A Delicate Truth

by John le Carré

  But nobody fobs off Emily. Not these days. Not after that scoundrel Bernard two-timed her.

  ‘What happened at Bailey’s yesterday?’ she demanded. ‘At the leather stall. You knew the man but you wouldn’t acknowledge him. He called you Paul and left some foul note in Mum’s handbag.’

  Kit had long abandoned his attempts to penetrate the near-telepathic communications between his wife and daughter.

  ‘Yes, well, I’m afraid that’s not something you and I are able to discuss,’ he replied loftily, avoiding her eye.

  ‘And you’re not able to discuss it with Mum either. Right?’

  ‘Yes, it is right, Em, as it happens. And I’m not enjoying it any more than she is. Unfortunately, it’s a matter of considerable official secrecy. As your mother is aware. And accepts. As perhaps you should.’

  ‘My patients tell me their secrets. I don’t go handing them around. What makes you think Mum will hand yours around? She’s silent as the grave. A bit more silent than you are sometimes.’

  Time to mount his high horse:

  ‘Because these are state secrets, Emily. Not mine and not your mother’s. They were entrusted to me and no one else. The only people I can share them with are the people who know them already. Which makes it, I have to say, rather a lonely business.’

  And on this fine note of self-pity, he rose, kissed her on the head, stalked off across the stable yard to his improvised office, locked the door and opened up his computer:

  Marlon will respond to your personal and confidential inquiries.

  *

  With Sheba riding proudly in the back of the nearly new Land Rover that he had acquired in exchange for his aged camper, Kit drives purposefully up Bailey’s Hill until he arrives by design at a deserted lay-by with a Celtic cross and a view of the morning mist rising in the valley. His first call is foredoomed, as he intends it to be, but Service ethic and some sense of self-protection requires him to make it. Dialling the Foreign Office switchboard, he gets a determined woman who requires him to repeat his name clearly and slowly. He does, and throws in his knighthood for good measure. After a delay so long that he would be justified in ringing off, she informs him that the erstwhile minister Mr Fergus Quinn has not been at his post for three years – a thing Kit well knows but this doesn’t stop him from asking – and that she has no number for him and no authority to pass messages. Would Sir Christopher – finally, thank you! – care to be connected with the resident clerk? No thank you, Sir Christopher would not, with the clear implication that a resident clerk wouldn’t match up to the level of security involved.

  Well, I tried, and it’s on record. Now for the tricky bit.

  Extracting the piece of paper on which he had written down Marlon’s telephone number, he touches it into his cellphone, turns the volume to maximum because his hearing’s going a bit, and swiftly, for fear of hesitation, presses green. Listening tensely to the number ringing out, he remembers too late what time of day it is in Houston, and has a vision of a bleary Marlon groping for his bedside phone. Instead, he gets the sincere voice of a Texan matron:

  ‘We thank you for calling Ethical Outcomes. Remember: at Ethical, your safety comes first!’

  Then a blast of martial music, and the all-American voice of Marlon on parade:

  ‘Hullo! This is Marlon. Kindly be advised that your inquiry will always be treated in the strictest confidence in accordance with Ethical’s principles of integrity and discretion. I’m sorry: there’s nobody around just now to take your personal and private call. But if you would care to leave a simple message of no more than two minutes in duration, your confidential consultant will get right back to you. After the signal, please.’

  Has Kit prepared his simple message of no more than two minutes in duration? During the long night, he evidently has:

  ‘This is Paul and I need to speak to Elliot. Elliot, this is Paul, from three years ago. Something pretty unpleasant has cropped up, not of my making, I may say. I need to talk to you urgently, obviously not on my home number. You’ve got my personal cellphone number, it’s the same old one as before, not encrypted, of course. Let’s fix a date to meet as soon as possible. If you can’t make it, perhaps you’d put me in touch with somebody I’m authorized to talk to. I mean by that somebody who knows the background and can fill in some rather disturbing blanks. I look forward to hearing from you very soon. Thank you. Paul.’

  With a sense of a tricky job well done in under two minutes, he rings off and sets out along a pony track with Sheba at his heels. But after a couple of hundred yards his sense of achievement deserts him. How long will he have to wait before anyone calls back? And, above all, where will he wait? In St Pirran there’s no cellphone signal – you can be on Orange, Vodafone or whatever. If he goes home now, all he’ll be thinking of will be how to get out again. Obviously, in due course he will be offering his womenfolk some unclassified account of what he’s achieved – but not until he’s achieved it.

  So the question is: is there a middle way, a stopgap cover story that will keep him within range of Marlon but out of range of his women? Answer: the tedious solicitor in Truro he recently engaged to sort out various piddling family trusts. Suppose, for argument’s sake, something has cropped up: a knotty legal matter that needs to be thrashed out in a hurry? And suppose Kit in the rush of events has completely forgotten all about the appointment till now? It plays. Next move, call Suzanna, which will take nerve, but he’s ready for her.

  Summoning Sheba, he returns to the Land Rover, slots his cellphone into its housing, switches on the ignition and is startled by the deafening shriek of an incoming call on maximum sound.

  ‘Is that Kit Probyn?’ a male voice blurts.

  ‘This is Probyn. Who’s that?’ – hastily adjusting the volume.

  ‘My name’s Jay Crispin from Ethical. Heard marvellous things about you. Elliot’s off the radar at the moment, a-chasing the deer, as we say. How’s about I stand in for him?’

  Within seconds, as it seems to him, the thing is settled: they will meet. And not tomorrow but tonight. No beating about the bush, no umming and ahhing. A forthright British voice, educated, one of us, and not in the least defensive, which of itself speaks volumes. The kind of man that in other circumstances it would be a pleasure to get to know – all of which he duly reported to Suzanna in suitably coded terms while they hurriedly dressed him in time to catch the ten forty-one from Bodmin Parkway station:

  ‘And you’ll be strong, Kit,’ Suzanna urged him, embracing him with all the power in her frail body. ‘It’s not that you’re weak. You’re not. It’s that you’re kind and trusting and loyal. Well, Jeb was loyal too. You said he was. Didn’t you?’

  Did he? Probably he did. But then, as he reminded her sagely, people do change, darling, even the best of us, you know. And some of us go clean off the rails.

  ‘And you’ll ask your Mister Big, whoever he is, straight out: “Was poor Jeb telling the truth and did an innocent woman and her child die?” I don’t want to know what it’s about. I know I never shall. But if what Jeb wrote on that beastly receipt is true, and that’s why we got the Caribbean, we must face up to it. We can’t live a lie, however much we might like to. Can we, darling? Or I can’t,’ she added, as an afterthought.

  And from Emily, more baldly, as they pulled into the station forecourt:

  ‘Whatever it is, Dad, Mum’s going to need proper answers.’

  ‘Well, so am I!’ he had snapped back at her in a moment of angry pain that he instantly regretted.

  *

  The Connaught Hotel in the West End of London was not an establishment that had come Kit’s way but, seated alone amid the bustle of waiters in the post-modern splendour of its lounge, he rather wished it had; for in that case he would not have chosen the elderly country suit and cracked brown shoes that he had snatched from his wardrobe.

  ‘If my plane’s late, just tell ’em you’re waiting for me, and they’ll look after you,’ Crispin had said,
without troubling to mention where his plane was coming from.

  And sure enough, when Kit murmured Crispin’s name to the black-suited major-domo poised like a great conductor at his lectern, the fellow had actually smiled:

  ‘Come a long way today, have we, Sir Christopher? Well, Cornwall, that is a long way. What may I tempt you with, compliments of Mr Crispin?’

  ‘Pot of tea, and I’ll pay for it myself. Cash,’ Kit had retorted stiffly, determined to retain his independence.

  But a cup of tea is not something the Connaught gives up lightly. To obtain one, Kit must settle for the Chic & Shock Afternoon Tea and look on helplessly while a waiter brings cakes, scones and cucumber sandwiches at thirty-five pounds plus tip.

  He waits.

  Several potential Crispins enter, ignore him, join others or are joined by them. From the strong, masterful voice he has heard on the telephone, he instinctively looks for the man to match it: big-shouldered perhaps, bags of confidence, a good stride. He remembers Elliot’s glowing eulogy of his employer. He wonders to himself in nervous jest what earthly form such powers of leadership and charisma will take. And he is not entirely disappointed when an elegant forty-something man of medium height, wearing a well-cut grey pinstripe suit, sits himself quietly down beside him, takes his hand and murmurs, ‘I rather think I’m your man.’

  And the recognition, if such it could be called, is immediate. Jay Crispin is as English and smooth as his voice. He is clean-shaven and, with his groomed, swept-back head of healthy hair and smile of quiet assurance, what Kit’s parents would have called clean-limbed.

  ‘Kit, I’m just so very sorry that this should have happened,’ the perfectly tuned voice declares, with a sincerity that cuts straight to Kit’s heart. ‘What a bloody awful time you’ve had. My God, what are you drinking – not tea!’ And as a waiter glides to their side: ‘You’re a whisky man. They do a pretty decent Macallan here. Take all this stuff away, will you, Luigi? And bring us a couple of the eighteen-year-olds. Make ’em big ’uns. Ice? – no ice. Soda and water on the side.’ And as the waiter departs: ‘And look here, thanks a million for making the trip. I’m just so terribly sorry you had to make it at all.’

  *

  Now Kit would never admit that he was attracted to Jay Crispin, or that his judgement was in any way undermined by the man’s compelling charm. From the outset, he would insist, he had harboured the gravest suspicions about the fellow, and kept them going throughout the meeting.

  ‘And life in darkest Cornwall suits you all right, does it?’ Crispin asked conversationally while they waited for their drinks to arrive. ‘You don’t pine for the bright lights? Personally, I’d be talking to the dicky birds after a couple of weeks. But that’s my problem, they tell me. Incurable workaholic. No powers of self-entertainment.’ And after this little confidence: ‘And Suzanna on the mend, I gather?’ – dropping the perfect voice for intimacy.

  ‘Vastly better, thank you, vastly. Country life is what she loves,’ Kit replied awkwardly, but what else is he supposed to say when the man asks? And gruffly, in an effort to turn the conversation round:

  ‘So where are you actually based? Here in London or – well, Houston, I suppose?’

  ‘Oh my God, London, where else? Only place to be, if you want my view – apart from North Cornwall, obviously.’

  The waiter was back. Hiatus while he poured out the drinks to Crispin’s specification.

  ‘Cashews, bits?’ Crispin asked Kit solicitously. ‘Or something a bit more substantial after your travels?’

  ‘Thank you, I’m doing very well’ – keeping his guard up.

  ‘Shoot away, then,’ said Crispin when the waiter had left.

  Kit shot. And Crispin listened, his handsome face puckered in concentration, his neat head wisely nodding to imply he was familiar with the story; even that he’d heard it before.

  ‘And then, the same evening, there was this, you see,’ Kit protested and, drawing a damp brown envelope from the recesses of his country suit, passed Crispin the piece of flimsy lined paper that Jeb had torn from his pad. ‘Take a look at that, if you will,’ he added, for extra portent – and watched Crispin’s manicured hand take it over, noting the double cuffs of cream silk and the gold engraved links; watched him lean back and, holding the paper in both hands, scrutinize it with the calm of an antiquarian examining it for watermarks.

  Well, did he look guilty, darling? Did he look shocked? Well, he must have looked something!

  But Crispin, so far as Kit could make out, didn’t look anything. The regular features didn’t flinch, there was no violent trembling of the hands: just a forlorn shake of the trim head, accompanied by the officer-class voice.

  ‘Well, you poor chap is all I can say, Kit. You absolute poor chap. What a truly bloody awful situation. And your poor Suzanna too. Ghastly. What she must be going through, God alone knows. I mean, she’s the one who really took the flak. Quite apart from not knowing why or where it’s coming from, and knowing she can’t ask. What a little shit. Forgive me. Christ!’ he said vehemently under his breath, suppressing some stab of inner pain.

  ‘And she really needs to get a straight answer,’ Kit insisted, determined to stick to his guns. ‘However bad it is, she’s got to know what happened. So have I. She’s taken it into her head that our posting to the Caribbean was a way of shutting me up. She even – totally unintentionally – seems to have infected our daughter with the same idea. So not a very pleasant insinuation, as you can imagine’ – cautiously encouraged by Crispin’s sympathetic nod – ‘not a very happy way to go into retirement: reckoning you’ve done a decent job for your country, then discovering it was all a charade to cover up a – well – murder, not to put too fine an edge on it’ – pausing for a waiter to bustle past pushing a trolley bearing a birthday cake with a single candle sparking on it. ‘Then throw in the fact that a first-class soldier has had his whole life trashed for him, or may have done. That’s not the sort of thing Suzanna takes lightly, seeing she tends to care rather more about other people than she does about herself. So what I’m saying is: no beating around the bush, we need to have the facts. Yes or no. Straight out. Both of us. All of us. Anyone would. Sorry about that.’

  Sorry how? Sorry to hear his voice slither out of control and feel the colour surge to his face? Not sorry at all. His dander was up at last, and so it should be. Suki would be cheering him on. So would Em. And the sight of this fellow Jay Crispin, smugly nodding away with his pretty head of wavy hair, would have infuriated them quite as much as it was starting to infuriate him.

  ‘Plus I’m the villain of the piece,’ Crispin suggested nobly, in the tone of a man assembling the case against him. ‘I’m the bad guy who set the whole thing up, hired a bunch of cheap mercs, conned Langley and our own Special Forces into providing support-in-aid and presided over one of the great operational fuck-ups of all time. That right? Plus I delegated the job to a useless field commander who lost his rag and let his men shoot the hell out of an innocent mother and her child. Does that about cover it, or is there anything else I did that I haven’t mentioned?’

  ‘Now look here, I didn’t say any of that –’

  ‘No, Kit, you don’t have to. Jeb said it, and you believe it. You don’t have to sweeten it. I’ve lived with it for three years, and I can live with it for another three’ – all without a hint of self-pity, or none that reached Kit’s ear. ‘And Jeb’s not the only one, to be fair on him. In my line of country we get ’em all: chaps with post-traumatic stress disorder, real or imagined, resentment about gratuities, pensions, fantasizing about themselves, reinventing their life stories, and rushing to a lawyer if they’re not muzzled in time. But this little bastard is in a class of his own, believe you me.’ A forbearing sigh, another sad shake of the head. ‘Done great work in his day, Jeb, none better. Which only makes it worse. Plausible as the day is long. Heart-breaking letters to his MP, the Ministry of Defence, you name it. The poison dwarf, we call him at head off
ice. Well, never mind.’ Another sigh, this one near silent. ‘And you’re absolutely sure the meeting was coincidence? He didn’t track you down somehow?’

  ‘Pure coincidence,’ Kit insisted, with more certainty than he was beginning to feel.

  ‘Did your local newspaper or radio down in Cornwall announce that Sir Christopher and Lady Probyn would be gracing the platform, by any chance?’

  ‘May have done.’

  ‘Maybe that’s your clue.’

  ‘No way,’ Kit retorted adamantly. ‘Jeb didn’t know my name until he showed up at the Fayre and put two and two together’ – glad to keep up the indignation.

  ‘So no pictures of you anywhere?’

  ‘None that came our way. And if there had been, Mrs Marlow would have told us. Our housekeeper,’ he declared stoutly. And for extra certainty: ‘And if she did miss something, the whole village would be telling her.’

  The waiter wanted to know whether they would like the same again. Kit said he wouldn’t. Crispin said they would and Kit didn’t argue.

  ‘Want to hear something about our line of work at all, Kit?’ Crispin asked, when they were alone again.

  ‘Not sure I should, really. Not my business.’

  ‘Well, I think you should. You did a great job in the Foreign Office, no question. You worked your backside off for the Queen, earned your pension and your K. But as a first-rate civil servant you were an enabler – all right, a bloody good one. You were never a player. Not what we might call a hunter-gatherer in the corporate jungle. Were you? Admit it.’

  ‘Don’t think I know where you’re leading,’ Kit growled.

  ‘I’m talking incentive,’ Crispin explained patiently. ‘I’m talking about what drives the average Joe Bloggs to get out of bed in the morning: money, filthy lucre, dosh. And in my business – never yours – who gets a piece of the cake when an operation is as successful as Wildlife was. And the sort of resentments that are aroused. To the point where chaps like Jeb think they’re owed half the Bank of England.’