A Delicate Truth A Novel

7





He had woken badly, with feelings he needed to disown and others he needed urgently to revive. Despite Emily’s consoling words to him it was Oakley’s anguished face and supplicating voice that stayed with him when he woke.

I’m a whore.

I didn’t know.

I knew, and led him on.

I didn’t know, and should have done.

Everybody knew but me.

And most frequently: after Hamburg, how could I be such a bloody fool – telling myself every man’s entitled to his appetites, and after all nobody got hurt but Giles?

Concurrently, he had undertaken a damage assessment of the information Oakley had, or had not, revealed about the extent to which his extramural journeyings were compromised. If Charlie Wilkins, or his certain friend in the Met, was Oakley’s source, which he took pretty much for granted, then the trip to Wales and his meeting with Brigid were blown.

But the photographs weren’t blown. The path to Shorty wasn’t blown. Was his visit to Cornwall blown? Possibly, since the police, or versions of them, had trampled all over Kit’s club and were by now presumably aware that Emily had come to rescue him in the company of a friend of the family.

In which case, what?

In which case, presenting himself to Shorty in the guise of a Welsh journalist and asking him to turn whistle-blower might not be the wisest course of action to pursue. It might in fact be an act of suicidal folly.

So why not abandon the whole thing, and pull the sheets over our heads, follow Oakley’s advice and pretend none of it ever happened?

Or in plain language, stop flailing yourself with unanswerable questions, and get down to Mill Hill for your date with Shorty, because one eyewitness who is prepared to stay alive and speak is all you’re ever going to need. Either Shorty will say yes, and we’ll do together what Kit and Jeb had planned to do, or Shorty will say no and scuttle off to tell Jay Crispin what a good boy he is, and the roof will fall in.

But whichever of these things happens, Toby will finally be taking the battle to the enemy.


Ring Sally, his assistant. Get her voicemail. Good. Affect a tone of suffering bravely borne:

‘Sally. Toby here. Bloody wisdom tooth acting up, I’m afraid. I’m booked in at the tooth fairy in an hour. So listen. They’ll have to count me out of this morning’s meeting. And maybe Gregory can stand in for me at the NATO bash. Apologies all round, okay? I’ll keep you posted. Sorry again.’

Next, the sartorial question: what does your enterprising provincial journalist wear on his visit to London? He settled for jeans, trainers and a light anorak, and – a neat touch in his opinion – a brace of ballpoints to go with the reporter’s notebook from his desk.

But reaching for his BlackBerry, he checked himself, remembering that it contained Jeb’s photographs that were also Shorty’s.

He decided he was better off without it.


The Golden Calf Café & Patisserie lay halfway along the high street, squeezed between a halal butcher and a kosher delicatessen. In its pink-lit windows, birthday cakes and wedding cakes jostled with meringues the size of ostrich eggs. A brass handrail divided the café from the shop. This much Toby saw from across the road before turning into a side street to complete his survey of parked cars, vans and the crowds of morning shoppers who packed the pavements.

Approaching the café a second time, now on the same side, Toby confirmed what he had observed on his first pass: that the café section at this hour was empty of customers. Selecting what the instructors called the bodyguard’s table – in a corner, facing the entrance – he ordered a cappuccino and waited.

In the shop section on the other side of the brass handrail, customers armed with plastic tongs were loading up their paper boxes with patisserie, sidling along the counter and paying their dues at the cash desk. But none qualified as Shorty Pike, six foot four – but Jeb come in from under him, buckled his knees for him, then broke his nose for him on the way down.

Eleven o’clock turned to ten past. He’s got cold feet, Toby decided. They reckon he’s a health risk, and he’s sitting in a van with his head blown off with the wrong hand.

A bald, heavy-set man with a pockmarked olive complexion and small round eyes was peering covetously through the window: first at the cakes and pastries, now at Toby, now at the cakes again. No blink-rate, weightlifter’s shoulders. Snappy dark suit, no tie. Now he’s walked away. Was he scouting? Or was he thinking he would treat himself to a cream bun, then changed his mind for his figure’s sake? Then Toby realized that Shorty was sitting beside him. And that Shorty must have been hovering all the time in the toilet at the back of the café, which was something Toby hadn’t thought of and should have done, but clearly Shorty had.

He seemed taller than his six foot four, probably because he was sitting upright, with both very large hands on the table in the half-curled position. He had oily black hair, close cropped at the back and sides, and high film-star cheekbones with a built-in grin. His dark complexion was so shiny it looked as though it had been scrubbed with a soapy nail-brush after shaving. There was a small dent at the centre of his nose, so perhaps Jeb had left his mark. He was wearing a sharply ironed blue denim shirt with buttoned-up regulation patch pockets, one for his cigarettes, the other for a protruding comb.

‘You’re Pete then, right?’ he asked out of the corner of his mouth.

‘And you’re Shorty. What can I get you, Shorty? Coffee? Tea?’

Shorty raised his eyebrows and looked slowly round the café. Toby wondered whether he was always this theatrical, or whether being tall and narcissistic made you behave like this.

And wondering this, he caught another glimpse, or thought he did, of the same bald, heavy-set man who had debated with himself about buying a cream bun, hurrying past the shop window with an air of conspicuous unconcern.

‘Tell you what, Pete,’ said Shorty.

‘What?’

‘I’m not all that comfortable being here, frankly, if it’s all the same to you. I’d like it a bit more private, like. Far from the maddening crowd, as they say.’

‘Wherever you like, Shorty. It’s your call.’

‘And you’re not being clever, are you? Like, you haven’t got a photographer tucked round the corner, or similar?’

‘I’m clean as a whistle and all alone, Shorty. Just lead the way’ – watching how the beads of sweat were forming on Shorty’s brow, and how his hand shook as it plucked at the pocket of his denim shirt for a cigarette before returning to the table without one. Withdrawal symptoms? Or just a heavy night on the tiles?

‘Only I’ve got my new wagon round the corner, see, an Audi. I parked it early, for in case. So I mean, what we could do, we could go somewhere like the recreation park, or somewhere, and have a talk there, where we’re not noticeable, me being somewhat conspicuous. A full and frank exchange, as they say. For your paper. The Argus, right?’

‘Right.’

‘That a big paper, is it, or what – just local – or is it, like, more national, your paper?’

‘Local, but we’re online too,’ Toby replied. ‘So it all adds up to quite a decent number.’

‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it? You don’t mind then?’ – huge sniff.

‘Mind what?’

‘Us not sitting here?’

‘Of course not.’

Toby went to the counter to pay for his cappuccino, which took a moment, and Shorty stood behind him like the next person in line, with the sweat running freely from his face.

But when Toby had done his paying, Shorty walked ahead of him to the entrance, playing the minder, his long arms lifted from his sides to make way.

And when Toby stepped on to the pavement, there was Shorty, waiting, all ready to steer him through the teeming shoppers: but not before Toby, glancing to his left, had again spotted the bald, heavy-set man with a weakness for pastries and cakes, this time standing on the pavement with his back to him, speaking to two other men who seemed equally determined to avoid his eye.

And if there was a moment when Toby contemplated making a dash for it, it was now, because all his training told him: don’t dither, you’ve seen the classic set-up, trust your instincts and go now, because an hour from now or less you’ll be chained to a radiator with your shoes off.

But his desire to see things through must have outweighed these reservations because he was already letting Shorty shepherd him round the corner and into a one-way street, where a shiny blue Audi was indeed parked on the left side, with a black Mercedes saloon parked directly behind it.

And once again his trainers would have argued that this was another classic set-up: one kidnap car and one chase car. And when Shorty pressed his remote from a yard away, and opened the back door of the Audi for him instead of the passenger door, while at the same moment his grasp on Toby’s arm tightened and the heavy-set man and his two chums came round the corner, any residual doubts in Toby’s mind must have died on the spot.

All the same, his self-respect obliged him to protest, if only lightly:

‘You want me in the back, Shorty?’

‘I’ve got another half-hour on the meter, haven’t I? Pity to waste it. Might as well sit here and talk. Why not?’

Toby still hesitated, as well he might, for surely the normal thing to do, for any two men who want to talk privately in a car, far from what Shorty insisted on calling the maddening crowd, was to sit in the front.

But he got in anyway, and Shorty climbed in beside him, at which moment the bald, heavy-set man slid into the driving seat from the street side and locked all four doors, while in the offside wing mirror his two male friends settled themselves comfortably into the Mercedes.

The bald man hasn’t switched on the engine, but neither has he turned his head to look at Toby, preferring to study him in the driving mirror in darting flicks of his little round eyes, while Shorty stares ostentatiously out of the window at the passers-by.


The bald man has put his hands on the steering wheel, but with the engine not running and the car not moving, this seems odd. They’re powerful hands, very clean and fitted with encrusted rings. Like Shorty, the bald man gives an impression of regimental hygiene. His lips in the driving mirror are very pink, and he has to moisten them with his tongue before speaking, which suggests to Toby that, like Shorty, he’s nervous.

‘Sir, I believe I have the singular honour of welcoming Mr Toby Bell of Her Majesty’s Foreign Office. Is that correct, sir?’ he enquires in a pedantic South African accent.

‘I believe you do,’ Toby agrees.

‘Sir, my name is Elliot, I am a colleague of Shorty here.’ He is reciting: ‘Sir – or Toby if I may make so bold – I am instructed to present the compliments of Mr Jay Crispin, whom it is our privilege to serve. He wishes us to apologize in advance for any discomfort you will have sustained thus far, and he assures you of his goodwill. He advises you to relax, and he looks forward to a constructive and amicable dialogue immediately upon arrival at our destination. Do you wish to speak personally to Mr Crispin at this moment in time?’

‘No, thank you, Elliot. I think I’m fine as I am,’ Toby replies, equally courteously.

Albanian-Greek renegade, used to call himself Eglesias, ex-South African Special Forces, killed some chap in a bar in Jo’burg and came to Europe for his health? That sort of Elliot? Oakley is asking, as they sip their after-dinner Calvados.

‘Passenger on board,’ Elliot reports into his mouthpiece, and raises a thumb in his side mirror for the benefit of the black Mercedes behind them.

‘Sad about poor Jeb, then,’ Toby remarks conversationally to Shorty, whose interest in the passers-by only intensifies.

But Elliot is instantly forthcoming:

‘Mr Bell, sir, every man has his destiny, every man has his allotted time span, I say. What is written in the stars is written. No man can beat the rap. Are you comfortable there in the back seat, sir? We drivers sometimes have it too easy, in my opinion.’

‘Very comfortable indeed,’ says Toby. ‘How about you, Shorty?’


They were heading south, and Toby had refrained from further conversation, which was probably wise of him because the only questions he could think of came out of a bad dream, like: ‘Did you personally have a hand in Jeb’s murder, Shorty?’ Or: ‘Tell us, Elliot, what did you actually do with the bodies of that woman and her child?’ They had descended Fitzjohn’s Avenue and were approaching the exclusive marches of St John’s Wood. Was this by chance ‘the wood’ that Fergus Quinn had referred to in his obsequious conversation with Crispin on the stolen tape recording?

‘… all right, yes, fourish … the wood suits me a lot better … more private.’

In quick order, he glimpsed an army barracks guarded by British sentries with automatic rifles, then an anonymous brick house guarded by United States marines. A sign said CUL-DE-SAC. Green-roofed villas at five million and rising. High brick walls. Magnolia trees in full bloom. Fallen cherry blossom lying like confetti across the road. Two green gates, already opening. And in the offside wing mirror, the black Mercedes nosing close enough to touch.


He had not expected so much whiteness. They have negotiated a gravel circle edged in white-painted stones. They are pulling up before a low white house surrounded by ornamental lawns. The white Palladian-style porch is too grand for the house. Video cameras peer at them from the branches of the trees. Fake orangeries of blackened glass stretch to either side. A man in an anorak and tie is holding the car door open. Shorty and Elliot get out, but Toby out of cussedness has decided to wait till he’s fetched. Now at his own choice he gets out of the car, and as casually stretches.

‘Welcome to Castle Keep, sir,’ says the man in the anorak and tie, which Toby is inclined to take as some kind of joke until he spots a brass shield mounted beside the front door portraying a castle like a chess piece surmounted by a pair of crossed swords.

He climbs the steps. Two apologetic men pat him down, take possession of his ballpoint pens, reporter’s notebook and wristwatch, then pass him through an electronic archway and say, ‘We’ll have it all waiting for you after you’ve seen the Chief, sir.’ Toby decides to enter an altered state. He is nobody’s prisoner, he is a free man walking down a shiny corridor paved with Spanish tiles and hung with Georgia O’Keeffe flower prints. Doors lead from either side of it. Some are open. Cheery voices issue from them. True, Elliot is strolling beside him, but he has his hands stored piously behind his back as if he’s on his way to church. Shorty has disappeared. A pretty secretary in long black skirt and white blouse flits across the corridor. She gives Elliot a casual ‘Hi’, but her smile is for Toby, and, free man that he is determined to be, he smiles back. In a white office with a sloped ceiling of white glass, a demure, grey-haired lady in her fifties sits behind a desk.

‘Ah, Mr Bell. Well done you. Mr Crispin is expecting you. Thank you, Elliot, I think the Chief is looking forward to a one-to-one with Mr Bell.’

And Toby, he decides, is looking forward to a one-to-one with the Chief. But alas, on entering Crispin’s grand office, he feels only a sense of anticlimax, reminiscent of the anticlimactic feelings he experienced that evening three years ago, when the shadowy ogre who had haunted him in Brussels and Prague marched into Quinn’s Private Office with Miss Maisie hanging from his arm and revealed himself as the same blankly handsome, forty-something television version of the officer-class business executive who was this minute rising from his chair with an orchestrated display of pleasurable surprise, naughty-boy chagrin and mannish good fellowship.

‘Toby! Well, what a way to meet. Pretty damned odd, I must say, posing as a provincial hack writing up poor Jeb’s obituary. Still, I suppose you couldn’t tell Shorty you were Foreign Office. You’d have frightened the pants off him.’

‘I was hoping Shorty would tell me about Operation Wildlife.’

‘Yes, well, so I gather. Shorty’s a bit cut up about Jeb, understandably. Not quite himself, ’twixt thee and me. Not that he’d have talked much to you. Not in his interests. Not in anyone’s. Coffee? Decaf? Mint tea? Something stronger? Not every day I hijack one of Her Majesty’s best. How far have you got?’

‘With what?’

‘Your investigations. I thought that’s what we were talking about. You’ve seen Probyn, seen the widow. The widow gave you Shorty. You’ve met Elliot. How many cards does that leave you with? Just trying to look over your shoulder,’ he explained pleasantly. ‘Probyn? Spent force. Didn’t see a sausage. All the rest is pure hearsay. A court would chuck it out. The widow? Bereaved, paranoid, hysterical: discount. What else have you got?’

‘You lied to Probyn.’

‘So would you have done. It was expedient. Or hasn’t the dear old FO heard of lies of expediency? Your problem is, you’re going to be out of a job pretty soon, with worse to come. I thought I might be able to help out.’

‘How?’

‘Well, just for openers, how about a bit of protection and a job?’

‘With Ethical Outcomes?’

‘Oh Christ, those dinosaurs,’ said Crispin, with a laugh to suggest he’d forgotten all about Ethical Outcomes until Toby happened to remind him of them. ‘Nothing to do with this shop, thank God. We got out early. Ethical put the chairs on the tables and went all offshore. Whoever owns the stock owns the liability. Absolutely no connection visible or otherwise with Castle Keep.’

‘And no Miss Maisie?’

‘Long gone, bless her. Showering Bibles on the heathens of Somalia when last heard of.’

‘And your friend Quinn?’

‘Yeah, well, alas for poor Fergus. Still, I’m told his party’s busting to have him back, now it’s been slung out of power, past ministerial experience being worth its weight in gold, and so on. Provided he forswears New Labour and all its works, of course, which he’s only too happy to do. Wanted to sign up with us, between you and me. On his knees, practically. But I’m afraid, unlike you, he didn’t cut the mustard.’ A nostalgic smile for old times. ‘There’s always the defining moment when you start out in this game: do we risk the operation and go in, or do we chicken? You’ve got paid men standing by, trained up and rarin’ to go. You’ve got half a million dollars’ worth of intelligence, your finance in place, crock of gold from the backers if you bring it off, and just enough of a green light from the powers that be to cover your backside, but no more. Okay, there were rumbles about our intelligence sources. When aren’t there?’

‘And that was Wildlife?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘And the collateral damage?’

‘Heartbreaking. Always is. The absolute worst thing about our business. Every time I go to bed, I think about it. But what’s the alternative? Give me a Predator drone and a couple of Hell-fire missiles and I’ll show you what real collateral damage looks like. Want to take a stroll in the garden? Day like this, seems a pity to waste the sunshine.’

The room they were standing in was part office, part conservatory. Crispin stepped outside. Toby had no choice but to follow him. The garden was walled and long and laid out in the oriental style, with pebble paths and water trickling down a slate conduit into a pond. A bronze Chinese woman in a Hakka hat was catching fish for her basket.

‘Ever heard of a little outfit called Rosethorne Protection Services?’ Crispin asked over his shoulder. ‘Worth about three billion US at last count?’

‘No.’

‘Well, bone up on them, I should, because they own us – for the time being. At our present rate of growth, we’ll be buying ourselves out in a couple of years. Four, max. Know how many warm bodies we employ worldwide?’

‘No. I’m afraid not.’

‘Full time, six hundred. Offices in Zurich, Bucharest, Paris. Everything from personal protection to home security to counter-insurgency to who’s spying on your firm to who’s screwing your wife. Any notion of the sort of people we keep on our payroll?’

‘No. Tell me.’

He swung round and, evoking memories of Fergus Quinn, began counting off his fingers in Toby’s face.

‘Five heads of foreign intelligence services. Four still serving. Five ex-directors of British intelligence, all with contracts in place with the Old Firm. More police chiefs and their deputies than you can shake a stick at. Throw in any odd Whitehall flunky who wants to make a buck on the side, plus a couple of dozen peers and MPs, and it’s a pretty strong hand.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ said Toby politely, noticing how some kind of emotion had entered Crispin’s voice, even if it was more the triumphalism of a child than of a grown man.

‘And in case you have any remaining doubts that your beautiful Foreign Office career is finished, be so kind as to follow me,’ he continued affably. ‘Mind?’


They are standing in a windowless room like a recording studio with cushioned hessian walls and flat screens. Crispin is playing an extract from Toby’s stolen recording to him at high volume, the bit where Quinn is putting the pressure on Jeb:

‘… so what I’m saying, Jeb, is, here we are, with the countdown to D-Day already ringing in our ears, you as the Queen’s soldier, me as the Queen’s minister …’

‘Enough, or more?’ Crispin enquires and, receiving no answer, switches it off anyway, and sits himself down in a very modern rocking chair by the console while Toby remembers Tina: Tina, the temporary Portuguese cleaning woman who stood in for Lula while she went on holiday at short notice; Tina who was so tall and conscientious that she polished my grandparents’ wedding photograph. If I’d been stationed abroad, it would never have occurred to me that she wasn’t working for the secret police.

Crispin is rocking himself like someone on a swing, now leaning back, now gently landing with both shoes together on the thick carpet.

‘How’s about I spell it out?’ he asks, and spells it out anyway. ‘As far as the dear old FO is concerned, you’re f*cked. Any time I choose to send them that recording, they’ll blow you out of the water. Say Wildlife loud enough to them, the poor dears will go wobbly at the knees. Look at what that idiot Probyn got for his trouble.’

Abandoning levity, Crispin braked his rocking chair and frowned theatrically into the middle distance:

‘So let’s move to part two of our conversation, the constructive part. Here’s a package for you, take it or leave it. We have our own in-house lawyers, we do a standard contract. But we’re flexible, we’re not stupid, we take every case on its merits. Am I reaching you? Hard to tell. We also know all about you, obviously. You own your flat, got a bit from your grandfather, not a lot, not exactly f*ck-you money, but you won’t starve. The FO currently pays you fifty-eight grand rising to seventy-five next year if you keep your nose clean; no major outstanding debts. You’re straight, you screw around where you can, but no wife and veg to tie you down. Long may it last. What else have you got that we like? A good health record, you enjoy outdoors, you’re fit, you’re solid Anglo-Saxon stock, low-born but you made it through the social lines. You’ve got three languages and a Class A Rolodex from every country where you’ve served Her Maj, and we can start you off at twice what she’s paying you. There’s a golden hullo of ten grand waiting for you on the day you join as an executive vice-president, car of your choice, all the trimmings, health insurance, business-class travel, entertainment expenses. Have I missed anything out?’

‘Yes, actually. You have.’

Perhaps in order to avoid Toby’s gaze, Crispin treats himself to a 360º turn on the runners of his very modern rocking chair. But when he comes back, Toby is there, still staring at him.

‘You still haven’t told me why you’re frightened of me,’ he complains, in a tone of mystification rather than challenge. ‘Elliot presides over a fiasco in Gibraltar, but you don’t fire him, you keep him where you can see him. Shorty thinks he may want to go public, so you hire him too, although he’s a coke-head. Jeb wanted to go very public, and wouldn’t come aboard, so he had to be suicided. But what have I got to threaten you with? F*ck all. So why am I getting an offer I can’t refuse? It makes no sense to me. Maybe it does to you?’

Establishing that Crispin prefers to keep his counsel, he rolls on:

‘So my reading of your situation would be this: Jeb’s death was a bridge too far, and whoever has been protecting you up till now is getting cold feet about protecting you in the future. You want me off the case because, for as long as I’m on it, I’m a danger to your comfort and safety. And actually that’s a good enough reason for me to stick with it. So do what you like with the recording. But my guess is you won’t do anything with it because you’re running scared.’


The world has gone into slow motion. For Crispin too? Or only for Toby? Rising to his feet, Crispin sadly assures Toby he’s got it all so, so wrong. But no hard feelings, and perhaps when Toby’s a few years older, he’ll understand the way the real world works. They avoid the embarrassment of shaking hands. And would Toby like a car home? No thank you. Toby would rather walk. And walk he does. Back down the O’Keeffe corridor with its terrazzo tiles, past the half-open doors with young men and women like himself sitting before their computers or bowed into their telephones. He receives his wristwatch, ballpoint pens and notebook from the polite men at the door, then strolls across the gravel circle and past the gatehouse through the open gates, with no sight of Elliot or Shorty or the Audi that brought him here, or of the chase car that followed it. He keeps walking. Somehow it is later than he thought. The afternoon sun is warm and kind, and the magnolias, as ever in St John’s Wood at this time of the year, are a perfect treat.


Toby never knew in any detail, then or afterwards, how he spent the next few hours, or how many of them there were. That he passed his life in review goes without saying. What else does a man do while he walks from St John’s Wood to Islington contemplating love, life and death and the probable end of his career, not to mention gaol?

Emily would still be in surgery, by his calculation, and it was therefore too early to call her, and he didn’t know what he was going to say to her if he did, and anyway he had taken the precaution of leaving the silver burner at home, and he absolutely didn’t trust phone boxes, even if they worked.

So he didn’t call Emily, and Emily later confirmed that he hadn’t.

There is no doubt that he stopped at a couple of pubs, but only for the company of ordinary people, since in crisis or despair he refused to drink, and he had a sense of being in the grip of both conditions. A cash ticket later turned up in the pocket of his anorak, indicating that he had bought a pizza with extra cheese. But when and where he had bought it was not given, and he had no recollection of eating it.

And for sure, wrestling with his disgust and anger, and determined as usual to reduce them to a manageable level, he gave due thought to Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil, and launched into a debate with himself about where Crispin fitted into her scheme of things. Was Crispin, in his own perception, merely one of society’s faithful servants, obeying market pressures? Maybe that was how he saw himself, but Toby didn’t. As far as Toby was concerned, Jay Crispin was your normal, rootless, amoral, plausible, half-educated, nicely spoken frozen adolescent in a bespoke suit, with an unappeasable craving for money, power and respect, regardless of where he got them from. So far, so good. He had met embryonic Crispins in every walk of life and every country where he had served: just never until now one who had made his mark as a trader in small wars.

In a half-hearted effort to find excuses for Crispin, Toby even wondered whether, deep down, the man was just plain stupid. How else to explain the cock-up that was Operation Wildlife? And from there, he wandered off into an argument with Friedrich Schiller’s grandiose statement that human stupidity was what the gods fought in vain. Not so, in Toby’s opinion, and no excuse for anybody, whether god or man. What the gods and all reasonable humans fought in vain wasn’t stupidity at all. It was sheer, wanton, bloody indifference to anybody’s interests but their own.

And that, so far as will ever be known, was where his mind was drifting as he entered his house, climbed the stairs to his flat, unlocked the door and reached for the light switch, only to have a bundle of wet rag shoved down his throat and his hands wrenched behind his back and bound with plastic strip, and possibly – though he could never be sure, he never saw or afterwards found it, and only remembered it, if at all, by its gluey smell – a piece of prisoner-quality sacking pulled over his head, as a prelude to the worst beating he could have imagined.

Or perhaps – only an afterthought – the sacking was there to mark some sort of no-go area for his assailants, because the one part of his body they left intact turned out to be his face. And if there was any clue, then or later, as to who was administering the beating, it was the unfamiliar male voice with no identifiable regional accent saying ‘Don’t mark the cunt’ in a tone of self-assured, military command.

The first blows were undoubtedly the most painful and the most surprising. When his assailants held him in the lock-grip, he thought his spine was going to snap, then that his neck was. And there was a period when they decided to strangle him, then changed their minds at the last moment.

But it was the hail of blows to his stomach, kidneys, groin and then his groin again that seemed never to end, and for all he knew it continued after he had lost consciousness. But not before the same unidentified voice had breathed into his ear in the same tone of command:

‘Don’t think this is over, son. This is for appetizers. Remember that.’


They could have dumped him on the hall carpet or tossed him on the kitchen floor and left him there but, whoever they were, they had their standards. They needed to lay him out with the respectful care of morticians, pull off his trainers and help him out of his anorak, and make sure there was a jug of water and a tumbler beside him on the bedside locker.

His wristwatch said five o’clock but it had been saying it for some while, so he supposed it had suffered collateral damage during the skirmish. The date was stuck between two numbers, and certainly Thursday was the day he’d fixed to meet Shorty, and therefore the day on which he’d been hijacked and driven to St John’s Wood, and perhaps – but who could be sure? – today was Friday, in which case Sally, his assistant, was going to wonder how long his wisdom tooth was going to be acting up. The darkness in the uncurtained window suggested night-time, but whether it was night-time just for him or everybody else as well seemed to be in the balance. His bed was coated with vomit and there was vomit on the floor, both old and recent. He also had a memory of half rolling, half crawling to the bathroom in order to vomit into the lavatory, only to discover, like so many intrepid mountaineers before him, that the journey down was worse than the journey up.

The human and traffic sounds in the street below his window were turned low, but again he needed to know whether this was a general truth or one confined to him alone. Certainly the sounds he was getting were muted sounds, rather than the raucous evening variety – assuming that it was indeed evening. So the more rational solution might be: it was a grey dawn and he had been lying here for anything between, say, twelve to fourteen hours, dozing and vomiting or simply dealing with the pain, which was an activity in itself, unrelated to the passage of time.

It was also the reason why he was only now, by stages, identifying and gradually locating the caterwauling that was issuing from beneath his bed. It was the silver burner howling at him. He had secreted it between the springs and the mattress before setting out to meet Shorty, and why on earth he’d left it switched on was another mystery to him, as it was apparently to the burner, because its howl was losing conviction and quite soon it wouldn’t have a howl at all.

Which was why he found it necessary to rally all his remaining strength and roll himself off the bed and crash to the floor where, if in his mind only, he lay dying for a while before making a grab for the springs, then hooking a finger round them and pulling himself up with his left hand, while his right hand – which was numb and probably broken – raked around for the burner, found it and clutched it against his chest, at the same moment as his left hand let go and he thumped back on to the floor.

After that it was only a matter of pressing green and saying ‘Hi’ with all the brightness he could muster. And when nothing came back and his patience ran out, or his energy did, he said:

‘I’m fine, Emily. A bit knackered, that’s all. Just don’t come round. Please. I’m toxic’ – by which he meant broadly that he was ashamed of himself; Shorty had been a washout; he had achieved nothing except the beating of a lifetime; he’d f*cked up just like her father; and for all he knew the house was under surveillance and he was the last person on earth that she should be visiting, whether in her capacity as a doctor or anything else.

Then as he rang off he realized that she couldn’t come anyway, because she didn’t know where he lived, he’d never mentioned it apart from saying Islington, and Islington covered quite a few square miles of dense real estate, so he was safe. And so was she, whether she liked it or not. He could switch the bloody thing off and doze, which he did, only to be woken again, not by the burner but by a thunderous hammering on the front door – done, he suspected, not by human hand but a heavy instrument – which stopped only to allow for Emily’s raised voice, sounding very like her mother’s.

‘I’m standing at your front door, Toby,’ she was saying, quite unnecessarily, for the second or third time now. ‘And if you don’t open it soon, I’m going to ask your downstairs neighbour to help me break into your flat. He knows I’m a doctor and he heard heavy thuds coming through the ceiling. Are you hearing me, Toby? I’m pressing the bell, but it’s not ringing so far as I can hear.’

She was right. All the bell was emitting was a graceless burp.

‘Toby, can you please come to the door? Just answer, Toby. I really don’t want to break in.’ Pause. ‘Or have you got somebody with you?’

It was the last of these questions that was too much for him, so he said ‘Coming’ and made sure the zip of his fly was closed before rolling off the bed again and half shuffling, half crawling down the passage on his left side, which was the relatively comfortable one.

Reaching the door, he pulled himself into a semi-kneeling position long enough to get his key out of his pocket and into the lock and double-turn it with his left hand.


In the kitchen, a stern silence reigned. The bed sheets were turning quietly in the washing machine. Toby was sitting nearly upright in his dressing gown and Emily with her back to him was heating a tin of chicken soup she had fetched, along with her own prescriptions from the chemist.

She had stripped him and bathed his naked body with professional detachment, noting without comment his grossly swollen genitals. She had listened to his heart, taken his pulse, run her hands over his abdomen, checked him for fractures and damaged ligaments, paused at the chequered lacerations round his neck where they had thought to strangle him and then thought better of it, put ice packs on his bruises and given him Paracetamol for his pain, and helped him limp along the corridor while she held his left arm round her neck and over her shoulder and with her right arm clutched his right hip.

But until now, the only words they’d exchanged had been in the order of ‘Do please try to keep still, Toby’ or ‘This may hurt a bit’ and, more recently, ‘Give me your door key and stay exactly where you are till I come back.’

Now she was asking the tough questions.

‘Who did this to you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you know why they did it to you?’

For appetizers, he thought. To warn me off. To punish me for being nosy and stop me being nosy in future. But it was all too woolly, and too much to say, so he said nothing.

‘Well, whoever did it must have used a knuckleduster,’ she pronounced, when she had got tired of waiting.

‘Maybe just rings on his fingers,’ he suggested, remembering Elliot’s hands on the steering wheel.

‘I shall need your permission before I call the police. Can I call them?’

‘No point.’

‘Why no point?’

Because the police aren’t the solution, they’re part of the problem. But again that’s something you can’t easily put across, so best just let it go.

‘It’s very possible that you’re suffering internal bleeding of the spleen, which can be life-threatening,’ Emily continued. ‘I need to get you to a hospital for a scan.’

‘I’m fine. I’m in one piece. You should go home. Please. They may come back. Honestly.’

‘You are not in one piece, and you need treatment, Toby,’ she replied tartly, and the conversation might have continued along these unproductive lines had not the front doorbell chosen that moment to emit its croak from the rusted tin box above Emily’s head.

She stopped stirring the soup and glanced up at the box, then enquiringly at Toby, who started to shrug, thought better of it.

‘Don’t answer it,’ he said.

‘Why not? Who is it?’

‘No one. Nobody good. Please.’

And seeing her pick up his house keys from the draining board and start towards the kitchen door:

‘Emily. It’s my house. Just let it ring!’

But it was ringing anyway: a second croak, longer than the first.

‘Is it a woman?’ she asked, still at the kitchen door.

‘There is no woman!’

‘I can’t hide, Toby. And I can’t be this afraid. Would you answer it if you were fit and I wasn’t here?’

‘You don’t know these people! Look at me!’

But she refused to be impressed. ‘Your neighbour from downstairs probably wants to ask how you are.’

‘Emily, for Christ’s sake! This isn’t about good neighbours.’

But she had gone.

Eyes closed, he held his breath and listened.

He heard his key turn, he heard her voice, then a much softer male voice, like a hushed voice in church, but not one that in his over-attentive state he recognized, although he felt he should.

He heard the front door close.

She’s stepped outside to talk to him.

But who the hell is he? Has he pulled her outside? Are they coming back to apologize, or to finish the job? Or did they think they might have killed me by mistake, and Crispin has sent them to find out? In the rush of terror that has taken hold of him, all of it is possible.

Still out there.

What’s she doing?

Does she think she’s fireproof?

What have they done to her? Minutes like hours. Jesus Christ!

The front door opening. Closing again. Slow, deliberate footsteps approaching down the corridor. Not hers. Definitely not Emily’s. Too heavy by half.

They’ve grabbed her and now they’re coming for me!

But they were Emily’s footsteps after all: Emily being all hospital and purposeful. By the time she reappeared, he had got up from his chair and was using the table to punt himself towards the kitchen drawer to find a carving knife. Then he saw her standing in the doorway, looking puzzled and holding a brown-paper parcel bound in string.

‘Who was it?’

‘I don’t know. He said you’ll know what it’s about.’

‘For f*ck’s sake!’

Grabbing the parcel, he turned his back on her – actually with the futile intention of protecting her in the event of an explosion – and set to work feverishly feeling the packet for detonators, timers, nails or whatever else they might have thought to add for maximum effect, very much in the manner in which he had approached Kit’s nocturnal letter, but with a greater sense of peril.

But all he could feel, after a lengthy exploration, was a wad of paper and a bulldog clip.

‘What did he look like?’ he demanded breathlessly.

‘Small. Well dressed.’

‘Age?’

‘Sixtyish.’

‘Tell me what he said: his words.’

‘“I have a parcel here for my friend and former colleague, Toby Bell.” Then something about had he come to the right address –’

‘I need a knife.’

She handed him the knife he had been reaching for and he slit the parcel open exactly as he had slit open Kit’s, down the side, and took from it a smeared photocopy of a Foreign Office file emblazoned with security caveats in black, white and red. He lifted the cover and found himself gazing incredulously at a clutch of pages held together by a bulldog clip, and written in the neat, unmistakeable handwriting that had followed him from post to post for the last eight years. And on top of them, by way of a covering letter, a single sheet of unheaded notepaper, again in the same familiar hand:

My dear Toby,

It is my understanding that you already have the prelude but not the epilogue. Here, somewhat to my shame …

He read no further. Jamming the note to the back of the document, he avidly scanned the top page:



OPERATION WILDLIFE – AFTERMATH AND RECOMMENDATIONS



By now his heart was racing so fast, his breathing so uneven, he wondered whether, after all, he was about to die. Perhaps Emily was wondering too, because she had dropped on her knees beside him.

‘You opened the door. Then what?’ he stammered out, frantically leafing through the pages.

‘I opened the door’ – gently now, to humour him – ‘he stood there. He seemed surprised to see me and asked if you were in. He said he was a former colleague and friend of yours, and he had this parcel for you.’

‘And you said?’

‘I said yes, you were in. But you were unwell, and I was your doctor attending you. And I didn’t think you should be disturbed, and could I help?’

‘And he said? – go on!’

‘He asked what you were suffering from. I said I was sorry, I wasn’t allowed to tell him that without your permission but you were as comfortable as could be expected pending further examination. And I was about to call an ambulance, which I am. Are you hearing me, Toby?’

He was hearing her, but he was also churning his way through the photocopied pages.

‘Then what?’

‘He seemed a bit thrown, started to say something, looked at me again – a bit beadily, I thought – and then he said might he know my name?’

‘Give me his words. His actual words.’

‘Jesus, Toby.’ But she gave them anyway: ‘“Would I be impertinent if I were to ask you your name?” How’s that?’

‘And you told him your name. You said Probyn?’

‘Doctor Probyn. What do you expect me to say?’ – catching Toby’s stare. ‘Doctors are open, Toby. Real doctors give their names. Their real names.’

‘How did he take it?’

‘“Then kindly tell him that I admire his taste in medical advisors,” which I thought was a bit fresh of him. Then he handed me the package. For you.’

‘Me? How did he describe me?’

‘“For Toby!” How the f*ck d’you think he described you?’

Fumbling for the note that he had shoved to the back of the photocopied pages, he read the rest of its message:

… you will not be surprised to learn that I have decided that a corporate life does not, after all, agree with me, and I have accordingly awarded myself a lengthy posting to distant parts.

Yours as ever,

Giles Oakley.

PS. I enclose a memory stick containing the same material. Perhaps you will add it to the one I suspect you already have. G.O.

PPS. May I also suggest that whatever you propose to do, it is done swiftly since there is every sign that others may act before you? G.O.

PPPS. I shall refrain from our cherished diplomatic custom of renewing my assurances of the highest esteem, since I know they would fall on deaf ears. G.O.

And in a transparent plastic capsule pasted to the top of the page, sure enough: a memory stick neatly marked SAME DOCUMENT.


He was standing at the kitchen window, uncertain how he had got there, craning his neck to look down into the street. Emily stood at his side, one hand to his arm to hold him steady. But of Giles Oakley, the diplomat who does everything by halves and had finally gone the whole hog, there was no sign. But what was the Kwik-Fit van doing, parked just thirty yards away on the opposite side of the street? And why did it take three burly men to change the front wheel of a Peugeot car?

‘Emily, please. Do something for me.’

‘After I’ve taken you to hospital.’

‘Rummage in the bottom drawer of that chest over there, and find the memory stick of my graduation party at Bristol University. Please.’

While she rummaged, he punted himself along the wall until he came to his desk. With his undamaged hand he switched on the computer and nothing happened. He checked the cable, the mains switch, tried to reboot. Still nothing.

Meanwhile, Emily’s rummaging was rewarded. She had found the memory stick, and was holding it aloft.

‘I’ve got to go out,’ he said, ungraciously seizing it from her.

His heart was racing again. He felt nauseous, but clear-headed and precise.

‘Listen to me, please. There’s a shop called Mimi’s in the Caledonian Road. Opposite a tattoo parlour called Divine Canvas and an Ethiopian restaurant.’ Why was everything so clear to him? Was he dying? From the way she was staring at him, he might as well be.

‘What if there is?’ she asked him. But his eyes had gone back to the street.

‘Tell me first if they’re still out there. Three workers talking to each other about bugger all.’

‘People in the street talk about nothing all the time. What about Mimi’s? Who’s Mimi?’

‘An Internet café. I need shoes. They’ve crashed my computer. And my BlackBerry for the addresses. Top-left drawer of my desk. And socks. I’ll need socks. Then see if the men are still there.’

She had found his anorak, which was crumpled but otherwise intact, and put his BlackBerry into the left side pocket. She had helped him put on his socks and shoes, and she had checked to see whether the men were still there. They were. She had given up saying ‘You can’t do this, Toby’ and was helping him to shuffle along the corridor.

‘Are you sure Mimi will be receiving at this hour?’ she asked, in an effort to be light-hearted.

‘Just get me down the stairs. Then go. You’ve done everything. You’ve been great. Sorry about the mess.’


The staircase might have been less of a nightmare if they could have agreed where Emily should place herself: above him to help guide his footsteps, or below to catch him if he plunged? Toby’s view was that below him was just bloody silly, she could never support his weight and they’d finish up in the hall on top of each other. Emily riposted that, if he started to fall, yelling in his ear from behind wasn’t going to stop him.

But these exchanges came and went in flashes amid the business of manhandling him downstairs and into the street, then speculating – both of them now – why there was a uniformed policeman loitering at the corner of Cloudesley Road, because, these days, whoever saw a lone copper standing on a street corner, looking benign? And – Toby this time – why had the supposed Kwik-Fit team still not changed that bloody wheel? But whatever the explanation, he needed Emily out of sight and sound, clear of it all, for her own sake, please, because the last thing on earth he wanted to do was make her into an accomplice, which he explained to her very clearly and at length.

So it surprised him to discover, as he prepared to launch himself into Copenhagen Street for the downhill sprint, that she had not only remained at his side but was actually steering him, and probably holding him up as well, with one hand gripping his forearm with unladylike strength, and her other arm fastened like iron around his upper back, but somehow avoiding the bruising, which reminded him that by now she knew the geography of his body pretty well.

They were at the junction when he stopped dead.

‘Shit.’

‘What’s shit?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Can’t remember what, for goodness’ sake?’

‘Whether Mimi’s is left or right.’

‘Wait here for me.’

She propped him on a bench and he waited dizzily for her while she made a hasty reconnaissance and returned with the news that Mimi’s was a stone’s throw away to the left.

But she needed his promise first:

‘We get you to hospital as soon as this is done. Deal? Now what’s the matter?’

‘I’ve got no bloody money.’

‘Well, I have. Plenty.’

We’re arguing like an old married couple, he thought, and we haven’t even kissed each other on the cheek. Perhaps he said it aloud, because she was smiling as she pushed open the door to a minuscule but scrupulously clean shop with a big plywood counter as you entered and nobody behind it and a bar at the far end selling coffee and refreshments and, on the wall, a poster offering to upgrade your PC, health-check it, recover lost data and remove any unfriendly virus. And beneath this poster, six computer booths and six customers perched upright before them, four black men and two blonde women. No booth free, so find somewhere to sit and wait.

So he sat at a table and waited while Emily fetched two teas and spoke to the manager. Then she came and sat down opposite Toby, holding both his hands across the table – not entirely, he wanted to believe, for medical reasons – until one of the men dismounted from his bar stool, leaving a booth free.

Toby’s head was reeling and the fingers of his right hand were in bad shape, so it was Emily in the end who was pushing home the memory sticks while he called up the addresses for her from his BlackBerry: Guardian, The New York Times, Private Eye, Reprieve, Channel 4 News, BBC News, ITN, and finally – not quite as a joke – the Press and Information Department of Her Majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

‘And one for my father,’ she said, and typed in Kit’s email address from memory, and pressed ‘send’, and included a copy to her mother in case Kit was still sulking in his tent and not opening his emails. Then, belatedly, Toby remembered the photographs that Brigid had let him copy into his BlackBerry, so he insisted Emily send them too.

And Emily was still doing this when Toby heard a siren wailing and thought at first it was the ambulance coming for him, and that Emily must somehow have managed to call for one when he wasn’t listening, maybe back at the flat when she was outside his door talking to Oakley.

Then he decided that she couldn’t possibly have done that without telling him, because if one thing was certain about Emily, it was that she didn’t have an ounce of guile in her bones. If Emily said, ‘I’ll call for an ambulance when we’ve done our work at Mimi’s,’ then that’s when she’d be calling for an ambulance and not a second before.

Next he thought: it’s Giles they’re coming for, Giles has thrown himself under a bus; because when a man like Giles, in his fractured state of mind, tells you he’s about to award himself a posting to distant parts, you’re entitled to take it any way you want.

Then it began to cross his mind that, by activating his BlackBerry in order to obtain the email addresses and dispatch Brigid’s photographs, he had sent up a signal that anyone with the necessary equipment could home on – he is briefly Beirut Man again – and if the spirit takes them, direct a rocket down the beam and blow the head off the unlucky user.

The sirens multiplied and acquired a more emphatic, bullying tone. At first, they seemed to be approaching from one direction only. But as the chorus grew to a howl, and the car brakes screamed in the street outside, Toby couldn’t be certain any more – nobody could be certain, even Emily – which direction they were coming from.





Acknowledgements



My thanks to Danny, Jessica and Callum for enlivening my researches in Gibraltar; to Drs Jane Crispin, Amy Frost and John Eustace for advice on medical matters; to the journalist and writer Mark Urban for giving so freely of his military expertise; to writer, activist and founder of openDemocracy, Anthony Barnett, for educating me in the manners of New Labour in its dying days; and to Clare Algar and her colleagues at the legal charity Reprieve, for instructing me in the British Government’s latest assaults on our liberty, whether implemented or planned.

Most of all I must thank Carne Ross, former British foreign servant and founder and director of the not-for-profit Independent Diplomat, who by his example demonstrated the perils of speaking a delicate truth to power. Without Carne’s example before me, and his pithy advice in my ear, this book would have been the poorer.