John Carré - A Delicate Truth

Deploying all available stealth lest he rouse Suzanna from her morning sleep, Kit shaved and put on a dark town suit, as opposed to the country effort he had mistakenly worn for that shit Crispin, whose role in this affair he would drag into the daylight if it cost him his pension and his knighthood.

Surveying himself in the wardrobe mirror, he pondered whether to add a black tie out of respect for Jeb and decided: too demonstrative, sends the wrong message. With an antique key that he had recently added to his key-ring, he unlocked a drawer of the commander’s desk and extracted the envelope to which he had consigned Jeb’s flimsy receipt and, from beneath it, a folder marked DRAFT containing his handwritten document.

Pausing for a moment, he discovered almost to his relief that he was weeping hot tears of grief and anger. A quick glance at the title of his document, however, restored his spirits and determination:

‘ Operation Wildlife , Part I: Eyewitness account by HM Minister’s Acting Representative in Gibraltar, in the light of additional information supplied by Field Commander, UK Special Force’.

Part II, subtitled ‘Field Commander’s Eyewitness Account’ would remain forever pending, so Part I would have to do double duty.

Progressing softly over dust sheets to the bedroom, he gazed in shame and marvel at his sleeping wife, but took good care not to wake her. Gaining the kitchen – and the one telephone in the house from which it was possible to speak without being overheard in the bedroom – he went to work with a precision worthy of the devious Bell.

Call Mrs Marlow.

He does, keeping his voice down; and yes, of course, she will be more than happy to spend the night at the Manor, just as long as it’s what Suzanna wants, because that’s the main thing, isn’t it? – and is the Manor telephone working again, because it sounds perfectly all right to her ?

Call Walter and Anna, dull but sweet friends.

He does, and wakes Walter up, but nothing’s too much trouble for Walter. Yes, of course he and Anna will be happy to drop by this evening and make sure Suzanna isn’t feeling neglected if Kit can’t make it back from his business appointment till tomorrow, and is Suzanna watching Sneakers on Sky, because they are?

Take deep breath, sit down at kitchen table, write non-stop as follows, no self-editing, crossings-out, marginal notes, et cetera:

Darling Suki,

A lot has come up regarding our soldier friend while you were asleep, and the net result is, I’ve got to trolley up to London as a matter of urgency. With luck the whole thing will be thrashed out in time for me to catch the five o’clock back, but if not I’ll take the night sleeper even if I can’t get a berth.

Then his pen started running away with him, and he let it:

Dearest You, I love you terribly, but the time has come for me to stand up and be counted, and if you were able to know the circumstances you would agree wholeheartedly. In fact you’d do the job a sight better than I ever could, but it’s time I rose to your standards of courage instead of dodging bullets.

And if the last line on inspection read more starkly to him than the rest, there was no time for a second draft if he was going to make the eight forty-two.

Taking the letter upstairs, he laid it on the dust sheets in front of their bedroom door and weighted it with a chisel from his faded canvas tool-bag.

Delving in the library, he found an unused A4 On Her Majesty’s Service envelope from his last posting, inserted his draft document and sealed it with liberal quantities of Sellotape, much in the manner that he had sealed his letter to young Bell last week.

Driving over the windswept moonscape of Bodmin Moor, he enjoyed symptoms of release and levitation. Alone on the station platform among unfamiliar faces, however, he was seized with an impulse to hurry home while there was time, grab back the letter, get into his old clothes and tell Walter, Anna and Mrs Marlow not to bother after all. But with the arrival of the express train to Paddington, this mood, too, passed, and soon he was treating himself to the full English breakfast ‘at seat’, but tea not coffee, because Suzanna worried about his heart.

While Kit was speeding on his way to London, Toby Bell sat rigidly at his desk in his new office, addressing the latest crisis in Libya. His lower back was in near-terminal spasm, for which he had to thank Emily’s sofa, and he was keeping himself going on a diet of Nurofen, the remains of a bottle of sparkling water, and disjointed memories of their last couple of hours together in her flat.

At first, having supplied him with pillow and eiderdown, she had withdrawn to her bedroom. But quite soon she was back, dressed as before, and he was more awake and even less comfortable than he had been when she left him.

Seating herself out of striking distance, she invited him to describe his journey to Wales in greater detail. All too willingly, he obliged. She needed the grim details, and he provided them: the travelled blood that couldn’t possibly have travelled there and turned out to be red lead, or didn’t; Harry’s concern to get the highest price for Jeb’s van; Brigid’s unsparing adjectival use of ‘fucking’ and her cryptic account of Jeb’s last joyful phone call to her following his encounter with Kit at the club, urging her to dump Harry and prepare for his return.

Emily listened patiently, mostly with her large brown eyes, which in the half-light of early morning had acquired a disconcerting immobility.

He then told her about Jeb’s fight with Shorty over the photographs, and how Jeb had afterwards hidden them, and how Brigid had discovered them, and how she had let Toby copy them into his BlackBerry.

On her insistence, he showed them to her, and watched her face freeze the way it had frozen in the hospital.

‘Why do you think Brigid trusted you?’ she asked, to which he could only reply that Brigid was desperate and had presumably come to the conclusion that he was trustworthy, but this didn’t seem to satisfy her.

Next she needed to know how he had wangled Jeb’s name and address out of the authorities, to which Toby, while not identifying Charlie by name, beyond saying that he and his wife were old friends, explained that he had once done a favour for their musical daughter.

‘And apparently she really is a very promising cellist,’ he added inconsequentially.

Emily’s next question therefore struck him as totally unreasonable:

‘Did you sleep with her?’

‘God, no! That’s bloody outrageous!’ he said, genuinely shocked. ‘What the hell made you think that?’

‘My mother says you’ve had masses of women. She checked you out with her Foreign Office wives.’

‘Your mother ?’ Toby protested indignantly. ‘Well, what do the wives say about you , for Christ’s sake?’

At which they both laughed, if awkwardly, and the moment passed. And after that, all Emily wanted to know was who had murdered Jeb, assuming he was murdered, which in turn led Toby into a rather inarticulate condemnation of the Deep State, and thence into a denunciation of the ever-expanding circle of non-governmental insiders from banking, industry and commerce who were cleared for highly classified information denied to large swathes of Whitehall and Westminster.

And as he concluded this cumbersome monologue, he heard six striking, and was by now sitting on the sofa and no longer lying on it, which allowed Emily to sit primly beside him with the burners on the table in front of them.

Her next question has a schoolmistressy ring: