It was late when he got back to his own office. Nearly dinnertime. His secretary, a self-martyring girl with a joyless expression, was putting on her coat when the telephone rang.
‘Not to worry, I’ll get it myself,’ he said, waving her on. He wasn’t meaning to be nice. Truth was, he’d simply reached the point where other people were an irritation, and he wanted to be rid of her. He wouldn’t know, till afterwards, how fortunate an impulse it had been.
The telephone kept ringing, an annoyance in itself. He picked it up, his tone impatient.
It was Ivan Reynolds calling. Not the smoothly condescending voice of his assistant, but the man himself, abrasive, demanding that Cayton-Wood come to the house. It was not a request, but a summons.
Cayton-Wood kept his temper with an effort. He was tired. He’d had a long and trying day, and clashing swords with Ivan Reynolds wasn’t how he cared to end it. ‘I’m afraid that’s quite impossible.’
‘The side door. After nine o’clock,’ was Reynolds’s answer, and the line went rudely dead.
He had a mind to go straight home, but he was frankly curious why someone who so publicly despised him should be asking for a meeting. So, of course, he went.
He’d been to Reynolds’s great house on the hill once before, and he knew of the existence of the side door, though he’d never had the privilege of using it. It was the unofficial entrance, unattended, used by close friends and, presumably, the mistresses. A person given access to the side door didn’t have to ring the bell, or knock; he simply let himself in, like a member of the household. Cayton-Wood thought it decidedly odd that he should have been asked to go in by that door. He went in with his guard up.
Inside, it appeared there was only one direction for the visitor to go, and that was upwards. A set of broad stairs, soft with carpet, climbed and turned and climbed again towards a spacious landing. Here again, there was no choice – just one great set of double doors of panelled oak set in the wall ahead.
Cayton-Wood waited a moment, leaning his weight on his walking stick while he recovered from the stairs. He wasn’t about to show weakness to Reynolds. The man was beneath him in every respect, and would need a reminder of that.
With his breath back to normal, he knocked at the doors.
‘Come in.’
The room, which seemed to function as a bedroom and a sitting room, was very large, and furnished all in browns and golds and varnished woods, a masculine domain. A Tiffany lamp by the four-poster bed cast a dragonfly pattern of amber and red on the wall, falling short of the shadows that lay in the corners.
Cayton-Wood hadn’t seen Reynolds since the surgery, and it surprised him to see how thoroughly the cancer had consumed the older man. The fiery American, who once had ruled a room by simply standing in it, now seemed smaller, withered, insubstantial, as though part of him had already begun to cross the grey divide between the living and the dead.
Death was not unfamiliar to Cayton-Wood. He’d seen it often enough, in North Africa; but it had always been quick death, in battle, and nothing like this. This repulsed him, and yet he found it gruesomely intriguing.
‘Taking good care of you, are they?’ he asked, looking round. ‘I thought you had a nurse.’
‘I gave her the night off.’
‘I see. Was that wise?’
‘It was necessary.’ Settling back on his pillows, Reynolds folded his arms in an attitude that suggested his old, imperious self. His features, tightened as they were with pain, were openly contemptuous. ‘I have to say, I didn’t think you’d have the guts to come.’
‘How could I not? Your invitation was so charming.’ He had not been asked to sit, but his leg was throbbing wickedly, and since there was no one to stop him doing so, he took a chair and swung it round to face the bed, and sat. There was no one to stop him lighting a cigar, either, so he did that too, and blew a careless stream of smoke towards the ceiling. ‘What is on your mind?’
‘Manuel Garcia.’
Cayton-Wood purposely didn’t react. ‘What about him?’
‘He’s dead. He shot himself this afternoon.’
He hadn’t seen that coming – it had not been in his plan, and it would complicate things. Damn, he thought. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘Of course you didn’t,’ Reynolds said. ‘Spivey wasn’t on the job today, was he, so he couldn’t tell you, and no one outside of the company knows, yet. Just the Coroner, and I don’t think he’s on your payroll, is he?’
Cayton-Wood smiled a tiny, cold smile that stopped short of his eyes. ‘Not yet, no.’
‘You haven’t asked me why Garcia killed himself.’
‘I can’t say I’m much interested.’
Reynolds’s smile was rather different. It was predatory, satisfied – the smile of a cat that’s backed a mouse into a corner. ‘He explained it all in here,’ he said, and reaching to the table at his bedside he held up an empty envelope. ‘Oh, I don’t have the letter anymore,’ he said, as Cayton-Wood leant forward. ‘I had Roger pass it on to your Ambassador. I thought that he might want to know what you’ve been up to.’
Cayton-Wood sat back. The smoke from his cigar wreathed upward, and he narrowed his eyes against it, trying to look unconcerned. ‘I rather think my word might have more weight with the Ambassador than that of a damned Spanish spy.’
‘Maybe. But I’ll make sure that people get to hear about it. That’s all you have to do in this town to ruin a man – start a rumour, raise suspicion. You know all about that, don’t you?’ The wily eyes were fixed on his in steady accusation. ‘Now you’ll know how it feels. I don’t think you’ll be welcome in Lisbon too long. You’re about to become an embarrassment.’
Cayton-Wood knew he was right. Whether the British believed what Garcia had written or not, the suspicion itself would be Cayton-Wood’s undoing. He’d no longer be of use to them. His careful plans, his careful life, were set to crumble round him like a child’s house of blocks, and all because Garcia had gone noble on him, bloody fool. He cursed the Spaniard silently.
Reynolds watched him, gloating. ‘Need a drink? There’s brandy in that bookcase, just behind you. You could bring me one, too, while you’re at it. I’m in a mood to celebrate.’
Cayton-Wood rose, taking advantage of the opportunity to turn his back and hide his expression from Reynolds. Pouring the brandy, he focused his mind, keeping calm. If Garcia had been able to find a way, however final, out of his dilemma, surely there was some way out of this, if one could only find the path.
‘I’ve got you,’ said Reynolds. ‘It took me some time, but I’ve finally got you, you bastard.’ His words held no violence, and yet there was hatred enough to make plain why he’d called Cayton-Wood here tonight. It hadn’t been enough that he should pass Garcia’s letter on and know that punishment would follow; he had wanted to deliver the coup de grâce himself – to look his adversary in the eye and feel the satisfaction of that victory, before death could come and take that from him, too. He said, ‘Your connections won’t help you this time. There’s nothing you can do to make those friends of yours support you, in the face of treason.’
Cayton-Wood set down his brandy. With the other glass in hand, he turned, advancing on the bed, his thinking done. He passed the glass to Reynolds. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘there is one thing.’
It was so simple, he thought afterwards, to take the pillow, press it to the ill man’s face, and hold it through the moment of weak struggle.
On the table by the bed there was a telephone. He picked it up, and calmly dialled a number. ‘It’s Jack Cayton-Wood. I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’ve got a situation here. I’m going to need your help.’
He’d stopped now, and was watching me. The ageing eyes were shrewd. ‘You didn’t know,’ he said. ‘You didn’t know that it was Reynolds.’
When I didn’t answer, he went on, ‘At any rate, that was the beauty of it all, you see. To kill a dying man. There’s no suspicion, then, of murder. We were on o
ur own, the two of us. No witnesses.’
‘And Whitehall backed you up.’
‘Of course. They had no choice. An SIS man killing Ivan Reynolds? At the least, it would have caused a dreadful row with the Americans.’
It struck me cold how casually he spoke about it. He had calculated all this in the time it took to pour a glass of brandy, back in Ivan Reynolds’s bedroom. He’d known that, by committing such a crime – one that could cause a minor nightmare for his government, in terms of its relations with America – he had guaranteed the SIS would shield him, in its own self-interest. And it had.
He told me how. ‘They fixed the whole scene beautifully. You never would have known that I was there. There was some plan, I believe, to buy the doctor off, but in the end that proved unnecessary. He took the death for what it seemed to be, and looked no further.’
‘And Roger Selkirk? He’d seen the letter Garcia left, hadn’t he? At least, he’d delivered it to the Ambassador.’
‘Yes, well, Roger was a different matter. He was bought. Or rather, we persuaded him that speaking out would not be wise.’
‘You blackmailed him.’
‘A nasty word. But yes, if you prefer to call it that.’
I frowned. ‘But how? I mean, everybody knew he was a homosexual, from what I’m told. That couldn’t have possibly hurt him, to have that come out.’
‘No, you’re quite right. It couldn’t. But the gentleman with whom he was consorting at the time was, shall we say, not open with his preferences. A private man, a family man, a man of some importance. It would have been disastrous for him if certain facts had been made public.’
I know my face reflected what I thought of him. ‘Why didn’t you kill Roger at the time, if he was such a threat?’
‘It wasn’t my decision.’ He reflected a moment, then said, ‘I’ll tell you, the person I ought to have killed was your Deacon. They wouldn’t let me do that, either, but they didn’t know what a colossal pain he would become. I knew. I knew the morning of the funeral, when he came to see me.’
* * *
His secretary, looking mournful, hovered in the doorway of his office.
‘Yes?’ he snapped, not looking up. ‘What is it?’
‘Mr Deacon’s in the waiting room. He’s wondering if he might have a word.’
‘Yes, all right, send him in.’ Shutting his ledger with a frown of impatience, he pushed it to one side and glanced at the clock. It was less than an hour till the funeral, and he had been told to be there at the start of the service. ‘I don’t have much time,’ was his greeting to Deacon, ‘so what’s on your mind?’
‘Murder,’ Deacon replied, in a mild voice that didn’t quite balance the chill of his eyes.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘No, I don’t believe that you’re the least bit sorry, that’s the problem. You’ve got used to doing what you want, to whom you want, and damn the consequences. Well, I’m here to hold you to account.’ He hadn’t moved, yet it felt like he’d somehow advanced upon Cayton-Wood.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I don’t know what it was you told Garcia, what you said to him, but I do know your hand was on that trigger every bit as much as his was. You’re responsible.’
Cayton-Wood lifted his eyebrows, looking at Deacon in much the same way that a man eyes a bug he’s preparing to squash. His smile was a reflex action, meaningless. ‘Actually, if you must know the truth, the blame lies more with you. It was Garcia’s rather touching, if misguided, sense of loyalty to you that made him choose to blow his brains out.’ Then, because that gave him the advantage, he pushed back his chair and stood, preparing for an exit before Deacon could come back at him with questions. ‘You know, much as I’d like to continue this, Andrew, the fact is I don’t have the time. So if you’ll kindly step aside…’
‘Make no mistake, I will report you. I will tell all I know about this game that you’ve been playing with the Spanish – and I know a great deal more than you might think.’
Cayton-Wood was nearly at the door. He could have walked away, and held his tongue; but, goaded by the thought that Deacon had the gall to talk to him – to him – in such a tone, he turned. ‘Don’t you dare try to threaten me. You’ll find you’re playing far out of your league. No one threatens me, understand? Ask Ivan Reynolds.’
He saw that strike home. Then he pushed through the doorway and out of the office and slammed the door, hard, at his back.
‘I shouldn’t have said that, of course,’ he admitted to me. ‘It amounted, I suppose, to a confession, and it caused no end of trouble for the higher-ups at Whitehall. Deacon wrote to them, soon after. He reported me.’ The fact seemed to amuse him, briefly. ‘They promised him a full investigation, then they reassigned him back to England. Reynolds, after all, was dead; there wasn’t any purpose left for Deacon at the company. The story given out was that his wife had died, quite suddenly, and he was going home because of that. I went home, too, but not till summer’s end, and at my own request. There was an opening in London that I fancied, and I’d grown rather tired of life abroad. Deacon was being kept out of the way, but he still was a bit of a nuisance. I paid him a visit to try to convince him to stop.’
‘At Southampton,’ I said. ‘At the docks.’ The scene James Cavender had witnessed as a boy, and had remembered. ‘I gather it was you who ruined the shipment of his household goods?’
‘You know about that, do you? It was just a little parting gift, arranged before the ship left Lisbon harbour. Quite a simple thing, to pay a chap to soak a crate with water. And it did have a spectacular effect. I thought it might help,’ he said, ‘frighten him off. But he was like a bulldog with a bone. He simply wouldn’t let it drop.’
Deacon had petitioned Whitehall, sending letter after letter telling what he knew, demanding Cayton-Wood be brought to justice.
Whitehall had continued to put Deacon off with promises – they’d hold internal inquiries, they’d said. They would investigate. ‘Truth was,’ the Colonel said, ‘they rather hoped he’d go away. But then he wrote to the Prime Minister, and once he’d done that, well, they had to take action. So someone decided the simplest thing was to kill me.’
His ‘death’, conveniently at sea, had been carefully faked, right down to the formal death announcement in The Times, and the funeral at St Martin-in-the-Fields. And Deacon had been taken to that funeral, and then afterwards, in offices at Whitehall, he’d been asked, in patriotic terms, to keep his mouth shut. Nothing good could come of it, not now, they’d said – not now that Cayton-Wood was dead. It would do damage, on a diplomatic level.
‘They had him pegged,’ the Colonel said. ‘He was an honourable man. Presumably he didn’t want to see his country pay the debt for one man’s sins. For my sins. It was me that he was after, and if I were dead, in his mind, that was justice of a sort. And I did suffer,’ he assured me. ‘It wasn’t easy, being dead. I had to sever contacts, leave the country altogether.’
He had gone to Kenya, started a new life in business there, choosing the Damien-Pryce name by cobbling together the surnames of two of his ancestors. He’d done well in his business, and better with his women. He had married twice. ‘Outlived them both,’ he said, ‘which left me rather nicely situated. I’d have likely stayed in Kenya, if it hadn’t been for Patrick’s mother.’ She’d been over on holiday, visiting friends, when he’d met her. He’d been doubly seduced, by her prettiness and by her money, and when he had learnt that her aunt was a powerful Member of Parliament, he had proposed on the spot.
‘So I came back to England,’ he said. ‘Not a problem, by that time. The war had been over for twenty-five years. There wasn’t really anyone at Whitehall who remembered me, or why I had been exiled. My parents were gone. True, my brother and his wife were still on the family estate up in Derbyshire, but that was miles from my wife’s home, down here, and the odds of my ever meeting up with anybody who had known me were even slimmer than the odds that they
might recognise me. I’ve often thought that ageing is the best disguise of all. Nobody notices one’s face, when one grows old.’
‘But Deacon noticed,’ I reminded him. ‘He saw you at the Chelsea Flower Show.’
‘That was unfortunate.’ The Colonel filled his port glass for a third time. ‘I’d never been to the damned thing before. Not my idea of fun, you see. Only this year Venetia’d got tickets and my wife was quite keen and the both of them thought I could do with the outing, and a man like me stands very little chance,’ he said, ‘when the women around him decide he could do with an outing.’ There was the charm again, effortless.
Ignoring it, I asked him, ‘Did you know that he had seen you?’
‘Oh, yes. Heavens, yes. I don’t know which of us was more affected by it, him or me. I knew I’d made a terrible mistake, you understand. If I’d been on my own, it might have been all right, but being in Venetia’s company…she’s highly recognisable. I knew that Deacon wouldn’t have much trouble finding out my name, the name that I’d been using since the war, and then…’ He shrugged. ‘I knew he wouldn’t let it go, a second time. I knew he’d give me trouble.’ He paused, and drank, and then he said, ‘It wasn’t that I thought that he’d have better luck, this time around, with Whitehall – it was still in their best interest to make sure the truth of Reynolds’s dying didn’t come to light. I knew that, if he went to them, they’d bury his report. But life, if nothing else, has taught me to expect the unexpected. So I hired a man to watch him; let me know what he got up to.’ There’d been nothing, in the summer, to be much cause for alarm. Then, ‘One day I got a call to say that Deacon had gone up to London. Sat in on a trial at the Old Bailey, of all things. At first I thought he’d gone to get a look at Patrick, but it wasn’t Patrick’s trial. And my man said that Deacon hadn’t seemed to be at all interested in the proceedings; he had spent the whole time watching a young woman, with red hair, and when she’d left, he’d tailed this same young woman back to her hotel. It made me curious. So, just for one day, I had my man follow you, instead of Deacon. That,’ he said, ‘is how I learnt your name.’ He set the port glass down, with care. ‘Your occupation.’
Every Secret Thing Page 33
