A Delicate Truth (10 page)

She sits upright and, like a child in
disgrace, talks to her plate.

Quinn walked into a quagmire, she says.
Defence was in a state of corporate rot long before he came on the scene. Perhaps Toby
knows that already? Toby does. Half its officials didn’t know whether they were
working for the Queen or the arms industry, and didn’t give a hoot as long as
their bread was buttered. Perhaps Toby knows that, too? Toby does. He has heard it from
Matti, but doesn’t let on. She’s not making excuses for Fergus. She’s
saying Crispin was there ahead of him and saw him coming.

Reluctantly, she once more helps herself to
Toby’s hand, and this time taps it sternly on the table to the rhythm of her words
as she scolds him:

‘And I’ll tell you what you
did
, you evil man’ – as if Toby himself is Crispin now – ‘you
set up your own
spy shop
. Right there inside the ministry. While everyone round
you was flogging
arms
, you were peddling raw
intelligence
: straight from the shelf, direct to
buyer
, no stops
between.
Un
spun,
un
tested,
un
pasteurized and above all
untouched by bureaucratic hands. Which was music to Fergie’s ears. Does he still
play music in his office?’

‘Mostly Bach.’

‘And you’re Jay like the
bird,’ she adds, in a flurried answer to his earlier question.

‘And Quinn actually
bought from
him
? Or his company did?’

Laura takes another pull of her Meursault,
shakes her head.

Toby tries again:

‘Was the stuff any good?’

‘It was expensive, so it had to be
good, didn’t it?’

‘What’s he
like
,
Laura?’ Toby insists.

‘Your minister?’

‘No! Jay Crispin, of
course.’

Laura takes a deep breath. Her tone becomes
terminal, and even angry:

‘Just listen to me, dear, will you?
The scandal at Defence is dead, and Jay Crispin is henceforth and forever banished from
all ministerial and government premises on pain of death. A strong formal letter has
been sent to him to that effect. He will never grace the corridors of Whitehall or
Westminster again.’ Another breath. ‘The inspiring minister whom you have
the honour to serve, on the other hand, bruiser though he may be, has embarked on the
next stage of his distinguished career, I
trust
with your help. Now will you
please get me my coat?’

After a week of flailing himself with
remorse, Toby remains dogged by the same question:
If the scandal at Defence is dead
and Crispin will never walk the corridors of Whitehall or Westminster again, then
what’s the bloody man doing lobbying the House of Lords?

Six weeks roll by. On the surface things
continue uneventfully. Toby drafts speeches and Quinn delivers them with conviction,
even when there’s nothing to be convinced of. Toby stands at Quinn’s
shoulder at receptions and murmurs the names of foreign dignitaries into his ear as they
approach. Quinn greets them as long-lost friends.

But Quinn’s continued secretiveness
drives not only Toby but the entire ministerial staff to the edge of desperation. He
will stalk out of a Whitehall meeting – at the Home Office, the Cabinet Office or
Laura’s Treasury – ignore his official Rover, hail a cab and disappear without
explanation till next day. He will cancel a diplomatic engagement and not inform the
diary secretary, his special advisors or even his Private Secretary. The pencilled
entries in the diary he keeps on his desk are so cryptic that Toby can decipher them
only with Quinn’s grudging assistance. One day the diary disappears
altogether.

But it’s on their trips abroad that
Quinn’s secretiveness assumes in Toby’s eyes a darker hue. Spurning the
hospitality offered by local British ambassadors, Quinn the People’s Choice
prefers to take up residence in grand hotels. When the Foreign Office Accounts
Department demurs, Quinn replies that he will pay his own way, which surprises Toby
since, like many affluent people, Quinn is notoriously tight.

Or is some secret benefactor perhaps paying
Quinn’s way for him? Why else would he keep a separate credit card for settling
his hotel bills and shield it with his body if Toby chances to come too close?

Meanwhile, Team Quinn is acquiring a
household ghost.

Brussels.

Returning to their grand hotel at six
o’clock in the evening after a long day’s haggling with NATO officialdom,
Quinn complains
of a nauseous headache, cancels his dinner engagement
at the British Embassy and retires to his suite. At ten, after heavy soul-searching,
Toby decides he must call up to the suite and enquire after his master’s welfare.
He gets voicemail. A
DO NOT DISTURB
notice hangs on the ministerial door.
After further cogitation he descends to the lobby and shares his concerns with the
concierge. Have there been any signs of life from the suite? Has the minister ordered
room service, sent down for aspirin or – since Quinn is a notorious hypochondriac – for
a doctor?

The concierge is bewildered:

‘But Monsieur le Ministre left the
hotel in his limousine two hours ago,’ he exclaims, in haughty Belgian French.

Now Toby is bewildered. Quinn’s
limousine
? He hasn’t got one. The only limousine on offer is the
ambassador’s Rolls, which Toby has cancelled on Quinn’s behalf.

Or did Quinn keep his embassy dinner
engagement after all? The concierge presumes to correct him. The limousine was not a
Rolls-Royce, monsieur. It was a Citroën sedan and the chauffeur was known
personally to the concierge.

Then kindly describe to me exactly what took
place – pressing twenty euros into the concierge’s waiting hand.

‘Most willingly, monsieur. The black
Citroën pulled up at the front door at the same time as Monsieur le Ministre
emerged from the centre lift. One suspects Monsieur le Ministre was advised by telephone
of his car’s imminent arrival. The two gentlemen greeted each other here in the
lobby, got into the car and rode away.’

‘You mean a gentleman got
out
of the car to collect him?’

‘From the
back
of the black
Citroën sedan. He was a passenger, clearly, not a servant.’

‘Can you describe the
gentleman?’

The concierge baulks.

‘Well, was he white?’ Toby demands
impatiently.

‘Completely, monsieur.’

‘How old?’

The concierge would guess that the
gentleman’s age was similar to the minister’s.

‘Have you seen him before? Is he a
regular here?’

‘Never, monsieur. I assumed a
diplomat, perhaps a colleague.’

‘Large, small, what did he look
like?’

The concierge again hesitates.

‘Like yourself but a little older, and
the hair shorter, monsieur.’

‘And they spoke what language? Did you
hear them talking?’

‘English, monsieur. Natural
English.’

‘Have you any idea where they went?
Did you gather where they were going?’

The concierge summons the
chasseur
,
a cheeky black Congolese boy in a red uniform with a pillbox hat. The
chasseur
knows exactly where they went:

‘To La Pomme du Paradis restaurant
close to the palace. Three stars.
Grande gastronomie!
’

So much for Quinn’s nauseous headache,
thinks Toby.

‘How can you be so sure of
that?’ he demands of the
chasseur
, who is bobbing about in his anxiety to
be of help.

‘It was the instruction he gave to the
driver, monsieur! I heard all!’

‘
Who
gave the instruction? To
do
what
?’

‘The gentleman who collected your
minister! He sat down beside the driver and said: “Now one goes to La Pomme du
Paradis” just as I was closing the door. His exact words, monsieur!’

Toby turns to the concierge:

‘You said the gentleman who collected
my minister rode in the back. Now we hear he sat in the front when they drove off.
Couldn’t the gentleman who collected him have been security?’

But it is the little Congolese
chasseur
who holds the floor, and he is not about to relinquish it:

‘It was
necessary
, monsieur!
Three persons in the back with an elegant lady: that would not be polite!’

A
lady
, thinks Toby, in despair.
Don’t tell me we’ve got
that
problem too.

‘And what kind of lady are we talking
about?’ he asks, all jocular, but heart in mouth.

‘She was
petite
and very
charming, monsieur, a person of distinction.’

‘And of what age, would you
say?’

The
chasseur
cracks a fearless
smile:

‘It depends which parts of the lady we
are talking about, monsieur,’ he replies, and darts off before the
concierge’s wrath can strike him down.

But next morning, when Toby knocks at the
door of the ministerial suite under the pretext of presenting Quinn with a sheaf of
flattering British press stories that he has printed off the Internet, it is not the
shadow of a young lady or an old one that he glimpses seated at the breakfast table
behind the frosted-glass partition to the
salon
as his minister brusquely opens
the door to him, grabs the papers and slams the door in his face. It is the shadow of a
man: a trim, straight-backed man of average height in a crisp dark suit and tie.

Like yourself but a little older, and
the hair shorter, monsieur.

Prague.

To the surprise of his staff, Minister Quinn
is only too happy to accept the hospitality of the British Embassy in Prague. The
ambassadress, a recent Foreign Office conscript from the City of London, is an old buddy
of Quinn’s from Harvard days. While Fergus was post-gradding in good governance,
Stephanie
was notching up a Master’s in Business Studies. The
conference, which takes place in the fabled castle that is Prague’s pride, is
spread over two days of cocktails, lunches and dinners. Its subject is how to improve
intelligence liaison between NATO members formerly under the Soviet maw. By the Friday
evening the delegates have departed, but Quinn will stay another night with his old
friend and, in Stephanie’s words, enjoy ‘a small private dinner all for my
old schoolmate Fergus’, meaning that Toby’s presence will not be
required.

Toby passes the morning drafting his report
on the conference, and the afternoon walking in the Prague hills. In the evening,
captivated as ever by the glories of the city, he strolls beside the Vltava, wanders the
cobbled streets, enjoys a solitary meal. On returning to the embassy, he chooses for his
pleasure the long way past the castle and notices that the lights in the first-floor
conference room are still burning.

From the street his view is constricted, and
the lower half of each window is frosted. Nonetheless by climbing the hill a few paces
and standing on tiptoe, he is able to discern the outline of a male speaker silently
holding forth from a lectern on the raised platform. He is of average height. The
bearing is erect and the jaw action perfunctory; the demeanour – he cannot say quite why
– unmistakably British, perhaps because the hand gestures, while brisk and economic, are
in some way inhibited. By the same token Toby has no doubt that English is the language
being spoken.

Has Toby made the connection? Not yet. Not
quite. His eye is too busy with the audience. It is about twelve strong and comfortably
settled in an informal half-circle round the speaker. Only the heads are visible, but
Toby has no difficulty in recognizing six of them. Four belong to the deputy chiefs of
the Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian and Czech military intelligence services, every one
of whom, only six hours earlier,
professed his undying friendship to
Toby before notionally boarding his plane or staff car for the journey home.

The two remaining heads, which are close
together and set apart from the rest, are those of Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the
Czech Republic and her old Harvard chum, Fergus Quinn. Behind them on a trestle table
lie the remnants of a lavish buffet that presumably replaced the small dinner all for
Fergus.

For five minutes or longer – he will never
know – Toby remains on the hillside, ignoring the passing night traffic, staring upward
at the lighted windows of the castle, his concentration now fixed on the silhouetted
figure at the lectern: on the trim, straight body, the crisp dark suit and the taut,
emphatic gestures with which he spells out his rousing message.

But what
is
the mysterious
evangelist’s message?

And why does it have to be spelt out
here
, rather than in the embassy?

And why does it meet with such conspicuous
approval from Her Majesty’s minister and Her Majesty’s ambassador?

And who above all is the minister’s
secret sharer, now in Brussels, now in Prague?

Berlin.

Having delivered a vacuous speech, written
by Toby on demand under the title ‘The Third Way: Social Justice and Its European
Future’, Quinn dines privately at the Adlon Hotel with unnamed guests. Toby, his
day’s work done, sits chatting in the garden of Café Einstein with his old
friends Horst and Monika and their four-year-old daughter, Ella.

In the five years Toby and Horst have known
each other, Horst has risen swiftly through the ranks of the German Foreign
Service to a position akin to Toby’s. Monika, despite the cares
of motherhood, contrives to work three days a week for a human rights group that Toby
rates highly. The evening sun is warm, the Berlin air crisp. Horst and Monika speak the
north German that Toby is most comfortable with.