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“Yes, that’s what happened,” I say. “But why is that relevant?”
“I think when Austen got his hands on the painting in Paris, he worked out what the hidden meaning concealed in it was, and he used that knowledge to coerce Cyril into changing his will.”
“Jesus, that family loves blackmail.” A thought occurred to me. “What that must also mean is that the painting implicates Cyril in something.”
“Exactly. Also meaning that when Austen promised his wife he had destroyed the painting, what he was destroying was evidence of how he twisted his brother’s arm into leaving him the house. But for whatever reason—perhaps because he was a painter too, and understood the aesthetic value of what he had in his possession—he couldn’t do it. He just painted over the bits that made its accusation legible, to those who knew what they were looking for.”
We are nearly at Caroline’s hotel now, and the traffic is thickening around us. I love this, I realize, being with her, watching her brain work, admiring the elegance with which her mind unpicks a problem.
“That’s why I believe both those paintings must be genuine, both Juliette’s,” she says. “Because hidden beneath Austen’s expert overpainting, both works are identical, and until now, nobody apart from her would have known that.”
She is smiling, waiting for one of us to click the last part of the puzzle into place.
Dave White has turned around in his seat now to face her. He is grinning.
“You’ve worked it out, haven’t you?” he says. “What it all means. The secret of the Sphinx.”
“Maybe. The details Austen overpainted must all be vital in some way. Clearly, Cyril had concealed something in the pyramid on the island at Longhurst,” she says.
“Something like... a body?” I suggest. “Something like, the body of the Missing Maid?”
“That would be the obvious assumption, yes.”
“You think Cyril killed her—that she is the bandaged figure in the boat in the painting?” asks Dave.
“That’s my theory. But that’s not all. Think about the face of the boatman, his beak,” she says.
“Thoth, you told me?” I say.
“Yes. God of knowledge. God of magic. And the hieroglyphics: the same phrase that appeared in the painting and over the entrance to the east wing at Longhurst. I am Yesterday, To-Day and To-morrow, and I have the power to be born a second time. The painting is not just telling us that Cyril killed Jane Herries and where she is buried. It’s telling us why he killed her.”
“It is?” I ask, baffled. Dave is frowning in confusion also.
“He killed her so he could try to bring her back,” says Caroline. “He killed her so he could try and bring them both back. That’s why his daughter Lucy—the bedraggled, damp girl—is so prominent in the painting. Because she’s the key to the whole thing.”
Then suddenly it all fits together. My initiation into Osiris, reading from Cyril’s old parchment. Freddie’s prank with the cat. Cyril Willoughby had founded the Osiris Society. He was not just obsessed with ancient Egypt. He was specifically obsessed with the idea of resurrection. No, not just the idea of resurrection. The practicalities of it. An obsession that must have taken him to even darker places when his own daughter died so young.
“Of course,” she says, conspiratorially. “There is only one way of proving it. We need to confirm that Jane Herries’s body is buried where the painting says it is. We have to go back to Longhurst.”
The car pulls up outside Caroline’s hotel. “This is your stop, I think,” Dave says to her, appearing surprisingly sad at the thought of saying goodbye.
And I suppose I knew then that I was not going back to the house I had shared with Sarah, that I was never going back to that house. That this was the end of my marriage, my gallery, of whatever the last years of my life had been. That I was leaving and I would not return. There is a weight, a sadness, to that. An awareness of the hurt that has been done that cannot be undone.
Five hours later, holding hands again, Caroline and I are tilting back into the sky together. Ten hours later, we are in a car up to Longhurst.
ALICE LONG, CAMBRIDGE, 1991
Nobody saw him take her out on the lake, but I can picture how it must have happened.
I remember Jane well. How young she seemed, even to me. How shy. The way she said good morning without ever meeting your eye. Could somehow, when you passed her in the hallway, bob her head and curtsy without breaking stride. Oh, how carefully he must have picked her, his victim. Someone meek, unsure of herself. A girl who had never been taught to swim.
It would not have been hard to persuade her into the boat. He was, after all, her employer. She would have expected just to row around the island, I imagine, perhaps disembark to look at the pyramid. Even if she had intimations of danger, how could she have refused?
She had not seen what happened to the cat. She had not felt it, damp within its cocoon of bandages, and guessed how it had died, and why, and what my father had been hoping to achieve with that tiny waterlogged body. Why it was so important the cat had died the same way as my sister had done.
Once they were out on the lake, Jane in that buttoned-up jacket the younger maids wore, all those skirts, how easy it must have been to give her a shove, tip her over the side of the boat. Once she was in that cold water, she would have been heavy and floundering. Did he speed things up, hold her head under? Did she even get a chance to scream? Not that it could have been heard, from the house, from the lawn, from the gardens.
My mother and I both knew he had done it. She would never have admitted it to anyone. But she knew. What I have never known is whether she understood why.