Every Secret Thing (28 page)

Len Taply came up close behind me – looking up, too, at the hill…and what was on it. He said, ‘It’s been a good many years since I’ve seen one of those.’

I’d seen several, in my travels – different shapes and different sizes. But I hadn’t thought I’d see one here, in Portugal. It was a windmill, squat and round, with whitewashed stucco and a blue stripe painted round both base and top. It looked, in shape and colouring, exactly like the windmill in the painting I had seen in Deacon’s house; though, in that painting and his photograph, the windmill’s canvas sails had been in use, spread fully on the large revolving frame of ropes and wood.

This windmill’s sails were tightly rolled and tied along their spokes, the frame unmoving. It looked sadder that way, as though it had outlived its usefulness and been forgotten.

At my shoulder, Len Taply said, ‘Shall we go take a closer look?’

Wendy glanced over. ‘Up there? You must be joking.’ She stayed in the parking lot, with Ivy, but I went with Len.

It took a few minutes to find the path up, in the tangle of brambles and trees that had covered the hillside. Then we climbed. Len went first, with surprising agility. I scrambled after him, holding at times with my hands to small rocks, clumps of grass, anything I could find. I was warm when I got to the top, breathing hard. I paused to catch my breath.

I wasn’t altogether sure Len even knew that I was there. He had the contemplative look of someone dealing with a memory – not a sad one, but a memory. And perhaps because he’d done so much remembering today, the private wall that had been holding in his wartime stories seemed to crack from all the strain, and as the thoughts spilt over, it appeared to me he felt a sudden urge to talk.

‘I saw inside a windmill once,’ he said. ‘Might even have been this one, though I don’t recall a town close by.’ He looked around, as if to judge the landmarks. ‘Still, it might have been. I wonder if there’s some way we could have a look inside.’

As if in answer, an old woman trundled past us, leisurely, in a black dress and headscarf, and took up position outside the locked door of the windmill. Turning towards us, she smiled, her face wrinkling more with the change of expression, and silently held out one hand, palm turned upwards, expectant.

The coins Len Taply offered to the woman seemed to satisfy her, because she took an old plain metal key from her pocket and unlocked the door, motioning us to go in, still with that unspeaking smile.

Inside, the windmill was quiet, and filled with the scent of old sawdust. A flight of open wooden stairs wound up along one wall into the loft, where at the centre of the bare swept floor the round stone millwheel lay unmoving, a few grains of corn still caught rough in its edges. There was a small round window up here, to let in light, and tools hung round the walls – a coil of rope, a metal-handled rake – but all of it looked old, as though it had been quite some time since anyone other than tourists had been in here.

Standing in the loft, Len looked around the cramped and tidy space, and shook his head. ‘No, this isn’t the same one. I’d know. I’d remember. Rather exciting, it was, when I went. Very secret. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone. Likely I shouldn’t be telling you, either,’ he said, with a wink, ‘but then, the war’s long over. Can’t hurt anybody now, I shouldn’t think.’

He paused, as though he wanted prompting, so I asked, ‘What were you doing?’

‘I was sent to fix a radio. They’d rigged one of these windmills up, you know, to make transmissions from. I don’t remember, as I say, exactly where it was. He drove me to it in the dead of night, this chap. Said here, fix this radio. That’s what I did, you see. That was my job. Not my job in the Air Force, but that’s what I worked at before I joined up. I loved radios. This chap who drove me, he’d found all that out, when he’d talked to me first. That was
his
job, to debrief all of us who came down out of France, to find out what we’d heard, what we’d seen, what we knew. Just a young man himself, not that much older than most of the boys, and an officer, but he’d been wounded at El Alamein. Had a gimpy leg.’

Cayton-Wood
, I thought, and felt a small thrill of excitement that the stories were connecting up in ways I’d never hoped they would. So Len had met with Cayton-Wood. At least, I thought he had, and then I knew it for a fact when he went on,

‘I don’t recall his name. He looked a bit like Douglas Fairbanks. And he drove a big, black Humber limousine. Very posh. Where he was transmitting to, I didn’t know. I didn’t ask. I only did the job, and that was that. It wasn’t much, but being in the night-time, and so secret…well, I thought it was exciting.’

There were a hundred questions I wanted to ask him, about his time in Caldas da Rainha, and when exactly he had been there, and if there was anything else he remembered about Cayton-Wood, but they weren’t easy questions to work into plain conversation, so I took a more general approach. ‘I expect there were lots of exciting things going on, so close to Lisbon, you know – foreign spies, and intrigues; bodies turning up in alleys…’

‘Oh, I heard some stories, yes. But none that would be fit to tell a nice young lady like yourself.’

He drew himself up gallantly, regaining his control, and I could almost hear the door slam shut again against that section of his past. He told me, ‘Anyway, we ought to go back down and join my wife, and Wendy. Go for lunch. There’s nothing here to see.’

The old woman, still standing at the open door, stepped back to let us out.

As she was locking up, I paused and turned back for another last look at the squat little windmill, standing forlorn on the rock-strewn hilltop, and once again I had that bothersome feeling, the same as I’d had after leaving Regina Marinho’s. Well, maybe, I thought, not
exactly
the same, because then I had felt that I’d overlooked something important, while now I felt more as though something important was missing.

And then, in an instant, the two feelings melded in one, and I knew what it was. I could see in my mind the old photo she’d shown me of Deacon, with Cayton-Wood standing a few faces over, a tall figure leaning his weight on a walking stick. And over that image James Cavender’s voice, like a ghost in my memory, repeated the story of how he’d discovered his uncle, despondent and drinking alone, after spending the day up in London. ‘…
it seemed to me that he was staring at one photograph, specifically
.’ The photo of the windmill, like the one that rose now from the hill in front of me. ‘
And when my uncle told me, “He’s not dead”,
’ the voice went on,
‘I rather fancied he was speaking of the man who’s in that photograph. A tall man with a walking stick – the outline of the figure’s fairly clear
.’

That solitary figure was the thing my mind had missed, just now, when I’d looked at the windmill. From my own imagination I could conjure it, no longer just a shadow. I could see the face, the features – see the man about whom Deacon had been speaking when he’d said, half to himself, half to his nephew: ‘He’s not dead. He should be dead.’

I saw Jack Cayton-Wood.

Deacon looked to the windmill again, judging distance, then back to his camera, adjusting the settings to make the best use of the late morning light.

He’d chosen a slightly different angle than the one that Garcia was painting from. Garcia, with an eye to colour and texture, showed more of the trees in the landscape behind, whereas Deacon preferred the uncluttered, clean lines of the far-distant hills and the ocean beyond.

The Spaniard looked up from his easel and smiled. ‘You take as long to make your photograph as I take with my painting.’

Deacon admitted it. ‘But I rather doubt my end result will be as good.’

‘You flatter me.’

‘I don’t. I tell the truth.’ He did, at that. ‘You ought to sell your paintings, Manuel. You could make your living at it.’

But Garcia, mixing colours on his palette, only shrugged. ‘I do not think my wife would be so happy with an artist’s pay. She likes too much the money that I earn from Mr Reynolds.’

‘Sell your paintings on the side, then.’

Once again the shrug. ‘Perhaps, someday.’ He was back at work now, concentrating.

Deacon liked to watch Garcia paint. It was one of the rare pleasures of his week to take a Sunday drive into the countryside and pass a few hours in Garcia’s quiet company, sharing the capture of beauty on canvas and talking of things that had nothing to do with the war.

It gave him hope to know that all the ugliness and hatred of these times had not yet managed to destroy completely that which was, to him, the very essence of humanity: the simple need for people of like minds to make connections; the capacity for friendship.

He was mindful, naturally, of what Garcia was, and mindful, too, of his own orders, his own loyalties. But still, he couldn’t help but like the Spaniard.

Without looking up this time, Garcia dryly said, ‘It is supposed to be the quicker way, you know, to use the camera. We have been here twenty minutes, and you have not moved.’

‘I’m waiting for that cloud to pass.’

There wasn’t much wind to help matters along, but at length the long cloud drifted clear of the frame, and Deacon, his eye to the viewfinder, prepared to take his shot. He hadn’t expected the door of the windmill to open.

The man who came out didn’t see them, at first. He locked the door after him, took a few paces away from the windmill and paused, a tall figure against the expanse of blank sky. Deacon, watching him still through the camera lens, wasn’t aware that his own hand had moved till the shutter clicked.

It was the tiniest of sounds. He doubted whether even Garcia, behind him, had heard it, and Garcia was a good deal closer to him than the man beside the windmill, but instinct advised him to lower the camera as Cayton-Wood turned.

Garcia had stopped painting, in surprise.

Deacon couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw
Cayton-Wood
cast a quick glance at the door of the windmill before starting down the small path towards them. By the time he’d reached the halfway point, his smile was in place.

He greeted them both, took a moment to admire Garcia’s artwork, then, as though it were quite normal that the three of them should run into each other in a setting so remote, he squinted skyward and remarked that they had picked a lovely day for it. And then he dropped his gaze to Deacon’s camera. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘if I spoilt your shot.’

And with that he excused himself, nodded, and left them, retreating along the steep path through the trees, leaving Deacon to wonder.

Not only had Cayton-Wood not told them why he had come there, or what he’d been doing alone in the windmill, but he’d also shown the physical reactions – the faint flush, and the adrenalin-fuelled eye movements – of a man caught unawares; a man who hadn’t wanted to be seen.

That Deacon hadn’t seen the Humber parked below seemed further evidence of Cayton-Wood’s attempts at
self-concealment.

Curious, he looked towards the windmill. He’d already formed a theory as to what might be inside it, based on the fact that, of all the windmills scattered through the countryside surrounding Lisbon, Garcia had chosen
this
windmill; had driven straight to it, had known the way, had seemed very familiar with where he should park and which path he should take. It would be a good spot for a transmitter, Deacon thought – far enough out that one wouldn’t be noticed, and common enough to blend in with the landscape.

But that did nothing to explain why Cayton-Wood would come up here alone.

Or why Garcia, head bent, frowning, to his painting, should look suddenly so thoughtful, and so worried.

Manuel Garcia
.

There it was, in black and white. It hadn’t meant a thing to me the first time I had read it. He’d been one name among the many in the list that Anabela had prepared, at my request – the list of those who’d died between November 1943 and April 1944.

He’d made it nearly to the end. He’d died on April 6
^th
. I felt a small surge of excitement as I read the name again. Perhaps
he
was the murder victim Deacon had wanted to tell me about. There was no cause of death recorded on the list – it was a simple register of names, and dates. But still, I thought it promising.

Which meant there were two obituaries that I needed to look up now, or have Anabela find for me: Manuel Garcia’s, here in Lisbon, and JL Cayton-Wood’s, in England.
Cayton-Wood’s
would be more difficult. I didn’t have a date, or an exact location, and only Regina Marinho’s word that he had died at all, but I was hoping Roger Selkirk might be able to supply me with more details when I met with him.

He would know about Garcia’s death, as well. It was strange that Regina Marinho had not.

Of course, I reasoned, it was possible she’d never heard. She’d left the company in March, she’d said. But if she’d kept in touch with Roger Selkirk all these years, and if he was as up on things as she said he was, it seemed unlikely she would never have been told about the Spaniard’s death. Unlikely, too, that such a thing would simply slip her mind, when she was talking to me, given that her memory of events had seemed so crystal clear.

Wendy, from the driver’s seat, asked, ‘Mum still sleeping?’

‘Yes, she is,’ I said.

‘It was all that lunch, I expect.’ She glanced back. ‘Do you always bring your work with you, on holiday?’

‘It isn’t really work.’ I packed the pages back into their envelope, and set it to one side. ‘Just reading.’

We were coming into Lisbon.

Wendy asked, ‘Where would you like to be let off?’

I wasn’t entirely sure. I couldn’t go back to the York House just yet – Matt would know where I was, then. He likely had somebody watching the door. I’d considered bunking in with Anabela, then abandoned the idea. Someone might have seen me eating dinner with her, Friday night – they might know who she was, and where she lived. And while I would have liked to stay at the hotel where Wendy Taply and her parents were, to have a bit more time to talk to Len, I knew I couldn’t risk that, either. I had no idea who might have been watching, on the highway, when I’d gotten in their car, and just because I didn’t think that we’d been followed, that didn’t mean I was safe.