John Carré - A Delicate Truth

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 office. 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.’

‘You seem to have forgotten that Jeb was army ,’ Kit broke in hotly. ‘ British army. He also had a bit of a thing about bounty-hunters, as he happened to inform me during our time together. Tolerated them, but that was as much as he could manage. He was proud of being the Queen’s soldier, and that was enough for him. Made the very point, I’m afraid. Sorry about that’ – getting hotter still.

Crispin was gently nodding to himself, like a man whose worst fears have been confirmed.

‘Oh dear. Oh Jeb. Oh boy. He actually said that, did he? God-a-mercy!’ He collected himself. ‘The Queen’s soldier doesn’t hold with mercenaries, but wants a mega-slice of the bounty-hunters’ cake? I love it. Well done, Jeb. Hypocrisy hits new depths. And when he doesn’t get what he wants, he turns round and shits all over Ethical’s doorstep. What a two-faced little’ – but for reasons of delicacy he preferred to leave the sentence unfinished.

And again Kit refused to be deterred:

‘Now look here, all that’s beside the point. I haven’t got my answer, have I? Nor has Suzanna.’

‘To what , exactly, old boy?’ Crispin asked, still struggling to overcome whatever demons were assailing him.

‘The answer I came for, damn it. Yes or no? Forget rewards, bounty, all that stuff. Total red herring. My question is, one: was the operation bloodless or was it not? Was anybody killed ? And if so, who were they? Never mind about innocent or guilty: were they killed? And two ’ – no longer quite the master of his arithmetic, but persisting nonetheless – ‘was a woman killed? And was her child killed? Or any child, for that matter? Suzanna has a right to know. So’ve I. And we both need to know what to tell our daughter, because Emily was there too. At the Fayre. Heard him. Heard things that she shouldn’t have done. From Jeb. Not her fault that she heard them but she did. I’m not sure how much, but enough.’ And as a mitigating afterthought, because his parting words to Emily at the railway station still shamed him: ‘Earwigging, probably. I don’t blame her. She’s a doctor. She’s observant. She needs to know things. Part of her job.’