Every Secret Thing (5 page)

It was just how he’d said it, I thought. ‘You’re
the
journalist’. Definite article. Clearly, his uncle had told him about me. But as to the ‘everything’ he thought his uncle had given me, I had no clue. Very likely I never would know. I had left the reception right after James Cavender’s snub, and I didn’t expect I would ever be back to The Laurels, or Elderwel.

I hadn’t gone there, after all, to cause a scene, or be embarrassed. I had better things to do. And so I’d pushed the matter from my mind, and got on with my work.

I’d spent today in Essex, out near Colchester, interviewing the family of one of the victims of my now-convicted murderer. They’d had a lot to say, and it was going on for seven when I finally made it back to my hotel.

The desk clerk was ready with my room key. ‘There’s a gentleman to see you.’

‘Oh?’

‘He’s been here since four-thirty. I did ask him if he’d like to leave a message, but he said that he’d prefer to wait. He’s in the Bugle Lounge,’ he said, and checked his notes. ‘A Mr Cavender.’

I crossed the lobby slowly, apprehensively.

The Bugle Lounge had lots of ferns and hunting prints and deep red fabric walls – a warmly masculine environment that made it a relaxing place to sit and have a quiet drink, or read the evening paper. James Cavender was doing both. He was sitting at a corner table, on his own, his chair drawn round to face the open doorway and the bar, so he’d be visible to anyone who entered.

Not that I saw him right away. He was one of a half-dozen men of a similar age, sitting round in a similar style, but when I saw him I remembered him – the long face, the pale eyes.

In spite of his earlier snub, he had old-fashioned manners. He stood as I came across to meet him.

‘Mr Cavender.’

He shook my hand. ‘Miss Murray. I do apologise for coming up like this, without an appointment. I did try telephoning first – my uncle left your name and number on his desk – but you were out. I haven’t caught you at an inconvenient time?’

I told him that he hadn’t, though my voice stayed fairly cool. A fleeting smile transformed his features as he motioned me to sit. We sat. Folding his newspaper neatly, he set it aside and studied it a moment, as though he wasn’t sure how to proceed. He glanced up. ‘May I buy you a drink?’

‘You don’t have to do that.’

‘Nonsense. What will you have?’

‘Dry white wine, please.’

He didn’t summon the waiter, but rose and fetched the drinks himself from the bar, a pause that was deliberately designed, I thought, to give him time to organise his mind. When he returned, his face had cleared; his eyes held purpose.

He began to talk before he’d finished sitting. ‘I was rude to you yesterday, Miss Murray. I apologise. I’d like you to know that I am not ordinarily rude.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘No, it isn’t. It isn’t.’ He swirled the contents of his glass and took a drink. ‘The thing is, Uncle Andrew was the only family I had left. I liked him. We got on together, he and I. We always did.’ He said it simply, quietly, the way I’d noticed most men spoke of things that they felt deeply. ‘I didn’t see the need for him to come up here, to London. It’s quite taxing at his age, you know…the trains, the tube. It’s tiring. And unnecessary, really, when he could have simply called you on the telephone. I told him that, but he insisted. Wouldn’t listen. Stubborn man, my uncle. If he’d taken my advice, and stayed at home…’ He left the thought unfinished, but I sensed the conflict in him – his frustration with his uncle, and the guilt he felt for fixing any blame upon the dead. ‘When I heard what had happened,’ he said, ‘I was angry. I still am. And rather inexcusably, I took that anger out on you. At any rate, I didn’t sleep too well last night, thinking of how I’d spoken to you. You were only carrying out Uncle Andrew’s last wishes, so to speak, and I ought to have helped. So,’ he sat back and steepled his fingers. ‘I’m not sure what you need, in terms of access to his files. He did keep photographs. Not many, mind you, and I wouldn’t know what you’d be looking for, but if you’d like to borrow them, you’re welcome.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t—’

‘He would have wanted you to see them, and the papers. I expect that’s why you made the trip down yesterday.’

‘Mr Cavender…’

‘Is it to be a book, or just an article? Early days yet, I know, but—’

‘Mr Cavender.’ This time my tone of voice registered. Waiting, he looked at me. How did I say this, I wondered?

I came at it sideways. ‘Your uncle and I didn’t really have much time to talk. We only exchanged a few words. I was busy, you see, with the trial and everything, so he told me I could call him, that we’d maybe go for dinner, but we never got that far because the accident—’

‘But that means…’ He was frowning as he tried to take it in, what I had told him. ‘But that means you don’t know…’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know anything.’

Andrew James Deacon, his nephew informed me, came into the world on November 11
^th
, in 1918, on the day that the First World War ended. Andrew’s mother took that to be a particular omen, and often in later years liked to remark on how peaceful her son’s face had been at his birth, as if he’d somehow in his nascent wisdom heard the guns fall silent all along the Western Front. At any rate, he grew to be an easygoing child who never quarrelled, never picked a fight, not even with his older sister, Lucy.

He loved languages, and painting, but being the son of a headmaster meant that there were certain academic expectations, and young Andrew had obligingly fulfilled them, going up to Oxford on a scholarship and coming down with firsts. His father offered him a teaching post, but Andrew, independent, turned it down, and went instead to work in South America. There his passion for paintings allowed him to build quite a reputable name as an art dealer, but after two years in Brazil a nearly fatal bout of dengue fever drove him north, to New York City, where he fell in love and married.

That had been, James Cavender confessed, a shock to all the family. ‘I was only a boy at the time, but I remember the talk. My mother had never recovered completely, you must understand, from the King’s abdication a few years before, and now here her own brother was marrying some strange American… No one approved.’ No one went to the wedding, either, but then of course there was a war on and it wasn’t such a simple thing to cross the Atlantic.

But later that year Andrew Deacon had crossed it, to take a position in Lisbon. His newlywed wife, for her safety, had stayed in New York, while her husband, alone, went to work with the famed Ivan Reynolds.

‘I didn’t know who Ivan Reynolds was, of course, when I was younger,’ said James Cavender. ‘My mother always spoke of him the way she spoke of royalty. In some ways, I expect, he was America’s equivalent. Like JP Morgan, or the Rockefellers.’

Which was, I thought, a good way of describing Ivan Reynolds. His was one of the twentieth century’s fairy-tale lives – the American son of a dispossessed White Russian mother and Scottish-born father, he’d made his first fortune in oil and his second in shipping, and had donated most of it back to the public by building fantastic museums to house his own privately gathered collections of art.

I would not for a moment have guessed that the quiet and modestly dressed old man sitting beside me that day on the steps of St Paul’s would ever have moved in the same sphere as Reynolds.

‘In the end, my uncle didn’t work for Ivan Reynolds very long. He went to Lisbon sometime late in 1943, I think, and Reynolds passed away the following spring, of cancer. My uncle came home after that.’

‘And his wife? Did she come over from New York, to join him?’

‘No, she died that spring, as well. I don’t know all the details. My uncle never spoke of it.’ He thought about this for a moment, then he said, as though it were important I should understand, ‘My uncle was a very private man. A quiet man. He didn’t talk much – never said two words when one would do.’

I took my wineglass from the table with a frown. ‘And yet he travelled all this way to talk to me, a stranger. Why?’

‘I don’t think he considered you a stranger. When he mentioned you, he spoke as if he knew you.’

‘No, we’d never met,’ I said. ‘He knew my grandmother.’

‘Ah, there you are, then. I felt sure there was a personal connection, from the way he spoke.’ The faint edge of a smile. ‘He’d had a call from Whitehall, I believe it was from Whitehall, and it left him rather…well, angry might not be the right word…more disgusted, I guess. He said little enough about it, only that things never changed and he shouldn’t have wasted his time; should have gone to the press to begin with. That’s where you came in,’ he said. ‘He didn’t mention you by name, of course. He wouldn’t have. But he did say he knew a journalist in London, a young woman, a Canadian, who was someone he could trust. He said you’d do a better job of it than anyone.’

‘A better job of what?’

‘Getting it out in the open, I assume.’

‘But you don’t know what “it” was?’

‘No, I don’t. I’m sorry.’

We were on our second round of drinks. The Bugle Lounge was filling, but oddly enough the increasing activity around us and the densely layered rise and fall of voices only seemed to make our corner more secluded, more untouched, as though we’d somehow found the calm eye of a storm and were secure in it.

James Cavender’s voice didn’t try to compete with the noise from the bar, but I heard him distinctly. ‘I
do
know it began last May,’ he said, and settled back. ‘The Chelsea Flower Show. It was my uncle’s passion, you know, gardening. His garden. He came up to London every year like clockwork for the show, he never missed it. Only this time, he came back all out of sorts. I noticed it straight off when I met his train, and he didn’t say anything all the way home. Not that he was a talkative man, as I’ve said, but it wasn’t the silence, so much as the
way
he kept silent.’ He paused, seeking a way to explain. ‘I saw a man once, on the news, whose house had crumbled in an earthquake. He’d lost everything, his home, his family, absolutely everything, and all he did was sit there, staring. Didn’t say a word. My Uncle Andrew looked like that,’ he said, and glanced at me to see that I was following. I nodded, once, to show I understood, and he continued, ‘I was worried, so I dropped round after dinner to look in on him. I found him drinking whiskey. Uncle Andrew rarely drank – he only kept a bottle in the house for company. And there he was, with half the bottle gone, and past the point of making sense. He simply sat there, staring at the wall, at all the photographs he’d taken in his travels…and the only thing he said was, “He’s not dead. He should be dead.”’ He took a drink himself, and shrugged. ‘Anyway, that was the beginning of it. The next day he got down his boxes of papers and started to write that report.’

I shook my head vaguely. ‘Report?’

‘Forgive me. I do keep forgetting. I was so sure, you see, that he had given you a copy. It was a fairly thick report, all typed, with referenced letters, documents. He spent a lot of time on it. He didn’t do much else all summer, only that and his garden. He sent the reports off the end of July. There were two, that I know of. One went to Whitehall, to someone named Petty. The other went airmail to Lisbon. I posted them both for him.’

‘And do you know what was in the report?’

He shook his head. ‘No, I’m afraid not. He didn’t discuss it, you see, and I didn’t intrude. I never did learn who it was who was meant to be dead. But…’ His pause had significance.

‘Yes?’

‘Well, it may have been nothing, but…that night, that first night he came back from London and I caught him drinking, just after the Flower Show, it seemed to me that he was staring at one photograph specifically. And when my uncle told me, “He’s not dead”, I rather fancied he was speaking of the man who’s in that photograph. I had a closer look myself, a little later on, but it was nobody I recognised.’ He stopped, then, as though something had occurred to him. ‘Unless…’ he said, ‘unless, of course…I’d quite forgotten
that
.’ His eyes began to lose their focus slightly as the memory rose. ‘One does forget…’

He raised his glass, but absently, and from his face I knew he was no longer in the present, but had slipped into another time completely, and his next words took me with him.

It had been this time of year, he said, the middle of September, when the mornings started cool and crisp and warmed to nearly sweltering by afternoon, as though the summer was not ready to give in, just yet, to autumn.

It was 1944, and he was twelve. He should have been at school that day, but his mother had taken him out on account of the trip to Southampton. The war years had made her protective, and paranoid. Even when they were at home in the village she kept a close watch from the sitting-room window for fear a bomb, unheralded, would strike the school. It wasn’t the idea of the bomb itself that worried her, so much as the idea that they might not die together, that they’d be in different places when it came. She’d been a worrier like that since James’s father had been listed with the missing in the fall of Hong Kong to the Japanese. At times she’d come quite close, James thought, to going mad, but then her brother, Andrew, had returned from several years abroad, and life had levelled out somewhat.

James hadn’t really wanted, or expected, to like his Uncle Andrew. James’s father had never got on with his
brother-in-law
, and the tensions had grown with the outbreak of war. James could often remember his father remarking that men who stayed safe in New York when their country had need of them weren’t men at all, they were cowards, and ought to be damned well ashamed of themselves. And now that James’s father had gone missing out in Hong Kong, James himself had grown disdainful, in his father’s place, of those men who had never donned a uniform.