Every Secret Thing

‘A thrilling, haunting and
deeply romantic story’
Rachel Hore, author of
A Place of Secrets

‘A deeply engaging romance and a compelling
historical novel. A marvellous book’
Bernard Cornwell

‘Fabulous summer reading fun’
Gail Anderson-Dargatz
author of
A Recipe for Bees

‘Part ghost story and part romance, it is beautifully imaginative,
with a dream-like quality’
The Bookseller

‘Like vintage Mary Stewart by way of Rosemary Sutcliffe …
updated with a sprinkling of the supernatural’
Scotland on Sunday

‘An intoxicating combination of history, mystery and romance,
which will hold you in its spell to the very end’
Book-of-the-Month Club

‘A lovely, clever book’
Evelyn Anthony

‘A strong first-person narrative tells the story of the
past and illuminates the present. If you liked
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
, you’ll love this’
Romantic Times

I’ve been told, by people more experienced at writing, that the hardest part of telling any story is the search for its beginning, and its end. I might add that it’s harder still when telling a true story, because truth does not allow for tidy endings.

The beginning was a problem in itself, in that this story started long before my birth. In many ways, it isn’t even properly my story; yet I chose, at last, to start where I came into it, and let the tales of those who came before me weave their way into the narrative.

Not everyone who spoke to me survived. And there were stories I learnt later, that were placed throughout the book as random flashbacks, for the sake of keeping everything in order. But for the most part, what I wrote was nothing more than a chronology of strange, confusing days, and what I saw, and what I lived, and what was told to me.

The ending didn’t come till I was nearly done revising my first draft.

It came, not in the form of inspiration, but by messenger, with flowers, for my birthday.

The dog heard the knock at the door before I did – he usually does – and I opened the door with a hand on his collar. Without the dog there at my side, I would never have opened my door to a stranger. Not even a smiling young man holding flowers.

But the flowers were roses. Tea roses. And when I saw them I knew straight away who’d sent them. It was, after all, my birthday, and although he was out of the country I knew that he wouldn’t have let the day pass without some sign to show he’d remembered.

With the roses came a box – not large, just the size of a bottle of wine, and about the same weight. It was wrapped twice: the first time in tidy brown paper, and under that, prettier tissue, with ribbons.

I sat down to open it, carefully working the knots. The box itself was very plain, and lined with wads of newspaper – Italian, from the look of it. I thought, at first, he’d sent a statuette, some kind of sculpture. It felt heavy in my hand. But then I turned it, and the paper fell away, and I could see exactly what it was.

Time stopped. At least, it seemed to stop. And then, in that peculiar way it sometimes has, it shifted, and it took me with it, back to that first morning on the grey steps of St Paul’s, in London.

But that won’t mean anything to you, yet – you won’t understand, unless I make a better start, and tell the story through from the beginning.

I first met Andrew Deacon on the morning of the day he died.

It bothered me, afterwards, how little I remembered him. Someone who changes your life the way Deacon changed mine should, by rights, be remembered, imprinted indelibly onto your brain, and I found it disturbing that though I had talked to him, shaken his hand, I could not with closed eyes shape his image; that through everything that followed he remained as insubstantial as a shadow at my shoulder, the impression of a man and nothing more.

How much of that was my fault and how much could be put down to Deacon himself I never would know. His life had depended for so long on his being average, on not being seen, that even if I’d studied him properly, really looked hard at him, it might not have made any difference. I wish I had tried. But that morning in September I saw only one more grey old man in overcoat and hat, and I was busy.

England

‘Do you have the time?’ the voice asked, at my shoulder.

I hadn’t been aware of the older man sitting beside me, but when I glanced up he was there. Mentally I registered the overcoat and hat; assessed the voice, an English voice, politely middle class. I glanced at the time display ticking at the bottom of my laptop’s screen.

‘It’s ten to ten.’

‘Thank you.’ He didn’t comment on my accent. Some people did when they were making conversation, but this man said nothing. He had taken a seat a respectable two feet away, leaning forward with elbows on knees, gazing down at the taxis and cars passing by. ‘Here for the trial, are you?’ he asked.

How he’d managed to deduce that I didn’t know – I wouldn’t have thought that my occupation was that obvious, but then maybe he’d simply been reading over my shoulder. I gave a vague dismissive nod, not wanting to encourage him. The fact that I’d resumed my typing didn’t put him off.

‘A most interesting case, don’t you think? He doesn’t look the type, but then they don’t, always.’

Oh, please
, I thought,
not now
, but it was too late – I could sense him settling in and getting comfortable, preparing for a chat.

At any other time that wouldn’t have annoyed me. I found the trial interesting myself, and didn’t mind discussing it. After all, it wasn’t very often we Canadians had something so sensational to follow involving one of our own – in this case a Winnipeg dentist who was, the Crown argued, a serial murderer, having spent fifteen years here in England methodically killing off strangers and assuming their identities, like a hermit crab fitting itself into one abandoned shell after another, discarding them once they’d outlived their usefulness. The case was a hard one to prove, and we journalists were often found debating in the pub around the corner at the end of each day’s testimony.

But this morning I didn’t have time to debate. This morning the jury, having been out two full days, was widely expected to come back with its verdict, and I, like my colleagues, was sticking as close as I could to the Old Bailey, waiting for word.

It was a good morning for waiting outdoors. Late September in London had always been one of my favourite times of the year, when the sun that so often stayed hidden in summer could suddenly break through for days at a stretch, bringing just enough warmth to soften the edge of the chill morning air.

I liked London. Liked working in London. My very first foreign assignment, in fact, had been here, and I’d fallen in love with the city – the tangible history, the bustle, the pulse of the river, the endless arterial flow of its traffic through streets that smelt sharply of diesel exhaust. I hadn’t been here in eight months, and I’d missed it. This current assignment, on that count, had come as a welcome surprise.

Ordinarily I wasn’t sent to cover trials – I was only a business reporter – but I’d been covering the latest Bombardier deal in Paris, conveniently close, from my editor’s viewpoint. She’d known that I wouldn’t say no, even though it would mean another week living out of my suitcase. And I hadn’t said no. I knew full well whatever success I enjoyed at my newspaper came from not letting my editor down.

Which was why I was sitting here now, on the broad steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, my third morning coffee grown cold on the hard stone beside me, bent over my laptop at work on two alternate articles, one for each verdict the jury might reach, so that when they did finally return I could fire the appropriate article off without delay. I was nearly finished now. A few more lines to go; a few more phrases to be tightened…

The old man beside me went on in his mild voice, ‘I should imagine it’s a fascinating job you have, observing other people’s lives. Telling their stories.’ He paused, but I didn’t get the sense that he was waiting for me to contribute anything. He was still looking out at the street, not at me. ‘I have a story I could tell you, if you’re interested. Not anything like this’ – he nodded at my laptop, in a reference to the trial – ‘but there’s a murder in it, just the same.’

‘Oh, yes?’ I said vaguely, my mind working to come up with a more common word for ‘hubris’.

‘An old murder, but one still deserving of justice.’

I didn’t say anything that time, just made a faint sound.

‘But you’re busy,’ he told me, and started to stand in that cautiously creaking way old men do. ‘I’m staying in town the night – ring my hotel if you like, we’ll have dinner. My card,’ he said, handing it down. His hand stayed outstretched, so I shook it politely, dismissively. Two steps below me he stopped and turned. ‘Oh, and do say hello to your grandmother for me. I hope that she’s well?’

I looked up at that. Frowning faintly I said, in a slow voice, ‘She’s very well, thank you.’

‘I thought that she might be.’ He smiled. Turned away. Then he paused for an instant and briefly turned back. ‘You have her eyes, you know.’ He’d very clearly meant that as a compliment, but even as that registered he’d started moving off again.

Bewildered, I lowered my gaze to the card he had given me.
Andrew Deacon
, it read, and below that an address in Hampshire that he’d neatly crossed out with a stroke of his pen to write, in its place,
The Fielding Hotel, Covent Garden
, with a phone number. Now how on earth, I wondered, did this man know my grandmother? More to the point, how had he known who I was?

I looked up and called: ‘Mr Deacon!’

In spite of his slowness to stand he had moved with surprising speed for someone his age, and had already reached the street, too far away to hear me. He was looking down… he didn’t see the car.

It all happened so very quickly. For all the times I would replay that scene in the strange days that came afterwards, the details would never grow clearer or easier to distinguish. There was the car, of course, but I only saw that for an instant – it came on fast and by the time I’d fully realised what had happened it had gone again, without so much as slowing down, just blending with the normal rush of traffic.

Nobody else seemed to take any notice.

The old man might have been a ghost, I thought, invisible to everyone but me…and I was frozen to my step in shock, unable to be any help. The clock kept ticking on across my laptop’s screen but time seemed not to move at all, until at last the first car stopped, and then another, and the kerb and sidewalk swelled with people, bending, peering, murmuring.

I saw a woman kneel to check the old man’s pulse. I held my breath.

And then she slowly stood, and faced the others, and I saw her shake her head.

‘Look, Kate, I know you’ve been upset by this, but keep it in perspective. After all,’ said Margot, setting a glass of white wine on the table in front of me before sliding into the booth with her own drink in hand, ‘it’s not as if you knew the man.’

She spoke in a tone I’d become very used to in the three years we’d known each other. Margot liked nothing better than giving advice. It was usually good advice – Margot had been in the business much longer than me. She was tougher, more worldly and, although at forty-four she was nearly twenty years my senior, she remained much more likely to grab male attention whenever we went out together. She was doing it now, on a Wednesday, in mid-afternoon, in this pub where we’d taken to meeting for drinks and a post-trial talk.

She wasn’t working this trial. Margot worked for her newspaper’s foreign desk, and a London trial wasn’t foreign news to her. But she was idling here right now between assignments, and she liked to act, with me, as something of a mentor.

She was watching me.

I moved my glass in aimless little squares across the tabletop. ‘But he knew me. He knew exactly who I was. He even knew my grandmother.’

‘Did he?’ This altered things. Her eyes grew faintly interested. ‘How curious. What else, exactly, did he say to you, this…?’

‘Deacon. Andrew Deacon.’ It seemed suddenly important to remember that, the dead man’s name. I’d remembered little else. I’d been trying all day to recall what he’d looked like, without success. I had his voice – some version of it – in my memory, but I couldn’t form the face. Each time I thought I caught a glimmer of a feature it would melt like sand beneath a running wave. I frowned, and turned my mind back. ‘Well, he said he had a story he could tell me…’

‘Oh, yes?’ Margot’s tone had dried. She, too, like me, had run the gauntlet of those people who, on learning we wrote for a living, backed us into a corner at parties and held us there, trapped, while they went on about their great ‘scoop’, their great story – ‘I’ll tell you, you write it, and we’ll split the profits…’

I shook my head. ‘It wasn’t like that, really. He was very sweet.’

‘And what was his story?’

‘Something about a murder.’ How had he phrased it? I tried to remember. ‘“An old murder, but one still deserving of justice.”’

‘And where did your grandmother come in?’

‘As he was leaving. He asked how she was doing.’

‘Ah. He called her by name, did he?’

‘No…’ He hadn’t, had he? ‘No, but then I only have the one,’ I said. ‘There’s only Grandma Murray. And besides, he told me that I had her eyes. I do.’

‘So one assumes he knew her fairly well?’

I couldn’t give an answer then…not then…just as I couldn’t tell her how the man had come to know who I was; how he’d known where he could find me.

‘Maybe,’ Margot theorised, ‘if this chap and your grandmother were friends, she might have told him you were here.’

‘My Grandma Murray? Not a chance. She doesn’t give out information like that, not to anyone. The Spanish Inquisition would have trouble finding out where I was staying.’

Margot smiled. She’d never actually met my grandmother, but she’d heard all my stories. ‘Still, I rather think that once you’ve had a chance to speak with her, you’ll find that’s what she’s done. It’s the only logical explanation.’ She took a drink. ‘How is she doing now, your grandmother? How’s she adjusting to having you home again?’

‘Fine, I guess. I thought she might have second thoughts, but actually we’re getting on OK. And it was crazy paying all that rent for that great big apartment when I wasn’t ever there.’

I knew that Margot thought that it was crazier to give up my own place, to live with family. It was something she’d have never done. But then, in her case, I could understand. I’d met
her
family. They were nuts.

She said, ‘So, you’re heading back when? At the weekend?’

I shook my head. ‘Not until Tuesday. My editor wants me to do a few follow-up interviews. Talk to the victims’ families, the lawyers, you know. And anyway, I’m booked for Friday night. I’m going down to Kent.’

‘And what’s in Kent?’

‘Patrick’s parents are throwing a party.’

The sisterly advising look was back. ‘Now, Kate, I thought that wasn’t serious. I’ve told you my opinion of your Mr Damien-Pryce.’

‘It isn’t and you have,’ I said. ‘Repeatedly.’

‘Then why…?’

‘The party,’ I informed her, ‘is for Patrick’s Aunt Venetia.’

‘Ah.’ She nodded understanding then, and even smiled approval. ‘Sorry. My misunderstanding. I thought you’d gone off the rails, for a moment. But I’ll permit you to see Patrick if you’re using him to meet Venetia Radburn.’

That had, actually, been my main objective since I’d first run into Patrick Damien-Pryce last week at the Old Bailey, or, more properly, since he’d run into
me
, so deliberately by chance that I’d suspected from the outset chance had not had much to do with it.

To be honest, I’d grown weary of his obvious pursuit. Some women would have found it flattering, I knew. The man was gorgeous. And intelligent. And witty. And urbane, in a way that few men were these days – at least, men under fifty. His clothes always fit to perfection; he knew the right places to go, and the people who worked there knew
him
, and I was beginning to think he could walk through a windstorm without it disturbing his hair.

‘Rising young star in the criminal courts,’ was how Margot had summarised him, when I’d asked. ‘Took silk at an early age; has the right pedigree. Very ambitious. His being a lawyer is only a prelude to politics, I should think.’

Politics would suit him. He was slick – that was the only word that fit him – and I’d never trusted men like that.

I would have tried much harder to discourage him, if Margot hadn’t also said that Patrick was related to Venetia Radburn, grand old dame of British politics, who even in retirement was regularly entertained by heads of state when travelling.

I’d have given a lot to be introduced to the woman, so the prospect of spending the whole of Friday evening eating dinner with her in return for letting myself be chased round the table a few times by her good-looking great-nephew seemed – to me, at least – to be a bargain.

‘Just mind you keep your wits about you,’ Margot told me now, her voice not managing to hide her amusement. ‘People like the Damien-Pryces are bound to have a pile in the country’ – which was British-speak, I knew, for ‘giant house’ – ‘and I’ve seen first-hand how property affects you. You go all wobbly,’ she accused me, ‘in great houses.’

‘I do not.’

‘You do. I was with you at Blenheim, remember? Last year.’

‘That’s different. Blenheim is a palace.’

‘I’m only saying. Certain settings,’ she informed me, ‘seem to make you lose your proper sense of judgement.’

A male voice above my shoulder asked, ‘Which settings would those be, then?’ and Patrick himself, pint in hand, slid confidently into the booth beside me, his long body as always looking too cramped in the small space.

‘Sorry, that’s classified,’ I said, immune to the strength of his smile.

Margot, less welcoming, told him he looked out of sorts.

‘Yes, well, I was late to court this morning. The police had traffic stopped in Cannon Street, for some inestimable reason…’

I said, ‘There was an accident. A hit-and-run. A man was killed.’