Every Secret Thing

by Susanna Kearsley

  Matt had understood. He hadn’t had the heart to tell the old man that he didn’t have a clue where I was at that moment. All morning, and all afternoon, he’d searched for me. And then, defeated, he’d gone back to his hotel. And found I’d left a message.

  That, I thought, explained what I’d seen in his eyes, and hadn’t understood, when we’d met at the hotel bar – relief. Relief I wasn’t dead; that he still had a chance to keep me safe.

  He’d planned, last night, to lay his cards out on the table, tell me everything. Well, possibly not everything. Enough, at least, to prove to me that we were on the same team, and to let me know that he was there to help.

  He’d worked it all out, what he wanted to say, and the best way to say it…

  And then I had told him, the very first thing, that I’d be flying to Toronto in the morning. He had known he wouldn’t see me after that.

  So Matt had let it go.

  He’d let me go, too. Someone else had already been lined up to take on the role of my guardian angel when I arrived back in Toronto, so Matt’s job, in that respect, had ended when, this morning, he had watched my plane take off.

  Then he had driven back downtown, and had some breakfast, and tried to come up with a plan for his day. ‘I still had three names on my list, for Portugal: Roger Selkirk, Joaquim, and a woman who’d worked as an Embassy code clerk. Joaquim’s name came first, so I started with him.’

  But Joaquim hadn’t been at the cemetery. Nobody had known where he might be, or when he might return. Irritated by the inconvenience, Matt had moved on to Roger Selkirk’s house. The neighbour I’d talked to had been outside, this time. She’d told Matt what she’d told me…except Matt had, of course, understood. And when, gripped by a growing sense of urgency, he’d gone to try to find the former code clerk, her home, too, had been deserted.

  He’d had a sense, unsettling, that he was running second in a race. For all he knew, he might already have been beaten.

  He’d wasted no more time. He’d put one last call through to Washington, and then had gone directly to the airport. The only flight they’d been able to get him on at such late notice had been routed through Frankfurt, arriving in Washington nearly an hour and a half after mine.

  He’d been met by a car at the airport, and driven to Georgetown, to talk to the last person left on his list.

  ‘Jenny Augustine,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right.’ Matt sat back, in a way that implied he was nearing the end of his tale. ‘But again, you were already there.’

  He’d known, before he’d even knocked at Jenny’s door, that I was in the house. There had been someone watching the Augustine house all that day, and they’d seen me arrive. He’d also been informed that we were definitely in the house; that nobody had left. But then, of course, they hadn’t known about the lane.

  He might have gone on standing on the front step, thinking we were in there and not answering, if he hadn’t received a call on his cell phone from the man who’d been watching the house all day, and who’d just left Matt a moment before.

  ‘He’d been sitting all day in his car,’ Matt explained. ‘He’d been dying to stretch his legs, grab a quick coffee. So he came down here. And lo and behold, there the two of you were. He thought I might be interested to know that. And I was.’ He lifted his own mug again, more for something to do than for anything else, I decided, because his coffee must have been as cold and unappealing now as mine. ‘So that’s the story. Any questions?’

  I had several, actually, but only one that really mattered. ‘How can I be sure that Mrs Augustine is all right?’

  ‘You just have to trust me, on that. Take my word.’

  I said nothing, and he looked at me with understanding.

  ‘Kate, I’m not the enemy.’

  ‘I don’t know that.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  I looked away. His eyes were too compelling when they watched my face like that. He was right – I did know that he’d told me the truth, but these past weeks had changed me so deeply, I’d had my emotions and thoughts under guard for so long, that I couldn’t just switch it all off, not at once.

  I said, ‘And this is what you meant to tell me yesterday, I take it?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that we’d get farther if we worked together, if we pooled our information. You talked to Regina Marinho; I didn’t. You talked to Andrew Deacon.’

  Again, I didn’t see the need to tell him that he’d got it wrong – that Deacon and I hadn’t really discussed much of anything, and that I’d never received his report.

  Matt must have been getting used to speaking through my silences. He said, ‘Look, Kate, you have to trust me. I’m on your side. If there’s anything you’ve learnt, anything you’ve been told, that can help us build a stronger case against this guy, we need to know.’ His voice grew more persuasive. He reminded me, ‘This isn’t easy, what we’re trying to do here.’

  And he told me why. He told me that, unless we proved, beyond all doubt, that Deacon’s accusations had been true, we’d never convince the authorities that the man Deacon had named in his report might also be linked to the present-day murders. We’d never get justice for Deacon, or Cavender, or for my grandmother. The murderer would win again. ‘He’ll walk,’ said Matt. ‘Because even with the testimonials I’ve got to back it up, the report on its own isn’t going to be enough, I don’t think – not given this guy’s connections. He’d laugh at us. And I don’t think he’s about to confess.’

  He was right – he had made a strong argument. But he had made one mistake. He’d assumed that I, too, had read Deacon’s report, so he’d mentioned the murderer’s name. Not the name that he’d gone by in Portugal, years ago, but the name he went by now.

  Matt sensed the change in me, I think. ‘Kate?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’re tired, I know. Why don’t we leave this till tomorrow? Let me come and get you after breakfast, you can meet my friend…’

  I said, ‘Your old man in the corner office?’

  ‘Yes. I know he wants to talk to you.’

  No doubt he did, I thought, but I was still a bit preoccupied. My newly focused mind had travelled backwards, and I felt like I was standing once again beside the grave at Deacon’s funeral, with the young priest Thomas Beckett reading from Ecclesiastes, underneath the sun: For God shall bring every work into judgement, with every secret thing…

  Every secret thing…

  I looked at Matt. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow.’

  And I smiled, so he’d believe me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  England Again

  I pass, like night, from land to land;…

  The moment that his face I see,

  I know the man that must hear me:

  COLERIDGE, ‘THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER’

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4

  Later on, when I looked back on it, the only explanation I could give for what I did next was that, at the time, I saw no other way.

  My life, as I was living now, was not a life. To be in fear, to be in hiding, using someone else’s name – this wasn’t how I wanted to go on. And it would never stop, so long as both the murderer and I were still alive. My only thought on that long morning flight to London was that, one way or another, I would see it end, today.

  I’d left a note for Matt, at my hotel: just an apology for missing our appointment, nothing more, but I had felt I’d owed him that, at least, for all that he had done. I hadn’t said where I was going, or what I’d resolved to do, because he would have tried to stop me. And I wasn’t letting anybody stop me. This was my fight now, to finish.

  ‘Purpose of your trip?’ the customs agent asked me, as I stood before him with my single suitcase.

  ‘Business.’ For, although I couldn’t tell the truth, that answer came the closest.

  It was raining when I came out of the terminal. I ha
d lost a day through travelling – already it was night here, and the rain fell cold and unrelenting from the strangely glowing sky that seemed to hover, eerily, a step from total darkness.

  I said nothing in the taxi; only watched the water chasing down the window glass in rivulets, until I recognised the lights and streets of Shepherd’s Bush. ‘Turn here,’ I said.

  There was no sign of life from Margot’s flat. I hadn’t thought there would be, really, but a part of me had hoped. I paid the driver, set my suitcase on the step, and bent to feel beneath the iron railing for the key she always kept there. I’d expected she’d stop doing that last year, when her neighbour in the flat next door had woken in the middle of the night to find a man beside her bed, a living nightmare. The woman’s screams had sent the man running, but all the tenants on the street had been uneasy afterwards. One had moved, and one had bought a dog, and one had put in an alarm. But Margot, who’d fearlessly travelled all parts of the world on her own, and who liked to meet danger head on, had gone a different route: she’d left her spare key in its place, and got a gun.

  It wasn’t legal. How she’d come by it, I didn’t know, but Margot often played outside the rules. She had shown it to me once – a deadly thing, so cold and heavy in my hand. I had been glad to pass it back to her.

  ‘I couldn’t ever shoot a gun,’ I’d told her.

  That was then.

  I found the key, and got the front door open, locking it behind me as I stepped into the narrow hallway. I left the lights off – there was no point alarming the already vigilant neighbours, I thought, as I felt my way through to the back of the flat, and the bedroom. The gun, I hoped, would still be in her bedside table, where I’d seen it last.

  Had I not been so focused, I might well have caught the warning signs: the waiting silence of the rooms; the bedroom door conveniently ajar. But as it was, the rough male hands that grabbed me took me wholly by surprise.

  I struggled. I couldn’t call out – his arm pressed my throat in a choke-hold. In panic, I tried to gulp air and discovered I couldn’t do that, either. Bright spots of light exploded in my head, behind my eyes, and blood roared upwards to my ears.

  A blinding flash, as though someone had hit the wall switch for the lights, and I was turned, and then I heard the man say, ‘Jesus!’

  And he let me go.

  Without his arm to hold me up I landed heavy on my knees, bent forward, gasping. He came with me, leaning down so his concerned face hovered inches from my own. ‘You all right?’

  It was Margot’s friend, Nick, the security expert, who’d been such good company on my flight home to Toronto, three weeks ago. He’d done well to recognise me, after only one meeting and with my new hair colour, but clearly he knew who I was.

  ‘I didn’t realise it was you,’ he said. Twisting round, he called back to the darkness of the bedroom, ‘It’s your friend. The one from Canada.’

  And the next thing I knew, there stood Margot herself, in the doorway. She looked as surprised as I felt. ‘Kate?’ Her gaze raked my face, to be sure. ‘What on earth…?’

  I found something resembling my voice. ‘You’re alive.’

  ‘Well, of course I’m alive.’ She was already at my side, kneeling to get to my level, her eyes a mixture of confusion and concern. ‘Did Nick hurt you? We heard the noise, you see,’ she started to explain, as I began to notice how the two of them were dressed – or not dressed. That explained, I thought, why there had been no lights on in the flat, although it was still relatively early in the evening.

  Nick stood, and stretched, and defended his actions. ‘Yeah, well, it’s a good thing I was here, or she’d have met with you and that damned gun.’

  Margot ignored him. She was looking at my hair again… my face. ‘What have you done to yourself?’

  I said, ‘You haven’t heard?’ But it was obvious she didn’t have a clue about the shooting in Toronto, or the fact that I’d been on the run.

  ‘Heard what? I’ve been away. I just flew back this morning; haven’t even rung the office.’ She sat back on her heels, her eyes expectant. ‘What the hell have I been missing?’

  ‘Idiot,’ said Margot, but she meant it fondly. She leant to pour the dregs of our second bottle of Bordeaux into my glass. ‘So you were just going to march in here, take my gun, and…then what? Face the lion in his den, and shoot him?’

  ‘Yes.’ The small word had a stubborn edge. I hadn’t changed my point of view.

  ‘It wouldn’t work. Nick, talk to her.’

  Nick, who’d just speared a new bottle of wine with the corkscrew, looked up. ‘It would work, all right.’

  ‘Nick!’

  ‘But it’s not very smart. You’d get caught,’ he assured me. ‘It’s difficult to get away with murder.’

  ‘He did,’ I said. ‘He got away with it in Lisbon, all those years ago, and he’s getting away with it now. He’s untouchable.’

  Margot said, ‘No one’s untouchable.’ Leaning back in her warmly lit sitting-room chair, with the strange wooden carvings and tapestries everywhere round her, she looked like some tribal wise woman preparing to give her advice. ‘There must be some other way we can get him.’

  The ‘we’ came so easily to her, that for the first time since I’d left Tony’s house in Toronto, I felt that I wasn’t alone.

  Nick had bested the cork. It came clear with the sound of a shot. ‘I can think of a way.’

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5

  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.