On the television, a quiz-show host was whipping up a furore.
‘I don’t know a Jeb, and I’ve never met a Jeb in my life,’ Toby replied in a carefully measured voice. ‘I’m Toby Bell, and I’m Foreign Office.’ And as a calculated afterthought, ‘But I’m also a private person, whatever that means.’
‘So which are you being now?’
‘A private person. Your family’s guest.’
‘But you still don’t know Jeb?’
‘Not as a private person, nor as a Foreign Service official do I know a Jeb. I thought I made that clear.’
‘So why’ve you come?’
‘Your father needs to talk to me. He hasn’t yet said why.’
Her tone eased, but only a little:
‘My mother’s discreet unto death. She’s also ill and doesn’t respond well to stress, which is unfortunate because there’s a lot of it about. So what I’m wondering is, are you here to make things worse or better? Or don’t you know that either?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘Does the Foreign Office know you’re here?’
‘No.’
‘But on Monday, it will.’
‘I don’t think you should presume that at all.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because first I need to listen to your father.’
Howls of jubilation from the television set as somebody wins a million pounds.
‘You talk to my father tonight and leave in the morning. Is that the plan?’
‘Assuming we’ve done our business by then.’
‘It’s St Pirran’s turn for Matins. My parents will be on church parade at ten. Dad’s a sidesman or a beadle or something. If you say your goodbyes before they leave for church, you could stay behind and we could compare notes.’
‘So far as we can, I’d be happy to.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘If your father wants to talk confidentially, then I have to respect his confidence.’
‘What about if I want to talk confidentially?’
‘Then I would respect your confidence too.’
‘Ten o’clock then.’
‘Ten o’clock.’
Kit was standing in the hall, clutching a spare anorak:
‘Mind if we do whisky later? Spot of weather coming up.’
*
They tramped through the drenched walled garden, Kit flourishing an old ash walking stick, Sheba at his heels and Toby struggling after them in a pair of borrowed wellingtons that were too big for him. They followed a towpath lined with bluebells and crossed a rickety bridge marked DANGER. A granite stile gave on to the open hillside. As they climbed, a west wind blew fine rain into their faces. There was a bench on the hilltop, but it was too wet to sit on, so they stood partly facing each other, eyes half closed against the rain.
‘All right up here?’ Kit asked, meaning, presumably: do you mind standing here in the rain?
‘Of course. Love it,’ Toby said politely, and there was a hiatus in which Kit seemed to screw up his courage, then plunge.
‘Operation Wildlife,’ he barked. ‘Roaring success, we were told. Drinks all round. Knighthoods for me, promotion for you – what?’
And waited, scowling.
‘I’m sorry,’ Toby said.
‘What for?’
‘I’ve never heard of Operation Wildlife.’
Kit was staring at him, the affability draining from his face. ‘Wildlife, for Christ’s sake, man! Hugely secret operation! Public-private enterprise to kidnap a high-value terrorist’ – and when Toby still gave no sign of recognition: ‘Look here. If you’re going to deny you ever heard of it, why the devil did you come down here?’
Then stood there glowering, with the rain running down his face, waiting for Toby’s answer.
‘I know you were Paul,’ Toby said, in the same measured tone he had employed with Emily. ‘But I’d never heard of Operation Wildlife until you mentioned it just now. I never saw any papers relating to Wildlife. I never attended meetings. Quinn kept me out of the loop.’
‘But you were his Private Secretary, for Christ’s sake!’
‘Yes. For Christ’s sake, I was his Private Secretary.’
‘How about Elliot? You heard of Elliot?’
‘Only indirectly.’
‘Crispin?’
‘Yes, I’ve heard of Crispin,’ Toby conceded, in the same level tone. ‘I’ve even met him. And I’ve heard of Ethical Outcomes, if that’s any help.’
‘Jeb? How about Jeb? Heard of Jeb?’
‘Jeb is also a name to me. But Wildlife isn’t, and I’m still waiting to know why you asked me to come here.’
If this was supposed to mollify Kit, it had the opposite effect. Jabbing his stick at the dip directly below them, he roared above the wind:
‘I’ll tell you why you’re here. That’s where Jeb parked his bloody van! Down there! Tyre marks till the cows trampled them. Jeb. Leader of our gallant British detachment. The chap they chucked on the scrapheap for telling them the truth. Down on his uppers. And you had no part in any of it, I suppose?’
‘None whatever,’ Toby replied.
‘Then maybe you’ll tell me,’ Kit suggested, his rage abating slightly, ‘before one or other of us goes mad, or we both do: how come you don’t know what Operation Wildlife was about, whereas you do know Paul and Jeb and the rest of them despite the fact that your own minister kept you out of the loop, which I personally find bloody hard to believe?’
Delivering his simple answer, Toby was surprised to discover that he had undergone no crisis of the soul, only an agreeable sense of catharsis:
‘Because I tape-recorded your meeting with the minister. The one where you said you were his red telephone.’
Kit took a while to absorb this:
‘Why the hell would Quinn do that? I never saw a man so jumpy. Tape his own secret meeting? Why?’
‘He didn’t tape it. I did.’
‘Who for?’
‘Nobody.’
Kit was having trouble making himself believe this:
‘Nobody told you to do it? You did it absolutely on your own. Secretly? With nobody’s permission?’
‘Correct.’
‘What an absolutely bloody filthy thing to do.’
‘Yes. Wasn’t it?’ Toby agreed.
In single file they returned to the house, Kit stomping ahead with Sheba and Toby trailing at a respectful distance.
*
Heads down, they sat at the long pine table drinking Kit’s best Burgundy and eating Mrs Marlow’s steak-and-kidney pie while Sheba watched covetously from her basket. It was beyond Kit’s powers to neglect his duties as a host, and Toby, whatever his faults might be, was his guest.
‘Don’t envy you bloody Beirut, I will say,’ he said stiffly, replenishing Toby’s glass.
But when, in a spirit of reciprocity, Toby enquired after Kit’s tour of the Caribbean, he was curtly warned off:
‘Not a good subject in this house, I’m afraid. Bit of a sore point.’
After which, they had to make do with Foreign Office chit-chat – who the big guns were these days, and whether Washington might finally come back to the Office, or be given to another outsider. But Kit very quickly lost patience and soon they were scurrying across the stable yard in pouring rain, Kit leading the way with a torch as they skirted piles of sand and granite setts. Then the sweet smell of hay as they passed empty horseboxes on their way to the old saddle room, with its brick walls, high, arched windows, and iron Victorian fireplace, ready laid.
And on an old linen press that did duty as a sofa-table, a wad of A4 paper, a pack of best bitter beer and a bottle of J&B, unbroached – all set ready, Toby assumed, not in honour of himself, but of Jeb, the guest who hadn’t come.
Kit had dropped into a crouch and was holding a match to the fire.
‘We’ve got a thing here called Bailey’s Fayre,’ he said into the fireplace, poking with his long forefinger at
the flames. ‘It’s supposed to go back to God knows when. Load of balls.’ And after puffing vigorously at the kindling: ‘I’m about to break every bloody rule I ever believed in, in case you didn’t know.’
‘Well, that makes two of us, doesn’t it?’ Toby replied.
And some kind of complicity was born.
*
Toby is a good listener, and for a couple of hours he has barely spoken except to offer the odd murmured word of sympathy.
Kit has described his recruitment by Fergus Quinn, and his briefing by Elliot. He has flown to Gibraltar as Paul Anderson, paced his hated hotel room, huddled on the hillside with Jeb, Shorty, Andy and Don, and provided his own ear- and eyewitness account of Operation Wildlife and its supposedly glorious conclusion.
He has described the Fayre: scrupulously monitoring himself as he goes along, catching himself out on this or that small point and correcting himself, then carrying on.
He has described with determined dispassion, though it comes hard to him, the discovery of Jeb’s handwritten receipt, and its impact upon Suzanna, then himself. He has yanked open a drawer of his desk and with a brusque ‘take a look for yourself’, pressed on him the flimsy piece of lined paper.
He has described with thinly disguised revulsion his meeting with Jay Crispin at the Connaught, and his reassuring phone call to Suzanna that in retrospect seems to cause him more pain than any other single episode.
And now he is describing his encounter with Jeb at the club.
‘How the hell did he know you were staying there?’ Toby interrupted in subdued bewilderment, at which a kind of joy briefly suffused Kit’s harrowed features.
‘Bugger stalked me,’ he said proudly. ‘Don’t ask me how. All the way from here to London. Saw me board the train in Bodmin, rode on it himself. Stalked me to the Connaught, stalked me to my club. Stealth,’ he added in marvel, as if stealth were a brand-new concept to him.
*
The club bedroom boasts a school bedstead, a washbasin with a towel no bigger than a pocket handkerchief and a two-bar electric fire that used to be coin-operated until an historic decision by the committee ruled that the cost of heating be included in the nightly charge. The shower is an up-ended coffin of white plastic crammed into a cupboard. Kit has successfully found the light switch but not yet closed the bedroom door behind him. Wordless, he watches Jeb get up from his chair, advance across the floor to him, pick the room key out of his hand, lock the door with it, drop it into the pocket of his smart blazer, and return to his seat beneath the open window.
Jeb orders Kit to switch off the overhead light. Kit obeys. Now the only light source is the glow of London’s orange night sky through the window. Jeb asks Kit for his cellphone. Kit mutely hands it over. Unbothered by the half-darkness, Jeb removes the battery, then the SIM card as deftly as if he were stripping down a gun, and tosses the pieces on to the bed.
‘Take your jacket off, please, Paul. How drunk are you?’
Kit manages ‘not very’. The Paul discomforts him but he takes his jacket off anyway.
‘Have a shower if you like, Paul. Just leave the door open.’
Kit doesn’t like, but ducks his head into the washbasin and sluices water on to his face, then rubs his face and hair with the towel in an effort to rub himself sober, but he is becoming more sober by the second anyway. A mind under siege can do a lot of things at once, and Kit’s is doing most of them. He is making a last-ditch effort to persuade himself that Jay Crispin was telling the truth and Jeb is the barking psychopath with the gift of the gab that Crispin said he was. The bureaucrat in him assesses his best course of action on this unproven assumption. Should he humour Jeb, offer him sympathy, medical help? Or should he – fat chance – lull him into complacency and wrest the key from him? Or failing that, make a mad dash for the open window and the fire escape? All this over urgently transmitted messages of love and abject apology to Suzanna, and requests to Emily for advice on the handling of the mentally sick and potentially violent patient.
Jeb’s first question is the more alarming for its placidity:
‘What did Crispin tell you about me, Paul, back there in the Connaught Hotel?’
To which Kit mumbles something to the effect that Crispin merely confirmed that Operation Wildlife was an unqualified success, an intelligence coup of exceptional value, and bloodless:
‘Everything it was trumped up to be, in fact. More’ – cavalierly adding – ‘despite that foul message you wrote on your so-called receipt for my wife’s handbag.’
Jeb stares at Kit without expression, as if he has misheard. He whispers something to himself that Kit can’t catch. Then there follows a moment which Kit, for all his determined objectivity, seems at a loss to describe in comprehensible terms. Somehow Jeb has crossed the bit of threadbare carpet that separates him from Kit. And Kit, with no memory of how he got there, finds himself jammed up against the door with one arm behind his back and one of Jeb’s hands holding him by the throat, and Jeb is talking into his face and encouraging Kit’s replies with smacks of his head against the doorpost.
Kit stoically recounts what happened next:
‘Bang. Head against the doorpost. Red sky at night. “What were you getting out of it, Paul?” What d’you mean? I say. “Money, what d’you think I mean?” Not a bloody bean, I told him. You’ve got the wrong man. Bang. “What was your share of the bounty, Paul?” Bang. Didn’t have a bloody share, I told him, and take your hands off me. Bang. I was angry with him by then. He’d got my arm in this bloody horrible twist. If you go on doing that, I said, you’ll break my fucking arm, and neither of us will be any the wiser. I’ve told you everything I know, so leave me alone.’
Kit’s voice lifts in pleased surprise:
‘And he did, dammit! Just like that. Left me alone. Took a long look at me, stood back and watched me slide down the wall in a heap. Then helped me to my feet again like a bloody Samaritan.’
Which was what Kit called the turning point: when Jeb went back to his chair and sat in it like a beaten boxer. But now Kit becomes the Samaritan. He doesn’t like the way Jeb is heaving and shaking:
‘Sort of sobbing noise coming out of him. Lot of choking. Well’ – indignantly – ‘if your wife’s been ill half her life, and your daughter’s a bloody doctor, you don’t just sit there gawping, do you? You do something.’
So Kit’s first question of Jeb, after they have sat in their separate corners for a while, is whether there’s anything Kit can get for him, his idea being – though he keeps the thought to himself – that in extremis he’ll track down old Em, as he insists on calling her, and get her to phone through a prescription to the nearest all-night chemist. But Jeb’s only response is to shake his head, get up, walk across the room, pour himself a tooth-glass of water from the washbasin, offer it to Kit, drink some himself, and sit down again in his corner.
Then after a while – could have been minutes, says Kit, but neither of them’s going anywhere so far as he knows – Jeb asks, in a hazy sort of voice, whether there’s any food about. It’s not that he’s actually hungry as such, he explains – bit of pride kicking in here, according to Kit – it’s for fuel purposes.
Kit regrets he has no food with him, but offers to pop downstairs and see if he can rustle something up with the night porter. Jeb receives this suggestion with another prolonged silence:
‘Seemed a bit out of it, poor chap. Gave me the impression he’d lost his train of thought and was having a spot of trouble getting it back. Know the feeling well.’
But in due course, good soldier that he is, Jeb braces himself, and digs in his pocket and hands over the bedroom key. Kit gets up from the bed and puts on his jacket.
‘Cheese all right?’
Cheese will be fine, says Jeb. But plain mousetrap, he can’t handle blue. Kit thinks that’s all he’s got to say, but he’s mistaken. Jeb needs to make a mission statement before Kit goes off to find cheese:
‘It was one big load of li
es, see, Paul,’ he explains, just as Kit is preparing to go downstairs. ‘Punter was never in Gibraltar. It was all made up, see. And Aladdin, well, he was never going to meet him, not in those houses or anywhere else, was he?’
Kit is wise enough to say nothing.
‘They conned him. Ethical did. Conned that minister of yours, Mr Fergus Quinn. Jay Crispin, the great one-man private-intelligence service. They led Quinn up the garden path and over the edge, same as where he led us, didn’t he? Nobody wants to admit they handed over a couple of million dollars in a suitcase for a load of old cobblers, well do they?’
Kit supposes not.
Jeb’s face has gone back into darkness and he is either silently laughing or – only Kit’s guess – silently weeping. Kit dithers at the door, not wanting to leave him, but not wanting to fuss over him either.
Jeb’s shoulders settle. Kit decides it’s all right to go downstairs.
*
Returned from his foray in the bowels of the club, Kit heaves the bedside table to the middle of the floor and sets a chair either side of it. He lays out a knife, bread, butter, Cheddar cheese and two pint bottles of beer and a jar of Branston Pickle that the night porter insisted on including in exchange for his twenty-pound tip.
The bread is white and pre-sliced in anticipation of tomorrow’s breakfast. With a slice laid flat on his palm, Jeb spreads butter, adds the cheese and trims it till it tessellates on the bread. Then he spoons pickle on top, takes up another slice of bread and makes a sandwich and cuts it methodically into quarters. Regarding such precision as unnatural in a Special Forces soldier, Kit puts it down to Jeb’s troubled state of mind and busies himself with the beer.
‘So down the hill we go to the terrace then, don’t we?’ Jeb resumes, when he’s taken the edge off his appetite. ‘No point in not, really, is there? Well, we had our reservations, naturally. Fix, find and finish? Well, maybe we hadn’t begun, what with Andy having done a job with Elliot way back, and not possessing a high opinion of him, frankly, not of his abilities, and not of the intelligence at his disposal either. Source Sapphire her name was, according to Elliot at the pre-operational briefing.’
A Delicate Truth Page 18
