Every Secret Thing (25 page)

Alvaro had simply shrugged and said, ‘You cannot fight a man like JL Cayton-Wood, Regina. You must do as he decides. And anyway,’ – he’d held her face in both his hands and smiled – ‘we can be married now.’

Deacon himself had been decent about it. He’d given her a little silver brooch for a going-away gift, and he’d done his best to reassure her he’d be fine.

‘You’ll have to be careful,’ she’d said, ‘around Spivey.’

‘I will be.’

And when she had looked at him, still unconvinced, he had told her, ‘It’s all right. To every thing there is a season, don’t forget. Your war is over now, Regina. You have earned your time of peace. Go and be happy.’

She’d nodded, and her gaze had for the last time fallen on the coloured photograph of Deacon and his wife. She’d asked, ‘You will come to the wedding?’

‘Yes, of course.’

And he had come. He’d stood at the back of the church, half in shadow, through the ceremony, and when she and Alvaro had turned to face their guests she’d seen him smiling. But later, when she’d looked for him outside, he wasn’t there. He’d slipped away, unnoticed in the crowd.

‘That was in March.’ She looked at me and smiled, a shade regretfully. ‘I didn’t see him after that. I didn’t make it to the funeral, Mr Reynolds’s funeral, sadly. I was ill.’

I was thinking. ‘Ivan Reynolds’ death…you’re sure that it was natural? I mean, it wasn’t—’

‘Murder? No, my dear, that one I’m sure of. He had cancer of the pancreas. It took him rather swiftly, so he hadn’t long to suffer, poor man. No, he wasn’t murdered. I’ve been trying,’ she confessed, ‘to think whom Mr Deacon might have meant. It
was
wartime, of course, and Lisbon was a place of danger. There were many deaths.’ Her forehead creased a little, trying to recall. ‘Roger would know more than I would about things like that.’

She had said that in the tones of someone speaking of a mutual acquaintance, as though she took it for granted I’d be speaking to this Roger. ‘Roger Selkirk?’ I asked, sorting through the names of all the people in her narrative.

‘That’s right. Did you ask him about murders when you met him?’

I was confused now. ‘I’ve never met him.’

‘Oh, but, I assumed… I’m sorry, dear, but it was Roger who first rang to let me know that you were here, and that you’d like to come to see me, and could he please give you my address and number, so I naturally assumed you’d been to talk to him.’

He must have been the source, I thought, to whom Joaquim, my English Cemetery man, had gone – the person whom Joaquim had thought might still know where to find Regina. Had I known, I might have met with him before I’d come to Evora. Frustration at the missed opportunity coloured my voice as I said, ‘No, I got your address from someone else. I never met Roger Selkirk. Does he still live in Lisbon?’

‘Oh, yes, and of course you must speak to him. Roger’s a character. And he’ll appreciate having a pretty young girl to tell stories to. Here, let me get his address for you.’ Standing, she crossed to a small roll-top writing desk in the far corner and opened a drawer to explore among the envelopes and papers.

Journalism, I thought, was all about asking the right questions, at the right time. I asked carefully, ‘Is there anyone else I should speak to?’

She tipped her head, thinking. ‘Well, Jenny, of course. Jenny Saunders that was, Jenny Augustine, now.’

‘Reynolds’s mistress?’

‘Oh, my dear,’ she said gently, as one who knows better, ‘she wasn’t his mistress. No, she was his daughter.’

That floored me. ‘His
daughter
?’

‘That’s right.’

‘But…the biographies, the articles…well, no one ever mentions he had children.’

‘No one knew, outside the company. Inside, there were a few of us, but Mr Reynolds was a careful man. He’d known the Lindberghs, you see, when their baby was kidnapped and killed, and it had quite a lasting effect on him. He was terribly paranoid; always concerned someone might try to do harm to Jenny, if they knew that she was his daughter. So he let her mother raise her, in America.’ She added,
‘She
was kept a secret, too, the mother. Almost no one knew about her. An actress, I think she was. Quite independent. But Jenny herself was a bit of a handful; she had a strong mind of her own, and when she finished school she was bound and determined to live with her father, so he brought her over to Lisbon.’

‘But didn’t she mind…I mean, the rumours about them…’

‘Oh, Jenny didn’t care what people thought, and Mr Reynolds didn’t, either. They were exactly like each other, in that way, although at times I think that she was more than even
he
could handle. Still, she was great fun.’ She closed one drawer; opened another. ‘I’m sure she’ll be able to help you. There wasn’t much that went on in those days that she wasn’t aware of. She was quite a bit sharper than most people realised, you know…she still is.’ Finding the envelope she wanted, she reached for a notepad and started to write. ‘I don’t know if she’s still at this address, mind. We used to have a card at Christmas, but it’s been a few years. She was living in Washington. Georgetown. A lovely old house. She’s alone now, and doesn’t see visitors often.’ She gave me the address, and added, with certainty, ‘But she’ll see you. She had rather a thing for your grandfather, Jenny did. Thought he was wonderful.’ Looking back down, she said, ‘All of us did.’

It was hard for me to reconcile her statement with the colourless old man I’d met in London, whose face I couldn’t even bring to mind. Ask the right question, I thought again, at the right moment: ‘You wouldn’t happen to have any photographs of him?’

‘Your grandfather? Yes, I should think so.’ Another desk drawer opened, protesting. ‘It would be here, if I had one. A bit of a jumble, I’m afraid. I never was much good at putting things in proper albums. My husband always said…ah, here we are. That’s your grandfather, third from the right.’

I took the photo from her hand with great anticipation. It had been taken out of doors, against a high hedge – several people standing smiling in a row, the men in dapper suits and hats that made them look not unlike gangsters, and the women neatly packed into the slender hourglass dresses of the Forties, some with gloves. They would be very old now, all of them, I thought. Quite old, or dead. And yet their faces, frozen laughing in the snapshot, were as youthful as my own.

I counted the heads from the right…one, two, three…

He was average height, neither the tallest man there, nor the shortest; his build neither heavy nor slight. And he’d turned, at the moment the camera had snapped, to the woman beside him, to listen or speak, so his features had blurred from the motion. I couldn’t make anything out but the fact he was clean-shaven. Maybe, I thought, if you already knew what he looked like, it would have been easy to tell who he was. But for me, with no image to work from, he might have been faceless. Invisible.

‘He was very nice-looking,’ said Regina Marinho. ‘Not flashy, but nice-looking.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. For, what else could I say?

‘I always distrusted the flashy ones. Cayton-Wood, he was a handsome man, terribly handsome, but not the same league as your grandfather. Not someone you could depend on. That’s him, on the left, with the moustache.’

A tall man, and notably good-looking, as she’d said, with his dark hair and Douglas Fairbanks grin. I wouldn’t trust him either, I decided.

‘He’s dead, too,’ she said. ‘Though that’s no loss. He went back to England before the war’s end, and he died there. He drowned, I believe, while out sailing.’

She was waiting for the photograph. I handed it back, not bothering to ask if I could keep it. I could tell from simply looking at her face she wasn’t one to part with memories. But she gave me, in its place, another tidy piece of notepaper with Roger Selkirk’s Lisbon address written on it. I copied both addresses – Roger’s and Jenny’s – with care in my notebook, and tucked the originals safely away.

‘You’ll enjoy Roger, I think,’ she said. ‘He’s a far better teller of stories than I am.’

Which was her polite and gentle way, I knew, of saying she was growing tired; that it was time to end our interview. Not that I could blame her – even without looking at my watch, I could tell from the change in the light outside the window that the afternoon was giving way to evening. I had taken up enough of her time.

Switching off my tape recorder, I pocketed the small machine and stood. ‘You did a wonderful job, really. Thank you so much.’

‘If it helped at all, my dear, then you’re quite welcome.’ Smiling, she shook my hand. Then, almost in the manner of an afterthought, she said, ‘You mentioned danger.’

‘Pardon?’

‘You said earlier my life might be in danger. Could you tell me how?’

It surprised me to discover I’d forgotten, clean forgotten, in the course of actually meeting Regina Marinho and hearing her talk, that I’d come here not only to learn what she knew, but to warn her. I said, ‘I’m so sorry. I should have told you right at the beginning, you should know.’

I didn’t tell her all of it. I didn’t mention Grandma Murray’s death, or what had happened in Toronto, because telling her all that would mean I’d have to blow my cover and reveal my true connection to the story. But I
did
tell her my theory that somebody else was on the same path I was, and I told her all about the grey car this morning, and the woman who had spoken to me in the street, and what I’d learnt from Anabela, last night over dinner.

‘I see.’ She took it all in, unperturbed. ‘And this Jankowski person, then, is…?’

‘I don’t know, exactly. But I know that he – or she – was also looking for your address. M Jankowski, was the name. It might be nothing…’ But I didn’t think, myself, that it was nothing. I remembered Anabela pointing out that M Jankowski was a Polish name. The woman here in Evora who’d faced me in the shuttered street had spoken with an Eastern European accent.

‘On the other hand,’ I said, ‘I’d feel much better if I knew that you’d be careful.’

‘My dear, you needn’t worry. I’ll take care. And I have others who’ll take care of me.’ She smiled, and raised her gaze again to mine, and then, ‘You have her eyes,’ she said, on a note of discovery. ‘Your grandmother’s eyes. Oh, that must have pleased Mr Deacon. He loved her so much.’

My mind travelled back to a day in September, to an old grey man who’d looked into my face the way Regina Marinho was looking right this minute, and who’d said ‘You have her eyes,’ but in a different sort of voice, and who had walked off lost in thoughts – or maybe memories – so deep he’d failed to notice the approaching car, the danger…

‘Yes,’ I told her quietly, ‘I do believe he did.’

* * *

I stopped in the Cathedral square.

My mind had been preoccupied, for several minutes now, with the unsettling thought that I had missed something this afternoon; had seen it and had let it pass without an understanding of its true importance. The feeling was so strong I nearly turned round to go back to Regina Marinho’s, then held myself in check with a reminder that I didn’t know if it was something I had seen or something I had heard, and either way the moment was now lost. I couldn’t get it back. The best that I could do now was to focus my subconscious in the hope that I’d eventually remember.

So I stopped in the Cathedral square, and tried to think. It was a contemplative place, not large, with lovely older buildings all around a quiet stand of mottled plane trees and some other lace-like trees whose name I didn’t know. And, framed by these, at the square’s farther end, there rose a ruined Roman temple.

It was an unexpected sight. The great Cathedral, with its towers and its turrets and its deeply carved front entrance, had been built to impress; to dominate the square, but the little Roman temple, with its fallen, broken columns, stole the eye, and the imagination.

It drew me to it, making me forget, for just that moment, why I’d come here, and the weariness I felt, and all my troubles.

I had always had a love of ancient history – of heroic deeds and tales of war and gods of old mythology – and I felt like a child, filled with wonder and awe, as I tipped my head back… far, far back, to stare upwards.

The temple soared above me, high on its stone podium, its fluted columns standing like a skeleton against the early evening sky. The south colonnade was entirely gone, but the three sides remaining were remarkably untouched, the long flat fascia stones still resting on the fancy upturned capitals. I only had to squint, and I could picture it intact. In this light, I could even imagine the ghosts of the Romans who’d worshipped there, moving among the long shadows.

And then, in one breath of the breeze, the ghosts vanished, chased off by the modern-day sounds of more people approaching. Another tour group – Evora appeared to be a magnet for them – poured into the little square and gathered at the temple’s base expectantly, their faces upturned, as was mine, with obvious appreciation.

A good-looking young man with very tight trousers pushed through to the front of the group, where he turned to address them. ‘OK, everyone, I’m going to ask you please to come closer, otherwise I’ll be shouting. Now, we are standing at the main religious centre of Evora, from the Roman times till nowadays. Behind me what you have now is the Roman temple, called sometimes the Temple of Diana. We are lucky to have such a temple here, is very rare, because the Roman temples often disappear. This is a small one, from the first century before Christ, and was saved because they used it from the late years of the thirteenth century till the nineteenth century, it was used as a slaughterhouse, so it was entirely covered with walls, with mortar and brick walls. Then came the nineteenth century, and it was a very romantic time, you know, when people were dreaming of the old civilisations like Greece and Rome, and they had just discovered a short time ago the ruins of Pompeii, and they were so enthusiastic with that, they started to imitate the old styles of art. The same movement in Portugal, and we paid more attention to these ruins, and so it was discovered that we had this precious monument beneath the bricks.’