Every Secret Thing

by Susanna Kearsley

  My frown deepened. I was electrically aware of my surroundings, now. I didn’t want to be here. I’d feel safer in my room upstairs, where I at least could lock the door to give me the illusion of security.

  I stood. In my imagination, all eyes watched me as I walked toward the exit, my shoes loud against the marble. In my hurry to get out, I pulled the door too quickly and its swing threw me off balance. I would have fallen if the man just coming through the door had not been quick enough to catch my elbows; hold me steady.

  ‘Careful,’ he said.

  Something warned me, as I raised my head to thank him. Some prescient tingle, that might have been simply the voice, or the height that the voice had been speaking from, led me to know I’d be facing a person who wasn’t a stranger.

  His eyes were brown. That registered. I hadn’t really seen them, in the rain outside the English Church. They laughed at me. He said, unable to resist the line, ‘We have to stop running into each other like this.’

  ‘Sorry.’ I straightened.

  ‘No problem. No harm done. I see your glasses survived this time.’

  Instinctively, I raised one hand to make sure I still had them on. It wasn’t often that I found myself unsure of what to say, and the moment of silence stretched awkwardly.

  Finally, I asked him inanely, ‘You’re staying here too, are you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, letting go my elbows. His quick downward glance held amusement. ‘Small world.’

  ‘Yes.’ My world seemed increasingly small these days.

  Stepping aside, he said, ‘My offer to buy you a coffee still stands, by the way. If you feel like it later, I’ll be in the bar.’

  And then, with a nod, he politely moved past me and into the restaurant, and waited for someone to seat him. At least, I thought, he wasn’t being pushy. I met all types, when I travelled, and the pushy ones were worst of all.

  I fought the urge to glance behind me as I went upstairs. The twisting corridors felt claustrophobic, and unsafe. It was a huge relief to reach my room, and turn the key behind me.

  Up-ending the manila envelope that Anabela had given me onto the bed, I shuffled the papers and clippings in search of Regina Marinho’s address. With that in hand, I tried to dial directory assistance, looking for her number. But I had no luck. It wasn’t listed.

  Heavy-shouldered with defeat, I crossed to tug the curtains tighter shut across the window. From the courtyard, I heard music, faintly, and the sounds of voices drifting over from the bar.

  I wondered, vaguely, whether the American would actually be looking for me, later on tonight. It didn’t matter – I would not be there. I’d had a long day, an exhausting day; I didn’t need to waste time drinking coffee with a stranger in a hotel bar. His being handsome didn’t enter into it. Or maybe, to be fair, it did.

  I’d had my share, already, of unwanted complications.

  So instead I took a bath, and went to bed, and slept so soundly that I didn’t hear the footsteps coming softly down the hall, or hear them stop outside my room, or hear the rasp of paper being pushed beneath my door.

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30

  The envelope was lying on the floor inside the door when I woke up next morning.

  At first I thought it might have been a note from Anabela, to explain why she had taken off so suddenly. But when I had the single page unfolded, I could see it was a fax. It hadn’t come from Anabela. It was from Joaquim, my English Cemetery man.

  He’d spoken to his friend, it seemed. His fax was brief – a name and address, little more. I was surprised he’d followed through. I hadn’t thought he would. It didn’t matter that I’d already been given the address, by Anabela. It was always good to have a second source, and this confirmed that Regina Marinho in fact lived in Evora. And there was more: he had sent me her phone number.

  Not a bad way to begin my day, I thought.

  The woman who picked up the phone at the other end when I called through spoke good English, like everyone else I had met here in Portugal. Only she wasn’t the woman I wanted. Not Regina Marinho. Her housekeeper, maybe. Regina Marinho was out.

  I asked, ‘Can you tell me when she might be home?’

  ‘I do not know.’ Coldly, unhelpful, as though she suspected I wanted to come and break into the house later.

  ‘No, I mean…this afternoon,’ I said. ‘Would she be home this afternoon?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘May I leave a message?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘My name is Katherine Allen. I’m in Lisbon, and I’d really like to speak to her. If she could call me back, at my hotel…’ And I read her the number, although from the silence I had no great faith she was writing it down.

  ‘Does she know you?’ the voice asked, protectively.

  ‘No.’ And then, the half-truth that had worked for me so far: ‘She knows my grandfather. His name is Andrew Deacon.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘She will remember him, I’m sure. They used to work together.’

  ‘Yes, I will give her your message, when she comes,’ the voice replied, but in a tone that made no promises. Dismissing me, she said goodbye and hung up the receiver.

  But I didn’t leave it there. I hadn’t travelled all this way to be put off so easily. Regina Marinho might have someone screening her calls, but she couldn’t screen me if I turned up in person and knocked at the door.

  It was time for a road trip.

  I wasn’t as keen on the prospect as I would have been a day ago – not because of Anabela’s telling me that someone else was also on the hunt for Deacon’s secretary, but because my self-protective instincts had been strengthened by my realisation, at the English Cemetery, that Joaquim had not been wholly truthful with me. He had known Deacon – at the very least, he’d recognised the name, I’d seen it in his eyes – but he’d denied it.

  Up till then, I had been thinking all of Deacon’s friends and colleagues were my allies in this business, and that finding them would be my only challenge. Having met Joaquim, I now thought differently. I knew there was a chance that Deacon’s secretary might not be all I’d assumed. It stood to reason, after all, that just as anyone who’d known Deacon in his Lisbon days might also know about the murder, so, too, any of them might have been involved.

  They might not all be glad to see me.

  And I wouldn’t know, until I’d met them, which of them to trust.

  Finding a rental car company hadn’t been difficult.

  Finding my way out of Lisbon was trickier. Once I got clear of the small streets and onto the highways that carried me south and then east, I breathed easier. Until I caught sight of the car, in my mirror.

  A gunmetal-grey hatchback, keeping its distance. I changed lanes and passed a few cars, to be certain, and for a few minutes I nearly believed I had only imagined it. But then the grey car settled behind me again, with a steady but menacing purpose.

  Something uncomfortable stirred in my memory – the car that had swished to a stop at the kerb as I’d flagged down a cab near the old English Cemetery. It, too, had been grey, and a hatchback. I hadn’t thought much of it, at the time. I’d just assumed that somebody was stopping to drop someone off, but now another possible scenario, more sinister, occurred to me. I couldn’t help wondering what might have happened if I hadn’t run for that taxi.

  I glanced in the side mirror. The sun was high and over us, reflecting on the windshield so I couldn’t see the driver, just the car, and that was staying far enough back that I couldn’t tell its make, or read the licence plate. I slowed a bit, but it slowed, too, and when I sped up again it matched my pace exactly.

  My mouth dried. I felt the sudden fear, the pure adrenalin surge of a lone swimmer spotting a shark in her wake. Because I was alone. This was a busy stretch of highway, but if I pulled off and stopped, no one would notice my distress – especially not when they saw the grey car stopping, too, to ‘assist’ me.

  Tony hadn’t coached
me, in Toronto, on what I should do if I were being followed on the highway. On foot, yes. He’d covered that. On foot, I was supposed to find a busy place – a restaurant, maybe, or a market, packed with people – and seek shelter there. Safety in numbers, he’d told me. My odds for survival were better as part of a crowd.

  It was all the advice that I had now, to go on. My eyes searched the road ahead, desperate, and saw in the distance a rest stop, with gas pumps. The rental car shuddered and leapt as I floored the accelerator, rocketing between the cars ahead of me with reckless disconcern. When I’d put three cars and a tour bus between me and my pursuer, I glanced at the mirror. The grey hatchback was nosing out impatiently behind the line of cars, but it was blocked.

  I grabbed my chance, and took the exit.

  It was sheer luck that the tour bus came off with me, like a shield that kept me safely out of view. I saw the grey car shoot straight past on the highway as I pulled around behind the flat-roofed restaurant building with the bus, and eased into a parking space.

  My hands were clenched so tightly round the steering wheel I had to consciously release my grip. And then the shaking started. It took hold of me so violently I nearly didn’t have the strength to stand, to leave the car, and yet I knew I had to manage it. The tour group had begun to disembark beside me, streaming from the bus doors in a cheerful, noisy, brightly coloured flood of human chaos. There was not much time.

  I stopped the shaking with an effort, making tight fists with my hands, and pushed my door open. For a minute, on the asphalt, I felt vulnerable. A target. Then the people from the tour group, without meaning to, enveloped me, and like a cork on water I was carried in their current to the restaurant, through the swinging doors.

  It was a cafeteria. I bought a cup of coffee and a roll, and found a seat in the middle of the crowding tables, facing the front windows but well back from them, where I could see the road.

  It wasn’t till some fifteen minutes later, when I’d started to relax a little, that the grey hatchback came smoothly down the exit ramp, into the parking lot.

  Whoever was behind the wheel had seen through my manoeuvre, and had doubled back.

  I didn’t breathe. I knew nobody looking in could see me, but I shrank against my chair, as if that futile act could hide me. I wanted to bolt, make a run for it, but I could hear Tony’s voice, in my head, saying: ‘Stay with the group,’ so I stayed with the group, still not breathing, and willed the grey car to pass by.

  A grey Renault Clio – I saw what it was, now. It crawled past the windows, the sun still reflecting too brightly for me to see who was inside. And then it vanished, and I knew that it had gone behind the building. Where my car was parked, in plain view, by the tour bus. The waiting was an agony. My heartbeats shook my ribcage, painful, pounding in my ears. And then, just when I thought I couldn’t bear the tension any more, the grey hatchback slid by, and turned, and sped back up the ramp onto the highway, heading east, to Evora.

  I exhaled, on a shaky sigh. My coffee had grown cold, the cream congealing on its surface, but I sat there several minutes longer, sipping it, until the tour group’s members started clearing off their tables, standing, gathering around their guide. I stood, too, and moved in among them, using them as camouflage to cross the parking lot again and slide into my rental car.

  I made sure that I got back on the highway well before their bus did, though. I didn’t want anything blocking my view of what might be behind me. Or what might be waiting ahead.

  The landscape changed.

  Wide, empty stretches of harvested grain fields, and scrub brush and parched-looking pines and cork trees with their blood-red trunks. An arid place, watchful and silent, where the frames of a few of the low whitewashed houses were still painted blue, in the Moorish tradition, to protect against bad spirits, and the evil eye.

  The evil eye, I thought now, could have seen a long way, here.

  Last night, at dinner, Anabela had described to me this region. ‘It is called the Alentejo – means “beyond the Tejo”, our name for the river that you call the Tagus. In the Alentejo there are not so many rivers as there are when one goes north, and there are not so many people, and the people who do live there have known suffering, throughout our history. This was the land for the battles, in Portugal. For the invasions. So in the Alentejo most of the villages and towns they are surrounded by the walls of a castle, and most famous of these is the regional capital, Evora. It is considered our museum town, our jewel. And it’s a fascinating place, like in the old days – all whitewashed inside, with its wrought-iron balconies, and with the lamps, and with small streets, surrounded by walls that were built by the Romans.’

  In my mind, from her description, I expected a medieval apparition, a walled fortress like you sometimes saw in movies, rising stalwart from the landscape of pine-covered hills, but of course it wasn’t anything like that. The town of Evora had long since grown beyond its ancient walls, and had spilt outwards in an orderly array of white-walled buildings, some quite modern, topped with red-tiled roofs and edged with ochre-yellow paint.

  I chose a hotel from the several clustered just outside the high town walls, to the south-west, and parked the car at the back. I hadn’t caught sight of the gunmetal-grey Renault Clio since I’d left the rest stop, but I didn’t want to take chances. I didn’t want my car to lead anyone to Regina Marinho’s front door. Besides which, I’d feel safer on the sidewalks, with the other tourists. I would walk from here.

  There weren’t too many cars, as it turned out, within the old town walls. I noticed them when they went by, the sound a rude disturbance of the more congenial human noises – lively voices, laughter, passing footfalls on the cobblestones, the noises which had doubtless filled these narrow streets a thousand years ago; before that, even, when the Romans had first come to build their walls and settle here.

  It was after I’d crossed a large square with a fountain that I first heard someone behind me. Firm steps, with no owner – an echo that followed when I turned a corner, and stopped when I stopped to look over my shoulder. I saw no one there. Quickening my pace, I turned in to a narrow street, with pretty balconies of old wrought iron, and shutters that rolled down to hide every window. The cobblestones beneath my feet were granite, hard and ringing, softened only by a long cascade of flowered vine that tumbled down one house’s wall to puddle on the pavement.

  Still the footsteps came, and then another sound, that I heard only very faintly, to begin with – the melodic, lively twittering of songbirds.

  Looking up, I saw the source. Beside two windows on the upper storey of the nearest house, someone had fastened several birdcages against the outside wall, their wires dark against the whitewashed plaster, bright colours flashing through them as the birds within the cages fluttered, hopped, and sang.

  A voice spoke, behind me – a pleasant voice, speaking in accented English. ‘They are beautiful, do you not think?’

  Wheeling round, I saw a woman standing several yards away. She had a striking face, high-cheekboned, stoic in a way that made it hard to guess her age. Her accent, too, was not the easiest to place. It sounded Eastern European. Russian, possibly. Or Polish.

  My first reaction was relief. I’d feared the worst, when I had heard those footsteps, and it made me feel much better to find out my fears had only been imagined.

  Still looking at the birds, she said, ‘It must be a hard life for them, being out here every day where they can see the sky, and yet not fly where they would go. Like little prisoners.’

  I was about to agree when her gaze came down, meeting mine. Something behind her eyes made me uncomfortable. ‘Then again,’ she said, ‘they might not care. They might not even know that they’ve been caught.’ Her smile was almost imperceptible. ‘Some creatures don’t.’

  The unease I’d felt earlier resurfaced with a rush.

  She took a step towards me, and the hand that had been in her pocket started to move, also, but a burst of laughter inter
rupted from around the corner, and a clattering of people surged into the street, dividing us. A tour group – very possibly the same one that had been my saviours earlier. I didn’t stop to reason, then. I tore my feet from where they had been rooted on the cobblestones, and fell in with the crowd. I looked back once, and saw the woman standing where I’d left her, making no attempt to follow, but that didn’t reassure me.

  And the minute I had turned the corner, out of sight, I ran.

  I made certain I was all alone, that nobody was watching, before I approached the house.

  It looked like nothing from the street. It was, in actual fact, rather ugly – a plain, flat-walled, two-storey slab with three iron-grilled windows, two up and one down, rimmed round with the same mustard-yellow paint that traced the frame and the foundation line. The whitewash was peeling in places and hadn’t been able to cover the horizontal line of power cables that ran straight across the building and connected with the next adjoining housefront. I might have made the mistake of thinking this was a poor neighbourhood, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the green iron gates to the garage-like opening in that plain wall had been left to stand open, allowing me to see not just the tidy black sedan that had been parked upon the intricate mosaic-patterned cobblestones, but the whole of what appeared to be a sheltered courtyard, thick with potted trees and plants, with delicately worked wrought-iron balconies in front of long french windows, and the lovely Portuguese blue tiles known as azulejos set around at intervals to beautify the space.

  I didn’t go into the courtyard at first. There was an intercom button beside the street entrance, and that’s what I pushed. It took a long time before somebody answered. The housekeeper again, I guessed, and knowing she spoke English I identified myself and said, ‘I telephoned earlier.’