John Carré - A Delicate Truth

‘Well now, I don’t think I’m totally sure either,’ Lionel replied keenly. ‘Kit, what’s your take on this?’

‘No idea,’ Kit growled. ‘Never saw her sign any document of that sort. She certainly never told me she’d signed one.’ And as the sick fury he had been suppressing for too long came to the surface: ‘Hell does it matter what she signed or didn’t sign? Not my fault she knows what she knows. Not hers either. The girl’s desperate. I’m desperate. She wants answers. We all do.’

‘All?’ Frances repeated, lifting her pallid face to him in a kind of frigid alarm. ‘Who is all in this equation? Are you telling us there are other people who are aware of the content of this paper?’

‘If they are, it’s none of my doing,’ Kit retorted angrily, turning to Lionel for the male relief. ‘And not Jeb’s either. Jeb wasn’t gabby, Jeb stuck to the rules. Didn’t go to the press or any of that stuff. Stayed strictly inside the camp. Wrote to his MP, his regiment – and probably to you people, for all I know,’ he ended accusingly.

‘Yes, well, it’s all very painful and very unfair,’ Lionel agreed, delicately touching the top of his frizzy grey hair with his open palm as if to console it. ‘And I think I may say that we have gone to very serious lengths over the last years to get to the bottom of what was obviously a very controversial, very complex, many-faceted – what can we say, Frances? – episode.’

‘ We being who?’ Kit grunted, but the question seemed to go unheard.

‘And everyone’s been very helpful and forthcoming – wouldn’t you agree, Frances?’ Lionel continued, and transferring his hand to his lower lip gave it too a consoling tweak. ‘I mean, even the Americans , who are normally very tight indeed about these things – and of course had no official locus at all , let alone un official – came through with a very clear statement distancing themselves from any hint that the Agency might have provided support-in-aid – for which we were duly grateful, weren’t we, Frances?’

And turning to Kit again:

‘And of course we did hold an inquiry. Internally, obviously. But with due diligence. And as a result, poor Fergus Quinn fell on his sword, which – and I think, Frances, you would share this view – was absolutely the decent thing to do at the time. But these days, who does the decent thing? I mean, when one thinks of the politicians who haven’t resigned and should have done, poor Fergus comes over like a shining knight. Frances, I believe you had a point?’

Frances had:

‘What I don’t understand, Sir Christopher, is what this document is supposed to be ? Is it an accusation? A witness statement? Or simply a minute of what somebody said to you, and you have reported it on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, with no commitment on your own part either way?’

‘It’s what it is , for Christ’s sake!’ Kit retorted, his flame now fully lit. ‘ Operation Wildlife was an utter cock-up. Total. The intelligence that prompted it was a lot of balls, two innocent people were shot dead, and there’s been a three-year cover-up by all parties involved – including, I strongly suspect, this place. And the one man who was willing to speak up has met an untimely death, which needs some very serious looking into. Bloody serious,’ he ended, on a bark.

‘Yes, well, I think we could just settle for unsolicited document of record , actually,’ Lionel murmured to Frances helpfully.

Frances was not to be appeased:

‘Would I be overstating the case, Sir Christopher, if I suggested that the whole burden of your testimony against Mr Crispin and others is derived from what Jeb Owens said to you between the hours of 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. on that one night in your club? I am excluding for the moment the so-called receipt that Jeb passed to your wife, and which I see you have added as an annexe of some sort.’

For a moment Kit appeared too stunned to speak.

‘What about my bloody testimony? I was there , wasn’t I? On the hillside! In Gibraltar. The minister’s man on the spot. He wanted my advice. I gave it to him. Don’t tell me nobody was recording what was being said back and forth. There’s no case for going in . My words, loud and clear. And Jeb agreed with me. They all did. Shorty, every man jack of them. But they’d got the order to go, so they went. Not because they’re sheep. But because that’s what decent soldiers do! However bloody silly the orders are. Which they were. Bloody silly. No rational grounds? Never mind. Orders are orders,’ he added, for emphasis.

Frances was scrutinizing another page of Kit’s document:

‘But surely everything you saw and heard in Gibraltar tallied precisely with the account you were afterwards given by those who had planned the operation, and were in a position to assess the outcome? Which you were patently not, were you? You had absolutely no idea of the outcome. You simply take your tune from other people. First you believe what the planners tell you. Then you believe what Jeb Owens tells you. On no more substantial evidence than your own preferences. Am I not right?’

And providing Kit with no opportunity to answer that question, she asked another:

‘Can you tell me, please, how much alcohol you had consumed before you went upstairs that night?’

Kit faltered, then blinked several times, like a man who has lost his sense of time and place, and is trying to recover them.

‘Not a lot,’ he said. ‘Soon wore off. I’m used to drink. You get a shock like that, you sober up bloody fast.’

‘Did you sleep at all?’

‘Where?’

‘In your club. In your club bedroom. During the passage of that night and early morning. Did you sleep or not?’

‘How the hell could I sleep? We were talking all the time!’

‘Your document suggests Jeb abandoned you at first light and spirited himself out of the club, we know not how. Did you go back to sleep after Jeb had disappeared so miraculously?’

‘I hadn’t slept in the first place, so how could I go back to sleep? And his departure wasn’t miraculous . It was professional. He’s a pro. Was. Knew all the tricks of the trade.’

‘And when you woke up – abracadabra, he wasn’t there any more.’

‘He’d gone already, I told you! There was no bloody abracadabra about it! It was stealth . The chap was a master of stealth ’ – as if propounding a concept that was new to him.

Lionel chipped in, decent Lionel:

‘Kit – man to man – just tell us how much you and Jeb put away that night – give us a rough idea. Everybody balks about how much they actually drink, but if we’re going to get to the bottom of this, we need the whole story, warts and all.’

‘We drank warm beer ,’ Kit retorted contemptuously. ‘Jeb sipped his and left most of it. That satisfy you?’

‘But in fact ’ – Lionel looking at his gingery-haired fingers now, rather than at Kit – ‘when you really get down to it, we are talking two pints of beer, aren’t we? And Jeb, as you say, is no sort of drinker – or wasn’t, poor chap – so presumably you mopped up the rest. True?’

‘Probably.’

Frances was once more talking to her notes.

‘So, effectively, two pints of beer on top of the very considerable quantity of alcohol you’d already drunk during and after dinner, not to mention two double eighteen-year-old Macallan whiskies consumed with Crispin at the Connaught before you ever reached your club. Calculated together, let us say eighteen to twenty units. One might also draw conclusions from the fact that, when you suborned the night porter, you specified one beer glass only. In effect, therefore, you were ordering for yourself. Alone.’