A Delicate Truth

by John le Carré

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Any sight or sound of said gentleman, and the force concerned will take no action but report immediately to the very top. I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me the reason for that large red ring at all, would you?’

  ‘Sorry, Charlie. I can’t.’

  ‘And that’s it, is it?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is.’

  Parking in the station forecourt, Charlie turned off the engine but kept the doors locked.

  ‘Well, I too am afraid, son,’ he said severely. ‘For your sake. And your lady’s sake, if there is one. Because when I ask my certain friend in the Met for a favour like that, and loud bells start ringing in his ear, which in the case of your Welshman they did, he has his own official commitments to consider, doesn’t he? Which is what he was good enough to tell me by way of a warning. He can’t just push a button like that and run away, can he? He has to protect himself. So what I’m saying to you is, son: give her my love, if she exists, and take a lot of care because I have a bad feeling you’re going to need it, now that our old friend Giles, alas, is no longer with us.’

  ‘Not with us? You mean he’s dead?’ Toby exclaimed, ignoring in his concern the implication that Oakley was in some way his protector.

  But Charlie was already chuckling away:

  ‘Dear me, no! I thought you knew. Worse. Our friend Giles Oakley is a banker. And you thought he was dead. Oh dear, oh dear, wait till I tell Beatrix. Trust our Giles to make timely use of the revolving door, I say.’ And lowering his voice to one of sympathy, ‘He’d got as high as they’d let him go, mind you. Reached his ceiling, hadn’t he? – as far as they were concerned. Nobody’s going to give him the top billet, not after what happened in Hamburg, are they? You’d never know when it was coming home to roost – well, would you?’

  But Toby, reeling from so many blows at once, had no words. After only a week back in London and a full tour in Beirut, during which Oakley had vanished into mandarin thin air, Toby had been curious to know when and how his erstwhile patron would surface, if at all.

  Well, now he had his answer. The lifelong foe of speculative bankers and their works, the man who had branded them drones, parasites, socially useless and a blight on any decent economy had taken the enemy’s shilling.

  And why had Oakley done that, according to Charlie Wilkins?

  Because the wise heads of Whitehall had decided he wasn’t bankable.

  And why wasn’t Oakley bankable?

  Lean your head back on the iron-hard cushions of the late train back to Victoria.

  Close your eyes, say Hamburg, and tell yourself the story you swore you would never speak aloud.

  *

  Shortly after arriving at the Berlin Embassy, Toby happens to be on night duty when a call comes in from the superintendent of the Davidwache in Hamburg, the police station charged with monitoring the Reeperbahn’s sex industry. The superintendent asks to speak to the most senior person available. Toby replies that he himself is that person, which at 3 a.m. he is. Knowing that Oakley is in Hamburg addressing an august body of ship-owners, he is immediately wary. There had been talk of Toby tagging along for the experience, but Oakley had scotched it.

  ‘We have a drunk Englishman in our cells,’ the superintendent explains, determined to air his excellent English. ‘It is unfortunately necessary to arrest him for causing a serious disturbance at an extreme establishment. He also has many wounds,’ he adds. ‘On his torso, actually.’

  Toby suggests the superintendent contact Consular Section in the morning. The superintendent replies that such a delay might not be in the best interests of the British Embassy. Toby asks why not.

  ‘This Englishman has no papers and no money. All are stolen. Also no clothes. The owner of the establishment tells us he was flagellated in the normal manner and regrettably became out of control. However, the prisoner is telling us he is an important official of your embassy, not your ambassador, maybe, but better.’

  It takes Toby just three hours to reach the doorstep of the Davidwache, having driven at top speed down the autobahn through clouds of ground mist. Oakley is lolling half awake in the superintendent’s office wearing a police dressing gown. His hands, bloodied at the fingertips, are bandaged to the arms of his chair. His mouth is swollen in a crooked pout. If he recognizes Toby, he gives no sign of it. Toby gives none in return.

  ‘You know this man, Mr Bell?’ the superintendent enquires, in a heavily suggestive tone. ‘Maybe you decide you have never seen him before in your life, Mr Bell?’

  ‘This man is a complete stranger to me,’ Toby replies obediently.

  ‘He is an imposter, perhaps?’ the superintendent suggests, again too knowingly by half.

  Toby concedes that the man may indeed be an imposter.

  ‘Then maybe you should take this imposter back to Berlin and interrogate him sharply?’

  ‘Thank you. I will.’

  From the Reeperbahn, Toby drives Oakley, now in a police tracksuit, to a hospital on the other side of town. No broken bones but the body a mess of lacerations that could be whip marks. At a crowded superstore, he buys him a cheap suit, then calls Hermione to explain that her husband has had a minor car accident. Nothing grave, he says, Giles was sitting in the back of a limousine without his seat belt. On the return journey to Berlin, Oakley speaks not a word. Neither does Hermione, when she comes to unload him from Toby’s car.

  And from Toby, also not a word, and none from Giles Oakley either, beyond the three hundred euros in an envelope that Toby found lying in his embassy mailbox in payment for the new suit.

  *

  ‘And that’s the monument there, look!’ the driver called Gwyneth exclaimed, pointing her ample arm out of the window and slowing down to give Toby a better view. ‘Forty-five men, a thousand feet down, God help them.’

  ‘What caused it, Gwyneth?’

  ‘One falling stone, boy. One little spark was all it ever took. Brothers, fathers and sons. Think of the women, though.’

  Toby did.

  After another sleepless night, and in defiance of every principle he had held dear from the day he entered the Foreign Service, he had pleaded a raging toothache, taken a train to Cardiff and a taxi for the fifteen-mile journey to what Charlie Wilkins had called Jeb’s unpronounceable address. The valley was a graveyard of abandoned collieries. Pillars of blue-black rain rose above the green hills. The driver was a voluble woman in her fifties. Toby sat beside her in the front seat. The hills drew together and the road narrowed. They passed a football field and a school, and behind the school an overgrown aerodrome, a collapsed control tower and the skeleton of a hangar.

  ‘If you’d just put me down at the roundabout,’ Toby said.

  ‘Now I thought you said you was visiting a friend,’ Gwyneth replied accusingly.

  ‘So I am.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you want me to drop you at your friend’s house then?’

  ‘Because I want to surprise them, Gwyneth.’

  ‘Not many surprises left in this place, I can tell you, boy,’ she said, and handed him her card for when he wanted to go back.

  The rain had eased to a fine drizzle. A red-haired boy of eight or so was riding a brand-new bicycle up and down the road, honking an antiquated brass horn that had been screwed to the handlebars. Black-and-white cattle grazed amid a forest of pylons. To his left ran a row of prefabricated houses with hooped green roofs and the same shed in each front garden. He guessed they were once the quarters of married servicemen. Number ten was the last of the row. A whitewashed flagpole stood in the front garden, but no flag flew from it. He unlatched the gate. The boy on the bicycle came skidding to a halt beside him. The front door was of stippled glass. No doorbell. Watched by the boy, he tapped on the glass. A woman’s shadow appeared. The door sprang open. Blonde, his own age, no make-up, curled fists, a set jaw and angry as all hell.

  ‘If you’re press, you can bugger off! I’ve had my fill of the lot of you!’


  ‘I’m not press.’

  ‘Then what the fuck d’you want?’ – her voice not Welsh but old-fashioned fighting Irish.

  ‘Are you Mrs Owens, by any chance?’

  ‘What if I am?’

  ‘My name’s Bell. I wondered whether I could have a word with your husband, Jeb.’

  Leaning his bicycle against the fence, the boy squeezed past him and stood at the woman’s side, one hand clasped possessively round her thigh.

  ‘And about what the fuck are you wishing to have a word with my husband, Jeb?’

  ‘I’m actually here on behalf of a friend. Paul, his name is’ – watching for a reaction but seeing none – ‘Paul and Jeb had a date to meet last Wednesday. Jeb didn’t show up. Paul’s worried for him. Thinks he may have had an accident with his van or something. The cellphone number Jeb gave him doesn’t answer. I was coming up this way, so he asked me to see if I could track him down,’ he explained lightly, or as lightly as he could.

  ‘Last Wednesday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Like a week ago?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Six fucking days?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Appointment where?’

  ‘At his house.’

  ‘Where the fuck’s his house, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘In Cornwall. North Cornwall.’

  Her face rigid, the boy’s also.

  ‘Why didn’t your friend come himself?’

  ‘Paul’s stuck at home. His wife’s sick. He can’t leave her,’ Toby replied, beginning to wonder how much of this he could do.

  A big, ungainly, grey-haired man in a buttoned woollen jacket and spectacles was looming at her shoulder, peering at him.

  ‘What seems to be our problem, Brigid?’ he enquired in an earnest voice that Toby arbitrarily awarded to the far north.

  ‘The man wants Jeb. He’s got a friend called Paul had a date with Jeb in Cornwall last Wednesday. Wants to know why the fuck Jeb didn’t show for it, if you can believe him.’

  The man laid an avuncular hand on the boy’s red head.

  ‘Danny, I think you should pop across to Jenny’s for a play. And we mustn’t keep the gentleman standing on the doorstep, must we, Mr –?’

  ‘Toby.’

  ‘And I’m Harry. How d’you do, Toby?’

  Curved ceiling, iron trusses holding it up. The linoleum floor glistening with polish. In a kitchen alcove, artificial flowers on a white tablecloth. And in the centre of the room facing a television set, a two-piece sofa and matching armchairs. Brigid sat on an arm. Toby stood opposite her while Harry pulled open the drawer of a sideboard and extracted a buff army-style folder. Holding it in both hands like a hymnal, he placed himself in front of Toby and drew a breath as if he were about to sing.

  ‘Now did you know Jeb personally at all, then, Toby?’ he suggested, by way of a precautionary introduction.

  ‘No. I didn’t. Why?’

  ‘So your friend Paul knew him but you didn’t, is that correct, Toby?’ – making doubly sure.

  ‘Just my friend,’ Toby confirmed.

  ‘So you never met Jeb at all. Not even to set eyes on, as we may say.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, this will come as a shock to you, Toby, all the same, and no doubt a much bigger shock to your friend Paul, who is sadly unable to be with us today. But poor Jeb very tragically passed away by his own hand last Tuesday, and we’re still trying to come to terms with it, as you may suppose. Not to mention Danny, naturally, although sometimes you have to wonder whether children manage these things better than we adults do.’

  ‘It was splashed enough over the papers, for fuck’s sake,’ Brigid said, speaking across Toby’s mumbled protestations of condolence. ‘Everyone in the fucking world knows about it except him and his friend Paul.’

  ‘Well, only local papers now, Brigid,’ Harry corrected her, passing Toby the folder. ‘It’s not everyone reads the Argus, is it?’

  ‘And the fucking Evening Standard.’

  ‘Yes, well, not everyone reads the Evening Standard either, do they? Not now it’s free. People like to appreciate what they buy, not what’s pressed on them for nothing. That’s only human nature.’

  ‘I really am deeply sorry,’ Toby managed to get in, opening the folder and staring at the cuttings.

  ‘Why? You didn’t bloody know him,’ Brigid said.

  WARRIOR’S LAST BATTLE

  Police are not looking for any other suspect in the death by shooting of ex-Special Forces David Jebediah (Jeb) Owens aged 34 who, in the words of the coroner, ‘fought a losing battle against post-traumatic stress disorder and its associated forms of clinical depression …’

  SPECIAL FORCES HERO ENDS OWN LIFE

  … served gallantly in Northern Ireland, where he met his future wife, Brigid, of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Later served in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan …

  ‘Would you like to telephone your friend, Toby?’ said Harry hospitably. ‘There’s a conservatory at the back if you require the privacy, and we’ve a good signal, thanks to the radar station nearby, I shouldn’t wonder. We had the cremation for him yesterday, didn’t we, Brigid? Family only, no flowers. Your friend wouldn’t have been missed, tell him, so no cause to reproach himself.’

  ‘What else are you going to tell your friend, Mr Bell?’ Brigid demanded.

  ‘What I’ve read here. It’s awful news.’ He tried again: ‘I’m dreadfully sorry, Mrs Owens.’ And to Harry: ‘Thanks, but I think I’d rather break it to him personally.’

  ‘Quite understood, Toby. And respectful, if I may say so.’

  ‘Jeb blew his fucking brains out, Mr Bell, if it’s of interest to your friend at all. In his van. They didn’t put that bit in the papers; they’re considerate. Some time last Tuesday evening, they think he did it, between six and ten o’clock. He was parked in the corner of a flat field near Glastonbury, Somerset, what they call the Levels. Six hundred yards from the nearest human habitation – they paced it. He used a 9mm Smith & Wesson, his weapon of choice, short barrel. I never knew he had a fucking Smith & Wesson, and as a matter of fact he hated handguns, which is paradoxical, but there it was in his hand, they say, short barrel and all. “Can we trouble you for an official identification, Mrs Owens?” “No trouble at all, Officer. Any time. Lead me to him.” Just as well I’d been in the constabulary. Straight through the fucking right temple. Small hole on the right side and not much of his face at all on the other. That’s exit wounds for you. He didn’t miss. He wouldn’t, not Jeb. He was always a lovely shot. Won prizes, Jeb did.’

  ‘Yes, well, reliving it doesn’t bring him back, does it, Brigid?’ said Harry. ‘I think Toby here deserves a cup of tea, don’t you, Toby? Coming all this way for his friend, that’s what I call loyalty. And a piece of Danny’s shortbread that you made with him, Brigid.’

  ‘They couldn’t wait to cremate him either. Suicides jump the queue, Mr Bell, in case you should ever have the problem.’ She had flopped from the arm into the chair, and was thrusting her pelvis at him in some kind of sexual contempt. ‘I had the pleasure of washing his fucking van out, didn’t I? Soon as they’d had their way with it. “Here you are, Mrs Owens, it’s all yours now.” Nice polite people, mind you, in Somerset. Very courteous to a lady. Treated me like a colleague too. There was a couple from the Met there. Directing operations for their country brothers.’

  ‘Brigid didn’t phone me, not till dinner time, she wouldn’t,’ Harry explained. ‘I’d lessons back to back. She knew that, which was very considerate on your part, wasn’t it, Brigid? You can’t let fifty children run wild for two hours, can you?’

  ‘Lent me their fucking hose too, which was nice. You’d think cleaning it out would be part of the service, wouldn’t you? But not with the austerity, not in Somerset. “Now are you quite sure you’ve done all your forensics?” I asked them, “because I don’t want to be the one to wash away the clues, now.” “We’ve all the clues we need
, thank you, Mrs Owens, and here’s a scrubbing brush for you, in case you need it.”’

  ‘You’re just upsetting yourself, Brigid,’ Harry warned from the kitchen alcove, filling a kettle and putting out pieces of shortbread.

  ‘I’m not upsetting Mr Bell, though, am I? Look at him. He’s a model of composure. I’m a woman playing catch-up on my dead husband, who is a dead stranger to me, you see, Mr Bell. Until three years ago I knew Jeb very well indeed, and so did Danny. The man we knew three years ago would not have killed himself with a fucking short-barrelled pistol, or a long-barrelled one for that matter. He’d never have left his son without a fucking father or his wife without a husband. Danny was the world to him. Even after Jeb turned bloody mad, it was Danny, Danny. Shall I tell you something about suicide that isn’t generally known, Mr Bell?’

  ‘Toby doesn’t need this, Brigid. I’m sure he’s a well-informed young gentleman who’s familiar with the psychology and suchlike. Am I not right, Toby?’

  ‘It’s fucking murder is what suicide is, Mr Bell. Never mind you murder yourself along with it. It’s other people you’re after killing. Three years ago I’d a great marriage going to the man of my dreams. I wasn’t bad myself, which he was good enough to comment on frequently. I’m a good fuck and he loved me full on, or so he said. Gave me every reason to believe him. I still do. I believe him. I love him. Always did. But I don’t believe the bastard who shot himself to kill us, and I don’t love him either. I hate him. Because if he did that, he is a bastard, I don’t care what the fucking cause was.’

  If he did that? Was the if delivered with greater force than she intended? Or was this merely Toby’s imagination?

  ‘And come to think of it, I don’t know what it was drove him round the fucking bend in the first place. I never did. He’d had a bad mission. There’d been some wrong killing. That was my full ration. After that, I could sing for it. Maybe you and your friend Paul know. Maybe Jeb trusted your friend Paul the way he wouldn’t trust me, his fucking wife. Maybe the police know too. Maybe the whole fucking street knows, and me and Danny and Harry here are the only odd ones out.’