A Delicate Truth (15 page)

A last forlorn glance at his BlackBerry
tells him that his appeal remains unheeded. He switches it off and consigns it to the
darkness of an inner pocket.

Having performed the ludicrous manoeuvres
required of him by his minister, Toby arrives in the anteroom to the Private Office and
confirms by internal telephone with the bemused security guards that he has successfully
escaped their attention.

‘You were solid glass, Mr Bell, sir. I
saw straight through you. Have a nice weekend.’

‘You too, and thanks a
bundle.’

Poised over his desk, he is emboldened by a
surge of indignation. Giles, you’re forcing me to do this.

The desk is supposedly prestigious: a
kneehole-style reproduction antique with a tooled-leather worktop.

Seating himself in the chair before it, he
leans forward and eases open the voluminous bottom right-hand drawer.

If there is a part of him that is still
praying that his requests of Works Department have miraculously been answered during the
night, let it pray no more. Like a rusting engine of war on a forgotten battlefield, the
ancient tape recorder lies where she has lain for decades, waiting for the call that
will never come: except that today it has. In place of voice activation, she boasts a
timing device similar to the one on the microwave in his flat. Her aged spools are bare.
But two giant tapes in dust-caked cellophane packets lie ready for duty on the shelf
above her.

Up for off. Down for record.

And wait for tomorrow when I come and get
you, if I’m not already in prison.

And tomorrow had finally come, and Isabel had
gone. It was today, an unseasonably sunny spring Sunday, and church bells were summoning
the sinners of Soho to repentance, and Toby Bell, bachelor of three hours’
standing, was still seated at his pavement table over his third – or was it fifth? –
coffee of the morning, steeling himself to commit the irrevocable act of
felony that he had been planning and dreading all night: to wit,
retrace his steps to the ministerial anteroom, collect the tape and spirit it out of the
Foreign Office under the noses of the security guards in the manner of the vilest
spy.

He still had a choice. He had worked that
out, too, in the long, wild reaches of the night. For as long as he sat at this tin
table, he could argue that nothing untoward had happened. No security officer in his
right mind would consider checking out an age-old tape recorder mouldering in the bottom
of his desk drawer. And in the distant possibility that the tape
was
discovered, well, he had his answer ready: in the stressful run-up to an ultra-secret
meeting of immense national importance, Minister Quinn had remembered the existence of a
covert audio system and instructed Toby to activate it. Later, with his head full of
affairs of state, Quinn would deny that he had given such an order. Well, an aberration
of that kind, for those who knew the man, would by no means be out of character; and for
those who remembered the tribulations of Richard Nixon, all too familiar.

Toby peered round for the pretty waitress
and, through the café doorway, saw her leaning over the counter, flirting with the
waiter.

She gave him a lovely smile and came
trotting out to him, still flirting.

Seven pounds, please. He gave her ten.

He stood on the kerb, watching the happy
world brush past him.

Turn left for the Foreign Office, I’m
on my way to prison. Turn right to Islington, I go home to a blessedly empty flat. But
already, in the brightness of the morning, he was striding purposefully down
Whitehall.

‘Back again, Mr Bell? They must be
running you ragged,’ said the senior guard, who liked a chat.

But the younger ones only glowered at their
screens.

The mahogany door was closed, but don’t
trust anything: Quinn may have snuck in early or, for all Toby knew, been in there all
night, hunkered down with Jay Crispin, Roy Stormont-Taylor and Mr Music Brad.

He banged on the door, called
‘Minister?’ – banged again. No answer.

He strode to his desk, yanked open the
bottom drawer and to his horror saw a pin-light burning.
Christ Almighty: if anybody
had spotted it!

He wound back the tape, coaxed it from its
housing, returned switch and timer to their previous settings. With the tape wedged
under his armpit he set out on his return journey, not forgetting a wave of
‘Cheerio’ to the older guard and a ‘fuck you’ nod of authority
to the younger ones.

It is only minutes later, but already a calm
of sleep has descended over Toby, and for a while he is standing still and everything is
passing him by. When he wakes, he is in the Tottenham Court Road, eying the windows of
second-hand electronics dealers and trying to decide which of them is the least likely
to remember a thirty-something bloke in a baggy black jacket and chinos who wanted to
buy a clapped-out second-hand family-sized tape recorder for cash.

And somewhere along the way he must have
stopped at a cashpoint, bought himself a copy of the day’s
Observer
, and
also a carrier bag with a Union Jack on it, because the tape is nestling inside the bag
between the pages of the newspaper.

And probably he has already dropped in on
two or three shops before he lucked out with Aziz, who has this brother in Hamburg whose
line of business is shipping scrap electronic equipment to Lagos by the container load.
Old fridges, computers, radios and clapped-out giant tape recorders: this brother
can’t get enough of them, which is how Aziz comes to be keeping
this pile of old stuff in his back room for his brother to collect.

And it is also how Toby, by a miracle of
luck and persistence, becomes the owner of a replica of the Cold War-era tape recorder
in the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk, except that this version was coloured a
sleek pearl-grey and came in its original box which, as Aziz regretfully explained, made
it a collector’s item and therefore ten quid more, plus I’m afraid
it’s got to be another sixteen for the adaptor if you’re going to wire it up
to anything.

Manhandling his booty into the street, Toby
was accosted by a sad old woman who had mislaid her bus pass. Discovering he had no
loose change, he astonished her with a five-pound note.

Entering his flat, he was brought to a dead
halt by Isabel’s scent. The bedroom door was ajar. Nervously he pushed it open,
then the door to the bathroom.

It’s all right. It’s just her
scent. Jesus. You never know.

He tried wiring up the tape recorder on the
kitchen table but the flex was too short. He uncoupled an extension lead from the living
room and attached it.

Grunting and whimpering, the great Hebbelian
Wheel of Life began to turn.

You know what you are, don’t you?
You’re a bloody little drama queen.

No titles, no credits. No soothing
introductory music. Just the minister’s unopposed, complacent assertion, delivered
to the beat of his bespoke suede boots by Lobb at a thousand pounds a foot, as he
advances across the Private Office, presumably to his desk.

You’re a drama queen, you
understand? D’you even know what a drama queen is? You don’t. Well,
that’s because you’re pig-ignorant, isn’t it?

Who the hell’s he talking to? Did I
come in too late? Did I set the timer wrong?

Or is Quinn addressing his Jack Russell bitch
Pippa, an election accessory that he sometimes brings in to amuse the girls?

Or has he paused in front of the gilt-framed
looking-glass and he’s giving himself the New Labour mirror test, and
soliloquizing while he does it?

Preparatory honking of ministerial throat.
It’s Quinn’s habit to clear his throat before a meeting, then wash his mouth
with Listerine with his loo door open. Evidently, the drama queen – whoever he or she is
– is being berated
in absentia
, and probably in the mirror.

Squeak of leather as he lowers himself into
his executive throne, ordered from Harrods on the same day he took office, along with
new blue carpet and a clutch of encrypted phones.

Unidentified scratching sounds from desk
area. Probably tinkering with the four empty red ministerial despatch boxes he insists
on keeping at his elbow, as opposed to the full ones Toby isn’t allowed to
open.

Yes. Well. Good of you to come, anyway.
Sorry to fuck up your weekend. Sorry you fucked up mine as a matter of fact, but you
don’t give a shit about that, do you? How’ve you been? Lady wife in good
form? Glad to hear it. And the little brats all well? Give them a kick up the arse
from me.

Footsteps approaching, faint but getting
louder. Party the first is arriving.

The footsteps have passed through the
unmanned, unlocked side entrance, traversed unmonitored corridors, scaled staircases,
without pausing to pee: all just as Toby did yesterday in his role of ministerial guinea
pig. The footsteps approaching the anteroom. One pair only. Hard soles. Leisured,
nothing stealthy. These are not young feet.

And they’re not Crispin’s feet
either. Crispin marches as to war. These are peaceful feet. They are feet that take
their time, they’re a man’s and – why does Toby think he knows this, but he
does – they’re a stranger’s. They belong to someone he
hasn’t met.

At the door to the anteroom they hesitate
but don’t knock. These feet have been instructed not to knock. They cross the
anteroom, passing – oh, mother! – within two feet of Toby’s desk and the recorder
grinding away inside it with its pin-light on.

Will the feet hear it? Apparently they
won’t. Or if they do, they make nothing of it.

The feet advance. The feet enter the
presence without knocking, presumably because that too is what they’ve been told
to do. Toby waits for the squeak of the ministerial chair, doesn’t hear it. He is
briefly assailed by a dreadful thought: what if the visitor, like cultural attaché
Hester, has brought his own music?

Heart in mouth, he waits. No music, just
Quinn’s offhand voice:

‘You weren’t stopped? Nobody
questioned you? Bothered you?’

It’s minister to inferior, and they
already know each other. It’s minister to Toby on an off day.

‘At no stage was I bothered or in any
way molested, Minister. Everything went like clockwork, I’m glad to say. Another
fault-free round.’

Another?
When was the last
fault-free round? And what’s with the equestrian reference? Toby has no time to
linger.

‘Sorry about screwing up your
weekend,’ Quinn is saying, in a familiar refrain. ‘Not of my doing, I can
assure you. Case of first-night wobblies on the part of our intrepid friend.’

‘It’s of no consequence
whatever, Minister, I assure you. I had no plans beyond clearing out my attic, a promise
I am only too happy to defer.’

Humour. Not appreciated.

‘You saw Elliot, then. That went off
all right. He filled you in. Yes?’

‘Insofar as Elliot was able to fill me
in, Minister, I’m sure he did.’

‘It’s called need-to-know. What
did you make of him?’ – not waiting for an answer. ‘Good bloke on a dark
night, they tell me.’

‘I shall be happy to take your word
for it.’

Elliot
, Toby is remembering,
Albanian-Greek renegade
 … 
ex-South African Special
Forces
 … 
killed some chap in a bar
 … 
came to
Europe for his health
.

But by now the scenting British animal in
Toby has parsed the visitor’s voice, and hence its owner. It is self-assured,
middle to upper class, literate and non-combative. But what surprises him is its
cheeriness. It’s the notion that its owner is having fun.

The minister again, imperious:

‘And you’re
Paul
,
right? That’s understood. Some sort of conference academic. Elliot’s got it
all worked out.’

‘Minister, a large part of me has been
Paul Anderson since our last conversation, and it shall remain Paul Anderson until my
task is complete.’

‘Elliot tell you why you’re here
today?’

‘I’m to shake the hand of the
leader of our small British token force, and I’m to be your red
telephone.’

‘That your own, is it?’ – Quinn,
after a beat.

‘My own what, Minister?’

‘Your own
expression
, for
Heaven’s sake.
Red telephone?
Out of your own head. You made it up? Yes
or no?’

‘If it’s not too
frivolous.’

‘It’s bang on the button, as it
happens. I might even use it.’

‘I should be flattered.’

Disconnect resumes.

‘These Special Forces types are
inclined to get a bit uppity.’ Quinn, a statement for the world. ‘Want
everything cut, dried and legalled before they’ll get out of bed in the morning.
Same
problem all across the country, if you want my view. Wife still
doing all right, is she?’

‘In the circumstances, splendidly,
thank you, Minister. And never a word of complaint, I may say.’

‘Yeah, well, women. What they’re
good at, isn’t it? They know how to deal with that stuff.’

‘Indeed they do, Minister. Indeed they
do.’

Which is the cue for the arrival of party
the second: another single pair of footsteps. They are lightweight, heel to toe and
purposeful. On the point of casting them as Crispin’s, Toby finds himself quickly
corrected:

‘Jeb, sir,’ they announce,
coming to a smart halt.

Is this the drama queen who has fucked up
Quinn’s weekend? Whether he is or not, with Jeb’s arrival a different Fergus
Quinn takes the stage. Gone the sulky lethargy and in place of it enter the raunchy,
straight-from-the-shoulder Glaswegian Man of the People that his electorate falls for
every time.