Every Secret Thing (30 page)

‘Oh, nothing much.’ I shrugged, and kept it light and friendly. ‘Sightseeing. What about you? You were going someplace after Evora, weren’t you? Where did you go?’

He had to think about it. Only for an instant, but I noticed. ‘Tomar,’ he said, ‘and then Coimbra, so that I could see the Roman ruins at Conimbriga.’

It wasn’t the truth, I suspected, but lacking any first-hand knowledge of those towns myself, I couldn’t test him. ‘What makes you so interested in Romans?’

‘That’s my mother’s fault,’ he said, and grinned. The hardness left his features when he talked about his childhood, and the myths his mother read to him as bedtime stories, and how his own fascination with the long-dead Empire had evolved to match her own. ‘I went out trick-or-treating as a Roman once, with the sheet and everything. My dad went insane. He’s a man’s man, my dad, and he hated the thought of his son going all over town in a dress, as he called it.’

My father would have never known what I wore out for Hallowe’en. It had been Grandpa Murray who had walked me round the block, and made a great admiring fuss about my costumes. I asked, ‘What does your father do?’

‘For a living, you mean? He’s a butcher.’

Like father, like son
, I thought harshly. I took a slightly larger drink of wine than I had meant to. ‘What made you want to be a lawyer?’

The wine warmed me while he talked, and made the whole encounter easier. The conversation flowed as well as it had done in Evora, or so it seemed to me. This time I noticed, though, that Matt spoke very freely of his past, and of his parents, but grew tighter with the details of his present. I heard stories of his college days, but nothing of his workplace. And although he told me several tales that featured his dog Reuben, I learnt nothing of his friends. Perhaps he didn’t have any. A job like his, I reasoned, wouldn’t lend itself to sociability.

Yet he seemed sociable enough, with me. That made him dangerous, because he had a way of asking questions that was almost incidental, so you didn’t see the trap until you’d started to reply.

After finishing one of the funnier stories about his dog, he asked, ‘Do you have pets?’

‘No.’

‘Not a dog person?’

‘No, it’s not that. I love dogs. But I travel too much, and that wouldn’t be fair to an animal.’ And then I stopped, because I realised what I’d said. Not that it mattered. He knew who I was, I was sure of that, and so it was of no importance if my cover story cracked a little here and there. Still, I’d told him I worked in a grocery store – not the sort of occupation where a person had much cause to travel.

I didn’t want him scoring points, however minor they might be. I set my wineglass down, and tried to think a step ahead for the remainder of our talk. When he started saying something about Canada again, I knew that he was leading up to asking more about my meeting with my non-existent old man in Toronto. I was ready, and I kept my answers vague. And when he asked about the scheduling of my flights, although he did it very neatly, I was ready for that, too.

He said, ‘You’ll have to get up pretty early, then. Are you driving yourself to the airport?’

I shook my head. ‘No, I got rid of my rental car. It was giving me trouble, yesterday, on the drive home from Evora’ – he already knew this – ‘so I let the company take it back.’

‘Didn’t they give you a new one?’

‘I didn’t want a new one. I’ve seen what the streets are like here in Lisbon. I’m not brave enough to tackle them. I’m not that skilled a driver.’

‘Aren’t you?’ His tone was dry, or so I imagined, but when I raised my head his eyes were neutral. ‘I can drive you to the airport, if you like.’

I hadn’t seen
that
coming, but I dodged it handily. ‘Thanks, that’s really nice of you, but I’ve already got a taxi booked. Besides, it’s way too early in the morning.’

‘I should let you get some sleep, then.’

I had been wondering how I would bring the conversation to a close. The fact he’d done it for me left me so relieved I quickly looked around the bar, because I didn’t want him seeing the emotion in my eyes.

‘I’ve enjoyed this,’ I lied. ‘Thanks for coming.’

‘You’re welcome. Maybe we can try it again sometime.’

A bigger lie: ‘I’d like that.’

‘Then here, take this.’ He handed me his business card. ‘You can call me next time you get down to the States.’

I bent my head to read it. Cleared my throat, which had gone dry. ‘You live in Washington.’

‘That’s right. Have you ever been there?’

I’d been there several times for work, and knew it well. The address for his office was on F Street, downtown, a short walk from the White House. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve never been.’

‘Well, then, you’ll have to make a point of it. I can show you the sights.’

‘Sounds fun.’ I pocketed the card, and found a smile to show him.

Matt smiled back, his quick and boyish smile, the one that looked so genuine, the one that made his brown eyes warm. It was the wine, I knew, but for that one small moment I could almost wish that things weren’t what they were. But then the spectres of my grandmother, and Cavender, and Deacon, rose between us, and my mind grew hard again.

Matt paid the bill, and walked me out.

I was relaxing slightly now – the meeting over, and the time of danger past – and I think something of that must have made my smile a little brighter as we said goodbye, because he kept my hand a little longer than he needed to, and then, without a warning, leant in close and kissed my cheek.

‘Take care,’ he said.

I had a long time, after he had gone, to wonder why he would have said that, and to wonder if he’d feel regret, when it came time to kill me.

There were only a handful of passengers on the flight from Lisbon up to Amsterdam. None of them looked threatening, but that meant nothing. I’d looked for Matt outside the airport – I’d been looking for his car – and though I hadn’t seen him, I’d felt sure someone had watched me, maybe followed, when I’d walked into the terminal. And while I’d known that
he
would not be on my plane, I knew that someone might.

They wouldn’t be too fond of me. My flight left at the
less-than-godly
hour of six a.m., and no one on the plane looked properly awake.

Including me. I hadn’t slept well. I had dreamt unsettling dreams that left me so on edge that, in the end, I’d turned on all the lights and spent the last few hours of the night curled in an armchair in a corner of my room, rereading every note I’d made, and every bit of information Anabela had passed on to me.

I’d spoken to her yesterday, before I’d met with Matt. She’d searched the whole of April, and of May, and there was no obituary for Manuel Garcia. She’d been apologetic. ‘I am so sorry,’ she had said, ‘that I could not do more.’

‘You’ve done so much. I don’t know how to thank you.’

‘There is no need. Just be careful.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ I had told her. ‘If things go well, then I’ll have bought myself some time. They won’t be keen to hurt me.’

But they meant, I knew, to follow me. I couldn’t let them do that.

In Amsterdam, while making my connection, I was vigilant. I had a lot of time to kill. The flight bound for Toronto didn’t leave till after one o’clock. I ate an early lunch, and sat in plain view, reading, for a while, before I made my way towards the gate and took a seat within the waiting area. Time went by; the small space filled. I didn’t look around because, again, there was no point. I wouldn’t recognise the face. But I felt certain, even if there had been no one on this morning’s flight from Lisbon, there’d be someone on
this
plane. They wouldn’t want to run the risk of losing sight of me.

At one o’clock I stood, and stretched, and headed for the washroom on the far side of the hall. I gambled that no one would bother getting up to follow me in there – the one door in and out was in full view of everybody in the waiting area.

At the sink, I washed my face and took a silent look at my reflection, just as unfamiliar to me now as it had been four days ago, in this same airport. Mindful of my near-disaster then, I checked my bag with care to make quite sure my travel wallet, with my passport, was still in it, before shouldering the strap. A group of women had come in, laughing and talking to one another, taking turns at the sinks while they freshened their make-up. Waiting, I put on my jacket and buttoned it carefully, changing my look, and then took the silk scarf that I’d stuffed in my pocket and tied it around my head, Grace Kelly-style. When the women began to leave, I left as well, blending in to the group, letting them be my shield as I whipped round the corner, away from the gate.

Thirty seconds later I was safely out of view, lost in the crowds of Schiphol Airport. Five more minutes and a smiling young attendant reached his hand to take my boarding pass, as I stood, out of breath from running, at another gate.

‘You are for Washington?’

I nodded.

‘We were just about to give the final boarding call,’ he said. He bent his head to read my pass, and in my paranoiac state I thought he took too long to do it, but at last he waved me through. ‘Enjoy your flight, Miss Allen.’

Safely in my window seat, I took my scarf off; turned my head against the cushion; closed my eyes.

The engines surged. I felt the motion, knew the moment when we left the ground, but these things only touched the edges of my consciousness. My fingers found the little medal on its chain around my neck, my parting gift from Tony in Toronto, and again I made a silent prayer – but not for my own safety.

Please
, I asked St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers,
Please let me be in time.

Washington

Washington, DC, took on a look of clean austerity in autumn.

I criss-crossed the city in taxis for half an hour, covering my tracks, watching through windows the stark, passing beauty set off by the strong, angled sunlight of late afternoon: holly hedges bright with small red berries; some trees naked, others gold and fluttering; grass littered with leaves; people jogging, in pairs and alone; the Potomac River a bright slash of blue with a few white boats dotting its surface; the white of the Washington Monument, and the gold gleam, slightly tarnished, of the giant figures looming at the end of the bridge as we crossed back again out of Arlington.

It was past five o’clock when the final taxi dropped me off at M Street and Wisconsin, in the heart of Georgetown. If the driver later saw my picture featured in a paper or the nightly news, he wouldn’t know exactly where I’d gone – a lot of tourists liked to be let off at M Street and Wisconsin, it was central and convenient to the upscale shops, the restaurants and boutiques, the rows of eighteenth-century townhouses that had stood here since George Washington had first begun to build his capital along the banks of the Potomac, and the even more exclusive streets where one might spot the wealthy or the famous; all the things that made this area of Washington a Mecca for so many people. Even at this hour of the evening, with the streetlights full on and the deep blue sky flattening into darkness, the brick sidewalks seemed barely to contain the flood of life, the jostling of humanity that moved against the constant sounds of traffic, squealing brakes, and slamming car doors. A bright red Gray Line trolley car came labouring uphill as I crossed over Wisconsin and wove myself as quickly as I could into the tapestry of people heading west on M Street.

Jenny Augustine lived on Potomac Street – not a long walk, but a world from the bustle of M and Wisconsin. There was here some measure of peace, that began with the silent cars lining both sides of the street, parked and idle. And over them, the ginkgo trees, tall trees, venerable, clinging to their golden, fan-shaped leaves in staunch defiance of the season. The scattering of leaves they had allowed to drop lay thinly, green and gold, across the worn brick sidewalk underneath, concealing in some places the uneven, crumbled spots that caught my heels.

The houses, too, gave the impression they’d been here forever. They were joined together, federal, lovely, some with Mansard rooflines, brick walls painted soft dove grey or yellowed cream or simply left the natural deep red. All up the street I saw front-door lights gleaming on black wooden shutters, and black iron railings, and black painted doors with brass numbers and knockers and letter slots, softened at times by small shrubs planted close to the walls at the edge of the sidewalk.

The Augustine house had black bars on the street-level windows as well, and a lion’s-head door knocker that looked as if its role was to intimidate. Inside the house, a dog barked when I knocked, but its barking was silenced. I waited.

When I knocked the second time the dog again barked, and again fell silent suddenly, as though someone had stilled it with a firm command. I couldn’t hear a human voice, but after a moment I heard the dog snuffling, close by the base of the door, and I knew that its owner could not be far off; that he or she was, in all likelihood, standing right there in the front hall, a few feet away from me, listening. Waiting. As I was.

I could have said something out loud, but the street was so quiet, and I would have had to raise my voice to be heard through the solid wooden door, and I didn’t know for certain that the area was safe. Instead I took my notebook from my bag, and wrote a name across one page, then tore it off and slipped it face-up through the letter box.

It was the longest minute I had ever stood on somebody’s front step.

And then, in the silence, a lock clicked, and another, and the door swung slowly inward on its hinges.

It struck me, as we looked at one another, that the image I had formed of Jenny Reynolds in my mind had been of someone young – as young and vital as she’d been in all the photographs I’d seen, and in the tales that had been told to me. It took some doing to reconcile that image with the woman I saw now, so old, so plain, her shoulders stooped as though the burden of the years had just become too much to carry. For a moment I rejected the idea, even though I knew it must be her, it had to be. She had her father’s facial lines, his nose, his cheekbones.

She held the piece of paper up, the one on which I’d written ‘Andrew Deacon’. In a quiet yet commanding voice, she asked me, ‘What is
your
name?’

I’d grown almost used to being Katherine Allen, but this was, I thought, my final port of call – there wasn’t anybody left to talk to, after this. It didn’t matter any longer who I was, and so I simply said, ‘Kate Murray.’

She looked me up and down, and finally nodded satisfaction. ‘Then,’ she told me, in decided tones, ‘you may come in.’

The dog was a Boston bull terrier, small and suspicious. It circled behind as I entered the house.

‘He isn’t used to strangers,’ I was told. ‘But he doesn’t usually bite.’

Which was all the reassurance that I got before she turned and led me down the hall. I’d expected the inside of the house to look like something from the pages of a decorating magazine, one of those ones that showed rooms I could never afford, filled with fine art and mirrors and flower arrangements. The hall, at least, was none of that. It was, like the owner herself, quite surprisingly plain – a coat rack, an umbrella stand, a row of family photos, and an oriental runner that had worn at its centre till the pattern of the carpet had begun to disappear.

She was talking. ‘Andrew told me to expect you; to be nice to you. I must say, you’ve taken your time, though, in—’

‘Not here.’ I stopped at the door of the room she had entered, refusing to follow. This kitchen, like my grandmother’s, was cosy, warm, inviting, with a scrubbed pine table set beneath a window, overlooking the back yard. ‘We can’t talk here. Is there another room?’

She turned, surprised at first, and then she looked me up and down a second time, with growing shrewdness. ‘I think, Kate Murray, that you’d better tell me just exactly what is going on.’

‘And so,’ I finished off, ‘that’s why I came to you; that’s why I’m here.’

She lit her third cigarette, exhaling into the already smoky small room that her husband had used as a
reading-room
, windowless, lined round with glass-fronted barristers’ bookshelves that caught the reflection of lamplight and cast it back to us from all four walls. The chairs wrapped round you, sagging at their centres where the springs had worn, a comfy spot to sit and talk, and I’d already talked too much.

I’d left nothing out, from my first meeting Deacon to my turning up this evening on her doorstep, and through it all she’d sat and smoked in silence. Not a single interruption. I admired that in people – the ability to sit and listen quietly, without interjecting their own thoughts and opinions – mostly because I was incapable of doing it myself. But in this instance I’d have rather had her interrupt. The story, told unbroken, sounded just like that: a story. Hardly plausible.

She drew on the cigarette, thinking. ‘I knew he was dead,’ she said finally. ‘No one got in touch to say so, but I knew. He said he’d call, you see. He said he’d call again, and when he didn’t…’ A small movement of her shoulder, like a shrug. ‘He was always a man of his word. So I knew.’

She had taken it matter-of-factly, I thought, just as Regina Marinho had, but with the same thread of wistful regret, as though something had passed from the world that would not be replaced. It wasn’t love, not love, not in the same way that my grandmother had felt it; yet these women had felt
something
, had esteemed the man so highly that the knowledge of his death somehow diminished them.

‘When,’ I asked her, ‘did you talk to him?’

‘The last time? Oh, back at the beginning of September.’

‘And he mentioned my name to you?’

‘Yes, several times. He made me write it down. He didn’t trust my memory, I suppose, even though he had ten years on me. Men can be like that. Unreasonable. Anyhow, he told me you’d be calling on me soon, and that I ought to let you in and be nice to you – his exact words. I don’t expect he trusted me with that, either. I’ve never had a reputation, really, for being nice.’ The willful Reynolds jaw was very much in evidence as she angled her head to tap ash from the cigarette.

Into the pause, I said, ‘Did he say why I’d be coming to see you?’

‘He said you’d fill in the details.’

‘Oh. I see.’

‘I gather, from what you’ve just been telling me, that you can’t do that.’

‘No.’

She echoed, ‘No.’

I took my tape recorder out and showed it to her. ‘Do you mind if I use this?’

She shook her head. ‘You’re sure he mentioned murder?’

‘Yes.’ I paused a moment, thinking, and then asked, straight out, ‘How did Manuel Garcia die?’

‘Garcia?’

‘Yes. He died on April 6
^th
.’

‘Oh, I remember the day well enough. But that wasn’t a murder. It wasn’t a nice death,’ she said, ‘but it wasn’t a murder.’

‘You’re certain of that?’

She nodded, drawing deeply on her cigarette. Her gaze began to drift and lose its focus in a way that I now found familiar. Quietly, she said, ‘I’m very certain. I was there.’

The day had got off to a promising start. She’d arrived at the office to find out that Vivian Spivey was ill, and would not be at work. That, for her, was as good as a holiday. Like Regina, Jenny had no use for Spivey, and lately her already poor opinion of the man had darkened to something approaching real hatred.

It had started the previous autumn, when she had been seeing a young man who worked in the legal department. James Iveson was from New York, like Jenny. He blew through the office that fall like a breath of fresh air, irresistibly fun, and of course, for Jenny, he had the added appeal of being somebody she had to keep secret.

It wasn’t that her father didn’t like James – quite the contrary – but Reynolds was increasingly upset about the rumours that marked Jenny as his mistress, and, protectively, he tried now to discourage any actions that might hurt her reputation. Life was dull for her, and sneaking out with James to go to nightclubs, or the movies, gave her something to look forward to; a temporary thrill.

And then one night, somebody took her father’s car and left it parked in front of James’s house till dawn, right on the street, where everyone could see it. Her father, when he found out, hit the ceiling. James was fired, and Reynolds purged the whole office of unmarried men.

She tried protesting, arguing, telling her father it hadn’t been her; that she’d been in her own bed all night, but the evidence was damning, and the word of her accuser more reliable.

The person who’d accused her had been Spivey. She suspected from the start that he had been involved, because he disliked James. She didn’t know the details, only that the air grew chilly in the office when the two men faced each other, and that Spivey resented the favour that James had been gaining with Reynolds. Suspicion had turned to certainty after she’d talked to her driver, Joaquim. He’d been off that one night, or else she would have had his word to back her up, but he—

‘Joaquim?’ I couldn’t help the interruption. ‘Your driver’s name was Joaquim?’

‘That’s right. Why?’

‘I think I might have met him, when I was in Portugal. Did he also do work for the British Embassy, do you know?’

‘I honestly couldn’t tell you. He wasn’t exactly a talkative person, Joaquim. He didn’t say much, about himself or anyone else. He overheard a lot of conversations, in the car, but I think he’d have stood up to torture before he repeated so much as a word.’

Yes, I thought, that sounded like the man I’d met in Lisbon.

Anyhow, she told me, picking up the thread of narrative, Joaquim had made a point of speaking to her, a thing that ran contrary to his character. He’d said that he’d seen Spivey at the garage on the afternoon before the car was taken to be parked at James’s house. There would have been no reason, so Joaquim had said, for Spivey to be at the garage, but the keys to both cars were kept there, in plain view. There would be no point in accusing Spivey, Joaquim had said, on such speculative evidence, and even less to gain by confronting him, since Spivey’s ill graces, once gained, could be poisonous. But Joaquim had thought Jenny should know, for her own sake. Before returning to his normal, tight-lipped self, he’d offered the advice that, ‘It is good, in a garden, to know where the snakes lie, so one can step carefully.’

Her personal opinion was that, if a snake were dangerous, one ought to take its head off with a shovel, but she knew Joaquim was right. Her father trusted Spivey, and that made a shield so strong that any arrows aimed at Spivey were deflected back upon the one who’d fired them. She’d have needed the Biblical David’s skill with a slingshot to topple the man from his pedestal. So she’d stepped carefully.

Even when she’d been assigned to Spivey as his secretary, later in the year, she had kept her complaints to a minimum, though working in close confines with the man had galled her terribly.

He’d known it too. She’d seen it in the way he smiled when she was in his office, a sadist’s smile that took its pleasure from another’s impotence. And there’d been little she could do but bite her tongue and tough it out.

Till Deacon came.

She hadn’t known, when she’d first seen her father’s new curator, that this quiet-spoken Englishman would change her life so greatly. She’d thought him rather dull, in the beginning; but that hadn’t stopped her envying Regina, who, with Roger Selkirk, and now Deacon, claimed the two best-mannered men to work for in the office.