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I am about to bring a woman back to life.
Epilogue
CAROLINE, ENGLAND, THE PRESENT DAY
It is a bright November afternoon and after a brief ceremony, they are re-interring the body of Jane Herries, the Missing Maid of Longhurst, in a plot next to her sister, Helen, in Arnos Vale cemetery, Bristol.
Patrick and I felt we ought to be here, really.
I was worried that there would be a lot of press in the church, but apart from one reporter from a local paper, it is just us and the few members of Herries’s family who could be traced. The focus of the vicar’s eulogy is her life, not her murder, the name of her murderer not mentioned. It does not need to be—the story has been endlessly reported on the news, with drone footage of the police cordon on the island, officers in hazmat suits removing items from the pyramid.
It had not been easy to persuade the police to take us seriously. I could tell that the officer who accompanied us to the island was humoring us initially, but when we arrived at the pyramid her mood perceptibly shifted. It felt undeniably eerie, overgrown. The chain on the pyramid’s metal door was so rusted it looked like something from a shipwreck. The lock came away on Patrick’s first tug, but the door, rusted shut, took a lot more effort to pry open. In the end, the hinges gave way entirely. Beyond was a narrow passageway, a flight of stone steps leading downward.
In single file, we made our way down them.
At the bottom of the steps there was a chamber, empty apart from two stone sarcophagi. Inscribed into the smaller one, in copper letters that had left trails of rust down the stone, were Lucy Willoughby’s name and her poignant dates. The name and dates on the larger were Cyril’s. I already knew not to expect to find a tomb here for Cyril’s wife, Juliette’s mother, who had predeceased her husband. She was buried in the local churchyard, something she had apparently insisted upon throughout her final illness and in her will.
We paced the chamber’s perimeter, searching for signs of secret doors or inner chambers, but the walls were blank. There was no way Cyril could have hidden Herries’s body in his own sarcophagus, as it would have been found when they buried him, and he would surely not have violated the sarcophagus containing the remains of his beloved daughter. It briefly crossed my mind that perhaps the Willoughbys were right, that this whole thing might have been a bizarre delusion on Juliette’s part, her way of processing a series of horrible, senseless tragedies. Patrick looked as baffled as I felt.
“It’s not here, is it? She’s not here. We were wrong.”
Then I thought of something. “Do you recall which pyramid this is modeled on? Which specific pyramid.”
“Djoser, at Saqqara. The oldest of all the pyramids. That’s what Cyril claimed, anyway.”
“Right. And under the pyramid at Djoser there are catacombs—a whole elaborate system of tunnels and interconnected burial chambers. Sam Fadel told me about them.”
The name was out of my mouth before I could stop myself. Patrick pointedly ignored it.
“So what you’re saying is that what we’re looking for might be underneath us?”
The police officer, playing along, directed her torch at the floor.
“And what exactly are we looking for, right now?” she asked.
“Something like that,” said Patrick.
And there they were, right where the torch was now pointing: chisel marks on the stone floor where a slab had been loosened and lifted.
The police officer had a tire iron in her car, which she went back across the lake and retrieved. Even then it was tricky to find the right angle to lift the heavy slab.
The steep tunnel of damp stone that was revealed was just big enough for an adult to crawl down, the torch illuminating it to a distance of about thirty feet.
The officer insisted on going down first. Patrick followed. I waited at the entrance to the tunnel. “It flattens out after about forty feet,” the police officer shouted back. “Then there is a chamber.”
There was silence, then a gasp and a sharp order barked at Patrick to back up. He reluctantly did so, huffing and puffing, crawling backward up the tunnel. The police officer scrambled out after him. As I helped her to her feet, I realized she was shaking.
“What is it?” Patrick said. “Did you find the body?”
She shook her head. Her face was ashen. “Not just one body. There must be at least a dozen.”
IT HAS BEEN A strange six months. Patrick’s dad’s funeral first, then Harry’s. Freddie’s trial—there was footage on the news of Athena arriving at court to support him, in her huge dark glasses, ignoring questions from the media—and his conviction. All the legal wrangling about who would inherit Longhurst, and what would happen to Harry’s share of the money from the sale of the painting. Patrick’s separation from Sarah. The laborious business of disentangling their financial affairs, coming to an arrangement about the house, trying to sell the gallery. Then the news in the last few weeks that she had started seeing someone else, someone a little younger than Patrick, a lot sportier. From the pictures she had shared on Instagram of them together—kite surfing, body boarding, scuba diving—they looked very well suited to each other, perhaps much better than she and Patrick had been. He had messaged to say he wished them every happiness.
As for Patrick and me, we have tried to take things in slow, tentative steps. Dates. Long dinners picking over the past, trying to work out where things went wrong last time. Serious conversations about how we can ensure it doesn’t happen again.
We talk about Harry. It wasn’t until his autopsy results were made public that a fresh mystery emerged. The cause of death was exactly what it had appeared to be—the severance of his carotid artery, resulting in catastrophic blood loss. What no one had expected was the level of lead in his blood. Wildly high levels of lead, which could have resulted only from months at least of ingesting the stuff somehow. Nor had the coroner been able to offer any plausible explanation for this.
The first thing that Patrick did, when he heard, was to start counting on his fingers how long it had been since Harry had moved back to Longhurst. How long since he had opened up the oldest part of the house, the east wing, and moved into Cyril’s old suite of rooms.