Every Secret Thing (23 page)

Because they shared a codebook, he’d be able to send messages to her, as well, and she to him, in secret, if the need arose.

She shifted focus from the novel to the photograph. It sat inside a handsome leather folding frame he’d angled round to see while he was working; not for other people’s eyes.

He saw Regina looking, and he said, ‘My wife, Amelia.’

‘Oh.’ It was a coloured photograph. She looked at the softly red hair of the woman; the laughing green eyes and the plain ivory folds of the wedding dress. ‘She’s very beautiful.’

‘Yes,’ he said, glancing away. ‘Yes, she is.’

‘You must miss her.’

‘I should miss her more if something were to happen to her. She’s safer to stay in New York, while this war’s on.’ He swivelled his chair and reached out for his coffee cup. ‘Thank you for this. Please, sit down.’

It took her less than half an hour to tell him what she knew about the people working there. He took no notes, but paid careful attention, and when she was done he seemed satisfied.

Thanking her, he smiled. ‘You’re a very keen observer, Miss Sousa.’

‘Regina.’

‘Regina, then. You seem to have this business well in hand. I can’t think why I’ve been brought over.’

‘Because I can’t go where Reynolds goes. The dinners, and the gatherings. You can. You’re on his level.’

‘Yes, well, that rather depends on how well he and I get on, doesn’t it? We shall see.’

She could have told him that he needn’t worry. She’d worked for Ivan Reynolds long enough to know that Andrew Deacon was exactly the sort of a man he would like. And indeed, she could tell from the moment that Reynolds stepped into the office, at lunchtime, that she had been right.

It always interested her to see the reaction of people meeting Reynolds for the first time. He was not what most expected – neither tall nor swaggering, looking a little untidy as though he had dressed in a hurry, his grizzled dark hair never totally tamed by the comb. Yet whereas Deacon’s office would have looked too large for many men, it looked too small for Reynolds. He commanded every room that he walked into, and he did it with an energy she’d never seen in any other man.

Deacon didn’t really react one way or another; he simply stood and offered his hand in introduction, and Reynolds’s features relaxed into something approaching a smile.

‘Glad to have you,’ he told Deacon. ‘You came highly recommended. Has Regina here been showing you the ropes?’

‘She has, yes.’

‘Well, that’s good. That’s very good.’ The handshake over, Reynolds coughed and looked around, his shrewd eyes taking in the wedding portrait on the desk before they moved on. ‘What do you think of your view?’

Deacon, his back to the window, said, ‘I like it very much.’ He nodded at one of the paintings that hung on the nearest wall. ‘The Kandinsky is especially fine.’

The painter’s name meant nothing to Regina, who knew little about art, but Reynolds seemed to be well pleased. He said to Deacon, ‘I can see we’re going to have a lot to talk about, at lunch. You’d better get your hat.’

They stayed out a considerable time. They weren’t back when Regina returned from her own lunch, to find Roger Selkirk making himself comfortable at her desk, tipped back in the chair with his arms folded, talking to Jenny.

‘Hullo,’ he said, as she came in. ‘I like that scarf. It suits you.’

She shrugged her coat off, hung it on its peg, and smiled. ‘All right, what are you after?’

‘My dear girl, why would you think I’m after anything?’

‘You aren’t here to compliment my fashion sense.’

Jenny, looking happier again, said, ‘He’s been dying to ask you about Mr Deacon.’

‘Hardly dying,’ Roger said. ‘I’m merely curious.’

Shooing him out of her chair with a good-natured wave of her hand, Regina sat. ‘I’m surprised you weren’t down here this morning.’

‘Yes, well.’ He shifted position to lean on the edge of her desk, instead. ‘One doesn’t want to appear
too
intrusive. Besides, I was wanted upstairs. Quite a scandal, we had. I was just telling Jenny. But come, first things first – what’s this Deacon chap like?’

‘Very nice. Very pleasant. A gentleman.’

‘Ah, then he’ll be odd man out here,’ Roger said. He grinned. ‘What else?’

‘I don’t know anything else. He’s only just arrived. I haven’t had much time to analyse his character.’

‘No need to be sarcastic.’

Jenny, from her desk across the office, said, ‘Well, I’ll trade you your new man for Spivey, Regina.’

‘No, thank you. I’ve had him.’

‘How on earth could you stand it?’ the girl asked.

‘I couldn’t.’ Calmly sorting through the morning’s mail, she said to Roger, quite as if she didn’t care, ‘What sort of a scandal did you have upstairs, then?’

‘Ah.’ Roger didn’t often gossip. For him to be doing it now meant the news must be something uncommonly interesting. ‘Well,’ he said, settling in, looking round to make sure that they couldn’t be heard, ‘the old man nearly gave poor Garcia the sack. It seems there’s something of a shortage in the petty cash. The old man was reviewing the books at the weekend and found things were short by a few hundred pounds. That’s why he had Garcia up this morning, called him on the carpet. And Garcia said he knew about the shortage; that he’d noticed it some months ago and watched it growing larger, but that he couldn’t account for it being there. Which of course was an unlikely story, but the more the old man raged and shouted, the more Garcia held his ground, and they had it out in Spanish, and at last the old man told him, fine, they’d start again from scratch, but if the money should fall short again, then,’ he slashed his throat from ear to ear with one neat finger. ‘Anyhow, Garcia demanded a new petty-cash box, with new keys, so I’d imagine that will end his troubles.’

Jenny asked him, ‘You don’t think he did it?’

‘My darling girl, if an accountant wants to rob his company, he’d be far more creative about it, and he’d likely steal more than a few hundred quid.’

Regina agreed. ‘Who, then?’

She already had her suspicions, but she wanted to see whether Roger might share them. He did. With a quirk of one eyebrow, he asked them, as teacher to pupils, ‘Well, who kept the petty cash before Garcia?’

Jenny said, ‘Mr Emmerson, wasn’t it? I know he left not long after I started, but—’

‘And who did Mr Emmerson – and his keys, presumably – go home with every Friday night, for dinner?’

‘Who?’ Jenny asked.

Roger looked at Regina. She said, ‘Have you said anything to Mr Reynolds?’

‘Heavens, no. No, I dislike Spivey as much as the next person, but I know better than to cross him, or accuse him without evidence. He’s slippery – he can slide around the issue and come out unscathed, and next you know,
your
head is on the chopping block, instead of his. Just look what became of our poor young American friend.’

Jenny lowered her head, and Roger, as though suddenly realising what he’d said, turned and started to say something to her, but just then the outer door opened and closed with a wind-driven bang, and the inner door opened and they were no longer alone.

Roger cheerfully greeted the man who came in. ‘Ah, Vivian. Just the man I was looking for.’

Vivian Spivey hunched out of his overcoat, shaking the remnants of rain from its folds as he hung it on the rack beside the door. ‘Oh? Why is that?’ He took his hat off with one long, thin, hand – an undertaker’s hand, Regina thought – and turned his long, thin face to Roger for an answer. His eyes were cold and empty of emotion.

Roger straightened from Regina’s desk. ‘Mr Reynolds had some questions about the number of barrels coming over on the next shipment. Do you have a moment to go over the manifests?’

‘Yes, all right, then. Come on through,’ Spivey told him, impatient.

The office seemed more airless without Roger to enliven it. Regina glanced over at Jenny, who was silently cranking a fresh sheet of paper into her typewriter, and she wondered if she ought to say something herself, as Roger had intended to, to comfort the younger girl, but in the end she thought it best to let the matter lie.

It was none of her business. Not that Roger wasn’t right – Spivey probably had been at the bottom of the young American’s fall from grace. It hadn’t been a secret that the two men had disliked each other, and she’d witnessed more than one occasion on which Spivey had manoeuvred to have somebody he didn’t like removed from their position.

She was glad he hadn’t managed to remove Manuel Garcia. But she knew the Spaniard wasn’t in the clear, just yet. He’d have to watch his back. And so, she thought, would Andrew Deacon.

There was a sense, that New Year, of a turning of the tide; a sense the war might soon be over, and the world restored to… well, if not to normal, then to something rather better than it was at present. The optimism caught, and spread. The first few weeks of January, nearly all the talk around the office was about the much-anticipated Allied landings – when they’d likely come, and where.

‘Perhaps Spain,’ Spivey said, and his glance at Garcia was pure condescension. ‘They wouldn’t meet with much resistance there, I’m sure.’

Garcia, without looking up, reminded everybody in the room that Spain was neutral. ‘We do not fight this war.’

‘No, but you’re in it, just the same. There’s no such thing as being neutral,’ Spivey said. ‘Everyone, in time, comes down on one side or the other.’

Garcia raised his head. ‘We have had our own years of war, in Spain. I fought then. I fought my countrymen, my brothers, and I learnt it is not always so easy to distinguish these “sides”, as you call them, from one another, or to know which one is right.’

Deacon, watching silently as always, made no comment, but Regina thought that in his eyes she saw a new respect and liking for Garcia. After that, she noticed Deacon always stopped to say good morning to Garcia, and to exchange a few words, from politeness. That was how the two men each discovered that they shared a love of gardening. Regina overheard them once discussing some elusive wildflower by its Latin name.

‘But yes, I know where this is growing,’ Garcia was saying. ‘Not far to the north, I will show you. I go there on Sundays, to paint.’

Deacon’s eyebrows rose in interest. ‘You’re a painter?’

‘Not a good one. It is only, how do you say it, my hobby. My wife would say I use it to escape the house, and her.’ He smiled.

Regina hadn’t seen Garcia smile much. It made him look a very different person; not so driven.

Deacon’s smile was not so great a transformation, but she liked it, all the same. She found that she looked forward to it every morning, just as she looked forward to his quiet, undemanding presence, calming at the centre of her day.

Reynolds, also, appeared quite approving of Deacon. Three times now he’d had him to parties, and once to an Embassy lunch, introducing him round. And on one remarkable occasion he’d asked Deacon if he’d mind escorting Jenny to the theatre.
That
had caused some tongues to wag around the office. Reynolds had never asked anyone other than Roger Selkirk to stand in for him with Jenny, and the fact that he’d asked Deacon showed a great degree of trust.

It was clear that the significance of this had not escaped their higher-ups. The messages for Deacon came more thickly now, and then one Friday afternoon word came that he should clear his next day’s calendar, as JL Cayton-Wood would send a car for him at breakfast. Regina knew this because, when he got the message, Deacon called her to his office.

He looked thoughtful. ‘Are you busy at the moment?’ That was what he always said when she came in, no matter how pressing his own concerns might be, as though he didn’t want to cause her inconvenience.

She assured him no, she wasn’t.

‘Good. Please, do sit down. I wondered, could you tell me what you know about Jack Cayton-Wood?’

She sat, and frowned a little. ‘Well, I haven’t met him often. I know my father does do business with him, now and then. Nearly everyone dealing with exports and imports in Lisbon must do business, at some time, with Mr Cayton-Wood. He virtually controls the harbour here – there is not much that can happen at the docks without his knowing and approving.’

‘And how long has he been doing this?’

‘A year, perhaps a little more. The man who held that job before him died, you see, quite suddenly, and Cayton-Wood had friends in the right places, so I understand. He is quite young, some think, to have such power, but before this he already was a military officer. He fought under Montgomery in North Africa. El Alamein.’

‘Is that how he injured his leg?’

‘Yes. It will never heal, I’m told. So he was discharged, and came here, to Lisbon.’

Deacon took this in, and then he asked her, ‘Do you like him?’

‘He is very well respected.’

‘That’s not what I asked.’

She said, honestly, ‘No, I don’t like him. I don’t know why I don’t, but there it is.’ She wouldn’t have spoken so plainly to anyone else, but with Deacon it seemed that he truly did want her opinion. In this instance, she couldn’t help thinking he shared it.

She never did know where he went with Cayton-Wood, that Saturday, or what the men discussed. Her Alvaro, who was with them, said only that they’d spent the afternoon just north of Lisbon, in the spa town of Caldas da Rainha, where the hot sulphur springs had for centuries soothed, even healed, those in need. Cayton-Wood, Alvaro told her, took the waters for his leg. But Alvaro said little else, and Deacon, when she saw him in his office Monday morning, said less still.

He looked as though his thoughts were troubled. He’d turned his chair so that his gaze fell full upon his wedding photograph, and he was sitting there in silence, staring, so absorbed he didn’t seem to hear Regina coming in. She set his coffee quietly beside him, on the desk.

She asked, ‘Is everything all right?’

He didn’t answer right away, but as she watched, his eyes turned with an effort from the portrait and he smiled shortly. ‘Thank you for the coffee.’

He was thinking of his wife, she knew. But there was in his eyes a certain sadness that she didn’t understand.