John Carré - A Delicate Truth

‘ Danny, shut the fuck up, for Christ’s sake! Jeb did, who d’you think? Tuesday, nine o’clock in the morning. Harry and Danny had just gone off on a school outing. I pick up the phone, it’s Jeb, like I never heard him these last three years. “I’ve found my witness, Brigid, the best you could ever think of. Him and me are going to set the record straight once and for all. Get rid of Harry, and as soon as I’m done we’ll start over again: you, me and Danny, same as old times.” That’s how depressed he was a few hours before he shot his fucking head off, Mr Bell.’

If a decade of diplomatic life had taught Toby one thing, it was to treat every crisis as normal and soluble. On the taxi ride back to Cardiff his mind might be a cauldron of unsorted fears for Kit, Suzanna and Emily; it might be in mourning for Jeb, and wrestling with the timing and method of his murder, and the complicity of the police in its cover-up, but outwardly he was the same chatty passenger and Gwyneth was the same chatty driver. Only on reaching Cardiff did he go about his dispositions exactly as if he’d spent the journey preparing them, which in truth he had.

Was he under scrutiny? Not yet, but Charlie Wilkins’s warning words were not lost on him. At Paddington, he had bought his railway ticket with cash. He had paid Gwyneth cash and asked her to drop him off and pick him up at the roundabout. He had kept to himself the identity of the person he was visiting, although he knew it was a lost cause. More than likely, at least one of Brigid’s neighbours had a watching brief to tip off the police, in which case a description of his personal appearance would have been reported, although, with any luck, police incompetence would ensure that word would take its time to travel.

Needing more cash than he’d reckoned on, he had no option but to draw some from a machine, thus advertising his presence in Cardiff. Some risks you just have to take. From an electronics shop a stone’s throw from the station he bought a new hard drive for his desktop and two second-hand cellphones, one black, one silver, with pay-as-you-go SIM cards and guaranteed fully charged batteries. In the world of downmarket electronics, he had been taught on his security courses, such cellphones were known as ‘burners’ because of the tendency of their owners to dispose of them after a few hours.

In a café favoured by Cardiff’s unemployed he bought a cup of coffee and a piece of slab cake and took them to a corner table. Satisfied that the background sound suited his purpose, he touched Shorty’s number into the silver burner and pressed green. This was Matti’s world, not his. But he had been at the edge of it, and he was not a stranger to dissembling.

The number rang and rang and he was reconciled to getting the messaging service when an aggressive male voice barked at him:

‘Pike here. I’m at work. What d’you want?’

‘Shorty?’

‘All right, Shorty. Who is this?’

Toby’s own voice, but without its Foreign Office polish:

‘Shorty, this is Pete from the South Wales Argus . Hi. Look, the paper’s putting together a spread on Jeb Owens, who sadly killed himself last week, as you probably know. Death of our unsung hero stuff. We understand you were quite a mate of his, that right? I mean, like, best mate? His winger, kind of thing. You must be pretty cut up.’

‘How’d you get this number?’

‘Ah well, we have our methods, don’t we? Look, what we’re wondering is – what my editor’s wondering – can we do an interview, like what a fine soldier Jeb was, Jeb as his best mate knew him, kind of thing, a full-page splash? Shorty? You still there?’

‘What’s your other name?’

‘Andrews.’

‘This supposed to be off the record or on?’

‘Well, we’d like it on the record, naturally. And face to face. We can do deep background, but that’s always a pity. Obviously, if there are issues of confidentiality, we’d respect them.’

Another protracted silence, with Shorty’s hand over the mouthpiece of his phone:

‘Thursday any good?’

Thursday? The conscientious foreign servant mentally checks his appointments diary. Ten a.m., departmental meeting. Twelve thirty p.m., inter-services liaison officers’ working lunch at Londonderry House.

‘Thursday’s fine,’ he replied defiantly. ‘Where’ve you got in mind? No chance of you coming up to Wales at all, I suppose?’

‘London. Golden Calf Café, Mill Hill. Eleven a.m. Do you?’

‘How do I recognize you?’

‘I’m a midget, aren’t I? Two foot six in my boots. And come alone, no photography. How old are you?’

‘Thirty-one,’ he replied too quickly, and wished he hadn’t.

On the return train journey to Paddington, again using the silver burner, Toby sent his first text message to Emily: need consultation asap please advise on this number as old number no longer operative, Bailey .

Standing in the corridor, he rang her surgery as a back-up and got the out-of-hours answering service:

‘Message for Dr Probyn, please. Dr Probyn, this is your patient Bailey asking for an appointment tonight. Please call me back on this number, as my old number no longer works. Thank you.’

For an hour after that it seemed to him that he thought of nothing but Emily: which was to say that he thought of everything from Giles Oakley’s defection and back again, but wherever he went, Emily went too.

Her reply to his text, barren though it was, lifted his spirits beyond anything he could have imagined:

I’m on shift till midnight. Ask for urgent-care centre or triage unit.

No signature. Not even an E.

At Paddington it was gone eight when he alighted but by then he had a new wish list of operational supplies: a roll of packaging tape, wrapping paper, half a dozen A5 padded envelopes and a box of Kleenex tissues. The newsagent in the station concourse was closed, but in Praed Street he was able to buy everything he needed, and add a reinforced carrier bag, a handful of top-up vouchers for the burners and a plastic model of a London Beefeater to his collection.

The Beefeater himself was surplus to requirements. What Toby needed was the cardboard box he came in.

His flat in Islington was on the first floor of a row of joined eighteenth-century houses that were identical save for the colour of their front doors, the condition of their window frames and the quality of their curtains. The night was dry and unseasonably warm. Taking the opposing pavement to his house, Toby first strolled past it, keeping a casual eye out for the classic telltale signs: the parked car with occupants, the bystanders on street corners chatting into cellphones, the men in overalls kneeling insincerely at junction boxes. As usual, his street contained all of these and more.

Crossing to his own side, he let himself into the house and, having climbed the stairs and unlocked his front door as silently as he knew how, stood still in the hall. Surprised to find the heating on, he remembered it was Tuesday, and on Tuesdays Lula, the Portuguese cleaning woman, came from three till five, so perhaps she had been feeling the cold.

All the same, Brigid’s calm announcement that her house had been professionally searched from top to bottom was still with him, and it was only natural that a sense of irregularity lingered in him as he went from room to room, sniffing the air for alien smells, poking at things, trying to remember how he’d left them and failing, pulling open cupboards and drawers to no effect. On his security training courses he had been told that professional searchers filmed their own progress in order to make sure they put everything back where they found it, and he imagined them doing that in his flat.