A Delicate Truth (27 page)

Another wait while Kit wrestled with his
memory.

‘Wednesday came. All right? Midday,
Jeb still hadn’t shown up. Two o’clock, three, still hadn’t. I call
the cellphone number he’s given me, get an automated answer, leave a message.
Nightfall, I leave another message:
hullo, it’s me, Paul, here again. Just
wondered what happened to our date
. Keeping Paul as my code name. For security.
I’d given him our landline number here because we don’t get a signal.
Thursday I leave another bloody message, get the same answering service. Friday morning,
ten, we get a phone call.
Jesus Christ!
’

He has clapped a bony hand over his lower
jaw and is holding
it there, muzzling the pain that refuses to be
stilled, because the worst is evidently still to come.

Kit isn’t sitting in his club bedroom
listening to Jeb any more. He isn’t shaking Jeb’s hand by the light of a
London dawn, or watching him slip away down the club stairs. He’s not happy as a
flea or pumped up, even if he’s still eager for the fray. He’s back home at
the Manor and, having broken the bad news to Suzanna, he’s worried sick and eating
his heart out, praying with every hour that slips by for a belated sign of life from
Jeb. In an effort to keep himself busy, he’s sanding the floorboards next to the
guest room and he can’t hear a bloody thing, so when the phone rings in the
kitchen, it’s Suzanna who picks it up, and Suzanna who has to climb the stairs to
the top floor and hammer on Kit’s shoulder to get his attention.

‘It’s somebody wanting
Paul,’ she says, when he’s turned off the sander. ‘A woman.’

‘What
sort
of woman, for
God’s sake?’ – Kit, already heading downstairs.

‘She won’t say. She needs to
speak to Paul personally’ – Suzanna, hurrying down after him.

In the kitchen, Mrs Marlow, all agog, is
doing flowers at the sink.

‘Bit of privacy, if you don’t
mind, Mrs M,’ Kit commands.

And waits till she has left the room before
picking up the phone from the sideboard. Suzanna closes the door after her and stands
rigid beside him, arms across her chest. The telephone has a loudspeaker mode for when
Emily calls. Suzanna knows how to work it, and switches it on.

‘Am I speaking to Paul, please?’
– educated, middle-aged female in professional mode.

‘Who’s this?’ Kit asks
warily.

‘My name is Dr Costello and I’m
calling from the mental-health wing of Ruislip General Hospital, at the request of an
inpatient who wishes to be known only as Jeb. Am I speaking to Paul, or to someone
else?’

Fierce nod from Suzanna.

‘I’m Paul. What’s the
matter with Jeb? Is he all right?’

‘Jeb is receiving excellent
professional care and is in good physical health. I understand you were expecting a
visit from him.’

‘Yes. I was. Still am. Why?’

‘Jeb has asked me to speak to you
frankly, in confidence. May I do that? And this really
is
Paul?’

Another nod from Suzanna.

‘Of course it is. It’s Paul.
Absolutely. Go ahead.’

‘I assume you know that Jeb has been
mentally unwell for some years.’

‘I was aware of that. So
what?’

‘Last night, Jeb volunteered himself
as an inpatient here. We diagnosed chronic schizophrenia and acute depression. He has
been sedated and is on suicide watch. In his lucid moments his greatest concern is for
you. For Paul.’

‘Why? Why should he be worried about
me
?’ – eyes on Suzanna – ‘I should be worrying about
him
, for Heaven’s sake.’

‘Jeb is suffering from severe guilt
syndrome brought on in part by malicious stories that he fears he’s been spreading
among his friends. He asked that you treat them for what they are: symptoms of his
schizophrenic condition, with no basis in reality.’

Suzanna thrusts a note at him:
Visit?

‘Yes, well look here, Dr Costello, the
point is, when can I come and see him? I could hop in the car now, if that would help. I
mean, d’you have
hours
? What goes on?’

‘I’m very sorry, Paul. I’m
afraid a visit by you at this time
could cause serious damage to
Jeb’s mental health. You are his fear object and he is not ready for a
confrontation.’

Fear object? Me?
Kit would like to
refute this outrageous allegation but tactic prevails.

‘Well, who else has he got?’ he
demands, this time off his own bat, no prompting from Suzanna. ‘Has he got other
friends who visit him? Relatives? I know he’s not exactly
gregarious
. How
about his wife?’

‘They’re estranged.’

‘Not exactly what he told me, but
still.’

Brief silence while Dr Costello apparently
checks the record:

‘We are in touch with a
mother
,’ she recites. ‘Any developments, any decisions
regarding Jeb’s treatment and welfare, will be referred to his natural mother. She
is also his empowered guardian.’

The phone pressed to his ear, Kit flings up
an arm, and at the same time swings round to Suzanna in astonishment and blatant
disbelief. But his voice stays steady. He’s a diplomat, he’s not about to
give the game away.

‘Well, many thanks for that, Dr
Costello. Very kind of you indeed. At least he’s got some family to look after
him. Can you give me his mother’s phone number? Maybe she and I could have a
chat.’

But Dr Costello, kind though she may be,
cites data protection and regrets that parting with Jeb’s mother’s number is
not, in the circumstances, something she is able to do. She rings off.

Kit on fire.

With Suzanna looking on in approving
silence, he dials 1471 and establishes that the caller withheld her number.

He calls Enquiries, gets himself put through
to Ruislip General Hospital, asks for the mental-health wing, asks for Dr Costello.

The male nurse couldn’t be more
helpful:

‘Dr Costello’s attending a course,
mate, back next week.’

‘How long’s she been
away?’

‘Also a week, mate. It’s a he,
actually. Joachim. Sounds more German to me, but he’s Portuguese.’

Kit somehow keeps his head.

‘And Dr Costello has not come into the
hospital during all that time?’

‘No, mate, sorry. Can anyone else help
at all?’

‘Well, yes, actually, I’d like
to talk to one of your inpatients, a chap named Jeb. Just tell him it’s
Paul.’

‘
Jeb?
Doesn’t ring a
bell, mate, hang on a jiffy –’

A different nurse comes to the phone, also
male, but not so friendly:

‘No Jeb here. Got a John, got a Jack.
That’s your lot.’

‘But I thought he was a
regular,’ Kit protests.

‘Not here. Not Jeb. Try
Sutton.’

Now the same thought occurs simultaneously
to both Kit and Suzanna: get on to Emily, fast.

Best if Suzanna rings her. With Kit, just at
the moment, she tends to be a bit scratchy.

Suzanna calls Emily’s cellphone,
leaves a message.

By midday, Emily has called back twice. The
sum of her enquiries is that a Dr Joachim Costello recently joined the mental-health
unit at Ruislip as a temporary, but he’s a Portuguese citizen and the course
he’s attending is to improve his English. Did their Costello sound Portuguese?

‘No she bloody didn’t!’
Kit roars at Toby, repeating the answer he gave Emily on the phone as he paces the
stable floor. ‘And she was a bloody
woman
, and she sounded like an Essex
schoolmistress with a plum up her arse, and Jeb hasn’t got a bloody mother and
never did have, as he was pleased to tell me. I’m not a big chap for intimate
revelations as a rule, but he was talking his heart out for the first time in three
bloody years. Never met his mother,
only thing he knows about her is
her name: Caron. He fled the coop when he was fifteen and joined the army as an
apprentice. Now tell me he made it all up!’

It is Toby’s turn to go to the window
and, freed from Kit’s accusing stare, abandon himself to his thoughts.

‘By the time this Dr Costello rang
off, had you given her any reason to think you didn’t believe her?’ he asks
at last.

Equally long deliberation by Kit:

‘No. I hadn’t. I played her
along.’

‘Then as far as she’s concerned,
or
they
are: mission accomplished.’

‘Probably.’

But Toby isn’t about to be satisfied
with ‘probably’:

‘So far as
they’re
concerned, whoever they are, you’ve been squared. Fobbed off. You’re on
side
’ – gathering conviction as he speaks. ‘You believe the
gospel according to Crispin, you believe Dr Costello even if she’s the wrong sex,
and you believe Jeb is schizoid and a compulsive liar and is sitting in the isolation
ward of a mental hospital in Ruislip and can’t be visited by his fear
object.’

‘No, I bloody don’t,’ Kit
snaps. ‘Jeb was telling me the literal truth. It shone out of him. It may be
tearing him apart: that’s another matter. Man’s as sane as you or
me.’

‘I absolutely accept that, Kit. I
really do,’ Toby says at his most forbearing. ‘However, for Suzanna’s
protection as well as your own, I suggest that the position you have
very
cleverly
carved out for yourself in the eyes of the opposition is well worth
preserving.’

‘Until when?’ Kit demands,
unappeased.

‘How about until I find Jeb?
Isn’t that why you asked me to come here? Or are you proposing to go and look for
him yourself – thereby, incidentally, setting the whole howling mob on you?’ Toby
demands, no longer quite so diplomatically.

And to this, for a while at least, Kit can
find no convincing answer, so instead chews at his lip, and grimaces, and gives himself
a gulp of Scotch.

‘Anyway, you’ve got that tape
you stole,’ he growls, by way of bitter consolation. ‘That meeting in the
Private Office with Quinn, Jeb and me. Stored away somewhere. That’s proof, if
it’s ever needed. It would scupper
you
, all right. Might scupper me as
well. Not sure I care too much about that either.’

‘My stolen tape proves
intent
,’ Toby replies. ‘It doesn’t prove the operation ever
took place, and it certainly doesn’t address the outcome.’

Kit grudgingly mulls this over.

‘So what you’re trying to tell
me
is
’ – as if Toby is somehow dodging the point – ‘Jeb’s the
only witness to the shootings. Right?’

‘Well, the only one willing to talk,
so far as we know,’ Toby agrees, not quite liking the sound of what he has just
said.

If he slept he wasn’t aware of it.

Sometime in the few short hours in bed he
heard a woman’s cry and supposed it was Suzanna’s. And after the cry, a
flurry of feet across the dust sheets in the corridor below him, and they must have been
Emily’s feet, hastening to her mother’s side, a theory borne out by the
murmurings that followed.

And after the murmurings, Emily’s
bedside light shining up through the cracks in the floorboards – is she reading,
thinking, or listening for her mother? – until either he or Emily went to sleep, and he
supposed he went first because he didn’t remember her light going out.

And when he woke later than he meant to, and
hurried downstairs to breakfast: no Emily and no Sheba, just Kit in his church tweeds
and Suzanna in her hat.

‘It was
honourable
of you,
Toby,’ Suzanna said, grasping his hand and keeping it. ‘Wasn’t it,
Kit? Kit was worried sick, we both were, and you came straight away. And poor
Jeb’s honourable too. And Kit’s not good at
sly
, are you, darling?
Not that
you
are, Toby, I don’t mean that at all. But you’re young
and you’re clever, you’re in the Office, and you can
delve
without,
well’ – little smile – ‘losing your pension.’

Standing in the granite porch she fervently
embraces him:

‘We never had a son, you see, Toby. We
tried to, but we lost him.’

Followed by a gruff ‘be in touch
then’ from Kit.

Toby and Emily sat in the conservatory, Toby
perched on an old sunlounger and Emily on a rush chair at the furthest end of the room.
The distance between them was something they had tacitly agreed upon.

‘Good talk with Dad last
night?’

‘If you can call it that.’

‘Perhaps you’d like me to go
first,’ Emily suggested. ‘Then you won’t be tempted into some
indiscretion you may regret.’

‘Thank you,’ Toby replied
politely.

‘Jeb and my father are planning to
produce a document about their exploits together, nature unknown. Their document will
have earth-shaking consequences in official quarters. In other words, they will be
whistle-blowers. At issue are a dead woman and her child, according to my mother. Or
possibly
dead. Or
probably
dead. We don’t know, but we fear
the worst. Am I warm so far?’

Receiving only a straight stare from Toby,
she drew in her breath and went on:

‘Jeb fails to make the date. So no
whistle. Instead, a woman doctor who is patently not a doctor and should have been a man
calls Kit, alias Paul, and tells him that Jeb has been confined in
a mental hospital. Investigations reveal this to be untrue. I feel I’m talking to
myself.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Jeb, meanwhile, is unfindable. He has
no surname, and is not in the habit of leaving a forwarding address. Official avenues of
enquiry, such as the police, are closed – not for us frail women to reason why.
You’re still listening, I hope?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Toby Bell is some kind of player
in this scenario. My mother likes you. My father prefers not to, but sees you as a
necessary evil. Is that because he doubts your allegiance to the cause?’