You said you must have cut yourself and not noticed.”
“Freddie’s blood.” She nods. “It was everywhere, but he didn’t want me to take him to the hospital—he had so much cocaine in his system, he was concussed, ranting about being expelled from university, about his mother disowning him. I called Dad’s driver—you might remember Karl—and told him to take Freddie straight to our private doctor in London. I said he was a friend who’d had a bad fall, drunk, and was too embarrassed to tell his parents. That he would be staying with us to recuperate,” she explains.
“While you stayed at Longhurst and pretended to look for him, so that nobody would suspect you were involved in his disappearance. But why not just let him recover, and then both come back to Cambridge?” I ask.
“Because of what was in Freddie’s car, Caroline—the car that Harry must have driven into the river to make it look like Freddie drowned. Freddie—like a fool—had written down the names and numbers and addresses of his main suppliers, the big guys, in that notebook in his glove compartment, along with all sorts of other incriminating and easy-to-decode information about what he had bought from whom and when, and knew it would lead the police straight to them. Can you imagine? He had no choice but to disappear—he needed all those people to believe that he was dead.”
“Why didn’t you at least tell me the truth?” I demand.
“Freddie and I made a pact not to tell anyone at all, but you knew me so well and could read me so easily I was worried you would work it out. So I did the only thing I could think of to stop you from suspecting—I stopped talking to you. For which I am sorry,” she says, with what seems like a genuine note of regret in her voice. “Freddie stayed in one of our houses in London until I graduated, and then we left for Dubai together.”
“But how did you even leave the country? Surely at the airport—”
“We flew privately,” she says. “I often did, so I knew how relaxed they could be about passports. I also know there are quite a lot of people in Dubai lying low, for one reason or another.”
“And he never knew? Your father?”
“Oh, once Freddie arrived, it all came out. There were rows. But Freddie won him over. And Dad was polo-mad, so it helped that Freddie was a nearly-qualified vet.”
I could just imagine Freddie turning on the megawatt charm I had always been immune to but which seemed to work like magic on other people.
“Didn’t Freddie ever want to come home?” I ask, trying to put myself in his shoes. I had spent most of my life wishing I could have just one more day, one more hour, with my mother—the thought of choosing to cut her off entirely was unimaginable.
She shakes her head. “What for? His mother was in South Africa and didn’t want him. When he left England he was in debt, an addict, about to fail his degree. He could have a new start here, but the deal we made was that once he was in Dubai, he stayed in Dubai, and he stayed clean. There’s no place better to do that than here, because the penalties are so harsh if you’re caught.”
I let this sink in—I always thought Freddie was the master manipulator, but it was Athena who had turned the situation to her advantage, getting the man she had always wanted all to herself.
“But you’re clearly leaving now,” I say, gesturing to the packing boxes. “What’s changed?
“My dad died,” she says simply.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Oh, so am I,” she says, her voice dripping bitterness. “And it was more of a loss than we’d ever imagined, because when we came to try to make sense of his will, we discovered all he had left us was a mountain of debt. The whole thing had been a charade for years. Endless financial subterfuge. When people think you’re rich, they’re happy to lend you money, or extend your credit. And then when they find out you’re not...”
“You end up here.”
“Quite. This was actually our housekeeper’s place at one point—a housekeeper we had to lay off because there was no longer a house to keep. It was the only thing Dad still owned outright, oddly enough. I didn’t own anything at all, and I had never needed to make any real money myself. Freddie has never earned or had the capacity to. So we were broke. But Freddie has always kept an eye on what was going on back home—he had Google alerts set up, read the papers. Keeping track as over the years all the people he still owed money to, all the people he had named and incriminated in his notebook, all the people he had fled the country to escape, ended up dead or in prison for decades. We talked about it, but he still didn’t want to go back, even with that threat gone. That’s also how we knew that Longhurst Hall had been put up for sale.”
I tried to imagine feeling so envious of an inheritance that you scoured newspapers for stories about it.
“And he wanted that money?”
“We had lived off my father for years until it all came tumbling down. Freddie wanted to do something for me, to lift us out of this horrible situation,” she says defensively, gesturing around the shabby apartment. “And if Longhurst sold, he had a right to benefit from that. The house really should have passed to his grandfather and then down to him, after all.”
“So he decided to get what he wanted by blackmailing Harry.”
She nodded. “Freddie always held on to the pictures that he took at the party as an insurance policy. He decided to use them to demand his share. He did it anonymously—Harry had no idea his cousin was still alive. Freddie sent the photos along with a note saying he knew what had happened that night, that Harry was a murderer and had driven Freddie’s car into a river to cover it up, threatening to tell the world if Harry didn’t pay up.”