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Together we stagger to the car, her maneuvering me into the back seat. In my hands, I find a cold bottle of water and I drink from it greedily. From the way Caroline and the driver are looking at me, I know I must look even worse than I feel. I can see tears collecting in the corners of her eyes.
“Let’s go,” Caroline says. The locks of the doors automatically click, and I flinch. I see that Dave White is sitting next to the driver, and I start to think this is all a mirage.
“What is going on? I don’t understand. I’ve just seen Freddie being processed into the prison. How did you—”
The desert is rolling past the window. For whole stretches of time, the view is so undifferentiated we hardly seem to be moving at all. Caroline and Dave share a glance, and he gives a nod.
“After we get out of this car, we can never discuss this in front of anyone else, ever again,” she says. “There is what I am about to tell you, and then there is what everyone else thinks happened.”
“I still don’t understand, and I am not convinced you aren’t a dream, but yes, fine,” I say, and I want to weep when she puts her hand in mine, looks me in the eye, and confirms that she is here, with me.
“It was a tourist’s phone,” she says. “Logged into the Wi-Fi at the hotel opposite, filming the view. Their camera caught him, Freddie, climbing from one balcony to another. You recall how Freddie always loved to climb?” she says.
“How could I forget?”
“Climbing up onto my balcony, after I had gone to bed. Taking a glass. Your glass. The one without lipstick on it. Climbing across onto Harry’s. He planned it—booked a room two floors down and checked in with a fake passport. Harry must have thought he was hallucinating when Freddie walked in through the balcony doors. Like seeing a ghost.”
I try to picture it: staring at you through your own reflection in glass, someone you have assumed is dead for thirty years. A man you have always believed you murdered.
“And they shared it with the police? That’s why I’m here?”
“Well, no,” Dave White interjects. “Not quite. There are parts of my business that are rather less... publicized than others. Because CCTV cameras never have full coverage, we have developed ways to fill the blind spots. So we’ve been trialing, through offering free Wi-Fi for hotel guests, the ability to access self-created content. It gives us a broader range of data points, time, location, and date stamped—”
“He rifles remotely through the photos and videos on people’s phones,” Caroline says bluntly. “Accesses their camera rolls and pretty much anything else he can find on there and uses it to spy on them—”
“That is not quite right. And we never use what we harvest nefariously, or rather we don’t let bad actors do so. But that is how we located the footage that exonerated you, searching within specific time and location parameters. And once we had that, it was easy to seed it out to social media at scale. Newspapers didn’t take long to pick up on it.”
“It was on the Daily Mail website within hours,” Caroline confirms. “The police here picked Freddie up at a private airfield as he was just about to get on a private jet to the UK.”
Caroline winces, and I see that I am gripping her hand so tightly my knuckles have gone white. Our eyes meet and she looks away. “They gave me my passport back,” she says. “The police. I am free to leave the country.”
I nod dumbly. “Of course,” I say. “Of course.”
“There is a flight at eight tonight.”
“Right. Yes.”
As the euphoria of freedom starts to wear off, it dawns on me that I have no idea what to do now, or even where I am going to go. My marriage is over, and I have no doubt whose sides our friends will be on. I am still holding Caroline’s hand tight.
“My dad died,” I say, a sharp pain in my throat as I realize this is the first time I’ve said it out loud.
“There’s something I need to say about—”
We are both speaking at once. Then we both fall silent.
Caroline seems to be figuring out the best way of putting something. “I don’t know why, or what was in it for him, but I think he set us up to find Self-Portrait as Sphinx at Harry’s twenty-first,” she says. “Looking back, it feels as if we were left a trail of breadcrumbs to a painting but we accidentally stumbled across the wrong one. You always stayed in the Green Room, right? Well, that was where Harry discovered the second Self-Portrait as Sphinx—and I think that was where your father left it for us to find.”
I try to map this out in my mind. It does sound plausible.
“The painting we found in 1991,” Caroline tells me, “had several key details overpainted. According to Dave’s analysis, it was Austen Willoughby who did the overpainting.”
“That would make sense, if that was the version in his possession,” I say.
“Do you remember at Harry’s party, his grandmother said Austen promised her he had destroyed it? Here’s my hypothesis. Somehow in Paris, before the fire, Austen acquired Self-Portrait as Sphinx. Juliette’s diary says he was there, at the opening night. That was why she removed it from the show. She would never have sold it to him, but maybe he stole it. Maybe he murdered Juliette and Oskar to get it, then set the fire to cover that up. And what happens next?”
“Do you know how many nights it is since I’ve had a decent night’s sleep?” I say, scratching my head.
“For no reason anyone can explain, when Cyril passes away with two daughters dead and no heir, instead of Longhurst passing to the second-oldest brother, Osbert, he leaves it to the youngest, Austen.”