Every Secret Thing (35 page)

Nick steered the van to a spot by the five-barred gate, just off the edge of the road, and killed the engine. Margot’s car lights, pulling in behind us, lingered on a second longer; then they, too, died and left us in darkness. The sky here was truly dark, not like in London. I saw cold stars shine past the black blowing shapes of the trees.

Margot’s car door opened. Closed. I heard her walking forward, and I rolled my window down. She said, ‘I’ve changed my mind. You shouldn’t do this. It’s too dangerous.’

‘I’m safe enough. You’re here. Nick’s here. If anything happens—’

‘We’ll never get up there in time. You’ll be dead.’

‘But you’ll have it on tape. You’ll have everything on tape. He won’t be able to escape that.’

‘Yes, well,’ said Margot, fidgeting against the cold, ‘you will forgive me, won’t you, if I don’t find that to be much consolation.’

Nick spoke up. ‘Don’t worry. He’s not going to harm her. If he threatens her, she only has to show him this.’ He held up an end of the wire I was wearing, and tucked it back into place, making sure everything was properly secured and out of sight. ‘Right then,’ he told me, ‘when you’re ready. Let me have a final sound check when you’re in the car.’

I had expected to feel nervous when this moment finally came, but as I stepped out of the van my nerves were steady. I felt calm.

Margot passed her car keys to me. ‘Kate,’ was all she said, but I understood.

‘I’ll be all right. I have to do this.’

In the car, I locked the door and clicked my seatbelt safely shut, as though that could protect me from what I would soon be facing. Then I said, out loud, so Nick could have his sound check: ‘Ready. Wish me luck.’

I waited till Nick pushed his driver’s door open a fraction and gave me the ‘thumbs-up’ sign. Then, with a deep breath, I started the car.

The great house rose out of the landscape to greet me as though it had stood there forever, a sprawling thing, solid, a looming black shape with the night sky behind it. The approach from the gate, up the long gravelled drive with the pond to one side, offered none of the welcoming views that I’d had on my first visit. The gabled wings, the angled chimneys, and the rows of stone-silled windows with their small glass panes were all in darkness now, save for two windows high up and three others on the ground floor.

I turned the car onto the broad gravel curve to the east of the main door and crunched to a stop.

He wouldn’t be expecting me to do this – I had that, at least, in my favour. Surprise, I’d been taught, was a powerful weapon, when one was behind in the odds.

The woman who answered my knock at the door still looked, to me, as carefully preserved and polished as some of the decorative objects that lined the front entrance hall – the carved wooden mirror with its hooks for hanging coats on, and the marble-topped table beneath it, and the large Japanese-looking blue and white porcelain floor vase that held an assortment of canes and umbrellas. I’d missed the significance of those canes the first time I’d seen them. I noticed them, now. I noticed, in particular, the cane with the ivory white dragon’s-head handle, its red eyes glaring at me from the middle of the jumble.

Patrick’s mother frowned faintly, attempting to place me.‘Yes?’

‘I’ve come to see the Colonel.’

‘Well, I’m afraid he’s not…that is, it’s rather late, and—’

‘Let her in,’ a voice behind her interrupted. Neither one of us, it seemed, had heard the wheelchair. Patrick’s mother, turning, looked as surprised as I was by the presence of her husband in the shadowed hall behind her.

‘Darling…’

‘It’s all right,’ he told her. ‘Let her in.’ And then he turned as well, his wheels a whisper on the carpet as he led the way into the room beyond.

It was the study I had so admired on my first visit – a man’s room, wine-red wallpaper washed with quiet light from fabric-covered floor lamps, and lithographed prints of a
fox-hunt
in frames chasing round the four walls, leaping draperies and bookshelves. He’d been reading. A paperback thriller sat open, face down, on an inlaid octagonal table, the book’s spine strained with the fat curve of still-unread pages. Beside the book, a small cut-crystal goblet with a trace of something deep red at its bottom caught the room’s soft light, expensively.

Patrick’s mother hovered in the doorway.

‘Darling, we’ll be fine,’ the Colonel said. ‘You needn’t worry.’ And the smile he sent his wife was a dismissal.

As she left, he wheeled himself towards the table and his book, retrieving, as he went, a glass decanter from a nearby shelf. ‘You’ve changed your hair,’ he said. ‘I can’t say I approve. I’m rather fond of red hair on a woman.’ The decanter, like his nearly empty glass, held dark red liquid. ‘Port,’ he told me, with another smile. ‘A particular weakness of mine, I’m afraid. I always did like a nice glass of port of an evening. Would you care to join me?’

Ever the charmer, I thought. Only now, I was immune. All I saw was a man who’d done murder; who’d ordered my grandmother’s murder, and Deacon’s; who’d stolen my own life as surely as if he had killed me, as well. It was all I could do to control my emotions – to stand there without giving vent to my rage. But I knew that my only hope now of defeating the man was to make him feel comfortable; get him to talk. To confess.

I accepted the wine he held out, though I had no intention of drinking it.

Standing, I watched him refilling his glass; watched his face. He hadn’t changed much from his photographs. Men didn’t change much, as a rule. And yet I’d failed to see it. As with Deacon, when I’d met the Colonel weeks ago, I’d seen an old man, nothing more.

Now it was obvious, even without the moustache, who he was.

‘I must say, I expected you sooner,’ he said, settling back in his wheelchair, the glass in one hand. ‘I told the others. They underestimated you rather badly, I believe.’

‘But you didn’t?’

‘Well, perhaps just a little.’ The smile had retreated to his eyes. ‘I should imagine you have questions. Do sit down.’

‘I’d rather stand, thanks.’

‘I’m an old man, in a wheelchair. Hardly a danger.’

I couldn’t let that pass. ‘Tell my grandmother.’

He’d been about to drink, but he lowered his glass. ‘Ah, your grandmother. Yes, that was unavoidable. They thought she was too great a risk.’

‘“They”?’

His eyes indulged me. ‘I’m an old man, in a wheelchair,’ he repeated. ‘What I did, I did a long, long time ago, when I was young. I couldn’t do it now. You surely don’t believe that I could kill a man with these?’ He held his hands towards me, veined and frail.

I didn’t answer. But I’d learnt to never underestimate the elderly. Age and frailness notwithstanding, I would not have turned my back to him.

‘Besides,’ he said, ‘It was different then. One had ideals, you see. Time steals those from us, one by one – you’ll find that out yourself, when you get old, like me. You’ll find that the things you once held to be truths will seem ridiculous, unworthy…but in those days…’ He broke off, and paused. ‘Your generation’s never been to war. You couldn’t hope to understand.’

‘I understand the difference between killing someone in a war, in combat, and cold-blooded murder.’

‘Do you, now? I wonder.’ Looking down, he tilted his glass so that the port inside it caught the light, a clear, deep red, like blood. ‘Would you care to hear my version of the story?’

I’d been counting on the offer. Moving as close as I dared, I selected an armchair that backed onto the bookcases, facing both him and the door. As I sat, I felt the thin line of wire press into my skin, and I hoped they were hearing this, down in Nick’s van, at the foot of the drive. ‘Yes, I would,’ I said.

John Lawrence Cayton-Wood – ‘JL’ to acquaintances and ‘Jack’ to friends and family – had been born into that elevated level of society where everything he would become was already decided. He’d obediently followed on the path his parents set for him – first boarding school, then Eton; then, because he was a second son, and by tradition in his family second sons took a commission in the army, he had finished off his schooling at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Coming out an officer, he’d found himself, a few years later, fighting in North Africa. El Alamein had ended his career.

He’d refused, out of pride, to return home a cripple. And since the wound in his leg had stubbornly resisted proper healing, he had looked around for prospects outside England. An old friend of the family had put him in touch with the man who had, at that time, wielded the greatest influence over all business done at the harbour in Lisbon, and Cayton-Wood, offered a job, had accepted, though his sights had been set, even then, on the highest position. He’d turned the whole of his intellect to that task, and after three months of plotting and intriguing he had managed to disgrace, and then displace, the man who’d hired him.

Settled in the top office, he’d soon developed a comfortable lifestyle, moving freely among the elite men and women of Lisbon society; dances and parties and Embassy functions and glittering nights at the local casinos. It had been at an Embassy luncheon, in fact, when he’d first been asked whether he’d be interested in doing secret work to help his country. His connections, he’d been told, were unmatched; his background impeccable; his abilities obvious.

Faced with such flattery, he had said yes. At the time that he had been recruited into it, the British Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS, had been focusing resources on Spain and Portugal. The SIS – also widely known as MI6 – was in charge of all British intelligence work done on non-British soil. It had several branches, and one – Section V, as in ‘Victor’ – was dedicated to counter-espionage, meaning that it gathered information on all secret foreign operations being planned against the British. Portugal and Spain were fertile hotbeds of such plans, in those years. Lisbon, in particular, with all its foreign agents moving openly amongst each other, lent itself to careful observation.

Cayton-Wood began by finding and recruiting, on his own, a web of sub-agents, almost all of them Portuguese nationals, all of them strategically located, who could keep him well informed. Some he found in the households of foreign ambassadors; some in the better hotels. And of course, he had Vivian Spivey. He’d met Spivey one day by chance, at the harbour, and though they were not of the same social class, he’d been aware of what he’d gain by being friendly to the man. Spivey worked for Reynolds.

Ivan Reynolds didn’t like Jack Cayton-Wood. He’d said so to his face, and to as many other people who would listen. Not that it did Cayton-Wood any harm, because Reynolds himself wasn’t really well liked, but it did create difficulties from an intelligence perspective. Reynolds’s oil was a vital resource for the British, though his loyalties were suspect. Spivey could keep Cayton-Wood informed of shipping movements, but his snooping round the offices was limited by co-workers. Even Regina, with her greater access to Reynolds’s mail and his phone calls, could not get as close to the man as the SIS wanted. So, since Reynolds snubbed Cayton-Wood socially, no course was left but to bring in a new man; a new agent.

Deacon.

From the start, Cayton-Wood didn’t care for him. He favoured men with weaknesses; with vices he could turn to his advantage. A man who liked drink, or young women, or boys, could be bribed along, or threatened with exposure. Andrew Deacon was, in Cayton-Wood’s opinion, quite the worst sort of a man to have to work with: He was honest.

Worse still, he was observant, and intelligent – both qualities that made him rather dangerous to Cayton-Wood. Because, for several months now, Cayton-Wood had been discreetly sharing information with the Spanish. Nothing vital, in his view. But, having long shared Winston Churchill’s own opinion of the Soviet regime, that it was a disease bent on spreading like cancer across the whole world, Cayton-Wood had thought it unforgivable that certain facts should not be shared with Franco, who’d made such a valiant stand against the communists. That Franco’s sympathies lay with the Axis hardly mattered, not when one took in the broader picture, because when this current war was over, with the British and Americans triumphant, it was obvious their guns would then be turned towards what Churchill called the ‘poison peril’ in the East – and Spain, in that fight, would be once again their ally.

Cayton-Wood’s conviction that the Spanish ought to be informed of certain British plans that might affect them might have remained only that – a conviction – had it not been for Manuel Garcia, who’d walked into the British Embassy one morning with an offer to turn double agent if he and his wife could be promised safe passage to England, to start a new life, at the war’s end.

Garcia was not the first enemy agent to offer his services. By that late stage of the war, when it seemed almost certain the Allies would win, a great many foreign agents had left their sinking ships and were already ‘doubled’, sending useless information back to their home countries under tight British control.

For someone like Manuel Garcia, who transmitted his reports each week by radio, the usual procedure was for Cayton-Wood to choose a lesser agent, fluent in Morse code, who’d act as the controller; who’d accompany Garcia every week to the transmission site and sit beside him, making sure he said what he’d been told to say – a mix of truths and
half-truths
and straight lies, designed to misinform the enemy and steer his forces in the wrong direction.

But Cayton-Wood hadn’t let anyone else be Garcia’s control. He had done it himself. He’d been able, that way, to send any and all information he thought should be sent. He’d thought it one of the more amusing ironies of his business that Garcia, who considered himself a traitor to Spain, was in fact being one of its most useful agents.

There were a few bumps, of course. Someone – he didn’t know who – had got wind of the leak, and was trying to trace it. But Cayton-Wood managed to steer the suspicion to Reynolds.