A Delicate Truth (11 page)

‘So, Toby’ – Horst, sounding not
quite as casual as he means to. ‘Your Minister Quinn is Karl Marx in reverse, we
hear. Who needs the state, when private enterprise will do the job for us? Under your
new British socialism, we bureaucrats are redundant, you and I.’

Unsure where Horst is coming from, Toby
prevaricates:

‘I don’t remember putting
that
into his speech,’ he says, with a laugh.

‘But behind closed doors, that is what
he is telling us, is it not?’ Horst insists, lowering his voice further.
‘And what I am asking you is, Toby, off the record, do you support your Mr
Quinn’s proposition? It’s not improper to have an opinion, surely. As a
private person, you are entitled to an off-the-record opinion about a private
proposition.’

Ella is crayoning a dinosaur. Monika is
assisting her.

‘Horst, this is Greek to me,’
Toby protests, dropping his voice to match Horst’s. ‘
What
proposition? Made to whom? About what?’

Horst seems undecided, then shrugs.

‘Okay. Then I may tell my boss that
Minister Quinn’s Private Secretary knows nothing? You don’t know that your
minister and his talented business associate are urging my boss to invest informally in
a private corporation that specializes in a certain precious commodity? You don’t
know that the commodity on offer is supposedly of higher quality than anything available
on the open market? I may tell him this officially? Yes, Toby?’

‘Tell your boss whatever you like.
Officially or otherwise. Then tell me what on earth the commodity is.’

High-grade information, Horst replies.

More commonly known as secret intelligence.

Collected and disseminated in the private
sphere only.

Unadulterated.

Untouched by government hands.

And this talented business associate of his?
Does he have a name? – Toby, incredulously.

Crispin.

Quite a persuasive fellow, says Horst.

Very English.

‘
Tobe. A quickie, sir, if I
may.
’

Since returning to London, Toby has found
himself in an impossible quandary. Officially he knows nothing of his minister’s
record of mixing private business with official duties, let alone of the scandal at
Defence. If Toby goes to his regional director, who expressly forbade him to enquire
into such matters, he will be betraying the confidences of Matti and Laura.

And Toby as ever is conflicted. His own
ambitions matter to him too. After almost three months as the minister’s Private
Secretary, he has no desire to compromise whatever bond he has forged with him, tenuous
though it is.

He is wrestling with these abstractions
when, at four o’clock one afternoon that same week, he receives the familiar
summons over the ministerial phone. The mahogany door is for once ajar. He taps, shoves
and enters.

‘Close it, please. Lock.’

He closes, locks. The minister’s
manner strikes him as a bit too affable for comfort: and the more so when he rises
blithely from his desk and, with an air of schoolboyish conspiracy, steers him to the
bay window. The newly installed music system, his pride, is playing Mozart. He lowers
the volume but is careful not to dowse it.

‘All well with you, Tobe?’

‘All fine, thanks.’

‘Tobe, I very much fear I’m
about to screw up yet another evening for you. Are you game for that?’

‘Of course, Minister. If it’s
necessary’ – thinking, Oh Christ, Isabel, theatre, dinner, not another.

‘I’m receiving royalty
tonight.’

‘Literally?’

‘Figuratively. But probably a damn
sight richer.’ Chuckle. ‘You help out with the honours, make your mark, go
home. How’s that?’

‘My
mark
,
Minister?’

‘Circles within circles, Tobe.
There’s a chance you may be invited aboard a certain very secret ship. I’ll
say no more.’

Aboard? Invited by
whom
?
What
ship? Under whose captaincy?

‘May I know the names of your royal
visitors, Minister?’

‘Absolutely
not
’ –
beaming smile of complicity – ‘I’ve spoken to the front gate. Two visitors
for the minister at seven. No names, no pack drill. Out by eight thirty, nothing in the
book.’

Spoken to the front gate?
The
man’s got half a dozen underlings at his beck and call, all bursting to speak to
the front gate for him.

Returning to the anteroom, Toby rallies the
reluctant staff. Judy, social secretary, is provided with a ministerial car and
dispatched post-haste to Fortnum’s to buy two bottles of Dom Pérignon, one
jar of foie gras, one smoked salmon pâté, a lemon and assorted crispbreads.
She’s to use her own credit card and the minister will reimburse. Olivia, the
diary secretary, phones the canteen and confirms that two bottles and two jars, contents
unstated, can be kept on ice till seven provided it’s all right with Security.
Grudgingly, it is. The canteen will supply an ice
bucket and pepper.
Only when all this is achieved may the remaining staff go home.

Alone at his desk, Toby affects to work. At
6.35 he descends to the canteen. At 6.40 he is back in the anteroom spreading foie gras
and smoked salmon pâté on crispbread. At 6.55 the minister emerges from his
sanctum, inspects the display, approves it and places himself before the anteroom door.
Toby stands behind him, on his left side, thus leaving the ministerial right hand free
to greet.

‘He’ll be on the dot. Always
is,’ Quinn promises. ‘So will she, the darling. She may be who she is, but
she’s got his mindset.’

Sure enough, as Big Ben strikes he hears
footsteps approach down the corridor, two pairs, the one strong and slow, the other
light and skittish. A man is outstriding a woman. Punctually at the last stroke, a
peremptory rap resounds on the anteroom door. Toby starts forward but is too late. The
door is thrust open and Jay Crispin enters.

The identification is immediate and definite
and so expected as to be anticlimactic. Jay Crispin, in the flesh at last, and high time
too. Jay Crispin, who caused an unsung scandal at Defence and will never grace the
corridors of Whitehall and Westminster again; who spirited Quinn from the lobby of his
grand hotel in Brussels, sat in the front passenger seat of the Citroën sedan that
took him to La Pomme du Paradis, breakfasted with him in the ministerial suite and
orated from the lectern in Prague: not a ghost, but himself. Just a trim,
regular-featured, rather obviously pretty man of no depth: a man, in short, to be seen
through at a glance; so why on earth hasn’t Quinn seen through him?

And halfway down Crispin’s left arm,
clinging to it with one bejewelled claw, trips a tiny woman in a pink chiffon dress with
matching hat and high-heeled shoes with diamanté buckles.
Age?
It depends which parts of the lady we are talking about, monsieur
.

Quinn reverently takes her hand and ducks
his heavy boxer’s head over it in a crude half-bow. But Quinn and Crispin are old
buddies reunited: see the rugged handshake, the manly shoulder-patting of the
Jay-and-Fergus show.

It’s Toby’s turn to be
acknowledged. Quinn lavishly to the fore:

‘Maisie, allow me to present my
invaluable Private Secretary,
Toby Bell
. Tobe, kindly pay your respects to Mrs
Spencer Hardy of Houston, Texas, better known to the world’s elite as the one and
only
Miss Maisie
.’

A touch like gauze drawn across Toby’s
palm. A Deep South murmur of ‘Why
hullo there, Mr Bell
!’ followed
by a vampish cry of ‘Hey, now listen, Fergus, I’m the only
belle
around here!’ to gusts of sycophantic laughter in which Toby obligingly joins.

‘And Tobe, meet my old friend Jay
Crispin. Old friend since –
when
, for God’s sake, Jay?’

‘Good to meet you, Toby,’
Crispin drawls in upper-end English of the very best sort, taking Toby’s hand in a
kinsman’s grasp and, without releasing it, vouchsafing him the sort of sturdy look
that says: We’re the men who run the world.

‘And good to meet
you
’
– omitting the ‘sir’.

‘And we do
what
here,
exactly?’ – Crispin, still gripping his hand.

‘He’s my Private Secretary, Jay!
I told you. Bound to me body and soul and assiduous to a fault. Correct,
Tobe?’

‘Pretty new to the job, aren’t
we, Toby?’ – finally letting his hand go, but keeping the ‘we’ because
they’re these two blokish chaps together.

‘Three months,’ the
minister’s voice chimes in again excitedly. ‘We’re twins. Correct,
Tobe?’

‘And where were we before, may one
enquire?’ – Crispin, sleek as a cat and about as trustworthy.

‘Berlin. Madrid. Cairo,’ Toby
replies with deliberate carelessness, fully aware that he’s supposed to be
making his mark
, and determined not to. ‘Wherever I’m sent,
really’ –
you’re too fucking close. Get out of my airspace
.

‘Tobe was posted out of Egypt just
when Mubarak’s little local difficulties started to appear on the horizon,
weren’t you, Tobe?’

‘As it were.’

‘See much of the old boy?’ –
Crispin enquires genially, his face puckering in earnest sympathy.

‘On a couple of occasions. From a
distance’ –
mainly I dealt with his torturers
.

‘What do you reckon to his chances?
Sits uneasy on his throne, from all one hears. Army a broken reed, Muslim Brotherhood
rattling at the bars: I’m not sure I’d like to be in poor Hosni’s
shoes right now.’

Toby is still hunting for a suitably anodyne
reply when Miss Maisie rides to his rescue:

‘
Mr Bell
. Colonel Hosni
Mubarak is
my friend
. He is America’s friend, and he was
put on earth
by God to make peace with the Jews
, to fight communism and jihadist terror.
Anybody seeking the downfall of Hosni Mubarak in his hour of need is an Iscariot, a
liberal and a surrender monkey, Mr Bell.’

‘So how about
Berlin
?’
Crispin suggests, as if this outburst has not taken place. ‘Toby was in
Berlin
, darling. Stationed there. Where we were just days ago.
Remember?’ – back to Toby – ‘what dates are we talking here?’

In a wooden voice, Toby recites for him the
dates he was in Berlin.

‘What sort of work, actually, or
aren’t you allowed to say?’ – innuendo.

‘Jack of all trades, really. Whatever
came up,’ Toby replies, with assumed casualness.

‘But you’re straight – not one
of
them
?’ – tipping Toby the insider’s smile. ‘You must be,
or you wouldn’t be here, you’d be the other side of the river’ –
knowing glance for the one and only Miss Maisie of Houston, Texas.

‘Political Section, actually. General
duties,’ Toby replies in the same wooden voice.

‘Well, I’m damned’ –
turning delightedly to Miss Maisie – ‘Darling, the cat’s out of the bag.
Young Toby here was one of Giles Oakley’s bright boys in Berlin during the run-up
to
Iraqi Freedom
.’

Boys? Fuck you.

‘Do I
know
Mr Oakley?’
Miss Maisie enquires, coming closer to give Toby another look.

‘No, darling, but you’ve heard
of him. Oakley was the brave chap who led the in-house Foreign Office revolt. Got up the
round robin to our Foreign Secretary urging him not to go after Saddam. Did you draft it
for him, Toby, or did Oakley and his chums cobble it together all by
themselves?’

‘I certainly didn’t draft
anything of the sort, and I’ve never heard of such a letter, if it ever existed,
which I seriously doubt,’ the astonished Toby snaps in perfect truth as elsewhere
in his mind he grapples, not for the first time, with the enigma that is Giles
Oakley.

‘Well, jolly good luck to you,
anyway,’ says Crispin dismissively and, turning to Quinn, leaves Toby to
contemplate at his leisure the same straight, suspect back that he glimpsed through the
frosted glass of his minister’s hotel suite in Brussels, and again through the
castle window in Prague.

Urgently google Mrs Spencer Hardy of Houston,
Texas, widow and sole heiress of the late Spencer K. Hardy III, founder of Spencer Hardy
Incorporated, a Texas-based multinational corporation trading in pretty well everything.
Under her preferred sobriquet of Miss Maisie voted Republican Benefactress of the Year;
Chairperson, the Americans for Christ Legion; Honorary President of a cluster of
not-for-profit pro-life and family-value organizations; Chair of the American Institute
for Islamic Awareness. And, in what looked almost like a recent add-on: President and
CEO of an otherwise undescribed body calling itself Ethical Outcomes Incorporated.

Well, well, he thought: a red-hot evangelist
and ethical to boot. Not a given. Not by any means.

For days and nights, Toby agonizes over the
choices before him. Go running to Diana and tell all? – ‘I disobeyed you, Diana. I
know what happened at Defence and now it’s happening all over again to us.’
But what happened at Defence is none of his business, as Diana forcefully informed him.
And the Foreign Office has many hellholes earmarked for discontents and
whistle-blowers.

Meanwhile, the omens around him are daily
multiplying. Whether this is Crispin’s work he can only guess, but how else to
explain the ostentatious cooling of the minister’s attitude towards him? Entering
or leaving his Private Office, Quinn now grants him barely a nod. It’s no longer
Tobe
but
Toby
, a change he would once have welcomed. Not now. Not
since he failed to make his mark and be invited aboard
a certain very secret
ship.
Incoming phone calls from Whitehall’s heavy hitters that were until
now routinely passed through the Private Secretary are rerouted to the minister’s
desk by way of one of several newly installed direct lines. In addition to the heavily
flagged despatch
boxes from Downing Street that Quinn alone may handle,
there are the sealed black canisters from the US Embassy. One morning a super-strong
safe mysteriously appears in the Private Office. The minister alone has the combination
to it.