A Delicate Truth (35 page)

‘And Kit hasn’t been in touch
since he left the house?’

‘No, and he’s not answering his
cellphone.’

‘Has he done this kind of thing
before?’

‘Refused to speak to us?’

‘Thrown a tantrum – gone AWOL – taken
matters into his own hands – whatever.’

‘When my beloved ex-partner waltzed
off with a new girlfriend and half my mortgage, Dad went and laid siege to their
flat.’

‘Then what did he do?’

‘It was the wrong flat.’

Resigned to returning to his desk, Toby
glances up with apprehension at the great bowed windows of his own Foreign Office.
Joining the unsmiling throng of black-suited civil servants passing up and down Clive
Steps, he succumbs to the same wave of nervous nausea that afflicted him on that
gorgeous spring Sunday morning three years ago when he came here to filch his illicit
tape recording.

At the front gate, he takes a calculated
risk:

‘Tell me, please’ – displaying
his pass to the security guard – ‘has a retired member called
Sir Christopher
Probyn
checked in today, by any chance?’ And to be helpful:
‘P–R–O–B–Y–N.’

Wait while guard consults computer.

‘Not here. Could have checked in
elsewhere. Did he have an appointment, at all?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Toby
and, back at his post, resumes his department’s deliberations about which way to
look in Libya.

‘Sir Christopher?’

‘The same.’

‘I’m Asif Lancaster from the
Executive Director’s department. How d’you do, sir?’

Lancaster was a black man, spoke with a
Mancunian accent and looked about eighteen years old, but to Kit’s eye most people
seemed to these days. Nevertheless he warmed to the fellow at once. If the Office had
finally opened its gates to the Lancasters of the world, he reasoned vaguely, then
surely he could expect a more receptive ear when he told them a few home truths about
their handling of
Operation Wildlife
and its aftermath.

They had reached a conference room. Easy
chairs. A long table. Watercolours of the Lake District. Lancaster holding out his
hand.

‘Look here, there’s one thing I
have to ask you,’ said Kit, even now not quite willing to part with his document.
‘Are you and your people cleared for
Wildlife
?’

Lancaster looked at him, then at the
envelope, then allowed himself a wry smile.

‘I think I can safely say we
are,’ he replied and, gently removing it from Kit’s unresisting grasp,
disappeared to an adjoining room.

It was another ninety minutes by the gold
Cartier watch presented to him by Suzanna on their twenty-fifth before Lancaster opened
the door to admit the promised senior legal advisor and his sidekick. In that period,
Lancaster had appeared no fewer than four times, once to offer Kit coffee, once to bring
it, and twice to assure him that Lionel was on the case and would be heading this way
‘just as soon as he and Frances have got their heads round the
paperwork’.

‘
Lionel?
’

‘Our deputy legal advisor. Spends half
his week in the Cabinet Office, and the other half with us. He tells me he was assistant
legal attaché in Paris when you were commercial counsellor there.’

‘Well, well,
Lionel
,’ Kit
says, brightening as he recalls a worthy, rather tongue-tied young man with fair hair
and freckles who made it a point of honour to dance with the plainest women in the
room.

‘And Frances?’ he enquires
hopefully.

‘Frances is our new Director in Charge
of Security, which comes under the Executive Director’s umbrella. Also a lawyer,
I’m afraid.’ Smile. ‘Used to be in private practice, till she saw the
light, and is now happily with us.’

Kit was glad of this information since it
would not otherwise have occurred to him that Frances was happy. Her demeanour on
sitting herself opposite him across the table struck him as positively mournful: thanks
not least to her black business suit, short-cropped hair and apparent refusal to look
him in the eye.

Lionel, on the other hand, though it was
twenty years on, had remained his decent, rather prissy self. True, the freckles had
given way to liver spots, and the fair hair had faded to an uneasy grey. But the
blameless smile was undimmed and the handshake as vigorous as ever. Kit remembered that
Lionel used to smoke a pipe and supposed he’d given it up.

‘Kit, super to see you,’ he
declared, bringing his face a little closer than Kit had bargained for in his
enthusiasm. ‘How’s well-earned retirement? God knows, I’m looking
forward to mine! And marvellous things we hear about your Caribbean tour, by the
way.’ Drop of the voice: ‘And Suzanna? How’s all
that
going?
Things looking up a bit?’

‘Very much so. Yes, fine, thank you,
great
improvement,’ Kit replied. And gruffly, as an afterthought:
‘A bit keen to get this over, frankly, Lionel. We both are. Been a bit of an
ordeal. ’Specially for Suki.’

‘Yes, well, of course we’re
absolutely
aware of that, and
more
than grateful to you for your
extremely helpful, not to say
timely
, document, and for
bringing the whole thing to our attention without – well – rocking the boat,’ said
Lionel, no longer so tongue-tied, settling himself at the table. ‘Aren’t we,
Frances? And of course’ – briskly opening a file and revealing a photocopy of
Kit’s handwritten draft – ‘we’re
immensely
sympathetic. I
mean, one can only
imagine
what you’ve been through. And Suzanna too,
poor girl. Frances, I think I’m speaking for both of us?’

If he was, Frances, our Director in Charge
of Security, gave no sign of it. She too was leafing through a photocopy of Kit’s
document, but so intently and slowly that he began to wonder whether she was learning it
by heart.

‘Did Suzanna ever sign a declaration,
Sir Christopher?’ she enquired, without raising her head.

‘Declaration of
what
?’
Kit demanded, for once not appreciating the
Sir Christopher
. ‘Sign
what
?’

‘An Official Secrets Act
declaration’ – her head still buried in his document – ‘stating that
she’s aware of its terms and penalties.’ And to Lionel, before Kit could
answer: ‘Or didn’t we do that for partners and significant others in his
day? I forget when that came in, precisely.’

‘Well now, I don’t think
I’m totally sure either,’ Lionel replied keenly. ‘Kit, what’s
your
take on this?’

‘No idea,’ Kit growled.
‘Never saw her sign
any
document of that sort. She certainly never
told
me she’d signed one.’ And as the sick fury he had been
suppressing for too long came to the surface: ‘Hell does it matter what she signed
or didn’t sign? Not
my
fault she knows what she knows. Not hers either.
The girl’s desperate.
I’m
desperate. She wants answers. We all
do.’

‘All?’ Frances repeated, lifting
her pallid face to him in a kind of frigid alarm. ‘Who is
all
in this
equation? Are you telling us there are other people who are aware of the content of this
paper?’

‘If they are, it’s none of
my
doing,’ Kit retorted angrily, turning to Lionel for the male
relief. ‘And not Jeb’s either. Jeb wasn’t gabby, Jeb stuck to the
rules. Didn’t go to the press or any of that stuff. Stayed strictly inside the
camp. Wrote to his MP, his regiment – and probably to you people, for all
I
know,’ he ended accusingly.

‘Yes, well, it’s all
very
painful and
very
unfair,’ Lionel agreed, delicately
touching the top of his frizzy grey hair with his open palm as if to console it.
‘And I think I may say that we have gone to very serious lengths over the last
years to get to the bottom of what was obviously a
very
controversial,
very
complex, many-faceted – what can we say, Frances? –
episode.’

‘
We
being who?’ Kit
grunted, but the question seemed to go unheard.

‘And everyone’s been very
helpful and forthcoming – wouldn’t you agree, Frances?’ Lionel continued,
and transferring his hand to his lower lip gave it too a consoling tweak. ‘I mean,
even the
Americans
, who are normally very tight
indeed
about these
things – and of course had no official locus at
all
, let alone
un
official – came through with a
very
clear statement distancing
themselves from any
hint
that the Agency might have provided support-in-aid –
for which we were duly grateful, weren’t we, Frances?’

And turning to Kit again:

‘And of course we
did
hold an
inquiry. Internally, obviously. But with due diligence. And as a result, poor Fergus
Quinn fell on his sword, which – and I think, Frances, you would share this view –
was absolutely
the decent thing to do at the time. But these days, who
does
the decent thing? I mean, when one
thinks
of the politicians
who
haven’t
resigned and should have done, poor Fergus comes over like a
shining knight. Frances, I believe you had a point?’

Frances had:

‘What I don’t understand, Sir
Christopher, is what this
document is supposed to
be
? Is it
an accusation? A witness statement? Or simply a minute of what somebody said to you, and
you have reported it on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, with no commitment on your own part
either way?’

‘It’s what it
is
, for
Christ’s sake!’ Kit retorted, his flame now fully lit. ‘
Operation
Wildlife
was an utter cock-up. Total. The intelligence that prompted it was a
lot of balls, two innocent people were shot dead, and there’s been a three-year
cover-up by all parties involved – including, I strongly suspect,
this
place.
And the one man who
was
willing to speak up has met an untimely death, which
needs some very serious looking into.
Bloody
serious,’ he ended, on a
bark.

‘Yes, well, I think we could just
settle for
unsolicited document of record
, actually,’ Lionel murmured to
Frances helpfully.

Frances was not to be appeased:

‘Would I be overstating the case, Sir
Christopher, if I suggested that the whole burden of your testimony against Mr Crispin
and others is derived from what Jeb Owens said to you between the hours of 11 p.m. and 5
a.m. on that one night in your club? I am excluding for the moment the so-called
receipt
that Jeb passed to your wife, and which I see you have added as an
annexe of some sort.’

For a moment Kit appeared too stunned to
speak.

‘What about
my
bloody
testimony? I was
there
, wasn’t I?
On
the hillside!
In
Gibraltar. The minister’s man on the spot. He wanted my advice. I gave it to him.
Don’t tell me nobody was recording what was being said back and forth.
There’s no case for going in
. My words, loud and clear. And Jeb
agreed with me. They all did. Shorty, every man jack of them. But they’d got the
order to go, so they went. Not because they’re sheep. But because that’s
what decent soldiers do! However bloody silly the orders are. Which they were.
Bloody
silly. No rational grounds? Never mind. Orders are orders,’ he
added, for emphasis.

Frances was scrutinizing another page of
Kit’s document:

‘But surely everything you
saw
and
heard
in Gibraltar tallied precisely with the account you
were
afterwards
given by those who had planned the operation, and were in a
position to assess the outcome? Which
you
were patently not, were you? You had
absolutely no idea of the outcome. You simply take your tune from other people. First
you believe what the planners tell you. Then you believe what Jeb Owens tells you. On no
more substantial evidence than your own preferences. Am I not right?’

And providing Kit with no opportunity to
answer that question, she asked another:

‘Can you tell me, please, how much
alcohol you had consumed before you went upstairs that night?’

Kit faltered, then blinked several times,
like a man who has lost his sense of time and place, and is trying to recover them.

‘Not a lot,’ he said.
‘Soon wore off. I’m used to drink. You get a shock like that, you sober up
bloody fast.’

‘Did you sleep at all?’

‘Where?’

‘In your club. In your club bedroom.
During the passage of that night and early morning. Did you sleep or not?’

‘How the hell could I sleep? We were
talking
all the time!’

‘Your document suggests Jeb abandoned
you at first light and spirited himself out of the club, we know not how. Did you go
back to sleep after Jeb had disappeared so miraculously?’

‘I hadn’t slept in the first
place, so how could I go back to sleep? And his departure wasn’t
miraculous
. It was professional. He’s a pro. Was. Knew all the tricks
of the trade.’

‘And when you woke up – abracadabra,
he wasn’t there any more.’

‘He’d gone already, I told you!
There was no bloody
abracadabra
about it! It was
stealth
. The chap was a master of
stealth
’ – as if propounding a concept that was new to him.

Lionel chipped in, decent Lionel:

‘Kit – man to man – just tell us how
much you and Jeb put away that night – give us a rough idea. Everybody balks about how
much they actually drink, but if we’re going to get to the bottom of this, we need
the whole story, warts and all.’

‘We drank
warm beer
,’
Kit retorted contemptuously. ‘Jeb sipped his and left most of it. That satisfy
you?’