John Carré - A Delicate Truth

Soundings that Toby has taken round the Whitehall bazaar are mixed at best: ‘Sucks up a brief quick enough, but watch your arse when he decides to act on it,’ advises a bruised Defence Ministry veteran strictly off the record. And from a former assistant called Lucy: ‘Very sweet, very charming when he needs to be.’ And when he doesn’t? Toby asks. ‘He’s just not with us,’ she insists, frowning and avoiding his eye. ‘He’s out there fighting his demons somehow.’ But what demons and fighting them how is more than Lucy is willing or able to say.

At first sight, nonetheless, all augurs well.

True, Fergus Quinn is no easy ride, but Toby never expected different. He can be clever, obtuse, petulant, foul-mouthed and dazzlingly considerate in the space of half a day, one minute all over you, the next a brooder who locks himself up with his despatch boxes behind his heavy mahogany door. He is a natural bully and, as advertised, makes no secret of his contempt for civil servants; even those closest to him are not spared his tongue-lashings. But his greatest scorn is reserved for Whitehall’s sprawling intelligence octopus, which he holds to be bloated, elitist, self-regarding and in thrall to its own mystique. And this is all the more unfortunate since part of Team Quinn’s remit requires it to ‘evaluate incoming intelligence materials from all sources and submit recommendations for exploitation by the appropriate services’.

As to the scandal-at-Defence-that-never-was, whenever Toby is tempted to edge alongside it, he bumps up against what feels increasingly like a wall of silence deliberately constructed for his personal benefit: case closed, mate … sorry, old boy, lips sealed … And once, if only from a boastful clerk in Finance Section over a Friday-evening pint in the Sherlock Holmes – got away with daylight robbery, didn’t he? It takes the unlovable Gregory, seated by chance next to Toby at a tedious Monday focus session of the Staffing and Management Committee, to set his alarm bells ringing at full blast.

Gregory, a large and ponderous man older than his years, is Toby’s exact contemporary and supposed rival. But it is a fact known to all that, whenever the two of them are in line for an appointment, it’s always Toby who pips Gregory at the post. And so it might have been in the recent race for Private Secretary to the new Junior Minister, except that this time round the rumour mill decreed that there was no proper contest. Gregory had served a two-year secondment to Defence, bringing him into almost daily contact with Quinn, whereas Toby was virgin – which is to say, he brought no such murky baggage from the past.

The focus session drags to its inconclusive end. The room empties. Toby and Gregory remain by tacit agreement at the table. For Toby the moment provides a welcome opportunity to mend fences; Gregory is less sweetly disposed.

‘Getting along all right with King Fergie, are we?’ he enquires.

‘Fine, thanks, Gregory, just fine. A few wrinkles here and there, only to be expected. How’s life as Resident Clerk these days? Must be pretty eventful.’

But Gregory is not keen to discuss life as a Resident Clerk, which he regards as a poor second to Private Secretary to the new Minister.

‘Well, watch out he doesn’t flog the office furniture out the back door is all I can say,’ he advises with a humourless smirk.

‘Why? Is that his thing? Flogging furniture? He’d have a bit of a problem, humping his new desk down three floors, even him!’ Toby replies, determined not to rise.

‘And he hasn’t signed you up to one of his highly profitable business companies yet?’

‘Is that what he did to you?’

‘No way, old sport ’ – with improbable geniality – ‘not me. I stayed clear. Good men are scarce, I say. Others weren’t so fly.’

And here without warning Toby’s patience snaps, which in Gregory’s company is what it tends to do.

‘Actually, what the hell are you trying to tell me, Gregory?’ he demands. And when all he gets is Gregory’s big, slow grin again: ‘If you’re warning me – if this is something I should know – then come out with it or go to Human bloody Resources.’

Gregory affects to weigh this suggestion.

‘Well, I suppose if it was anything you needed to know , old sport, you could always have a quiet word with your guardian angel Giles, couldn’t you?’

A self-righteous sense of purpose now swept over Toby which, even in retrospect, seated at his rickety coffee table on a sunny pavement in Soho, he could still not wholly justify to himself. Perhaps, he reflected, it was nothing more complicated than a case of pique at being denied a truth owed to him and shared by those around him. And certainly he would have argued that, since Diana had ordered him to stick like glue to his new master and not let him make puddles, he had a right to find out what puddles the man had made in the past. Politicians, in his limited experience of the breed, were repeat offenders. If and when Fergus Quinn offended in the future, it would be Toby who would have to explain why he had let his master off the lead.

As to Gregory’s jibe that he should go running to his guardian angel Giles Oakley: forget it. If Giles wanted Toby to know something, Giles would tell him. And if Giles didn’t, nothing on God’s earth was going to make him.

Yet something else, something deeper and more troubling, is driving Toby. It is his master’s near-pathological reclusiveness.

What in Heaven’s name does a man so seemingly extrovert do all day, cloistered alone in his Private Office with classical music booming out and the door locked not only against the outer world but against his very own staff? What’s inside those plump, hand-delivered, double-sealed, waxed envelopes that pour in from the little back rooms of Downing Street marked STRICTLY PERSONAL & PRIVATE which Quinn receives, signs for and, having read, returns to the same intractable couriers who brought them?

It’s not only Quinn’s past I’m being cut out of. It’s his present.

His first stop is Matti, career spy, drinking pal and former embassy colleague in Madrid. Matti is currently kicking his heels between postings in his Service’s headquarters across the river in Vauxhall. Perhaps the enforced inactivity will make him more forthcoming than usual. For arcane reasons – Toby suspects operational – Matti is also a member of the Lansdowne Club off Berkeley Square. They meet for squash. Matti is gangly, bald and bespectacled and has wrists of steel. Toby loses four–one. They shower, sit in the bar overlooking the swimming pool and watch the pretty girls. After a few desultory exchanges, Toby comes to the point:

‘So give me the story, Matti, because nobody else will. What went wrong at Defence when my minister was in the saddle?’

Matti does some slow-motion nodding of his long, goatish head:

‘Yes, well. There’s not a lot I can offer you, is there?’ he says moodily. ‘Your man went off the reservation, our lot saved his neck and he hasn’t forgiven us is about the long and short of it – silly bugger.’

‘Saved his neck how , for God’s sake?’

‘Tried to go it alone, didn’t he?’ says Matti contemptuously.

‘Doing what? Who to?’

Matti scratches his bald head and does another ‘Yes, well. Not my turf, you see. Not my area.’

‘I realize that, Matti. I accept it. It’s not my area either. But I’m the bloody man’s minder, aren’t I?’

‘All those bent lobbyists and arms salesmen beavering away at the fault lines between the defence industry and procurement,’ Matti complains, as if Toby is familiar with the problem.