A Delicate Truth (25 page)

If this was supposed to mollify Kit, it had
the opposite effect. Jabbing his stick at the dip directly below them, he roared above
the wind:

‘I’ll tell you why you’re
here. That’s where Jeb parked his bloody van! Down there! Tyre marks till the cows
trampled them.
Jeb
. Leader of our gallant British detachment. The chap they
chucked on the scrapheap for telling them the truth. Down on his uppers. And you had no
part in any of it, I suppose?’

‘None whatever,’ Toby replied.

‘Then
maybe
you’ll tell
me,’ Kit suggested, his rage abating slightly, ‘before one or other of us
goes mad, or we
both
do: how come you
don’t
know what
Operation Wildlife
was about, whereas you
do
know Paul and Jeb and
the rest of them
despite
the fact that your own minister kept you out of the
loop,
which I personally find bloody hard to believe?
’

Delivering his simple answer, Toby was
surprised to discover that he had undergone no crisis of the soul, only an agreeable
sense of catharsis:

‘Because I tape-recorded your meeting
with the minister. The one where you said you were his red telephone.’

Kit took a while to absorb this:

‘Why the hell would Quinn do that? I
never saw a man so jumpy. Tape his own secret meeting? Why?’

‘He didn’t tape it. I
did.’

‘Who for?’

‘Nobody.’

Kit was having trouble making himself
believe this:

‘Nobody
told
you to do it?
You did it absolutely on your own. Secretly? With nobody’s permission?’

‘Correct.’

‘What an absolutely bloody filthy
thing to do.’

‘Yes. Wasn’t it?’ Toby
agreed.

In single file they returned to the house,
Kit stomping ahead with Sheba and Toby trailing at a respectful distance.

Heads down, they sat at the long pine table
drinking Kit’s best Burgundy and eating Mrs Marlow’s steak-and-kidney pie
while Sheba watched covetously from her basket. It was beyond Kit’s powers to
neglect his duties as a host, and Toby, whatever his faults might be, was his guest.

‘Don’t envy you bloody Beirut, I
will say,’ he said stiffly, replenishing Toby’s glass.

But when, in a spirit of reciprocity, Toby
enquired after Kit’s tour of the Caribbean, he was curtly warned off:

‘Not a good subject in this house,
I’m afraid. Bit of a sore point.’

After which, they had to make do with
Foreign Office chit-chat – who the big guns were these days, and whether Washington
might finally come back to the Office, or be given to another outsider. But Kit very
quickly lost patience and soon they were scurrying across the stable yard in pouring
rain, Kit leading the way with a torch as they skirted piles of sand and granite setts.
Then the sweet smell of hay as they passed empty horseboxes on their way to the old
saddle room, with its brick walls, high, arched windows, and iron Victorian fireplace,
ready laid.

And on an old linen press that did duty as a
sofa-table, a wad of A4 paper, a pack of best bitter beer and a bottle of J&B,
unbroached – all set ready, Toby assumed, not in honour of himself, but of Jeb, the
guest who hadn’t come.

Kit had dropped into a crouch and was
holding a match to the fire.

‘We’ve got a thing here called
Bailey’s Fayre,’ he said into the fireplace, poking with his long forefinger
at the flames. ‘It’s supposed to go back to God knows when. Load of
balls.’ And after puffing vigorously at the kindling: ‘I’m about to
break every bloody rule I ever believed in, in case you didn’t know.’

‘Well, that makes two of us,
doesn’t it?’ Toby replied.

And some kind of complicity was born.

Toby is a good listener, and for a couple of
hours he has barely spoken except to offer the odd murmured word of sympathy.

Kit has described his recruitment by Fergus
Quinn, and his
briefing by Elliot. He has flown to Gibraltar as Paul
Anderson, paced his hated hotel room, huddled on the hillside with Jeb, Shorty, Andy and
Don, and provided his own ear- and eyewitness account of
Operation Wildlife
and
its supposedly glorious conclusion.

He has described the Fayre: scrupulously
monitoring himself as he goes along, catching himself out on this or that small point
and correcting himself, then carrying on.

He has described with determined dispassion,
though it comes hard to him, the discovery of Jeb’s handwritten receipt, and its
impact upon Suzanna, then himself. He has yanked open a drawer of his desk and with a
brusque ‘take a look for yourself’, pressed on him the flimsy piece of lined
paper.

He has described with thinly disguised
revulsion his meeting with Jay Crispin at the Connaught, and his reassuring phone call
to Suzanna that in retrospect seems to cause him more pain than any other single
episode.

And now he is describing his encounter with
Jeb at the club.

‘How the hell did he know you were
staying there?’ Toby interrupted in subdued bewilderment, at which a kind of joy
briefly suffused Kit’s harrowed features.

‘Bugger stalked me,’ he said
proudly. ‘Don’t ask me how. All the way from here to London. Saw me board
the train in Bodmin, rode on it himself. Stalked me to the Connaught, stalked me to my
club.
Stealth
,’ he added in marvel, as if stealth were a brand-new
concept to him.

The club bedroom boasts a school bedstead, a
washbasin with a towel no bigger than a pocket handkerchief and a two-bar electric fire
that used to be coin-operated until an historic decision by the committee ruled that the
cost of heating be included in the nightly charge. The shower is an up-ended coffin of
white
plastic crammed into a cupboard. Kit has successfully found the
light switch but not yet closed the bedroom door behind him. Wordless, he watches Jeb
get up from his chair, advance across the floor to him, pick the room key out of his
hand, lock the door with it, drop it into the pocket of his smart blazer, and return to
his seat beneath the open window.

Jeb orders Kit to switch off the overhead
light. Kit obeys. Now the only light source is the glow of London’s orange night
sky through the window. Jeb asks Kit for his cellphone. Kit mutely hands it over.
Unbothered by the half-darkness, Jeb removes the battery, then the SIM card as deftly as
if he were stripping down a gun, and tosses the pieces on to the bed.

‘Take your jacket off, please, Paul.
How drunk are you?’

Kit manages ‘not very’. The
Paul
discomforts him but he takes his jacket off anyway.

‘Have a shower if you like, Paul. Just
leave the door open.’

Kit doesn’t like, but ducks his head
into the washbasin and sluices water on to his face, then rubs his face and hair with
the towel in an effort to rub himself sober, but he is becoming more sober by the second
anyway. A mind under siege can do a lot of things at once, and Kit’s is doing most
of them. He is making a last-ditch effort to persuade himself that Jay Crispin was
telling the truth and Jeb is the barking psychopath with the gift of the gab that
Crispin said he was. The bureaucrat in him assesses his best course of action on this
unproven assumption. Should he humour Jeb, offer him sympathy, medical help? Or should
he – fat chance – lull him into complacency and wrest the key from him? Or failing that,
make a mad dash for the open window and the fire escape? All this over urgently
transmitted messages of love and abject apology to Suzanna, and requests to Emily for
advice on the handling of the mentally sick and potentially violent patient.

Jeb’s first question is the more
alarming for its placidity:

‘What did Crispin tell you about me,
Paul, back there in the Connaught Hotel?’

To which Kit mumbles something to the effect
that Crispin merely confirmed that
Operation Wildlife
was an unqualified
success, an intelligence coup of exceptional value, and bloodless:

‘Everything it was trumped up to be,
in fact.
More
’ – cavalierly adding – ‘despite that foul message you
wrote on your so-called receipt for my wife’s handbag.’

Jeb stares at Kit without expression, as if
he has misheard. He whispers something to himself that Kit can’t catch. Then there
follows a moment which Kit, for all his determined objectivity, seems at a loss to
describe in comprehensible terms. Somehow Jeb has crossed the bit of threadbare carpet
that separates him from Kit. And Kit, with no memory of how he got there, finds himself
jammed up against the door with one arm behind his back and one of Jeb’s hands
holding him by the throat, and Jeb is talking into his face and encouraging Kit’s
replies with smacks of his head against the doorpost.

Kit stoically recounts what happened
next:

‘
Bang
. Head against the
doorpost. Red sky at night. “What were you getting out of it, Paul?” What
d’you mean? I say. “Money, what d’you think I mean?” Not a
bloody bean, I told him. You’ve got the wrong man.
Bang
. “What was
your share of the bounty, Paul?”
Bang
. Didn’t have a bloody share,
I told him, and take your hands off me.
Bang
. I was angry with him by then.
He’d got my arm in this bloody horrible twist. If you go on doing that, I said,
you’ll break my fucking arm, and neither of us will be any the wiser. I’ve
told you everything I know, so leave me alone.’

Kit’s voice lifts in pleased
surprise:

‘And he did, dammit! Just like that.
Left me alone. Took a long look at me, stood back and watched me slide down the wall in
a heap. Then helped me to my feet again like a bloody Samaritan.’

Which was what Kit called the turning point:
when Jeb went back to his chair and sat in it like a beaten boxer. But now Kit becomes
the Samaritan. He doesn’t like the way Jeb is heaving and shaking:

‘Sort of sobbing noise coming out of
him. Lot of choking.
Well
’ – indignantly – ‘if your wife’s
been ill half her life, and your daughter’s a bloody doctor, you don’t just
sit there gawping, do you? You
do
something.’

So Kit’s first question of Jeb, after
they have sat in their separate corners for a while, is whether there’s anything
Kit can get for him, his idea being – though he keeps the thought to himself – that
in extremis
he’ll track down old Em, as he insists on calling her,
and get her to phone through a prescription to the nearest all-night chemist. But
Jeb’s only response is to shake his head, get up, walk across the room, pour
himself a tooth-glass of water from the washbasin, offer it to Kit, drink some himself,
and sit down again in his corner.

Then after a while – could have been
minutes, says Kit, but neither of them’s going anywhere so far as he knows – Jeb
asks, in a hazy sort of voice, whether there’s any food about. It’s not that
he’s actually hungry as such, he explains – bit of pride kicking in here,
according to Kit – it’s for fuel purposes.

Kit regrets he has no food with him, but
offers to pop downstairs and see if he can rustle something up with the night porter.
Jeb receives this suggestion with another prolonged silence:

‘Seemed a bit
out of it
, poor
chap. Gave me the impression he’d lost his train of thought and was having a spot
of trouble getting it back. Know the feeling well.’

But in due course, good soldier that he is,
Jeb braces himself, and digs in his pocket and hands over the bedroom key. Kit gets up
from the bed and puts on his jacket.

‘Cheese all right?’

Cheese will be fine, says Jeb. But plain
mousetrap, he can’t handle blue. Kit thinks that’s all he’s got to
say, but he’s mistaken. Jeb needs to make a mission statement before Kit goes off
to find cheese:

‘It was one big load of lies, see,
Paul,’ he explains, just as Kit is preparing to go downstairs.
‘
Punter
was never in Gibraltar. It was all made up, see. And
Aladdin
, well, he was never going to meet him, not in those houses or
anywhere else, was he?’

Kit is wise enough to say nothing.

‘They conned him. Ethical did. Conned
that minister of yours, Mr Fergus Quinn. Jay Crispin, the great one-man
private-intelligence service. They led Quinn up the garden path and over the edge, same
as where he led us, didn’t he? Nobody wants to admit they handed over a couple of
million dollars in a suitcase for a load of old cobblers, well do they?’

Kit supposes not.

Jeb’s face has gone back into darkness
and he is either silently laughing or – only Kit’s guess – silently weeping. Kit
dithers at the door, not wanting to leave him, but not wanting to fuss over him
either.

Jeb’s shoulders settle. Kit decides
it’s all right to go downstairs.

Returned from his foray in the bowels of the
club, Kit heaves the bedside table to the middle of the floor and sets a chair either
side of it. He lays out a knife, bread, butter, Cheddar cheese and two pint bottles of
beer and a jar of Branston Pickle that the night porter insisted on including in
exchange for his twenty-pound tip.

The bread is white and pre-sliced in
anticipation of tomorrow’s breakfast. With a slice laid flat on his palm, Jeb
spreads butter, adds the cheese and trims it till it tessellates on the bread.
Then he spoons pickle on top, takes up another slice of bread and
makes a sandwich and cuts it methodically into quarters. Regarding such precision as
unnatural in a Special Forces soldier, Kit puts it down to Jeb’s troubled state of
mind and busies himself with the beer.

‘So down the hill we go to the terrace
then, don’t we?’ Jeb resumes, when he’s taken the edge off his
appetite. ‘No point in not, really, is there? Well, we had our reservations,
naturally. Fix, find and finish? Well, maybe we hadn’t begun, what with Andy
having done a job with Elliot way back, and not possessing a high opinion of him,
frankly, not of his abilities, and not of the intelligence at his disposal either.
Source
Sapphire
her name was, according to Elliot at the pre-operational
briefing.’