John Carré - A Delicate Truth

She looks at him, looks at her watch: 2 a.m. She fetches an eiderdown and a pillow from her bedroom.

‘Now you’ll be too cold,’ he objects.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she replies.

6

A stubborn Cornish mist had settled itself in the valley. For two days now no westerly had managed to drive it away. The arched brick windows of the stable that Kit had made his office should by rights have been full of budding leaves. Instead they were blanked out with the deadly whiteness of a shroud: or so it seemed to him as he quartered the harness room in his agitation, much as three years ago he had pounded his hated prison bedroom in Gibraltar waiting for the call to arms.

It was half past six in the morning and he was still wearing the wellingtons he’d put on to hurry across the orchard at Mrs Marlow’s urging to take the phone call from Emily on the spurious grounds that she couldn’t get through on the Manor line. Their conversation, if you could call it that, was with him now, albeit out of sequence: part information, part exhortation, and all of it a knife thrust through the gut.

And just as in Gibraltar, so here in the stables he was muttering and cursing at himself, half aloud: Jeb. Jesus Christ, man. Utter bloody nonsense … We were on a roll … Everything to go for – all of this interspersed by imprecations of bastards, bloody murderous bastards and the like.

‘You’ve got to lie low, Dad, for Mum’s sake, not just for yours. And for Jeb’s widow. It’s only for a few days, Dad. Just believe whatever Jeb’s psychiatrist said to you, even if she wasn’t Jeb’s psychiatrist. Dad, I’m going to hand you over to Toby. He can say it better than me.’

Toby? What the hell’s she doing with that sneaky bugger Bell at six in the morning?

‘Kit? It’s me. Toby.’

‘Who shot him, Bell?’

‘Nobody. It was suicide. Official. The coroner’s signed off on it, the police aren’t interested.’

Well, they ought to be bloody interested! But he hadn’t said that. Not at the time. Didn’t feel he’d said anything much at the time, apart from yes , and no , and oh well , yes , right , I see .

‘Kit?’ – Toby again.

‘Yes. What is it?’

‘You told me you’d been putting together a draft document in anticipation of Jeb’s visit to the Manor. Your own account of what happened from your perspective three years back, plus a memorandum of your conversation with him at your club, for him to sign off on. Kit?’

‘What’s wrong with that? Gospel truth, the whole bloody thing,’ Kit retorts.

‘Nothing’s wrong with it, Kit. I’m sure it will be extremely useful when the time comes for a démarche. It’s just: could you please find somewhere clever to put it for a few days? Out of harm’s way. Not in a safe or anywhere obvious. Maybe in the attic of one of the outhouses. Or perhaps Suzanna would have a brainwave. Kit?’

‘Have they buried him?’

‘Cremated.’

‘That’s a bit bloody quick, isn’t it? Who put them up to that? More jiggery-pokery, by the sound of it. Christ Almighty .’

‘Dad?’

‘Yes, Em. Still here. What is it?’

‘Dad? Just do what Toby says. Please. Don’t ask any more questions. Just do nothing, find somewhere safe for your opus, and take care of Mum. And leave Toby to do whatever he’s got to do up here, because he’s really working on this from every angle.’

I’ll bet he is, sneaky bastard – but he manages not to say that, which is surprising given that, with the devious Bell telling him what he should or shouldn’t be doing, and Emily backing him to the hilt, and Mrs Marlow with her ear to the parlour door, and poor Jeb dead with a bullet through his head, he might have said any bloody thing.

Wrestling for sanity, he goes back to the beginning yet again.

He’s standing in Mrs Marlow’s kitchen in his wellingtons and the washing machine’s going, and he’s told her to switch the bloody thing off or he won’t be able to hear a word.

Dad, this is Emily.

I know it’s Emily, for God’s sake! Are you all right? What’s going on? Where are you?

Dad, I’ve got really sad news for you. Jeb’s dead. Are you listening, Dad? Dad?

Holy God.

Dad? It was suicide, Dad. Jeb shot himself. With his own handgun. In his van.

No, he didn’t. Bloody nonsense. He was on his way here. When?

On Tuesday night. A week ago.

Where?

In Somerset.

He can’t have done. Are you telling me he killed himself that night? That bogus doctor woman called me on Friday.

Afraid so, Dad.

Has he been identified?

Yes.

Who by? Not that bogus bloody doctor, I trust?

His wife.

Christ Almighty.

Sheba was whimpering. Stooping to her, Kit gave her a consoling pat then glowered into the distance while he listened to Jeb’s parting words murmured to him on the club landing at first light:

You get to think you’re abandoned, sometimes. Cast out, like. Plus the child and her mother, lying there in your head. You feel responsible, like. Well, I don’t feel that any more, do I? So if you don’t mind, Sir Christopher, I’ll give your hand a shake.

Offering me the hand he’s supposed to have shot himself with. A good firm shake, along with a See you first thing Wednesday at the Manor then , and me promising to be short-order chef and run him up scrambled eggs for his breakfast, which he said was his favourite.

And wouldn’t call me Kit although I told him to. Didn’t think it was respectful, not to Sir Christopher. And me saying I never deserved a bloody knighthood in the first place. And him blaming himself for horrors he never committed. And now he’s being blamed for another horror he didn’t bloody commit: to wit, killing himself.

And what am I being asked to do about it? Sweet Fanny Adams. Go and hide the draft document in some hayloft, leave everything to the devious Bell and keep my stupid mouth shut.

Well, maybe I’ve kept it shut a bit too bloody much.

Maybe that’s what was wrong with me. Too willing to blast off about things that don’t matter a fart, and not quite willing enough to ask a few awkward questions like: what actually happened down there on the rocks behind the houses? Or: why am I being handed a cushy retirement posting in the Caribbean when there are half a dozen chaps above me who deserve it a bloody sight more than I do?

Worst of all, it was his own daughter telling him to keep his mouth shut, led on by young Bell, who seemed to have a knack of wearing two hats at once and getting away with it and – the rage rising in him again – getting away with old Em too, and persuading her, totally against her better judgement by the sound of her , to poke her nose into matters she doesn’t know the first bloody thing about, except what she’s overheard or picked up from her mother and shouldn’t have done.

And just for the record: if anybody was going to dish old Em the dirt about Operation Wildlife and related matters, it wasn’t going to be the devious Bell, whose sole qualification appeared to be spying on his minister, and it wasn’t going to be Suzanna. It was going to be her own bloody father, in his own time and in his own way.

And with these uncoordinated thoughts resounding furiously in his head he strode back across the fog-ridden courtyard to the house.