Every Secret Thing (20 page)

There was nobody here, at this end of the church, and any doors that I could find were firmly locked. One of those doors, in a little side porch, looked as though it hadn’t been opened in a hundred years. It was a massive thing, of solid wood with elaborately wrought-iron hinges, and cold iron rings for handles – the sort of a door you expected to find in a medieval castle. I tried it, all the same, and knocked, and the sound echoed round in the small, cloistered space. There were windows here, but even they had a medieval feel – high and arching between carved stone columns, with small diamond panes of opaque, sea-green glass that let light come through softly. The columns were carved at the bottom to look like the waves of the sea, and their tops were wound round with stone thistles and roses and leaves. The walls had been plastered calm aquamarine, and combined with the pale greenish light from the tall leaded windows the total effect was of quiet, and stillness.

I could hear the rain pattering down on the leaves and the stone of the walkway outside, just behind me, but here in the porch I felt totally cut off, secluded.

It was a jolt when, unexpectedly, the door before me opened with a creak of ancient hinges and a man stepped out…an older man, in working clothes. He looked me up and down and, with the sharpness of the woman in the Rua de São Domingos, pegged me as a tourist. ‘Yes?’

I cleared my throat. ‘Joaquim?’

‘Yes, I am Joaquim.’

‘I was sent here by somebody at the Embassy,’ I said. ‘The British Embassy. I understand you worked there in the war.’

He looked at me more closely. ‘Yes.’

‘I’m looking for a man who worked there, too. You might remember him.’

When I mentioned the name, Joaquim stepped fully through the door and swung it closed behind him with a clang. He was a tall man, though his shoulders had begun to stoop with age, and in his weathered face I thought I read a keen intelligence. ‘Marinho,’ he repeated, faintly frowning. ‘I don’t know…’

‘He married a woman by the name of Regina Sousa. She worked for Ivan Reynolds.’

At first I’d thought he might be having trouble with my speaking English, but his pause had been merely for thought. His use of the language, in actual fact, was quite effortless, as might be expected of someone who’d worked at the Embassy. ‘Yes, I remember him now, this Marinho of yours. I remember his wife. She was very pretty, very nice. The rest of us were envious.’

My pulse gave an expectant leap. ‘Do you know what became of them? Do they still live in Lisbon?’

‘No. No, they left here not long after they were married. Moved away.’

‘You wouldn’t know to where?’

Again I felt the sharp look; the assessment. ‘She was, perhaps, a relative of yours, the wife?’

I suppose I could have told him yes; invented some relationship, but I wasn’t altogether sure a lie would make it past those eyes. I settled on a partial truth. ‘I’m looking her up on behalf of a friend of hers – someone she worked with. My grandfather, actually.’ That wasn’t bad. Deacon had been, however unofficially, my Grandma Murray’s ‘husband’.

It seemed to satisfy Joaquim. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Ah. Because there is a person who might know, who might have kept in touch with them. I could ask him.’

‘Oh, would you?’ I hadn’t meant it to come out on such a note of neediness, but it did, and he reacted with a purposeful glance at his watch.

‘He won’t be at home until later this evening,’ he said, ‘but if you leave me your name and a number where you can be reached…’

I was already scrambling for pen and paper. Tearing a page from the small notebook I’d brought, I pressed it smooth against the window ledge and wrote. ‘I’m here for a week, at the York House Hotel.’ As I passed him the details, I said, ‘If you can find out anything at all, I really would appreciate it.’

He took the page and folded it in careful quarters. ‘Your grandfather, he worked for Ivan Reynolds, did you say? It is only that the company was small, and I knew many of the people there.’

I gave myself a mental kick, embarrassed by the oversight. Here I was, supposedly a journalist, and I’d completely failed to realise that Joaquim, who had moved and worked among the British during the Second World War, might be a source of more than just the secretary’s address.

‘I would be curious,’ he said, ‘to know the name.’

And so I told him. ‘Andrew Deacon.’

‘Deacon.’ Once again, he tried the name himself, and shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t remember him.’ He gave a small shrug and half turned to look out at the weather; the rain coursing down from the leaves of a green and brown palm tree that grew just outside the arched door of the porch.

But I had seen the fleeting light of recognition, and was not convinced. Watching his face carefully, I said, ‘He was in charge of Mr Reynolds’s art collection, for a time. Mrs Marinho was his secretary.’

‘Ah.’ He nodded. Looked at me again. ‘I don’t remember him.’

‘Oh, well, he was only here for a short time, a few months really, towards the end of the war. He doesn’t talk about it much,’ I ventured. ‘I gather there was some unpleasantness. A death.’

‘There were so many deaths, in those days,’ was his rather vague reply. But I hadn’t been mistaken about the intelligence – I sensed it again in the small silent moment before he closed our conversation with, ‘I will be sure to let you know if I learn anything of interest from my friend.’

I knew dismissal when I heard it. ‘I’d appreciate that, really. Thank you.’

Nodding an acknowledgement, he pulled the big door open to the church. It creaked protestingly. ‘Safe journey, menina,’ he said. Then he stepped inside, the door slammed shut, and that was that.

I was thinking, with my head down, as I stepped out round the corner of the porch into the rain, and straight into the path of a man coming round in the other direction. We collided, and the impact knocked my glasses to the unforgiving asphalt.

‘Hey, I’m sorry,’ he said, bending to retrieve them. ‘Are you OK?’

My first thought, when he straightened, was that he must be from Boston, by his accent. And my second was that, Patrick notwithstanding, he was one of the best-looking men I’d seen. He was fairly young – my side of thirty-five, probably – average height, average build, but with the kind of a face that was hard to forget. Not a pretty-boy face, but a harder one, masculine, strong, like the hand he held out to me now.

He was holding my glasses. Both lenses were cracked.

‘Sorry,’ he said again. ‘Look, let me pay for these.’ Then, because I’d taken so long to answer, he asked, in a slower voice, ‘Do you speak English?’

I actually blushed. ‘Yes. I…sorry, it’s just been a very long day.’ Taking the ruined glasses from his hand I said, ‘It’s all right, you don’t need to pay for anything. It was an accident, and anyway, I’ve got a spare pair back at my hotel.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Very sure.’

‘Then at least let me buy you a coffee.’ His voice was persuasive, and in different circumstances I might well have given in to it. But not now. This was not why I had come to Lisbon.

‘Thanks, but no.’

‘I’m harmless.’ And he smiled. It was a great smile, but I held to my resolve.

I flattered myself that I felt his eyes watching me as I walked all the way back down the rain-slicked path, between the dripping trees. But both times that I glanced behind he wasn’t watching me at all. The first time he was standing where I’d left him, on the path, head bent to read a leaning tombstone in the softly falling rain. And the second time he wasn’t there, he’d gone.

My footsteps, so intrusive in the little English Cemetery’s garden-like tranquillity, were swallowed the minute I stepped through the heavy green door in the wall, by the purposeful swish of the traffic along the wet street.

The light had flattened, here, and evening had begun to settle in. I couldn’t do much more today, I thought, in terms of searching, and for all the running round I’d done I wasn’t any closer to my goal.

I’d had such high hopes for the Embassy, but I salved my disappointment with the hope that Anabela would have more to tell me when we met tonight.

With that in mind, I started looking for a cab to take me back to my hotel. It wasn’t easy, with the rain. Most taxis passing me were full already, moving by so quickly that I doubted if their drivers would have noticed me at all. I’d walked some distance on my own before I saw an empty cab approaching.

As I stepped out to wave down the driver, a
gunmetal-grey
hatchback slid to a stop at the kerb just in front of me, blocking my view, but the taxi had, luckily, seen me. The driver stopped, casting a clear arc of rainwater onto the roadway as, ducking round the rear of the hatchback, I pulled my collar up and made a run for it.

The restaurant, like the rest of my hotel, was classy – quiet and exclusive, sectioned into separate rooms. I’d come down fifteen minutes early, so I’d have a chance to choose a table that would give some privacy for me to talk with Anabela. Nobody was sitting in the first small section I walked into, but the tables there were open to each other, and unshielded, so I turned my eye instead towards the section on my left, built long and narrow like a cloister, with a low, wood-beamed ceiling, the beautiful blue-and-white Portuguese tiles forming baseboard and wainscoting, expertly set in the rough-plastered white walls above floors of polished white marble.

This, I thought, would be the better place to talk. Each little window alcove in the long row sheltered a small table so discreetly that I’d walked past two and noticed nothing till the woman spoke. ‘You’re Katherine.’ She said it with certainty; smiled when I turned. ‘Guy is good with descriptions.’

He’d described her to me, too, of course, though he needn’t have bothered. He had a predictable taste in his women – I’d known she’d be striking, with dark hair, worn long and unbound past her shoulders. The cigarette was a bit of a surprise, because he didn’t ordinarily go for smokers, but maybe Anabela had had other charms to compensate.

We shook hands, and I sat.

The window alcove had been meant for two. She had a wall at her back, I had one at mine. Our knees were almost meeting underneath the table. In between us was a long white window tilted partly open to the courtyard, letting in a cool, pervasive breeze that stirred the curtains, patterned blue and white to match the tiles. The tablecloth was pure white linen, very fine, and set with ivory plates and sparkling wine and water glasses, silver cutlery, and one small glass of dainty yellow flowers, just like daisies, with black centres. Black hearts, I thought, set at the centre of innocence.

She said, ‘You got my message, did you, earlier?’

‘I did, yes, thanks.’

‘I thought you might have come in on a morning flight. Guy wouldn’t tell me when you were arriving.’

‘Probably,’ I said, ‘he was just being cautious.’

She tapped ash from her cigarette and exhaled rather thoughtfully, her eyebrows raised a fraction. ‘So then it’s true…there’s something in this business that requires caution?’ Sitting back, she said, ‘I wasn’t sure. Guy can be so James Bond sometimes, you know?’

I did know, but I didn’t really blame him, in this instance. Since the shooting in Toronto, I too had developed all the instincts of a secret service agent – always wary, always watching, lest the shadow of an enemy should cross my path. It wasn’t anything I could control. I had been changed. My senses were so heightened by the constant threat of danger that, just sitting here, I felt aware of everything – the sound of other voices conversing at tables in the next secluded section of the restaurant; the clink of glasses and cutlery; the quick steps of the waitress on the marble floor, approaching us; the furtive rush of the breeze over the window ledge, lifting the curtains at my shoulder; the slam of a door at the back.

There was music playing quietly from somewhere – soft guitars behind a plaintive female voice singing songs that were almost like Renaissance airs, a fitting background for a menu that offered such uncommon delicacies as ‘stewed wild pigeon with ham’. I’d never had pigeon before, so I ordered it; then, settling back, said: ‘I really appreciate all of the time you’ve put into this.’

Anabela shrugged. ‘It was nothing. I’m happy to do it.’ And not only for Guy’s sake, I decided. She impressed me as a woman who would go to any lengths to help a colleague.

It was good to feel a part of my old world again, however briefly. The ground was familiar and firm – we were journalists, having a meal, talking shop, sharing research.

Anabela told me, ‘I have copies of the records that you wanted, of the deaths. November 1943 to April 1944.’ She balanced her cigarette end on the ashtray and bent to her briefcase, retrieving a thick manila envelope that thumped between us on the little table. ‘There are many. And you wanted to know news of Ivan Reynolds also, yes? I had success there, too. The newspapers, I don’t think that they very much approved of Ivan Reynolds. Which is quite good for us, because, you know, they wrote about him constantly.’

I had the envelope open, now, and was leafing through the pages as she pointed to them. ‘There, I found you many articles about the man, his company, the projects they were working on that year. Most I found in Portuguese, and so I made you my translations.’

‘Why didn’t they approve of him?’

She paused to give the question some consideration. ‘I couldn’t tell you that. Perhaps his wealth, his attitudes – he was a most neurotic man – but no one ever comes right out and says that this is why they don’t like Ivan Reynolds. No, it’s more subtle. It’s a thing you sense, when reading all these articles – how often these reporters choose to write about him; what they write; their tone. I don’t know why he wasn’t liked,’ she said. ‘You maybe would have had to know the man himself, to answer that.’

I’d come across a photograph, and studied it a moment. I’d seen dozens of such photographs, of course, in my own reading, but I hadn’t yet seen one like this, that showed him as he would have looked when Deacon first arrived in Lisbon. Reynolds would have been in his late fifties, then – a powerfully built man with a broad and slightly heavy face, and deeply set, distrustful eyes.