A Delicate Truth A Novel

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.


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 ‘f*cking’ 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:

‘So what do you hope to get out of Shorty when you meet him?’ she demands, and waits while he thinks of an answer, which is the more difficult since he hasn’t got one; and anyway he hasn’t told her, for fear of alarming her, that he will be meeting Shorty in the first instance under the slender guise of a journalist, before declaring himself in his true colours.

‘I’ll just have to see which way he jumps,’ he says nonchalantly. ‘If Shorty’s as cut up about Jeb’s death as he says he is, maybe he’ll be willing to step into Jeb’s shoes and testify for us.’

‘And if he isn’t willing?’

‘Well, I suppose we just shake hands and part.’

‘That doesn’t sound like Shorty, from what you’ve told me,’ she replies severely.

And at this point, a drought overcomes their conversation, during which Emily lowers her eyes and lays her fingertips together beneath her chin in contemplation, and he supposes she is preparing herself for the phone call she is about to make to her father, by way of Mrs Marlow.

And when she reaches out her hand, he assumes that it’s to pick up the black burner. But instead, it’s his own hand she picks up, and holds gravely in both of hers as if she’s taking his pulse, but not quite; then without comment or explanation lays it carefully back on his lap.

‘Actually, never mind,’ she mutters impatiently to herself – or to him; he’s not quite sure.

Does she want his comfort in this moment of crisis, and is too proud to ask for it?

Is she telling him she has thought about him and decided she isn’t interested, so have his hand back?

Or was it the imaginary hand of a present or former lover that she was reaching for in her anxiety? – which was the interpretation he was still favouring as he sat diligently at his new desk on the first floor of the Foreign Office, and the silver burner in his jacket pocket announced in a raucous burp that it had a text message for him.

Toby was not at this point wearing his jacket. It was slung over the back of his chair. So he had to swing round and fish for the burner with rather more enthusiasm than he would have deployed had he known that Hilary, his formidable second-in-command, was standing in the doorway needing his urgent attention. Nevertheless he persisted in the movement and, with a smile that asked her forbearance, extracted the burner from his pocket, searched for the unfamiliar button to press, pressed it and, still smiling, read the message:

Dad has written a mad letter to Mum and is on the train to London.


The Foreign Office waiting room was a windowless dungeon of prickly chairs, glass tables and unreadable magazines about Britain’s industrial skills. At the door lurked a burly black man in a brown uniform with yellow epaulettes, and at a desk an expressionless Asian matron in the same uniform. Kit’s fellow detainees included a bearded Greek prelate and two indignant ladies of an age who had come to complain about their treatment at the hands of the British Consulate in Naples. It was of course a crying outrage that a ranking former member of the Service – and a Head of Mission at that – should be required to wait here, and in due season he would make his feelings known in the right quarter. However, alighting at Paddington, he had vowed to remain courteous but purposeful, keep his wits about him at all times and, in the interests of the greater cause, ignore whatever slings and arrows came his way.

‘My name’s Probyn,’ he had told them cheerfully at the front gate, volunteering his driving licence in case they needed verification. ‘Sir Christopher Probyn, former High Commissioner. Do I still regard myself as staff? Apparently, I don’t. Well, never mind. How are you?’

‘To see?’

‘The Permanent Under-Secretary – better known these days, I understand, as the Executive Director,’ he added indulgently, careful to conceal his visceral distaste at the Office’s rush towards corporatization. ‘I know it’s a big call and I’m afraid I haven’t a date. But I do have a very sensitive document for him. Failing that, his Private Secretary. Rather confidential, I’m afraid, and rather urgent’ – all delivered merrily through a six-inch hole in a wall of armoured glass, while on the other side of it an unsmiling youth in a blue shirt and chevrons tapped details into a computer.

‘Kit, they’ll probably know me as in his Private Office. Kit Probyn. You’re quite sure I’m not staff? Probyn with a Y.’

Even when they patted him down with an electric ping-pong bat, took his cellphone off him and fed it into a cabinet of glass-fronted lockers with numbered keys, he had continued to remain totally calm.

‘You chaps full time here, or do you look after other government buildings as well?’

No answer, but still he hadn’t bridled. Even when they tried to get their hands on his precious draft document, he had remained courteous, if implacable.

‘No go, I’m afraid, old boy, with all due respect. You have your duty to do, I have mine. I came here all the way from Cornwall to hand-deliver this envelope, and hand-deliver it I shall.’

‘We only want to run it through X-ray, sir,’ the man said, after a glance at his colleague. So Kit looked on benignly while they operated their laborious machine, then grabbed back the envelope.

‘And it was the Executive Director in person you were wishing to see, was it, sir?’ the colleague enquired, with what Kit might easily have mistaken for irony.

‘Indeed it was,’ he replied jauntily. ‘And still is. The big chief himself. And if you’d pass that message upstairs rather sharply, I’d be obliged.’

One of the men left the cubicle. The other stayed and smiled.

‘Come by train then, did you?’

‘I did.’

‘Nice trip, was it?’

‘Very, thank you. Most enjoyable.’

‘That’s the way then. My wife comes from Lostwithiel, actually.’

‘Splendid. A proper Cornish girl. What a coincidence.’

The first man had returned: but only to escort Kit to the featureless room where he now sat, and had sat for the last half-hour, inwardly fulminating but resolved not to show it.

And now at last his patience was rewarded, for who should come bustling up to him grinning like a schoolgirl but Molly Cranmore herself, his long-time buddy from Logistical Contingencies, wearing a name tag and a bunch of electronic keys round her neck and holding out her hands and saying, ‘Kit Probyn, what a lovely, lovely surprise!’ while Kit in return was saying, ‘Molly, my God, of all people, I thought you’d retired aeons ago, what on earth are you doing here?’

‘Alumni, darling,’ she confided in a happy voice. ‘I get to meet all our old boys and girls whenever they need a helping hand or fall by the wayside, which isn’t you at all, you lucky man, you’re here on business, I know. Now then. What kind of business? You’ve got a document and you want to hand it personally to God. But you can’t because he’s on a swan to Africa – well deserved, I may add. A great pity because I’m sure he’ll be furious when he hears he missed you. What’s it about?’

‘I’m afraid that’s something I can’t tell even you, Molly.’

‘So can I take your document up to his Private Office and find the right minion for it? – I can’t? – not even if I promise not to let it out of my sight in the meantime? – not even then. Oh dear,’ she confirmed, as Kit continued to shake his head. ‘So does it have a name, your envelope? Something that will set bells ringing on the first floor?’

Kit debated the question with himself. A cover name, after all, was what it said it was. It was there to cover things up. Ah, but was a cover name of itself something to be covered up? If so, then there would have to be cover names for cover names, ad infinitum. All the same, the idea of blurting out the hallowed word Wildlife in the presence of a Greek prelate and two irate ladies was more than he could stomach.

‘Then kindly tell them that I need to speak to his highest authorized representative,’ he said, hugging the envelope to his chest.

Getting there, he thought.


Toby, meanwhile, has sought instinctive refuge in St James’s Park. With the silver burner pressed to his ear, he is hunched under the very same plane tree from which, just three years earlier, he dispatched his futile appeal to Giles Oakley, informing him that a fictitious Louisa had walked out on him and begging his advice. Now he is listening to Emily, and noting that her voice is as calm as his own.

‘How was he dressed?’ he asks.

‘The full monty. Dark suit, best black shoes, favourite tie and a navy raincoat. And no walking stick, which Mother takes as an omen.’

‘Has Kit told your mother that Jeb’s dead?’

‘No, but I did. She’s distraught and very scared. Not for herself, for Kit. And, as always, practical. She’s checked with Bodmin station. The Land Rover’s in the car park and they think he bought a senior citizen’s day return, first class. The train was on time out of Bodmin, and arrived on time in Paddington. And she’s rung his club. If he shows up, would they please get him to ring her? I told her that wasn’t good enough. If he shows up, they should ring her. She said she’d call them again. Then she’ll call me.’

‘And Kit hasn’t been in touch since he left the house?’

‘No, and he’s not answering his cellphone.’

‘Has he done this kind of thing before?’

‘Refused to speak to us?’

‘Thrown a tantrum – gone AWOL – taken matters into his own hands – whatever.’

‘When my beloved ex-partner waltzed off with a new girlfriend and half my mortgage, Dad went and laid siege to their flat.’

‘Then what did he do?’

‘It was the wrong flat.’

Resigned to returning to his desk, Toby glances up with apprehension at the great bowed windows of his own Foreign Office. Joining the unsmiling throng of black-suited civil servants passing up and down Clive Steps, he succumbs to the same wave of nervous nausea that afflicted him on that gorgeous spring Sunday morning three years ago when he came here to filch his illicit tape recording.

At the front gate, he takes a calculated risk:

‘Tell me, please’ – displaying his pass to the security guard – ‘has a retired member called Sir Christopher Probyn checked in today, by any chance?’ And to be helpful: ‘P–R–O–B–Y–N.’

Wait while guard consults computer.

‘Not here. Could have checked in elsewhere. Did he have an appointment, at all?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Toby and, back at his post, resumes his department’s deliberations about which way to look in Libya.


‘Sir Christopher?’

‘The same.’

‘I’m Asif Lancaster from the Executive Director’s department. How d’you do, sir?’

Lancaster was a black man, spoke with a Mancunian accent and looked about eighteen years old, but to Kit’s eye most people seemed to these days. Nevertheless he warmed to the fellow at once. If the Office had finally opened its gates to the Lancasters of the world, he reasoned vaguely, then surely he could expect a more receptive ear when he told them a few home truths about their handling of Operation Wildlife and its aftermath.

They had reached a conference room. Easy chairs. A long table. Watercolours of the Lake District. Lancaster holding out his hand.

‘Look here, there’s one thing I have to ask you,’ said Kit, even now not quite willing to part with his document. ‘Are you and your people cleared for Wildlife?’

Lancaster looked at him, then at the envelope, then allowed himself a wry smile.

‘I think I can safely say we are,’ he replied and, gently removing it from Kit’s unresisting grasp, disappeared to an adjoining room.


It was another ninety minutes by the gold Cartier watch presented to him by Suzanna on their twenty-fifth before Lancaster opened the door to admit the promised senior legal advisor and his sidekick. In that period, Lancaster had appeared no fewer than four times, once to offer Kit coffee, once to bring it, and twice to assure him that Lionel was on the case and would be heading this way ‘just as soon as he and Frances have got their heads round the paperwork’.

‘Lionel?’

‘Our deputy legal advisor. Spends half his week in the Cabinet Office, and the other half with us. He tells me he was assistant legal attaché in Paris when you were commercial counsellor there.’

‘Well, well, Lionel,’ Kit says, brightening as he recalls a worthy, rather tongue-tied young man with fair hair and freckles who made it a point of honour to dance with the plainest women in the room.

‘And Frances?’ he enquires hopefully.

‘Frances is our new Director in Charge of Security, which comes under the Executive Director’s umbrella. Also a lawyer, I’m afraid.’ Smile. ‘Used to be in private practice, till she saw the light, and is now happily with us.’

Kit was glad of this information since it would not otherwise have occurred to him that Frances was happy. Her demeanour on sitting herself opposite him across the table struck him as positively mournful: thanks not least to her black business suit, short-cropped hair and apparent refusal to look him in the eye.

Lionel, on the other hand, though it was twenty years on, had remained his decent, rather prissy self. True, the freckles had given way to liver spots, and the fair hair had faded to an uneasy grey. But the blameless smile was undimmed and the handshake as vigorous as ever. Kit remembered that Lionel used to smoke a pipe and supposed he’d given it up.

‘Kit, super to see you,’ he declared, bringing his face a little closer than Kit had bargained for in his enthusiasm. ‘How’s well-earned retirement? God knows, I’m looking forward to mine! And marvellous things we hear about your Caribbean tour, by the way.’ Drop of the voice: ‘And Suzanna? How’s all that going? Things looking up a bit?’

‘Very much so. Yes, fine, thank you, great improvement,’ Kit replied. And gruffly, as an afterthought: ‘A bit keen to get this over, frankly, Lionel. We both are. Been a bit of an ordeal. ’Specially for Suki.’

‘Yes, well, of course we’re absolutely aware of that, and more than grateful to you for your extremely helpful, not to say timely, document, and for bringing the whole thing to our attention without – well – rocking the boat,’ said Lionel, no longer so tongue-tied, settling himself at the table. ‘Aren’t we, Frances? And of course’ – briskly opening a file and revealing a photocopy of Kit’s handwritten draft – ‘we’re immensely sympathetic. I mean, one can only imagine what you’ve been through. And Suzanna too, poor girl. Frances, I think I’m speaking for both of us?’

If he was, Frances, our Director in Charge of Security, gave no sign of it. She too was leafing through a photocopy of Kit’s document, but so intently and slowly that he began to wonder whether she was learning it by heart.

‘Did Suzanna ever sign a declaration, Sir Christopher?’ she enquired, without raising her head.

‘Declaration of what?’ Kit demanded, for once not appreciating the Sir Christopher. ‘Sign what?’

‘An Official Secrets Act declaration’ – her head still buried in his document – ‘stating that she’s aware of its terms and penalties.’ And to Lionel, before Kit could answer: ‘Or didn’t we do that for partners and significant others in his day? I forget when that came in, precisely.’

‘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 unofficial – 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.’

‘Have you been sniffing around my club? That’s bloody disgraceful! Of course it was only one beer glass! D’you think I wanted to tell the night porter I’d got a man in my room? Who did you talk to anyway? The secretary? Christ Almighty!’

He was appealing to Lionel, but Lionel was back to patting his hair, and Frances had more to say:

‘We are also reliably informed that it would be impossible for any individual, master of stealth though he may be, to infiltrate himself into your club’s premises, either through the service entrance at the rear, or through the front door, which is kept under surveillance at all times, both by the porter and by CCTV. Added to which, all club personnel are police vetted and security-aware.’

Kit was fumbling, choking, fighting for lucidity, for moderation, for sweet reason:

‘Look here, both of you. Don’t grill me. Grill Crispin. Grill Elliot. Go back to the Americans. Find that fake doctor woman who told me Jeb had gone mad when he was already dead.’ Stumble. Breathe. Swallow. ‘And find Quinn, wherever he is. Get him to tell you what really happened down there on the rocks behind the houses.’

He thought he’d finished, but discovered he hadn’t:

‘And hold yourselves a proper public inquiry. Trace that poor bloody woman and her child and get some compensation for her relatives! And when you’ve done that, find out who killed Jeb the day before he was going to sign up to my document and put in his own word.’ And somewhat erratically: ‘And don’t for God’s sake believe anything that charlatan Crispin tells you. Man’s a liar to his boots.’

Lionel had finished patting his hair:

‘Yes, well, Kit, I don’t want to make a big matter of this but, if push ever came to shove, you’d be in a pretty unhealthy position, frankly. A public inquiry of the sort you’re hankering after – which could result from, well, from your document – is light years away from the sort of hearing that Frances and I envisage. Anything deemed in the smallest way to go against national security – secret operations successful or otherwise, extraordinary rendition whether merely planned or actually achieved, robust interrogation methods, ours or more particularly the Americans’ – goes straight into the Official Secrets box, I’m afraid, and the witnesses with it’ – raising his eyes respectfully to Frances, which is the cue for her to square her shoulders and place her hands flat on the open folder before her as if she is about to levitate.

‘It is my duty to advise you, Sir Christopher,’ she announces, ‘that you are in a most serious position. Yes, acknowledged, you took part in a certain very secret operation. Its authors are scattered. The documentation, other than your own, is patchy. In the few files that are available to this Office, no names of participants are mentioned – save one. Yours. Which does rather mean that in any criminal investigation that resulted from this document, your name would predominate as senior British representative on the ground, and you would have to answer accordingly. Lionel?’ – turning hospitably to him.

‘Yes, well, that’s the bad news, Kit, I’m afraid. And the good news is, frankly, pretty hard to come by. We have a new set of rules since your day for cases where sensitive issues are involved. Some already in place; others, we trust, imminent. And, very unfortunately, Wildlife does tick a lot of those boxes. Which would mean, I’m afraid, that any inquiry would have to take place behind closed doors. Should it find against you – and should you elect to bring a suit – which would naturally be your good right – then the resultant hearing would be conducted by a hand-picked and very carefully briefed group of approved lawyers, some of whom would obviously do their best to speak for you and others not so for you. And you – the claimant, as he or she is rather whimsically called – would I’m afraid be banished from the court while the government presented its case to the judge without the inconvenience of a direct challenge by you or your representatives. And under the rules currently being discussed, the very fact that a hearing is being conducted might of itself be kept secret. As of course, in that case, would the judgement.’

After a rueful smile to harbinger a further spot of bad news, and a pat for his hair, he resumed:

‘And then, as Frances so rightly says, if there were ever a criminal case against you, any prosecution would take place in total secrecy until a sentence was handed down. Which is to say, I’m afraid, Kit’ – allowing himself another sympathetic smile, though whether for the law or its victim was unclear – ‘draconian though it may sound, Suzanna wouldn’t necessarily know you were on trial, assuming for the moment that you were. Or at least not until you’d been found guilty – assuming, once more, that you had been. There would be a jury of sorts – but of course its members would have to be very heavily vetted by the security services prior to selection, which obviously does rather stack the odds against one. And you, for your part, would be allowed to see the evidence against you – at least, let us say, in broad brush – but I’m afraid not share it with your nearest and dearest. Oh and whistle-blowing per se would absolutely not be a defence, whistle-blowing being – and may it forever remain so in my personal view – by definition a risk business. I’m deliberately not pulling my punches here, Kit. I think Frances and I both feel we owe you that. Don’t we, Frances?’

‘He’s dead,’ Kit whispered incoherently. And then again, fearing he might not have spoken aloud: ‘Jeb’s dead.’

‘Most unhappily, yes, he is,’ Frances agreed, for the first time accepting a point of Kit’s argument. ‘Though not perhaps in the circumstances you seek to imply. A sick soldier killed himself with his own weapon. Regrettably, that is a practice that is on the increase. The police have no grounds for suspicion, and who are we to dispute their judgement? Meanwhile, your document will be kept on record in the hope that it will never have to be used against you. I trust you share that hope.’


Reaching the foot of the great staircase, Kit appears to forget which way to turn, but fortunately Lancaster is on hand to guide him to the front gates.

‘What did you say your name was, my dear fellow?’ Kit asks him as they shake hands.

‘Lancaster, sir.’

‘You’ve been very kind,’ says Kit.


The news that Kit Probyn had been positively sighted in the smoking room of his club in Pall Mall – transmitted yet again by text over Emily’s black burner, thanks to a tip-off from her mother – had reached Toby just as he was settling down at the long table in the third-floor conference room to discuss the desirability of engaging in talks with a Libyan rebel group. What excuses he had pleaded for leaping from his seat and stalking out of the room now escaped him. He remembered pulling the silver burner from his pocket in full view of everyone – he had no alternative – and reading the text and saying, ‘Oh my God, I’m terribly sorry,’ then probably something about somebody dying, given that the news of Jeb’s death still occupied his mind.

He remembered pelting down the stairs past a Chinese delegation coming up, then running and walking the thousand-odd yards from the Office to Pall Mall, all the while talking feverishly to Emily, who had summarily abandoned her evening surgery and got herself on to a tube headed for St James’s Park. The club secretary, she had reported before she descended, had at least honoured his promise to inform Suzanna the moment Kit appeared, if not with the good grace that might have been expected of him:

‘Mum said he made Dad sound like some sort of criminal on the loose. Apparently the police went round there this afternoon, asking a lot of questions about him. Said it was to do with something called enhanced vetting. How much he drank and whether he’d had a man in his room when he stayed in the club recently, if you can believe it. And had he bribed the night porter to serve them food and drink – what on earth was that about?’

Panting from his exertions and clutching the silver burner to his ear, Toby took up his agreed position next to the flight of eight stone steps that led up to the imposing portals of Kit’s club. And suddenly Emily was flying towards him – Emily as he’d never seen her – Emily the runner, the freed wild child, her raincoat billowing, dark hair streaming behind her against a slate-grey sky.

They climbed the steps, Toby leading. The lobby was dark and smelt of cabbage. The Secretary was tall and desiccated.

‘Your father has removed himself to the Long Library,’ he informed Emily in a dispirited nasal twang. ‘Ladies can’t go in, I’m afraid. You’re allowed downstairs, but only after 6.30.’ And to Toby, having looked him over: tie, jacket, matching trousers. ‘You’re all right to go in as long as you’re his guest. Will he vouch for you as his guest?’

Ignoring the question, Toby turned to Emily:

‘No need for you to hang around in here. Why don’t you hail a cab and sit in it till we come?’

At low-lit tables, amid cages of ancient books, greying men drank and murmured head to head. Beyond them, in an alcove given over to marble busts, sat Kit, alone, bowed over a glass of whisky, his shoulders shaking to the uneasy rhythm of his breathing.

‘It’s Bell,’ Toby said into his ear.

‘Didn’t know you were a member,’ Kit replied, without lifting his head.

‘I’m not. I’m your guest. So I’d like you to buy me a drink. Vodka, if that’s all right. A large one,’ he told a waiter. ‘On Sir Christopher’s tab, please. Tonic, ice, lemon.’ He sat down. ‘Who’ve you been talking to at the Office?’

‘None of your business.’

‘Well, I’m not sure about that. You made your démarche. Is that right?’

Kit, head down. Long pull of Scotch:

‘Some bloody démarche,’ he muttered.

‘You showed them your document. The one you’d drafted while you were waiting for Jeb.’

With improbable alacrity, the waiter set Toby’s vodka on the table, together with Kit’s bill and a ballpoint pen.

‘In a minute,’ Toby told him sharply, and waited till he’d left. ‘Just please tell me this. Did your document – does your document – make any mention of me? Maybe you found it necessary to refer to a certain illegal tape recording? Or Quinn’s erstwhile Private Secretary. Did you, Kit?’

Kit’s head still down, but rolling from side to side.

‘So you didn’t refer to me at all? Is that right? Or are you just refusing to answer? No Toby Bell? Anywhere? Not in writing, not in your conversations with them?’

‘Conversations!’ Kit retorted with a rasping laugh.

‘Did you or didn’t you mention my involvement in this? Yes or no?’

‘No! I didn’t! What d’you think I am? A snitch, as well as a bloody fool?’

‘I saw Jeb’s widow yesterday. In Wales. I had a long talk with her. She gave me some promising leads.’

Kit’s head rose at last, and Toby to his embarrassment saw tears lying in the rims of his reddened eyes.

‘You saw Brigid?’

‘Yes. That’s right. I saw Brigid.’

‘What’s she like, poor girl? Christ Almighty.’

‘As brave as her husband. The boy’s great too. She put me on to Shorty. I’ve arranged to meet him. Tell me again. You really didn’t mention me? If you did, I’ll understand. I just need to know for sure.’

‘No, repeat no. Holy God, how many times do I have to say it?’

Kit signed the bill and, refusing Toby’s proffered arm, clambered uncertainly to his feet.

‘Hell are you doing with my daughter anyway?’ he demanded, as they came unexpectedly face to face.

‘We’re getting along fine.’

‘Well, don’t do what that shit Bernard did.’

‘She’s waiting for us now.’

‘Where?’

Keeping a hand at the ready, Toby escorted Kit on the journey across the Long Library into the lobby, past the Secretary and down the steps to where Emily was waiting with the cab: not inside it, as instructed, but standing in the rain, stoically holding the door open for her father.

‘We’re going straight off to Paddington,’ she said, when she had settled Kit firmly into the cab. ‘Kit needs some solids before the night sleeper. What about you?’

‘There’s a lecture at Chatham House,’ he replied. ‘I’m expected to put in an appearance.’

‘Talk later in the evening then.’

‘Sure. See how the land lies. Good idea,’ he agreed, conscious of Kit’s befuddled gaze glowering at them from inside the cab.

Had he lied to her? Not quite. There was a lecture at Chatham House and he was indeed expected, but he did not propose to attend. Lodged behind the silver burner in his jacket pocket – he could feel it pricking at his collarbone – was a letter on stiff paper from an illustrious-sounding banking house, hand-delivered and signed for at the main entrance of the Foreign Office at three that afternoon. In bold electronic type, it requested Toby’s presence at any time between now and midnight at the company’s headquarters in Canary Wharf.

It was signed G. Oakley, Senior Vice-President.


A chill night air whipped off the Thames, almost clearing away the stink of stale cigarette smoke that lingered in every fake Roman arcade and Nazi-style doorway. By the sodium glare of Tudor lanterns, joggers in red shirts, secretaries in top-to-toe black livery, striding men with crew cuts and paper-thin black briefcases glided past each other like mummers in a macabre dance. Before every lighted tower and at every street corner, bulked-out security guards in anoraks looked him over. Selecting one at random, Toby showed him the letter heading.

‘Must be Canada Square, mate. Well, I think it is, I’ve only been here a year’ – to a loud peal of laughter that followed him down the street.

He passed under a walkway and entered an all-night shopping mall offering gold watches, caviar and villas on Lake Como. At a cosmetics counter a beautiful girl with bare shoulders invited him to sniff her perfume.

‘You don’t by any chance know where I can find Atlantis House, do you?’

‘You wanna buy?’ she asked sweetly, with an uncomprehending Polish smile.

A tower block rose before him, all its lights blazing. At its base a pillared cupola. On its floor a Masonic starburst of gold mosaic. And round its blue dome, the word Atlantis. And at the back of the cupola, a pair of glass doors with whales engraved on them that sighed and opened at his approach. From behind a counter of hewn rock, a burly white man handed him a chrome clip and plastic card with his name on it:

‘Centre lift and no need for you to press anything. Have a nice evening, Mr Bell.’

‘You too.’

The lift rose, stopped, and opened into a starlit amphitheatre of white archways and celestial nymphs in white plaster. From the middle of the domed firmament hung a cluster of illuminated seashells. From beneath them – or as it seemed to Toby from among them – a man was striding vigorously towards him. Backlit, he was tall, even menacing, but then as he advanced he diminished, until Giles Oakley in his new-found executive glory stood before him: the achiever’s rugged smile, the honed body of perpetual youth, the fine new head of darkened hair and perfect teeth.

‘Toby, dear man, what a pleasure! And at such short notice. I’m touched and honoured.’

‘Nice to see you, Giles.’


An air-conditioned room that was all rosewood. No windows, no fresh air, no day or night. When we buried my grandmother, this is where we sat and talked to the undertaker. A rosewood desk and throne. Below it, for lesser mortals, a rosewood coffee table and two leather chairs with rosewood arms. On the table, a rosewood tray for the very old Calvados, the bottle not quite full. Until now, they had barely looked each other in the eye. In negotiation, Giles doesn’t do that.

‘So, Toby. How’s love?’ he asked brightly when Toby had declined the Calvados and watched Oakley pour himself a shot.

‘Fair, thank you. How’s Hermione?’

‘And the great novel? Done and dusted?’

‘Why am I here, Giles?’

‘For the same reason that you came, surely’ – Oakley, putting on a little pout of dissatisfaction at the unseemly pace of things.

‘And what reason is that?’

‘A certain covert operation, dreamed up three years ago but mercifully – as we both know – never executed. Might that be the reason?’ Oakley enquired with false jocularity.

But the impish light had gone out. The once-lively wrinkles round the mouth and eyes were turned downward in permanent rejection.

‘You mean Wildlife,’ Toby suggested.

‘If you want to bandy state secrets about, yes. Wildlife.’

‘Wildlife was executed all right. So were a couple of innocent people. You know that as well as I do.’

‘Whether I know it or you know it is neither here nor there. What is at issue is whether the world knows it, and whether it should. And the answer to those two questions, dear man – as must be evident to a blind hedgehog, let alone a trained diplomat such as yourself – is very clearly: no, thank you, never. Time does not heal in such cases. It festers. For every year of official British denial, count hundreds of decibels of popular moral outrage.’

Pleased with this rhetorical flourish, he smiled mirthlessly, sat back and waited for the applause. And when none came, treated himself to a nip of Calvados and airily resumed:

‘Think on it, Toby: a rabble of American mercenaries, aided by British Special Forces in disguise and funded by the Republican evangelical right. And for good measure, the whole thing masterminded by a shady defence contractor in cahoots with a leftover group of fire-breathing neocons from our fast-dissolving New Labour leadership. And the dividend? The mangled corpses of an innocent Muslim woman and her baby daughter. Watch that play out in the media marketplace! As to gallant little Gibraltar with her long-suffering multi-ethnic population: the cries to give her back to Spain would deafen us for decades to come. If they don’t already.’

‘So?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘What d’you want me to do?’

Suddenly Oakley’s gaze, so often elusive, was fixed on Toby in fiery exhortation:

‘Not do, dear man! Cease to do. Desist forthwith and for ever! Before it’s too late.’

‘Too late for what?’

‘For your career – what else? Give up this self-righteous pursuit of the unfindable. It will destroy you. Become again what you were before. All will be forgiven.’

‘Who says it will?’

‘I do.’

‘And who else? Jay Crispin? Who?’

‘What does it matter who else? An informal consortium of wise men and women with their country’s interests at heart, will that do you? Don’t be a child, Toby.’

‘Who killed Jeb Owens?’

‘Killed him? Nobody. He did. He shot himself, the poor man. He was deranged for years. Has nobody told you that? Or is the truth too inconvenient for you?’

‘Jeb Owens was murdered.’

‘Nonsense. Sensational nonsense. Whatever makes you say that?’ – Oakley’s chin coming up in challenge, but his voice no longer quite so sure of itself.

‘Jeb Owens was shot through the head by a gun that wasn’t his own, with the wrong hand, just one day before he was due to join up with Probyn. He was bubbling over with hope. He was so full of hope he rang his estranged wife on the morning of the day he was killed to tell her just how full of hope he was and how they could start their lives all over again. Whoever had him murdered got some B-list actress to pretend she was a doctor – a male doctor, actually, but she didn’t know that, unfortunately – and make a cold call to Probyn’s house after Jeb’s death with the happy message that Jeb was alive and languishing in a mental hospital and didn’t want to talk to anyone.’

‘Whoever told you such drivel?’ – but Oakley’s face was a lot less certain than his tone.

‘The police investigation was led by diligent plain-clothes officers from Scotland Yard. Thanks to their diligence, not a single clue was followed up. There was no forensic examination, a whole raft of formalities were waived, and the cremation went through with unnatural speed. Case closed.’

‘Toby.’

‘What?’

‘Assuming this is the truth, it’s all news to me. I had no idea of it, I swear. They told me –’

‘They? Who’s they? Who the f*ck is they? They told you what? That Jeb’s murder had been covered up and everybody could go home?’

‘My understanding was and is that Owens shot himself in a fit of depression, or frustration, or whatever the poor man was suffering from – wait! What are you doing? Wait!’

Toby was standing at the door.

‘Come back. I insist. Sit down’ – Oakley’s voice close to breaking. ‘Perhaps I’ve been misled. It’s possible. Assume it. Assume you’re right in everything you say. For argument’s sake. Tell me what you know. There are bound to be contrary arguments. There always are. Nothing is set in stone. Not in the real world. It can’t be. Sit down here. We haven’t finished.’

Under Oakley’s imploring gaze, Toby came away from the door but ignored the invitation to sit.

‘Tell it to me again,’ Oakley ordered, for a moment recovering something of his old authority. ‘I need chapter and verse. What are your sources? All hearsay, I’ve no doubt. Never mind. They killed him. The they you are so exercised about. We assume it. And having assumed it, what do we then conclude from that assumption? Allow me to tell you’ – the words coming in breathless gasps – ‘we conclude decisively that the time has come for you to withdraw your cavalry from the charge – a temporary, tactical, orderly, dignified withdrawal while there’s time. A détente. A truce, enabling both sides to consider their positions and let tempers cool. You won’t be walking away from a fight – I know that isn’t your style. You’ll be saving your ammunition for another day – for when you’re stronger and you’ve got more power, more traction. Press your case now, you’ll be a pariah for the rest of your life. You, Toby! Of all people! That’s what you’ll be. An outcast who played his cards too early. It’s not what you were put on earth for – I know that, better than anyone. The whole country’s crying out for a new elite. Begging for one. For people like you – real men – the real men of England, unspoiled – all right, dreamers too – but with their feet on the ground. Bell’s the real thing, I told them. Uncluttered mind, and the heart and body to go with it. You don’t even know the meaning of real love. Not love like mine. You’re blind to it. Innocent. You always were. I knew that. I understood. I loved you for it. One day, I thought, he’ll come to me. But I knew you never would.’

But by then, Giles Oakley was talking to an empty room.


Lying on his bed in the darkness, the silver burner at his right hand, Toby listens to the night shouts from the street. Wait till she’s home. The sleeper leaves Paddington at 11.45. I’ve checked and it left on time. She hates taking taxis. She hates doing anything the poor can’t afford. So wait.

He presses green anyway.

‘How was Chatham House?’ she asked drowsily.

‘I didn’t go.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Called on an old friend. Had a chat.’

‘About anything in particular?’

‘Just this and that. How was your father?’

‘I handed him over to the attendant. Mum will scrape him off the train at the other end.’

A scuffle, quickly suppressed. A smothered murmur of ‘Get off!’

‘That bloody cat,’ she explained. ‘Every night she tries to get on my bed, and I shove her off. Who did you think it was?’

‘I didn’t dare wonder.’

‘Dad’s convinced you have designs on me. Is he right?’

‘Probably.’

Long silence.

‘What’s tomorrow?’ she asked.

‘Thursday.’

‘You’re meeting your man. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘I have a clinic. It finishes around midday. Then a couple of house calls.’

‘Maybe the evening then,’ he said.

‘Maybe.’ Long silence. ‘Did something go wrong tonight?’

‘Just my friend. He thought I was gay.’

‘And you’re not?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘And you didn’t succumb out of politeness?’

‘Not that I recall.’

‘Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?’

Keep talking, he wanted to tell her. It doesn’t have to be your hopes and dreams. Any old thing will do. Just keep talking till I’ve got Giles out of my head.