John Carré - A Delicate Truth

And ten minutes later, sure enough Charlie was handing back the card with a name and address written out in a policeman’s careful hand, and Toby was saying, Fantastic, Charlie, wonderful, she’ll be over the moon, and can we please stop at a cash machine on the way to the station?

But none of this quite removed the cloud of concern that had formed on Charlie Wilkins’s normally untroubled face, and it was still there when they stopped at a hole in the wall and Toby duly handed Charlie his two hundred pounds.

‘That gentleman you asked me to find out about just now,’ Charlie said. ‘I don’t mean the car. I mean the gentleman who owns it. The Welsh gentleman, according to his address.’

‘What about him?’

‘My certain friend in the Met informs me that the said gentleman with the unpronounceable address has a rather large red ring round his name, in a metaphorical manner of speaking.’

‘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.