Every Secret Thing (6 page)

He’d met his uncle coldly, accepting him into the house with no thought of making friends, but it was easier to dislike the imagined Uncle Andrew than the real one, than this quiet man who never had an unkind word for anyone; who only had to put his hands upon the earth, it seemed, to make the garden bloom with flowers where before there had been weeds. And though he felt a traitor to his father, James had found that, as the weeks and months had passed, he’d formed a bond with Uncle Andrew that was based, as much as anything, on their shared sense of loneliness.

Where James had been missing his father – and to some extent his mother, since she hadn’t for some time now been the mother he had known before the war – Andrew Deacon had been missing someone, too. His wife’s death was a wound so raw he rarely even mentioned it, and if somebody else did he would bring the conversation to an end.

‘He must have loved her very much,’ James Cavender confided. ‘He was quite a young man, then, but that was it for him. There were no other women. And he wore his wedding ring until he died. I had him buried with it.’

Anyhow, he carried on, he’d come to feel a kinship with his Uncle Andrew, so he hadn’t minded being taken out of school that day to go down to Southampton. There had only been himself, his mother, and his uncle, and the driver of the van they’d hired to bring his uncle’s few household effects home to Elderwel.

Andrew Deacon had flown back to England from Lisbon by plane, in the spring, but his paintings and belongings had been left to follow on by ship. They’d twice been delayed, but considering there was a war on, the fact that they’d made it to England at all was a miracle.

James, looking back, had a very clear memory of that afternoon – the busy docks, the ships, the shouting, and the blue September sky…and his Uncle Andrew, talking to a nervous-looking member of the crew. ‘What sort of damage?’ his uncle was asking…and then they were turning around again, back to the ship.

There were two crates, not large. Sitting there on the quay they looked normal enough from a distance, but close up James saw they were dripping with water. The man in ship’s uniform, leading them, made his apologies, made his excuses – a hatch had been left open; no one knew how…

Andrew Deacon took this news the way that he took everything: calmly, no change of expression. He moved to examine the crates, walking round them, and James saw him lean in to sniff at a waterlogged section of wood.

While the adults were talking, James made a careful imitation of his uncle’s actions, walking slowly round each crate in turn, hands clasped behind his back. He even sniffed the slats as well, and smelt…well, nothing. He’d expected the seaweedy smell of salt water, but the wet boards only smelt like wood.

Stepping back, he bumped against a man…not Uncle Andrew.

All he would remember in his later years was that the man had been tall, with a moustache and walking stick. The walking stick stayed in his memory because it was carved with a dragon’s head handle, an ivory white dragon’s head handle with glaring red eyes. This was what registered with the boy James as he stood looking up at the stranger.

The man spoke. A posh voice. ‘Hullo, my boy. You’re giving them a good once-over, are you? Are they yours?’

James had been spared the need of answering by his uncle’s reappearance.

The adult James Cavender paused in his narrative. The lights in the Bugle Lounge seemed to have dimmed. Someone laughed in the shadowy corner behind me; I don’t think he heard it. He lifted his head. ‘I’d never seen my Uncle Andrew angry. I suppose that’s why it stuck with me, that one day at the docks, why I remembered it so vividly – because I’d never seen him look like that.’

James, at twelve, had not known what to do. Andrew Deacon’s eyes ignored the boy, and fastened on the stranger, who had, smiling, lit a pipe and raised his walking stick to indicate the damaged crates. ‘Some trouble with your shipment, was there? Ah, well,’ he said, ‘accidents will happen.’

Andrew Deacon, very calmly, had said, ‘James, go to your mother, would you? There’s a good lad. I won’t be a moment.’

But he’d been a long time talking to the man. And then the man had gone, as inexplicably, it seemed, as he’d arrived.

‘I never knew his name,’ James Cavender said now, to me. ‘We never saw him, after that. But it might have been him in the photograph, there by the windmill. A tall man with a walking stick – the outline of the figure’s fairly clear. One can’t make out the face, but then I don’t remember faces from my childhood. Do you?’

I hadn’t thought about it really.

‘Anyway, I don’t suppose that’s much help to you. Maybe these,’ he told me, ‘will be more.’ And from the seat beside him, underneath his folded coat, he drew a large manila envelope and handed it across to me.

‘What’s this?’

‘They’re the letters that my uncle wrote to Mother, in the war.’

‘Oh, no,’ I said, and pushed the envelope away. ‘I couldn’t…’

‘Nonsense. He wouldn’t have minded.’

I wasn’t so sure anybody would want a reporter to read his old letters, but James Cavender insisted I had no cause for concern.

‘My mother’s dead. Been dead for twenty years,’ he said. ‘She might have lived much longer, but my father wore her down. He came back to us, after the war,’ he explained, ‘but he wasn’t the same man. He’d been in a Japanese prison camp, all those years, and…well, it would have changed any man, what he went through. He was…difficult.’ He left the rest unsaid, and shifted topics to, ‘My Uncle Andrew wasn’t with us anymore, by that point. He went back to doing business as an art dealer. He travelled. It was only after Father died that he came back to Elderwel to settle.’

‘With his garden.’

‘With his garden, yes.’

I looked down, at the envelope of letters.

James Cavender followed my gaze. ‘They’re from Portugal. I thought you might need to know details of what he was doing in Lisbon.’

‘I’m sorry? Why…?’

‘Well, it must have something to do with Lisbon, mustn’t it, this story he wanted to tell you? He sent a report there.’

I nodded, accepting the logic. And then I said slowly, ‘He talked about justice, the day that I met him. He mentioned a murder.’

‘I wouldn’t know anything about that, I’m afraid.’

‘He never spoke of any deaths in Lisbon?’

‘He never spoke of Lisbon. There was Ivan Reynolds, naturally – he died, but that was cancer. And my uncle’s wife, but she was in New York.’ He tipped his head as he considered. ‘I should imagine there were any number of murders in Lisbon, in the war years. It was rather like Casablanca, wasn’t it? A neutral place with people from both sides milling about, plotting things in back alleys…a magnet for spies and skullduggery.’

‘And there’s nothing in the letters to your mother?’

‘About murder? Not that I recall. But you might find a reference that I’ve missed, when you read them.’ He thought of something, brightening. ‘He does mention several acquaintances, people he worked with. Perhaps they might be of some help, if they’re still living. That can be something of a problem, when you get to Uncle Andrew’s age,’ he told me. ‘Finding people still alive. It’s like that poem by Kingsley, do you know the one I mean? “Young and Old”, I think it’s called. “When all the world is young, lad”, that’s how it begins, and how one ought to travel, have adventures, fall in love, and then it finishes quite touchingly:

He pondered this a moment, while he finished off his drink. ‘I suppose that’s why my uncle came to live in Elderwel again, when he was done with dealing art and all his travelling. My mother was there, and myself. Although,’ he said, with faint regret, ‘the face he’d loved the most when he was young, I should imagine, would have been his wife’s. He wrote a fair bit about
her
in his letters to Mother.’

I looked at the envelope of letters again, and he said, ‘Those were the ones that I could find straight off; there may be more that I can let you have.’

I realised he assumed that I was taking on the story, and before I could think of a nice way to let him down gently, he said: ‘I’ll be going through my uncle’s things this next while, clearing out the house before it’s sold. If I do come across a copy of his report, shall I send it to you here, or shall I wait till you come down?’

I didn’t need more work, I thought. I had more than enough on my plate as it was, without chasing cold leads on an uncertain story that might, in the end, not be worth half the effort. But I looked at his face, at the pale blue eyes that yesterday had been so cold, and now were so expectant. And I couldn’t tell him no. It wouldn’t cost me anything to let him send the damned report, I told myself. I didn’t have to read it. ‘I’m only here till Tuesday morning,’ I relented. ‘So I likely won’t have time to make another trip to Elderwel. But if you do find something, you can always send it on to me in Canada. I’ll give you my address.’ Tearing a sheet from my notebook I wrote the address of my grandmother’s house in Toronto.

He took it, and thanked me. We stood.

We said our goodbyes in the lobby. I could have gone up to my room straight away but I stayed there to watch him walk out through the great glass revolving doors. Not that I really expected that lightning would strike twice, but after all, this was the second time a member of his family had journeyed up to London just to talk to me, and I wanted to be absolutely certain this one got away all right.

He did. There were cabs in a queue at the front of the hotel, and he got into one. I wondered if he’d taken a hotel room for himself somewhere, or if he would be going back tonight, by train. It must have been a nuisance for him, coming all this way and waiting round so long to see me. I decided that he must have loved his uncle very much, to make the effort.

I was thinking this, and walking slowly back towards the elevator, when someone who’d been sitting on a lobby sofa rose to block my way. A small man, slightly built, with a receding hairline over sharp dark eyes.

‘Miss Murray? I was wondering if I might have a word.’

My temper had calmed by the following morning, but the whole thing still seemed so unlikely, to me, so surreal – this stranger drawing me aside to have a seat with him among the hotel lobby’s potted palms, his patronising voice pitched low enough so people wouldn’t overhear.

He’d shown me his credentials: Sergeant Robert Metcalf, Scotland Yard. He had been very to the point. ‘I believe you are acquainted with a Mr Andrew Deacon,’ he had told me, ‘and that Mr Deacon may have passed you certain information that he wanted you to publish.’

I had stared at him a moment…then, deciding that what Mr Deacon had or had not given me was none of this man’s business, I’d said only an enquiring, ‘Yes?’

‘The thing is, Miss Murray, that a good deal of what Mr Deacon told you is protected by the Official Secrets Act, and I’m afraid that any attempt to make those details public would be very inadvisable. At best, any such publication would be suppressed. At worst, there might be charges brought.’

‘Charges against whom?’

He’d smiled, a condescending smile, instead of answering, but the implication had been clear to me then, as had the threat. It had the opposite effect, with me, from what he had intended. Always had. Just like Pandora’s Box – when someone told me that I couldn’t look inside, it only made the contents fascinate me more.

I’d placed my own notebook more firmly on top of the manila envelope James Cavender had brought for me, the one that held his uncle’s wartime letters home from Lisbon, and feeling indignation flare inside me I had turned to Sergeant Robert Metcalf. Anyone who fired a warning shot across my bow, I’d thought, deserved a full-scale onslaught in return.

I couldn’t quite remember what I’d said, what words I’d used…only that I’d been a little fierce, and very probably insulting, in my staunch defence of the freedom of the press. And then, not giving him a chance to speak again, I’d made a perfect exit, putting the whole incident behind me as I’d gone up to my room.

But now, this morning, sitting on my bed in my pyjamas with my breakfast tray in front of me, I wished I hadn’t been so hasty; that I’d stayed around a little longer, asked more questions, made an effort to be civil. If I’d kept my wits about me, and kept the man talking, I might have learnt just what Scotland Yard
thought
I’d been told by Andrew Deacon… might have learnt, in fact, just how they’d known I’d ever met the man.

Maybe it wasn’t too late. With my toast still in one hand, I reached for the phone and the London directory.

Sergeant Metcalf wasn’t at his desk. He wasn’t even, the receptionist informed me, in the country. I’d just missed him. He had flown out this morning, and wouldn’t be back until Friday. But if I cared to leave a message on his voicemail…

So I left a message, brief and to the point: I regretted the way I’d behaved when we met; could he please call me when he got back, at my home in Toronto, so we could discuss this?

I left him the number and hung up, faintly frustrated, honestly curious now as to what had been in Andrew Deacon’s report. He’d sent two copies off, so his nephew had said – one to Lisbon, the other to Whitehall, to someone named…

‘Petty.’ I said it out loud, so it lodged in my memory and, taking a moment to wash down my toast with a swallow of coffee, I once again reached for the phone.

This was trickier, and more involved, than calling Scotland Yard. Whitehall wasn’t one specific building, it was more of a district – a street, and a place, and a court, lined with government offices, stretching roughly from Trafalgar Square down to the Houses of Parliament. When someone spoke of ‘Whitehall’ they were speaking of the British Civil Service, but which branch…?

A half-hour of phoning around turned up only one Petty: a Stephen in the Foreign Office.

Stephen Petty’s secretary had a friendly voice. I almost hated lying to her, but I was fairly certain people in the Foreign Office weren’t inclined to volunteer much information to a total stranger calling, or to journalists.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I wonder if I could just check the status of some correspondence that my father sent to Mr Petty, this past summer.’

‘Yes, of course. Your father’s name was…?’

‘Andrew Deacon.’

‘Deacon…Deacon…Yes, of course, I do seem to remember that. I’m sure I passed that on to Mr Petty. If you’ll bear with me a moment, I’ll go ask him.’

I was put on hold, and stayed there long enough to drink a second cup of coffee. I was pondering the wisdom of a third one, when the woman’s voice returned, apologetic.

‘I’m so sorry. It appears I was mistaken.’

‘Oh?’

‘There’s no report from anyone named Deacon in our files.’

I felt a twang of disappointment. Then, ‘I didn’t say “report”,’ I pointed out. ‘I just said “correspondence”. How did you—’

‘The thing is,’ she cut in, ‘we don’t have anything at all from Mr Deacon.’

‘Ah.’

‘So there you are. I’m sorry that we couldn’t help.’ And I was hurried off the telephone as though I were a salesperson.

I hung the phone up slowly, while the journalistic sixth sense I depended on began to tingle deep within my mind. Well, well, I thought. There might, in fact, be something more to this affair than I had first believed. I might just, after all, have to begin to dig around a bit, and see what I could learn.

Pushing my breakfast tray down to the end of the bed, I leant over to pick up the big envelope James Cavender had given me, the letters that his uncle had been writing home from Lisbon, in the war. What was it he’d told me? ‘I thought you might need to know details of what he was doing in Lisbon.’

I was starting to think that he might have been right.