A Delicate Truth (17 page)

Toby sat on the edge of his bed. On the
sheets, traces of their final loveless coupling. On the BlackBerry beside him, the text
of his last message to Oakley sent an hour ago:
love life shattered vital we talk
soonest, Toby
.

Change sheets.

Clear bathroom of Isabel’s
detritus.

Wash up last night’s supper
dishes.

Pour rest of red Burgundy down sink.

Repeat after me:
countdown’s
already begun … here we are with the bloody clock ticking … see
you on the night, as they say, Paul
.

Which
night? Last night? Tomorrow
night?

And still no message.

Make omelette. Leave half.

Switch on
Newsnight
, encounter one
of God’s little ironies. Roy Stormont-Taylor, Queen’s Counsel, the silkiest
silk in the business, in striped shirt and white open-necked collar, is pontificating on
the essential differences between law and justice.

Take aspirin. Lie on bed.

And at some point, unknown to himself, he
must have dozed off, because the shriek of a text message on his BlackBerry woke him
like a fire alarm:

Urge you forget lady
permanently.

No signature.

Text back, furiously and impulsively:
No
way. Too bloody important. Vital we discuss soonest. Bell.

All life has ceased.

After the headlong sprint, the sudden,
endless, fruitless wait.

To sit all day long at his kneehole desk in
the ministerial anteroom.

To work methodically through his emails,
take phone calls, make them, barely recognizing his own voice.
Giles, where in
God’s name are you?

At night, when he should be celebrating
bachelorhood regained, to lie awake longing for Isabel’s chatter and the solace of
their carnality. To listen to the sounds of carefree passers-by in the street below his
window and pray to be one of them; to envy the shadows in the curtained windows
opposite.

And once – is it night one or two? – to be
woken from a
half-sleep to the absurdly melodious strains of a male
choir declaring itself – as if for Toby’s ears alone – ‘
impatient for
the coming fight as we wait the morning’s light
’. Convinced he is
going mad, he scrambles to the window and sees below him a ring of ghostly men in green,
bearing lanterns. And he remembers belatedly that it’s St Patrick’s Day and
they are singing ‘A Soldier’s Song’ and Islington has a thriving Irish
population: which in turn sends his mind skimming back to Hermione.

Try calling her again? No way.

As to Quinn, the minister has providentially
embarked on one of his unexplained absences, this time an extended one. Providentially?
– or ominously? Only once does he offer any sign of life: a mid-afternoon phone call to
Toby’s cellphone. His voice has a metallic echo, as if it is speaking from a bare
cell. Its tone verges on the hysterical:

‘Is that you?’

‘It is indeed, Minister. Bell. What
can I do for you?’

‘Just tell me who’s been trying
to get hold of me, that’s all. Serious people, not riff-raff.’

‘Well, to be frank, Minister, nobody
very much. The lines have been strangely quiet’ – which is no less than the
truth.

‘What do you mean,
“strangely”? Strangely how? What’s strange? There’s nothing
strange going on, hear me?’

‘I wasn’t suggesting there was,
Minister. Just that the silence is – unusual?’

‘Well, keep it that way.’

As to Giles Oakley, unwavering object of
Toby’s despair, he is being equally elusive. First, according to Victoria, his
assistant, he is still in Doha. Then he is in conference all day and possibly all night
as well, and may on no account be disturbed. And when Toby asks whether the conference
is in London or Doha, she replies tartly that she is not authorized to supply
details.

‘Well, did you tell him it was urgent,
Victoria?’

‘Of course I bloody did.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘That urgency is not synonymous with
importance,’ she replies haughtily, no doubt quoting her master word for word.

It is another twenty-four hours before she
calls him on the internal line, this time all sweetness and light:

‘Giles is at Defence right now.
He’d love to talk to you but it’s likely to drag on a bit. Could you
possibly meet him at the foot of the Ministry’s steps at half seven, take a stroll
along the Embankment and enjoy the sun?’

Toby could.

‘And you heard all this how?’
Oakley enquired conversationally.

They were strolling along the Embankment.
Chattering girls in skirts flounced past them arm in arm. The evening traffic was a
stampede. But Toby was hearing nothing but his own too-strident voice and Oakley’s
relaxed interjections. He had tried to look him in the eye and failed. The famous Oakley
pebble jaw was set tight.

‘Let’s just say I picked it up
in bits,’ Toby said impatiently. ‘What does it matter? A file Quinn left
lying about. Things I overheard him whispering on the phone. You
instructed
me
to tell you if I heard anything, Giles. Now I’m telling you!’

‘I instructed you
when
,
exactly, dear man?’

‘At your own house. Schloss Oakley.
After a dinner discussing alpacas. Remember? You asked me to stick around for a
Calvados. I did. Giles, what the fuck
is
this?’

‘Odd. I have no memory of any such
conversation. If it took place, which I dispute, then it was surely private,
alcohol-induced and not in any circumstance for quotation.’

‘Giles!’

But this was Oakley’s official voice,
speaking for the record; and Oakley’s official face, not a muscle moving.

‘The further suggestion that your
minister, who I understand to have spent a relaxing and well-deserved weekend in his
recently acquired Cotswold mansion in the company of close friends, was engaged in
promoting a hare-brained covert operation on the shores of a sovereign British colony –
wait!
– is both slanderous and disloyal. I suggest you abandon
it.’

‘Giles. I don’t believe
I’m hearing this.
Giles!
’

Grabbing Oakley’s arm, he drew him
into a recess in the railing. Oakley looked down icily at Toby’s hand; and then,
with his own, gently removed it.

‘You are mistaken, Toby. Were such an
operation to have occurred, do you not imagine that our intelligence services, ever
alert to the danger of private armies going off the reservation, would have advised me?
They did
not
so advise me, therefore it has manifestly not occurred.’

‘You mean the spies don’t
know
? Or are deliberately looking the other way?’ – thoughts of
Matti’s phone call – ‘What
are
you telling me, Giles?’

Oakley had found a spot for his forearms and
was straining forward as if to relish the bustling river scene. But his voice remained
as lifeless as if he were reading from a position paper:

‘I am telling you, with all the
emphasis at my command, that there’s nothing for you to know. There
was
nothing to know, and there will
never
be anything to know, outside the
fantasies of your heat-oppressed brain. Keep it for your novel, and get on with your
career.’

‘
Giles
,’ Toby pleaded,
as if in a dream. But Oakley’s features, cost him what it might, remained rigidly,
almost passionately, in denial.

‘Giles
what
?’ he
demanded irritably.

‘This isn’t my
heat-oppressed brain
talking to you. Listen:
Jeb.
Paul. Elliot. Brad. Ethical Outcomes. The Rock.
Paul’s in our very own
Foreign Office. He’s a member in good standing. Our colleague. He’s got a
sick wife. He’s a
low flyer
. Check the leave-of-absence roster and
you’ve got him nailed. Jeb’s
Welsh
. His team comes from our own
Special Forces. They’ve been struck off the regimental roll in order to be
deniable. The Brits push from the land, Crispin and his mercenaries pull from the sea
with a little help from Brad Hester, graciously financed by Miss Maisie and legalled by
Roy Stormont-Taylor.’

In a silence made deeper by the clatter
round him, Oakley went on smiling fixedly at the river.

‘And all this you have from fag ends
of conversation you weren’t supposed to overhear, but did? Misrouted files with
stickers and caveats all over them that just
happened
to come your way. Men
bound together in conspiracy who just
happened
to reveal their plans to you in
careless conversation. How very resourceful you are, Toby. I seem to remember your
telling me you didn’t listen at keyholes. For a moment, I had the very vivid
feeling you had been present at the meeting.
Don’t
,’ he commanded,
and for a moment, neither man spoke.

‘Listen to me, dear man,’ he
resumed, in an altogether softer tone. ‘Whatever information you imagine you
possess – hysterical, anecdotal, electronic, don’t tell me – destroy it before it
destroys you. Every day, all across Whitehall, idiotic plans are aired and abandoned.
Please, for your own future, accept that this was another.’

Had the lapidary voice faltered? What with
the bustling shadows of pedestrians, the passing lights and din of river traffic, Toby
could not be sure.

Alone in the kitchen of his Islington flat,
Toby first played the analogue tapes on his replica recorder, at the same time making
a digital recording. He transferred the digital recording to his
desktop, then to a memory stick for back-up. Then buried the recording as deep in the
desktop as it would go, while aware that if the technicians ever got their hooks on it
nothing was going to be buried deep enough and the only thing to do in that unhappy
eventuality was to smash the hard drive with a hammer and distribute the fragments over
a wide area. With a strip of industrial-quality masking tape conveniently left behind by
an odd-job man, he pasted the memory stick behind a foxed photograph of his maternal
grandparents on their wedding day which hung in the darkest corner of the hallway, next
to the coat hooks, and tenderly consigned it to them for safekeeping. How to dispose of
the original tape? Wiping it clean wasn’t enough. Having cut it into small pieces,
he set fire to them in the sink, nearly setting fire to the kitchen in the process, then
flushed what remained down the sink disposal unit.

His posting to Beirut followed five days
later.

The sensational arrival of Kit and Suzanna
Probyn in the remote North Cornish village of St Pirran did not at first receive the
ecstatic welcome that it merited. The weather was foul and the village of a mood to
match: a dank February day of dripping sea-mist, and every footstep clanking down the
village street like a judgement. Then at evening around pub time, the disturbing news:
the gyppos were back. A camper – new, most likely stolen – with an upcountry
registration and curtains in the side windows had been sighted by young John Treglowan
from his father’s tractor as he drove his cows to milking:

‘They was up there, bold as brass, on
Manor parkland, the exact same spot they was last time, proud of that clump of old
pines.’

Any brightly coloured washing on the line
then, John?

‘In this weather? Not even
gyppos.’

Children at all, John?

‘None as I did see, but most likely
they was hid away till they knowed the coast was clear.’

Horses then?

‘No horses,’ John Treglowan
conceded. ‘Not yet.’

And still only the one camper, then?

‘You wait till tomorrow, and
we’ll have half a dozen of the buggers, see if we don’t.’

They duly waited.

And come the following evening were still
waiting. A dog had been spotted, but not a gyppo dog, or not to look at, it being a
plump yellow Labrador accompanied by a big-striding bloke in
a broad
mackintosh hat and one of those Driza-Bone raincoats down to his ankles. And the bloke
didn’t look any more gyppo than the dog did – with the result that John Treglowan
and his two brothers, who had been spoiling to go up there and have a quiet word with
them, same as last time, were restrained.

Which was as well, because next morning the
camper with its curtains and upcountry registration and yellow Labrador in the back
rolled up at the post-office mini-market, and a nicer spoken pair of retired foreigners
you couldn’t wish to ask for, according to the postmistress – foreigner being
anyone who had the ill taste to come from east of the Tamar river. She didn’t go
as far as to declare they were ‘gentry’ but there was a clear hint of
quality in her description.

But that don’t solve the question, do
it?