A Delicate Truth (34 page)

And if the last line on inspection read more
starkly to him than the rest, there was no time for a second draft if he was going to
make the eight forty-two.

Taking the letter upstairs, he laid it on
the dust sheets in front of their bedroom door and weighted it with a chisel from his
faded canvas tool-bag.

Delving in the library, he found an unused
A4 On Her Majesty’s Service envelope from his last posting, inserted his draft
document and sealed it with liberal quantities of Sellotape, much in the manner that he
had sealed his letter to young Bell last week.

Driving over the windswept moonscape of
Bodmin Moor, he enjoyed symptoms of release and levitation. Alone on the station
platform among unfamiliar faces, however, he was seized with an impulse to hurry home
while there was time, grab back the letter, get into his old clothes and tell Walter,
Anna and Mrs Marlow not to bother after all. But with the arrival of the express train
to Paddington, this mood, too, passed, and soon he was treating himself to the full
English breakfast ‘at seat’, but tea not coffee, because Suzanna worried
about his heart.

While Kit was speeding on his way to London,
Toby Bell sat rigidly at his desk in his new office, addressing the latest crisis in
Libya. His lower back was in near-terminal spasm, for which he had to thank
Emily’s sofa, and he was keeping himself going on a diet of Nurofen, the remains
of a bottle of sparkling water, and disjointed memories of their last couple of hours
together in her flat.

At first, having supplied him with pillow
and eiderdown, she had withdrawn to her bedroom. But quite soon she was back, dressed as
before, and he was more awake and even less comfortable than he had been when she left
him.

Seating herself out of striking distance,
she invited him to describe his journey to Wales in greater detail. All too willingly,
he obliged. She needed the grim details, and he provided them: the travelled blood that
couldn’t possibly have travelled there and turned out to be red lead, or
didn’t; Harry’s concern to get the highest price for Jeb’s van;
Brigid’s unsparing adjectival use of ‘fucking’ and her cryptic account
of Jeb’s last joyful phone call to her following his encounter with Kit at the
club, urging her to dump Harry and prepare for his return.

Emily listened patiently, mostly with her
large brown eyes, which in the half-light of early morning had acquired a disconcerting
immobility.

He then told her about Jeb’s fight
with Shorty over the photographs, and how Jeb had afterwards hidden them, and how Brigid
had discovered them, and how she had let Toby copy them into his BlackBerry.

On her insistence, he showed them to her,
and watched her face freeze the way it had frozen in the hospital.

‘Why do you think Brigid trusted
you?’ she asked, to which he could only reply that Brigid was desperate and had
presumably come to the conclusion that he was trustworthy, but this didn’t seem to
satisfy her.

Next she needed to know how he had wangled
Jeb’s name and address out of the authorities, to which Toby, while not
identifying Charlie by name, beyond saying that he and his wife were old friends,
explained that he had once done a favour for their musical daughter.

‘And apparently she really
is
a very promising cellist,’ he added inconsequentially.

Emily’s next question therefore struck
him as totally unreasonable:

‘Did you sleep with her?’

‘God, no! That’s bloody
outrageous!’ he said, genuinely shocked. ‘What the hell made you think
that?’

‘My mother says you’ve had
masses of women. She checked you out with her Foreign Office wives.’

‘Your
mother
?’ Toby
protested indignantly. ‘Well, what do the wives say about
you
, for
Christ’s sake?’

At which they both laughed, if awkwardly,
and the moment passed. And after that, all Emily wanted to know was who had murdered
Jeb, assuming he
was
murdered, which in turn led Toby into a rather
inarticulate condemnation of the Deep State, and thence into a denunciation of the
ever-expanding circle of non-governmental insiders from banking, industry and commerce
who were cleared for highly classified information denied to large swathes of Whitehall
and Westminster.

And as he concluded this cumbersome
monologue, he heard six striking, and was by now sitting on the sofa and no longer lying
on it, which allowed Emily to sit primly beside him with the burners on the table in
front of them.

Her next question has a schoolmistressy
ring:

‘So what do you hope to get out of
Shorty when you meet him?’ she demands, and waits while he thinks of an answer,
which is the more difficult since he hasn’t got one; and anyway he hasn’t
told her, for fear of alarming her, that he will be
meeting Shorty in
the first instance under the slender guise of a journalist, before declaring himself in
his true colours.

‘I’ll just have to see which way
he jumps,’ he says nonchalantly. ‘If Shorty’s as cut up about
Jeb’s death as he says he is, maybe he’ll be willing to step into
Jeb’s shoes and testify for us.’

‘And if he isn’t
willing?’

‘Well, I suppose we just shake hands
and part.’

‘That doesn’t sound like Shorty,
from what you’ve told me,’ she replies severely.

And at this point, a drought overcomes their
conversation, during which Emily lowers her eyes and lays her fingertips together
beneath her chin in contemplation, and he supposes she is preparing herself for the
phone call she is about to make to her father, by way of Mrs Marlow.

And when she reaches out her hand, he
assumes that it’s to pick up the black burner. But instead, it’s his own
hand she picks up, and holds gravely in both of hers as if she’s taking his pulse,
but not quite; then without comment or explanation lays it carefully back on his
lap.

‘Actually, never mind,’ she
mutters impatiently to herself – or to him; he’s not quite sure.

Does she want his comfort in this moment of
crisis, and is too proud to ask for it?

Is she telling him she has thought about him
and decided she isn’t interested, so have his hand back?

Or was it the imaginary hand of a present or
former lover that she was reaching for in her anxiety? – which was the interpretation he
was still favouring as he sat diligently at his new desk on the first floor of the
Foreign Office, and the silver burner in his jacket pocket announced in a raucous burp
that it had a text message for him.

Toby was not at this point wearing his
jacket. It was slung over the back of his chair. So he had to swing round and fish for
the burner with rather more enthusiasm than he would have deployed
had he known that Hilary, his formidable second-in-command, was standing in the doorway
needing his urgent attention. Nevertheless he persisted in the movement and, with a
smile that asked her forbearance, extracted the burner from his pocket, searched for the
unfamiliar button to press, pressed it and, still smiling, read the message:

Dad has written a mad letter to Mum and
is on the train to London.

The Foreign Office waiting room was a
windowless dungeon of prickly chairs, glass tables and unreadable magazines about
Britain’s industrial skills. At the door lurked a burly black man in a brown
uniform with yellow epaulettes, and at a desk an expressionless Asian matron in the same
uniform. Kit’s fellow detainees included a bearded Greek prelate and two indignant
ladies of an age who had come to complain about their treatment at the hands of the
British Consulate in Naples. It was of course a crying outrage that a ranking former
member of the Service – and a Head of Mission at that – should be required to wait here,
and in due season he would make his feelings known in the right quarter. However,
alighting at Paddington, he had vowed to remain courteous but purposeful, keep his wits
about him at all times and, in the interests of the greater cause, ignore whatever
slings and arrows came his way.

‘My name’s
Probyn
,’ he had told them cheerfully at the front gate, volunteering his
driving licence in case they needed verification. ‘
Sir Christopher
Probyn
, former High Commissioner. Do I still regard myself as staff? Apparently, I
don’t. Well, never mind. How are you?’

‘To see?’

‘The Permanent Under-Secretary –
better known these days, I understand, as the Executive Director,’ he added
indulgently,
careful to conceal his visceral distaste at the
Office’s rush towards corporatization. ‘I know it’s a big call and
I’m afraid I haven’t a date. But I do have a very sensitive document for
him. Failing that, his Private Secretary. Rather confidential, I’m afraid, and
rather urgent’ – all delivered merrily through a six-inch hole in a wall of
armoured glass, while on the other side of it an unsmiling youth in a blue shirt and
chevrons tapped details into a computer.

‘
Kit
, they’ll probably
know me as in his Private Office. Kit
Probyn
. You’re quite
sure
I’m not staff? Probyn with a Y.’

Even when they patted him down with an
electric ping-pong bat, took his cellphone off him and fed it into a cabinet of
glass-fronted lockers with numbered keys, he had continued to remain totally calm.

‘You chaps full time here, or do you
look after other government buildings as well?’

No answer, but still he hadn’t
bridled. Even when they tried to get their hands on his precious draft document, he had
remained courteous, if implacable.

‘No go, I’m afraid, old boy,
with all due respect. You have your duty to do, I have mine. I came here all the way
from Cornwall to hand-deliver this envelope, and hand-deliver it I shall.’

‘We only want to run it through X-ray,
sir,’ the man said, after a glance at his colleague. So Kit looked on benignly
while they operated their laborious machine, then grabbed back the envelope.

‘And it
was
the Executive
Director in person you were wishing to see, was it, sir?’ the colleague enquired,
with what Kit might easily have mistaken for irony.

‘Indeed it was,’ he replied
jauntily. ‘And still is. The big chief himself. And if you’d pass that
message upstairs rather sharply, I’d be obliged.’

One of the men left the cubicle. The other
stayed and smiled.

‘Come by train then, did you?’

‘I did.’

‘Nice trip, was it?’

‘Very, thank you. Most
enjoyable.’

‘That’s the way then. My wife
comes from Lostwithiel, actually.’

‘Splendid. A proper Cornish girl. What
a coincidence.’

The first man had returned: but only to
escort Kit to the featureless room where he now sat, and had sat for the last half-hour,
inwardly fulminating but resolved not to show it.

And now at last his patience was rewarded,
for who should come bustling up to him grinning like a schoolgirl but Molly Cranmore
herself, his long-time buddy from Logistical Contingencies, wearing a name tag and a
bunch of electronic keys round her neck and holding out her hands and saying, ‘Kit
Probyn, what a lovely, lovely surprise!’ while Kit in return was saying,
‘Molly, my God, of
all
people, I thought you’d retired
aeons
ago, what on earth are
you
doing here?’

‘Alumni, darling,’ she confided
in a happy voice. ‘I get to meet all our old boys and girls whenever they need a
helping hand or fall by the wayside, which isn’t you
at all
, you lucky
man, you’re here on business, I know.
Now
then. What
kind
of
business? You’ve got a document and you want to hand it personally to God. But you
can’t because he’s on a swan to Africa –
well deserved
, I may add.
A
great
pity because I’m sure he’ll be furious when he hears he
missed you. What’s it about?’

‘I’m afraid that’s
something I can’t tell even you, Molly.’

‘So can I take your document up to his
Private Office and find the right minion for it? – I can’t? – not even if I
promise not to let it out of my sight in the meantime? – not even then. Oh dear,’
she confirmed, as Kit continued to shake his head. ‘So does it have a name, your
envelope? Something that will set bells ringing on the first floor?’

Kit debated the question with himself. A cover
name, after all, was what it said it was. It was there to cover things up. Ah, but was a
cover name
of itself
something to be covered up? If so, then there would have
to be cover names for cover names, ad infinitum. All the same, the idea of blurting out
the hallowed word
Wildlife
in the presence of a Greek prelate and two irate
ladies was more than he could stomach.

‘Then kindly tell them that I need to
speak to his highest authorized representative,’ he said, hugging the envelope to
his chest.

Getting there
, he thought.

Toby, meanwhile, has sought instinctive
refuge in St James’s Park. With the silver burner pressed to his ear, he is
hunched under the very same plane tree from which, just three years earlier, he
dispatched his futile appeal to Giles Oakley, informing him that a fictitious Louisa had
walked out on him and begging his advice. Now he is listening to Emily, and noting that
her voice is as calm as his own.

‘How was he dressed?’ he
asks.

‘The full monty. Dark suit, best black
shoes, favourite tie and a navy raincoat. And no walking stick, which Mother takes as an
omen.’

‘Has Kit told your mother that
Jeb’s dead?’

‘No, but I did. She’s distraught
and very scared. Not for herself, for Kit. And, as always, practical. She’s
checked with Bodmin station. The Land Rover’s in the car park and they think he
bought a senior citizen’s day return, first class. The train was on time out of
Bodmin, and arrived on time in Paddington. And she’s rung his club. If he shows
up, would they please get him to ring her? I told her that wasn’t good enough. If
he shows up,
they
should ring her. She said she’d call them again. Then
she’ll call me.’