John Carré - A Delicate Truth

‘ Jeb? Doesn’t ring a bell, mate, hang on a jiffy –’

A different nurse comes to the phone, also male, but not so friendly:

‘No Jeb here. Got a John, got a Jack. That’s your lot.’

‘But I thought he was a regular,’ Kit protests.

‘Not here. Not Jeb. Try Sutton.’

Now the same thought occurs simultaneously to both Kit and Suzanna: get on to Emily, fast.

Best if Suzanna rings her. With Kit, just at the moment, she tends to be a bit scratchy.

Suzanna calls Emily’s cellphone, leaves a message.

By midday, Emily has called back twice. The sum of her enquiries is that a Dr Joachim Costello recently joined the mental-health unit at Ruislip as a temporary, but he’s a Portuguese citizen and the course he’s attending is to improve his English. Did their Costello sound Portuguese?

‘No she bloody didn’t!’ Kit roars at Toby, repeating the answer he gave Emily on the phone as he paces the stable floor. ‘And she was a bloody woman , and she sounded like an Essex schoolmistress with a plum up her arse, and Jeb hasn’t got a bloody mother and never did have, as he was pleased to tell me. I’m not a big chap for intimate revelations as a rule, but he was talking his heart out for the first time in three bloody years. Never met his mother, only thing he knows about her is her name: Caron. He fled the coop when he was fifteen and joined the army as an apprentice. Now tell me he made it all up!’

It is Toby’s turn to go to the window and, freed from Kit’s accusing stare, abandon himself to his thoughts.

‘By the time this Dr Costello rang off, had you given her any reason to think you didn’t believe her?’ he asks at last.

Equally long deliberation by Kit:

‘No. I hadn’t. I played her along.’

‘Then as far as she’s concerned, or they are: mission accomplished.’

‘Probably.’

But Toby isn’t about to be satisfied with ‘probably’:

‘So far as they’re concerned, whoever they are, you’ve been squared. Fobbed off. You’re on side ’ – gathering conviction as he speaks. ‘You believe the gospel according to Crispin, you believe Dr Costello even if she’s the wrong sex, and you believe Jeb is schizoid and a compulsive liar and is sitting in the isolation ward of a mental hospital in Ruislip and can’t be visited by his fear object.’

‘No, I bloody don’t,’ Kit snaps. ‘Jeb was telling me the literal truth. It shone out of him. It may be tearing him apart: that’s another matter. Man’s as sane as you or me.’

‘I absolutely accept that, Kit. I really do,’ Toby says at his most forbearing. ‘However, for Suzanna’s protection as well as your own, I suggest that the position you have very cleverly carved out for yourself in the eyes of the opposition is well worth preserving.’

‘Until when?’ Kit demands, unappeased.

‘How about until I find Jeb? Isn’t that why you asked me to come here? Or are you proposing to go and look for him yourself – thereby, incidentally, setting the whole howling mob on you?’ Toby demands, no longer quite so diplomatically.

And to this, for a while at least, Kit can find no convincing answer, so instead chews at his lip, and grimaces, and gives himself a gulp of Scotch.

‘Anyway, you’ve got that tape you stole,’ he growls, by way of bitter consolation. ‘That meeting in the Private Office with Quinn, Jeb and me. Stored away somewhere. That’s proof, if it’s ever needed. It would scupper you , all right. Might scupper me as well. Not sure I care too much about that either.’

‘My stolen tape proves intent ,’ Toby replies. ‘It doesn’t prove the operation ever took place, and it certainly doesn’t address the outcome.’

Kit grudgingly mulls this over.

‘So what you’re trying to tell me is ’ – as if Toby is somehow dodging the point – ‘Jeb’s the only witness to the shootings. Right?’

‘Well, the only one willing to talk, so far as we know,’ Toby agrees, not quite liking the sound of what he has just said.

If he slept he wasn’t aware of it.

Sometime in the few short hours in bed he heard a woman’s cry and supposed it was Suzanna’s. And after the cry, a flurry of feet across the dust sheets in the corridor below him, and they must have been Emily’s feet, hastening to her mother’s side, a theory borne out by the murmurings that followed.

And after the murmurings, Emily’s bedside light shining up through the cracks in the floorboards – is she reading, thinking, or listening for her mother? – until either he or Emily went to sleep, and he supposed he went first because he didn’t remember her light going out.

And when he woke later than he meant to, and hurried downstairs to breakfast: no Emily and no Sheba, just Kit in his church tweeds and Suzanna in her hat.

‘It was honourable of you, Toby,’ Suzanna said, grasping his hand and keeping it. ‘Wasn’t it, Kit? Kit was worried sick, we both were, and you came straight away. And poor Jeb’s honourable too. And Kit’s not good at sly , are you, darling? Not that you are, Toby, I don’t mean that at all. But you’re young and you’re clever, you’re in the Office, and you can delve without, well’ – little smile – ‘losing your pension.’

Standing in the granite porch she fervently embraces him:

‘We never had a son, you see, Toby. We tried to, but we lost him.’

Followed by a gruff ‘be in touch then’ from Kit.

Toby and Emily sat in the conservatory, Toby perched on an old sunlounger and Emily on a rush chair at the furthest end of the room. The distance between them was something they had tacitly agreed upon.

‘Good talk with Dad last night?’

‘If you can call it that.’

‘Perhaps you’d like me to go first,’ Emily suggested. ‘Then you won’t be tempted into some indiscretion you may regret.’

‘Thank you,’ Toby replied politely.

‘Jeb and my father are planning to produce a document about their exploits together, nature unknown. Their document will have earth-shaking consequences in official quarters. In other words, they will be whistle-blowers. At issue are a dead woman and her child, according to my mother. Or possibly dead. Or probably dead. We don’t know, but we fear the worst. Am I warm so far?’

Receiving only a straight stare from Toby, she drew in her breath and went on:

‘Jeb fails to make the date. So no whistle. Instead, a woman doctor who is patently not a doctor and should have been a man calls Kit, alias Paul, and tells him that Jeb has been confined in a mental hospital. Investigations reveal this to be untrue. I feel I’m talking to myself.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Jeb, meanwhile, is unfindable. He has no surname, and is not in the habit of leaving a forwarding address. Official avenues of enquiry, such as the police, are closed – not for us frail women to reason why. You’re still listening, I hope?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Toby Bell is some kind of player in this scenario. My mother likes you. My father prefers not to, but sees you as a necessary evil. Is that because he doubts your allegiance to the cause?’

‘You’d have to ask him that.’

‘I thought I’d ask you. Is he expecting you to find Jeb for him?’

‘Yes.’

‘For both of you, then?’

‘In a way.’

‘ Can you find him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you know what you’ll do when you have found him? I mean, if Jeb’s about to blow the whistle on some great scandal, perhaps you might have a last-minute change of heart and feel bound to turn him over to the authorities. Might you?’