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PATRICK, DUBAI, TWELVE HOURS AFTER HARRY’S DEATH

A murderer. That is what they think I am. Harry Willoughby, my oldest friend, was killed last night, and the police think that I did it.

Where did I go after the party at the gallery? That is what the officer keeps asking me.

“Home,” I keep telling him. “I signed the paperwork for the sale of the painting, I called and left a voice message for my wife, then I drove home.”

“Straight home?” he asks.

“Straight home,” I say, as confidently as I can muster. Because suddenly it has occurred to me that if I tell them where I actually went, or what I actually did, I won’t be the only one in a cell.

So instead of confessing that I went back to my ex-wife’s hotel room for a celebratory drink and committed adultery—which is not just frowned upon but technically illegal here in Dubai—I lie. The instant the lie leaves my lips, it hits me that if he somehow finds out I haven’t told the truth, I’m going to be in even worse trouble.

When the interrogation is over, I am taken to a holding cell. The smell of it, stale and acrid, is overpowering. One large room divided by a wall of floor-to-ceiling green-painted bars. On one side of the bars there about fifteen detainees, all male. Everyone is wearing the clothes they were arrested in—laborers in blue jumpsuits, guys in hotel porter garb, an older man in a cheap suit. Several are lying on the floor with jackets over their heads. A few have managed to find an angle at which they can sleep in one of the plastic chairs. On the other side of the bars, a man in uniform sits at a desk. On the wall behind him our phones lie in numbered cubbyholes. A couple of my cellmates are up at the bars, arms outstretched, asking to use their phones, being ignored. Every so often, the guard looks up in irritation, asks one his name, grabs his phone, and hands it to him.

It is almost three hours before I am able to call Sarah.

Several times I have gone up to the bars, been ignored, and sat back down again. This time I have been standing there for twenty minutes before he acknowledges my presence, sighs, and asks my name. I tell him. He starts searching the cubbyholes in a desultory fashion, checking the plastic bags in which the phones are kept, on which our names are scribbled. I tell him mine is on the bottom row, far left. He either does not hear me or does not understand. He brings out the wrong phone several times and holds it up. I shake my head each time but try to look encouraging, praying that he won’t get irritated and stop looking. Eventually, he brings over the right phone, holding up three fingers and then tapping his watch.

I have missed calls and new messages, but with the phone at just 19 percent power, I decide to ignore them. With trembling hands, I call my wife. It goes straight to voicemail. Of course it does. The sheikha’s wedding Sarah is running is in the middle of the desert—no phones allowed, and no reception anyway. She won’t even see I have tried to call her until sometime on the drive home tomorrow. I leave a very brief message, promising I will try to call again. I don’t know what else to say.

The instant I hang up, I am surrounded by men asking if they can use my phone too, hands pressed together, imploring. “I’m sorry,” I say to them, genuinely meaning it. “The battery, it’s very low... I’m so sorry.”

What happens when the thing dies, I just don’t know.

At the back of my mind I can feel a storm cloud gathering, a deluge of grief that will hit when it sinks in that Harry—someone whose life has been entangled with mine for as long as I can remember—is gone. For the moment, though, I just feel numb.

I am about to hand the phone back to the guard when it occurs to me that I know a lawyer here, Tom Wilson, the husband of a friend of Sarah’s. He’s not a criminal lawyer, but he must at least have some idea how the UAE’s legal system works. Thankfully, I have his number saved. Tom’s phone rings, keeps ringing. Fuck. I hang up, call again. This time, he answers.

“Patrick! Good to hear from you—”

I stop him abruptly, explain what has happened, fast, and tell him what the police have been asking me. It sounds like I’ve caught him at home—in the background I can hear his wife, Sumira, asking what’s going on.

“Patrick’s in a cell at CID, out by the airport,” he tells her.

“Christ,” is her non-reassuring response. “What the fuck’s he done?”

“I haven’t done anything,” I say emphatically, loud enough, I hope, for her to hear too.

There is a long silence at the other end of the line. When Tom speaks, he sounds like he is considering his words very carefully.

“Patrick. There is something it is vital for you to understand. Just like the UK, the UAE’s judicial system is based upon the principle that you’re innocent until you are proven guilty.”

“That’s good news, because I am innocent,” I say. “And as soon as they start to investigate, they’ll realize that.”

“In theory, yes. In practice, I am not so sure. Because I don’t think they are going to investigate, Patrick. Not in any real way. Not if they’ve got a plausible culprit. Because in my experience, in this country, once someone has been charged, they almost always get convicted.”

“That person being me.”

“Look, let’s not despair just yet,” Tom says. “You may be able to convince them there has been a mistake before they charge you, before this goes any further.”

“Oh God,” I hear Sumira saying.

“‘Oh God’?” I ask.

“It’s nothing,” said Tom. “The TV’s on.”

“It’s on the news,” Sumira says. “It’s on BBC News 24.”

“What is it, Tom?” I ask.

His voice sounds strained, distracted. “They’re reporting that a British man has been found murdered, Patrick. At a hotel in the DIFC. They’re not naming him yet, but they are showing footage of the hotel, cordoned off. The police have confirmed they have someone in custody.”

The blood in my ears is roaring. My fingers can barely grip the phone. The fact that the police have released a statement about my arrest is not good news at all. The slim chance I might still have had of persuading them they’ve got the wrong man has already evaporated. Tom and Sumira know that. I know that. What they do not know, what I have not yet told Tom because I cannot bring myself to say it aloud, is why the police are convinced I’m Harry’s killer.

Because according to the officer who interrogated me, they have identified the murder weapon, the implement that was used to brutally slash his throat. It was a broken champagne glass.

A broken champagne glass with my fingerprints all over it.

CAROLINE, DUBAI, TWELVE HOURS AFTER HARRY’S DEATH

The taxi driver looks concerned as he stops outside the police station, the building’s blue-tinted windows reflecting an enormous, almost empty parking lot. I open the car door and the heat instantly fogs my sunglasses.

“Are you sure this is where you want to go, madam?” he asks.

“I’m sure,” I tell him. As the closest police station to the DIFC, this is the one to which everyone at the gallery seemed confident Patrick will have been taken. The best place to go for answers about what is going on.

For hours I had been hanging around at the gallery, waiting for news. The police told us nothing as they marched Patrick to the patrol car. Neither Patrick’s bewildered employees nor the journalists, obviously excited by the prospect of a much bigger story than the one they’d arrived at the press conference to report, had any sense of what was actually happening. It was unclear at that stage what Patrick had even been arrested for.

One of the local journalists was the first to hear that a British man in his fifties had been found dead in his suite at the Mandarin Oriental. My hotel. I thought immediately of Harry, staying on the same floor, how terrible he had looked last night. Please God, don’t let it be him, I silently prayed.

“Was it a heart attack?” I had asked. “A stroke?”

The journalist shook his head. “We’ve been ordered not to report this yet, but he was murdered.” He ran a finger across his throat. “There was a lot of blood in the room.”

Giles Pemberton, there at the press conference to report for the Times, visibly paled. Should he come with me to the police station to inquire about Patrick, he had asked. I would be fine, I told him.

I am starting to regret that decision a little now.

I ask the taxi driver to wait, not quite sure how I will get back to my hotel otherwise.

Inside the white-tiled lobby of the police station there is a water dispenser, several rows of chairs, a laminated notice in English and Arabic about the procedure for paying a traffic fine. I have been standing in front of the reception counter for several minutes before the man behind it looks up. He raises an eyebrow, which shifts his gold-badged beret up a quarter inch.

“Patrick Lambert,” I say. “I am looking for Patrick Lambert.”

He has me spell the name, types it noisily into the keyboard in front of him. His expression does not change. He scratches his nose. He shakes his head. “No Lambert,” he says.

“Can you tell me which of the other stations Patrick Lambert is being held at? He went with the police,” I say. “I saw him getting into the car—the blue lights were flashing.” For some reason, I feel the need to mime this.

“You are his wife?” he asks.

“Friend,” I confirm.

“Then we cannot share this information anyway, madam,” he says.

“His wife, Sarah, is out of town, working. Not contactable. Please, is there anyone else here you could ask?” I plead.

It feels strange, saying her name aloud. Sarah. Patrick’s wife.

All night after Patrick left I had been lying there in bed, mentally lambasting myself for what had happened, horrified at what a mistake he and I had made, swept up in nostalgia and the excitement of events like a pair of middle-aged idiots. This morning, as he introduced me to the assembled press with that dimpled smile, that discreet wink, I was forced to admit to myself that I would never feel about anyone else the way I felt about Patrick Lambert.

And now this. Now all of this.

The officer shakes his head, making it clear the matter is closed. “I cannot help you, madam.”

Outside the station, I climb back into my taxi and the driver asks me where I want to go. “The hotel, I suppose,” I tell him. “Mandarin Oriental, DIFC, please.” I don’t think there is anything to be achieved by returning to the gallery, and at any rate I need to change out of these clothes, the creased and sweltering trouser suit I have been wearing all day.

When we pull up outside the hotel, all is complete pandemonium.

Uniformed men everywhere. Multiple police cars parked out front. Guests standing around outside and in the lobby, waiting to get back into their rooms. Long lines at the front desk—people wanting to check in, to check out, find out what is going on, complain. Businessmen in suits talking loudly about missing their flights. The staff trying to mollify people, explaining that the hotel remains an active crime scene.

I take a seat in the lobby with my phone in my hand in case Patrick calls. After several hours, during which all I can think to do is obsessively check the news feeds, scouring the internet desperately for any fresh information about what is going on, we are allowed upstairs to our rooms. There is much grumbling in the elevator from other guests, some lurid speculation about what has happened. I try not to think about Harry, and remind myself it has not yet been officially confirmed it is Harry who is dead.

The elevator stops at my floor and I can see, halfway down the corridor, three policemen standing around, talking. It is Harry’s room they are standing outside. As I approach them, on legs that suddenly feel reluctant to carry me, one asks my room number and directs me around the long way to get there. A few minutes after I close my door—I have just kicked off my shoes and started a cold shower running—there is a knock. A policeman. One of his colleagues is waiting at the door opposite.

“You were staying here last night?” he asks, without introducing himself. I confirm this. He asks to see my passport, which I retrieve from the safe in my closet, handing it to him. He jots down my details and asks if I saw anything or anyone suspicious, or heard any disturbance.

“I’m afraid not,” I say.

He does not write anything down in his notebook. Nor does he return my passport. He is not really looking at me but over my shoulder, into my room. He asks what time I went to bed, then where I was before that. I tell him I got in around midnight, having attended an event at the Lambert Gallery. His eyes narrow.

“We will need to talk to you further, madam. Until then, you must remain in Dubai, so I will take this with me.” He holds up my passport, then opens the back page for his colleague to log the details in a pink receipt book. He tears off the duplicate and hands it to me, and they both start off down the corridor.

My mobile rings. I answer it, fumbling to swipe. My heart is pounding so loudly that it feels like it must be audible over the phone line. “Caroline, thank God.” Patrick’s voice is very faint. I can hear other voices in the background.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in a cell, at a police station near the airport,” he says, sounding exhausted. “They keep offering me things to sign. Things I can’t read, in Arabic. I have a lawyer friend trying to find out where I am exactly, to get hold of someone from the British embassy.”

“I can help too,” I say. “I’m your alibi. You were with me last night, I’ll tell them—”

The reaction from the other end of the line is immediate and sharp. “Don’t tell them that, for Christ’s sake,” Patrick hisses.

At first I assume it is Sarah he is thinking of, his marriage he is concerned about. Despite everything else going on, I feel a twinge of sadness at this.

“You have to remember where we are,” says Patrick, his voice insistent. “Do you not remember what I told you last night, about adultery being illegal? People have gone to prison for it. You can’t provide me with an alibi. You can’t help me. You can only make things worse and land yourself in trouble too.”

“But did you see Harry last night? If you went to Harry’s room after you left mine, you might have been the last person to see him alive.”

“I can’t talk about that now. Not on the phone. Caroline, I’m calling because you need to leave. Something is going on and I don’t want you getting entangled in it. Get on a plane. Get out of the country. Do it now.”

“I can’t, Patrick.” He continues talking for a second, telling me to pack and call a taxi right away, before what I have said registers.

“Patrick, the police have just taken my passport.”

ALICE, LONDON, 1938

Alice Long. Alice Evelyn Maud Long. I repeated the name silently throughout the journey. As I lay on the top bunk while the ferry crossed the channel, listening to the woman below me snoring. As I lined up to disembark at Dover. I showed my passport to the man in his booth, who barely glanced at it before waving me through. For a while I shuffled along with the crowd, soaking in the English voices, eyes adjusting to English signs and advertisements, my nose picking up English scents I had forgotten: damp woolen coats, hair oil, fish and chips.

Not until I was actually standing at the train station ticket office did I realize I had no idea where to go. With Oskar at my side, the plan had been America, with England a brief stop-off. Only now did it strike me how half-formed our vision of what would happen next had been. Once in New York, had Oskar believed he would be able to normalize his visa arrangements, resume his old identity, relaunch his career? There were certainly dealers over there who admired his work. Buyers with money. Other Surrealist artists, native and imported. Were his visions of long evenings in Manhattan bars, parties at which everyone spoke French, our life in Paris reconstructed across the Atlantic? The thought of being in a city where so many of our friends and acquaintances had already assembled, where so many people knew and would recognize us, had been very appealing when Oskar and I had been planning to go there together. Now New York felt impossible, for precisely the same reason.

Los Angeles? San Francisco? I knew no one in either city. I knew nothing about either city. If Los Angeles or San Francisco, why not Mexico City, why not Peking, why not Casablanca? I was very aware how fortunate I was, to be faced with such choices. I had enough money, from Oskar’s sale of my painting, to get me anywhere. The trouble was, it would not last forever—I would need to earn a living soon enough, and I had not exactly been brought up to do so. I did not have the skills for clerical or teaching or nursing work. I could not bear the thought of picking up a paintbrush again, not yet. I thought of the photographs I had taken in Paris of Oskar and his friends. I had those rolls of film with me. I had my camera.

The first train that arrived at the platform was going to London, which felt to me like a sign. I paid for a first-class ticket, then panicked and instead sat in second class, where I was far less likely to know anyone. I took a room in the first hotel I passed in Charing Cross. The lobby was gloomy, the elevator tiny, the bellboy sullen. The room smelled close and dusty, and when I tried to open the window, I found it painted shut. In the middle of the night, I heard footsteps in the corridor and was sure I saw the door handle turn, so I barricaded myself in with the dressing table. I put my clothes and boots on and spent the rest of the night dozing on top of the covers, fully dressed.

The following morning, I moved to a hostel for women on Gower Street. While it was marginally more salubrious, I was confident nobody I knew in England would ever come near the place. I could tell that the other women living there were puzzled by me. Who I was. What had brought me there. I did not blame them. I was wrestling with the same questions myself. At first I spoke as little as possible, conscious of my accent attracting attention, inviting curiosity. Once, I heard someone in the corridor outside my room make a joke about “her ladyship,” and I was sure the object of their mockery was me. Instead of speaking I listened, to the words the women around me used, the way they said things, and practiced copying them.

I bought myself a suit, chopped off my curls so that my hair was barely long enough to tuck behind my ears, and turned my auburn dark brown with chemist-bought dye. Now that even I barely recognized the girl I kept catching sight of in shop windows, it felt safe enough for me to start traipsing up and down Fleet Street, doing the rounds of newspaper and magazine offices with my modest folder of photographs. Pictures of André Breton with his hands crossed on his chest, fingers splayed, trying to look imposing. Of Man Ray, deeply engrossed in a game of chess. Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, pulling faces.

I developed them in the sink in my room at the hostel, a blanket draped over the curtain rail to block out the light. Every time I developed a photo of Oskar, every time his face emerged beneath my hands, I felt my heart leap up into my throat. Oskar, smiling. Oskar lying on the grass, wearing sunglasses, pretending to sleep. Oskar inspecting his own painting on the wall of our apartment. Every time one took shape before me, I felt a split second of happiness before grief took its place. Each time, I forced myself to picture the way he had looked as he came at me, his face contorted. It was an accident, I told myself. I had been terrified. I had not meant to kill him. He was the one who had struck me first.

On the third day, someone finally agreed to look at my photographs. At the Telegraph office, a man with gray sideburns and the sluggish air of someone who had been drinking at lunch flicked through them, making me flinch at how carelessly he shuffled each to the back. At one point, when it looked like one might fall to the floor, I almost lunged to grab it.

He looked at a long, typed list in front of him, selected a few, then excused himself and disappeared over to a bank of desks where a group of men were shouting over one another and smoking. “They’re very good,” he told me on his return, and passed them back. “We’ll take these three. How much are you asking?”

I had absolutely no idea, and could not even see which he had selected. I made up a figure on the spot, not sure if it was too high or too low, and we shook on it.

I bought the Telegraph the next day and had to steady myself against a lamppost when I saw which they had used and why. It was Oskar, sitting at the little wooden table by the window in our apartment, brushes and paint arranged in front of him. It was not the picture, though, but the headline that knocked the wind out of me: “Fatal Paris Fire Kills Artist Oskar Erlich and MP’s Daughter.”

I had done it. The body, the necklace, the fire, my whole plan. It had actually worked.

I had succeeded in murdering us both.