Every Secret Thing (43 page)

And I would not be safe, I knew, so long as he remained there. I would always have to watch my step, to look behind me on the street, to never drop my guard. I didn’t want to live like that, but it was how things had to be, as long as Cayton-Wood was living. And he
was
alive – I knew that in my heart. I knew his shadowy protectors had removed him from the path of justice once again, as they had done before.

‘Don’t worry,’ Jim said. He was watching me as if he knew my thoughts; as if he knew what I had been through, and what I still had to face. He smiled kindly. ‘No one lives for ever. But the truth survives us all.’

His face looked tired. We’d been talking for a long time, and the organisers of the small reception had begun to stack the chairs. Our interview was coming to a close.

I turned my tape recorder off, and started packing up my notebook.

‘Did you get what you were after?’ he asked.

More than I had hoped for. But I only told him, ‘Yes,’ and thanked him, even though the words seemed so inadequate, for what I had been given.

‘If you have the time, I’m staying in Toronto for the weekend, at the Royal York Hotel,’ he said. ‘I’d like to buy you dinner while I’m here.’

I’d said no to Deacon, when he had invited me to dinner, and I’d learnt from my mistake. ‘I’d like that. Thanks.’ And then, because it had only just occurred to me, ‘Do you need a ride back to Toronto? Because I’ve got my car here.’

‘No, no, thank you, but my driver’s in the parking lot.’ He checked his watch. ‘Unless he’s given up on me. I’ve been a little longer than I said I’d be.’

He stood, and helped me with my coat, and walked me out. A gentleman. The parking lot was busy, thick with slowly rolling cars and milling people.

‘There he is,’ said Jim. ‘I guess I won’t be stranded after all.’

I couldn’t see his car at first. My view was blocked by a reversing van. But as it pulled away, I saw the long, black Lincoln Continental, and the man who stood beside it, leaning on the driver’s door, arms folded.

‘I believe,’ said Jim, ‘that you and Matt already know each other, don’t you?’

Matt Jankowski’s gaze met mine across the space between us, and he smiled.

I was so surprised to see him that I couldn’t think of anything to say.

I slowly turned to Jim, beside me, and all of a sudden I knew where I’d seen him before. He had been at the next table over, at Dean and Deluca’s, in Washington, sitting behind Jenny Augustine. My mind began to flip through memories, like a rapid slideshow: Matt’s voice, telling me that Jenny would be fine.
She’s with a friend of mine. A friend of hers, too, as it happens
. Further back, Matt saying how he had been sent to Lisbon by a former senior partner in his firm, a man who had been FBI…

I said to Jim, with certainty, ‘You have a corner office.’

‘Yes, I do.’ His brows came down a fraction. ‘How did you know that?’

I only smiled. So now I knew just how Matt’s old man in the corner office had been able to identify me. Jim had been a friend of Deacon’s; he had known of Deacon’s death. He’d also heard about my grandmother’s. And that meant he most likely would have known that I was missing. It would have been simple enough to compare the recent photographs of me that had been run in the Toronto papers to the ones that Matt had sent from Portugal.

I understood that now. And more. I gave myself a mental shake for missing all the clues. They’d all been there – he’d been in nearly every story I had heard, from the beginning, though he’d been different things to different people, filling many roles. A very active piece, I thought, upon the chequerboard.

‘Be careful, now,’ he said. I let him take my elbow; let him usher me between the cars, the people. ‘Matt’s a tough young man to read, sometimes,’ he told me. ‘That’s a good trait for a lawyer, but…he’s cautious when it comes to certain things, I’ve noticed. If that ever changes, well, you take my advice, Katie. Give him a chance. It wasn’t for my sake alone that he did what he did.’ As we neared the Lincoln, he said, in a louder voice, ‘I’ll let you two figure out the details of that dinner.’ And with a briefly affectionate squeeze of my shoulder, he let himself into the car.

Matt stayed standing outside with me, shoulders hunched in his heavy black overcoat, hands swallowed deep in the pockets, and as the silence stretched he coughed and said, ‘How are you?’

‘Fine, thank you.’ I waited, then asked, ‘Did you get the tape?’

‘Yes, thanks.’ He looked at me. ‘That was an idiotic thing to do, you know that? You could have been killed. If I’d known you were going to do that, I’d…’ He bit the end off the sentence, unfinished, and glanced away sharply, as I thrust my own hands defensively into my pockets.

‘He’d have tried to kill me anyway. He still might.’

Matt frowned, as though the thought disturbed him. ‘You’re not back at your grandmother’s house, are you?’

‘No.’ The lawyer, my grandmother’s lawyer, had offered me the keys, but I had left them in his care. ‘No, I’m staying with friends.’

He didn’t ask with whom, or where. For all I knew, he might already have had Tony’s address in his pocket; might have known exactly where I’d been. He only said, ‘And the police are giving you protection?’

I shrugged, without taking my hands from my pockets. ‘They’ve done what they can.’

The wind swirled cold between us for a moment, then he told me, ‘I could do a better job.’ His voice was casual, but his eyes, when they found mine, were anything but.

I was suddenly very aware of Jim Iveson, sitting in the front seat of the Lincoln Continental, with a clear view through the windshield. Not quite certain of my answer, I looked down.

Matt didn’t seem put out. ‘So,’ he said. ‘We’re having dinner.’

‘Yes.’

‘And after that? What are your plans?’

‘I don’t know.’ It wasn’t so simple, I’d found, to just walk back into a life. Too many things had changed – it was like putting on old clothes that didn’t quite fit. For the moment, I still had my job at the paper, but, ‘I thought I might try my hand at writing a book,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a good idea for one.’

‘What kind of book?’

‘True crime.’

‘How does it end?’ he asked.

I knew it mattered how I answered, but I really didn’t know. I knew the figures on the chequerboard were shifting once again, but it was just too soon, I thought. Too soon.

He understood, I think. He drew himself up, in the wind, and found my gaze, and held it. ‘Maybe when you get that figured out,’ he told me evenly, ‘you’ll let me know.’

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 learnt the truth of that.

All through that winter, and the springtime, and the summer that came after, I was writing. People helped me: Jenny Augustine, who, as she’d promised, used her publishing connections to arrange a solid book deal for me; Regina Marinho, whom I found, with Anabela’s aid, in a remoter part of Portugal – in hiding, but, to my relief, quite safe; Manuel Garcia’s widow, who was living in the north of England, and who kindly shared with me her memories of her husband, and her memory of the visit she’d had one week after that, from Deacon. He’d bought all her husband’s paintings. Every one. When she had protested, he’d said that he was sure he would recover what he’d paid her, when he sold them in his shop. Meantime, he’d made arrangements with the British Embassy to honour their agreement with Garcia, so that, when the war was over, she could emigrate to England. What he gave her for the paintings was enough to pay her passage, and to buy a little house. ‘He was a good man,’ she had told me rather huskily. ‘You must write kindly of him.’

She had sent me, too, a small sketch of her husband’s, that she’d saved for all these years. Not the windmill – that would have been too much to hope – but a view over Lisbon, with its crowded streets and houses tumbling down to meet the harbour. Jim, when he saw it framed over my desk, was admiring.

‘He had a great talent,’ he said. ‘Such a waste.’

Jim helped, too, with my writing. He called me daily on the phone, and visited in person when he could. And he bought me the dog. It was company for me, he said, though I knew he was really just trying to give me protection. He worried, a great deal, about my protection. So I was surprised when, in June, he announced he was going on holiday. Our wet and gloomy spring, he said, had left him starved of sunshine, and he had a sudden urge to see again the places he had travelled to, when he was younger – Istanbul, and Rome, and the idyllic isles of Greece.

I missed him, when he left, but I enjoyed the stream of postcards, and of course by then I was absorbed completely by the book. I was revising my first draft, then, and still searching for the ending.

And, at last, 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 Jim 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.

The phone rang, and I reached for it with absent fingers. Tony, sounding cheerful. ‘Happy birthday, gorgeous.’

‘Thanks.’

I was still looking down, at the handle-sized, ivory white dragon’s head carving, with lifeless red eyes. I could see, at the bottom, where someone had sawn off the walking stick. Clearly in my mind I could hear Jim’s voice saying, like a promise,
No one lives for ever
. And I knew what he had done.

Tony’s voice, forgotten, asked, ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine. I’m just…’

‘You were working, weren’t you? Isn’t that thing finished yet?’

I glanced toward the great untidy pile of pages sitting to the side of my computer; then my gaze went further – past the table to the window, and beyond, where I could see the two small rosebushes my grandmother had planted in the yard, against the fence. They were in bloom, now; pale pink, beautiful. I gripped the phone more tightly. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s finished now.’

And slowly, but decidedly, I set my birthday present down, and folded shut the box.

We writers choose our stories, sometimes. Sometimes, they choose us.

I still remember this one choosing me some fifteen years ago when, at a dinner party, I was told the sad tale of a man who’d witnessed something in the war, and who had written a report, and who had suffered for it. What struck me at the time, and what stayed with me, wasn’t what he’d seen, but that this man, grown old and disillusioned in his search for justice, had at last arranged to meet a journalist, to pass on his report and make it public. ‘But he died,’ so I was told, ‘before the meeting could take place.’

So Andrew Deacon grew from that, a grey and faceless shadow at my shoulder who would not allow me rest until I put him on the page.

It took four years to write this book, and in that time I had the help of many people, some who have themselves inspired characters – most notably the incredible Canadian women who actually went to New York in the Forties to work for Sir William Stephenson’s British Security Coordination, and who so generously shared their memories with me. I’m indebted to the writer Bill McDonald, author of
The True Intrepid
, one of the best and most fascinating biographies of Sir William Stephenson, for introducing me to these ‘BSC Ladies’ – June Welsh, Mayo Lyall, Wynne Woodcock, Betty Noakes, Jean Martin, Bev Bible, and Chris Ruttan, without whose help Kate’s grandmother would not have been the woman that she was.

I am indebted, also, to the FBI’s Rex Tomb, who in the chaos that immediately followed 9/11, when the FBI undoubtedly had more important things to do, still found time to connect me with retired agent Kenneth Crosby, in whose gracious company I learnt of the realities of working in intelligence in the Second World War.

For details of Camp X, I was assisted by Norm Killian of the Camp X Historical Society, and by several of the veterans who had trained there, most particularly Leslie Davis, who not only suggested Deacon could be an instructor, but proposed the way that Georgie might be sent up from New York to meet him – plot points I’d been struggling with till then.

In Portugal, I owe thanks to Regina Gato, Fátima Da Silva of the British Embassy Consular Service, Anabela Matos of the York House Hotel, and above all to Robert Wilson, awardwinning author of
A Small Death in Lisbon
, who went beyond the call of kindness to read through the book in manuscript to see I got my facts straight.

Closer to home, in Toronto, Sue Gariepy of the
Globe and Mail
patiently answered all my journalism questions, as did the incomparable Suanne Kelman.

And finally, my mother, as always my first and best reader, helped more than she knows.

S
USANNA
K
EARSLEY
was a museum curator before she took the plunge and became a full-time author. The past and its bearing on the present is a familiar theme in her books. She won the prestigious Catherine Cookson Fiction Award for her novel
Mariana
, and was shortlisted for the Romantic Novel of the Year Award for
Sophia’s
Secret
. The e-book of
Sophia’s Secret
, published in the US and Canada as
The Winter Sea
, has been in the top five of the
New York Times
bestseller list.

www.susannakearsley.com