A Delicate Truth (28 page)

‘You’d have to ask him
that.’

‘I thought I’d ask you. Is he
expecting you to find Jeb for him?’

‘Yes.’

‘For both of you, then?’

‘In a way.’

‘
Can
you find him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you know what you’ll do when
you
have
found him? I mean, if Jeb’s about to blow the whistle on some
great scandal, perhaps you might have a last-minute change of heart and feel bound to
turn him over to the authorities. Might you?’

‘No.’

‘And I’m to believe
that?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re not settling some
old score?’

‘Why the hell should I be doing
that?’ Toby protested, but Emily graciously ignored this little display of
temper.

‘I’ve got his registration
number,’ she said.

She had lost him. ‘You’ve
what?’

‘Jeb’s.’ She was fumbling
in the thigh pocket of her tracksuit. ‘I photographed his van while he was giving
Dad grief at
Bailey’s. I photographed the licence disc,
too’ – extracting an iPhone and fiddling with the icons – ‘Valid twelve
months and paid eight weeks ago.’

‘Then why haven’t you given the
registration number to Kit?’ Toby asked in bewilderment.

‘Because Kit fucks up, and I
don’t want my mother living through a fucked-up manhunt.’

Unfolding herself from the rush chair, she
strolled over to him and held the phone deliberately to his face.

‘I’m not putting this into my
own phone,’ Toby said. ‘Kit doesn’t want electronic. I don’t
either.’

He had a pen but nothing to write on. She
produced a piece of paper from a drawer. He wrote down the registration number of
Jeb’s van.

‘If you give me your cellphone number,
perhaps I can tell you how my enquiries are going,’ he suggested, by now
recovered.

She gave him her cellphone number. He wrote
that down too.

‘And you might as well have my surgery
number and hospital roster,’ she said, and watched him add it all to his
collection.

‘But we say absolutely nothing
specific to each other over the phone, all right?’ he warned her severely.
‘No winks and nods or arch references’ – remembering his security training –
‘and if I text you or need to leave a message for you, I’ll be Bailey, after
the Fayre.’

She gave a shrug, as if to humour him.

‘And will I be disturbing you if I
have to call you late at night?’ he enquired finally, doing his best to sound, if
anything, even more practical and down-to-earth.

‘I live alone, if that’s what
you’re asking,’ she said.

It was.

On the slow train back to London, through
the hours of half-sleep in his flat, and on the bus to work on the Monday morning, Toby
Bell, not for the first time in his life, pondered his motives for putting his career
and freedom at risk.

If his future had never looked rosier, which
was what Human Resources were forever telling him, why go back to his past? Was this his
old
conscience he was dealing with – or a newly invented one?
And
you’re not settling some old score?
Emily had asked him: and what was
that
supposed to mean? Did she imagine he was on some kind of vengeance
kick against the Fergus Quinns and Jay Crispins of this world, two men of such glaring
mediocrity in his eyes as to be not worth a second thought? Or was she externalizing
some hidden motive of her own? Was it
Emily
who was settling an old score –
against the entire race of men, her father included? There had been moments when
she’d given him that impression, just as there had been others, admittedly
short-lived, when she had seemed to come over to his side, whatever that side was.

Yet for all this fruitless soul-searching –
perhaps even because of it – Toby’s performance on his first day at his new desk
was exemplary. By eleven o’clock he had interviewed every member of his new staff,
defined their areas of responsibility, cut potential overlap and streamlined
consultation and control. By midday he was delivering a well-received mission statement
to a meeting of managers. And by lunchtime he was sitting in his regional
director’s office, munching a sandwich with her. It was not till his day’s
work was well and truly done that, pleading an
external appointment,
he took a bus to Victoria station, and from there, at the height of the rush-hour
bustle, telephoned his old friend Charlie Wilkins.

Every British Embassy should have its Charlie
Wilkins, they used to say in Berlin, for how could they ever have managed without this
genial, unflappable sixty-something English ex-copper with half a lifetime of diplomatic
protection under his belt? A bollard jumped out at your car, did it, as you were leaving
the Bastille Day bash at the French Embassy? Shame on it! An overzealous German
policeman took it into his head to breathalyse you? The liberty! Charlie Wilkins will
have a quiet word with his certain friends in the Bundespolizei and see what can be
done.

But in Toby’s case the boot,
unusually, was on the other foot because he was one of the few people in the world who
had actually managed to do a favour for Charlie and his German wife, Beatrix. Their
daughter, a budding cellist, had lacked the academic qualifications for an audition at a
grand music college in London. The principal of the college turned out to be a bosom
friend of Toby’s maternal aunt, herself a music teacher. Phone calls were hastily
made, auditions arranged. No Christmas had gone by since but Toby, wherever he was
stationed, had received a box of Beatrix’s home-made
Zuckergebäck
and a gilded card proudly reporting their brilliant daughter’s progress. And when
Charlie and Beatrix retired gracefully to Brighton, the
Zuckergebäck
and
the cards kept flowing, and Toby never failed to write his little note of thanks.

The Wilkins’s bungalow in Brighton was
set back from its fellows and might have been transported from the Black Forest.
Ranks of red-coated tulips lined the path to the Hansel and Gretel
porch. Garden gnomes in Bavarian costume thrust out their buttoned chests, and cacti
clawed at the enormous picture window. Beatrix had decked herself in her best finery.
Over Baden wine and liver dumplings the three friends talked old times and celebrated
the musical accomplishments of the Wilkins daughter. And after coffee and sweet
liqueurs, Charlie and Toby retired to the den in the back garden.

‘It’s for a lady I know,
Charlie,’ Toby explained, imagining for convenience’s sake that the lady was
Emily.

Charlie Wilkins gave a contented smile.
‘I said to Beatrix: if it’s Toby, look for the lady.’

And this lady, Charlie – he explained, now
blushing becomingly – was out shopping last Saturday and managed to go head to head with
a parked van and do it serious damage, which was doubly unfortunate since she’s
already got a whole bunch of points on her licence.

‘Witnesses?’ Charlie Wilkins
enquired sympathetically.

‘She’s sure not. It was in an
empty corner of the car park.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ Charlie
Wilkins commented, with a slight note of scepticism. ‘And no CCTV footage at
all?’

‘Again not,’ said Toby, avoiding
Charlie’s eye. ‘So far as we know, obviously.’

‘Obviously,’ Charlie Wilkins
echoed politely.

And since she’s a good girl at heart,
Toby forged on, and since her conscience won’t let her sleep till she’s paid
her dues – but no way can she afford to lose her licence for six months, Charlie – and
since she at least had the nous to write down the van’s registration number, Toby
was wondering – well,
she
was wondering whether there was any way – and
delicately left the sentence for Charlie to finish for himself.

‘And has our lady friend any idea what
this exclusive service might cost us?’ Charlie enquired, pulling on a pair of
grandfatherly
spectacles to scrutinize the piece of plain card Toby
had passed him.

‘Whatever it costs, Charlie, I’m
paying for it,’ Toby replied grandly, with renewed acknowledgements to Emily.

‘Well, in that case, if you will
kindly join Beatrix for a nightcap, and bear with me for ten minutes,’ said
Charlie, ‘the charge will be two hundred pounds to the widows and orphans fund of
the Metropolitan Police, cash please, no receipt, and for old times’ sake, nothing
for me.’

And ten minutes later, sure enough Charlie
was handing back the card with a name and address written out in a policeman’s
careful hand, and Toby was saying,
Fantastic, Charlie, wonderful, she’ll be
over the moon, and can we please stop at a cash machine on the way to the
station?

But none of this quite removed the cloud of
concern that had formed on Charlie Wilkins’s normally untroubled face, and it was
still there when they stopped at a hole in the wall and Toby duly handed Charlie his two
hundred pounds.

‘That gentleman you asked me to find
out about just now,’ Charlie said. ‘I don’t mean the car. I mean the
gentleman who owns it. The
Welsh
gentleman, according to his
address.’

‘What about him?’

‘My certain friend in the Met informs
me that the said gentleman with the unpronounceable address has a rather large red ring
round his name, in a metaphorical manner of speaking.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Any sight or sound of said gentleman,
and the force concerned will take no action but report immediately to the very top. I
don’t suppose you’d like to tell me the reason for that large red ring at
all, would you?’

‘Sorry, Charlie. I
can’t.’

‘And that’s it, is
it?’

‘I’m afraid it is.’

Parking in the station forecourt, Charlie
turned off the engine but kept the doors locked.

‘Well, I too am afraid, son,’ he
said severely. ‘For your sake. And your lady’s sake, if there is one.
Because when I ask my certain friend in the Met for a favour like that, and loud bells
start ringing in his ear, which in the case of your Welshman they did, he has his own
official commitments to consider, doesn’t he? Which is what he was good enough to
tell me by way of a warning. He can’t just push a button like that and run away,
can he? He has to protect himself. So what I’m saying to you is, son: give her my
love, if she exists, and take a lot of care because I have a bad feeling you’re
going to need it, now that our old friend Giles, alas, is no longer with us.’

‘Not
with us
? You mean
he’s
dead
?’ Toby exclaimed, ignoring in his concern the implication
that Oakley was in some way his protector.

But Charlie was already chuckling away:

‘Dear me, no! I thought you knew.
Worse. Our friend Giles Oakley is a
banker
. And you thought he was dead. Oh
dear, oh dear, wait till I tell Beatrix. Trust our Giles to make timely use of the
revolving door, I say.’ And lowering his voice to one of sympathy,
‘He’d got as high as they’d let him go, mind you. Reached his ceiling,
hadn’t he? – as far as
they
were concerned. Nobody’s going to give
him the top billet, not after what happened in
Hamburg
, are they? You’d
never know when it was coming home to roost – well, would you?’

But Toby, reeling from so many blows at
once, had no words. After only a week back in London and a full tour in Beirut, during
which Oakley had vanished into mandarin thin air, Toby had been curious to know when and
how his erstwhile patron would surface, if at all.

Well, now he had his answer. The lifelong
foe of speculative bankers and their works, the man who had branded them
drones, parasites, socially useless and a blight on any decent
economy had taken the enemy’s shilling.

And why had Oakley done that, according to
Charlie Wilkins?

Because the wise heads of Whitehall had
decided he wasn’t bankable.

And why wasn’t Oakley bankable?

Lean your head back on the iron-hard
cushions of the late train back to Victoria.

Close your eyes, say
Hamburg
, and
tell yourself the story you swore you would never speak aloud.

Shortly after arriving at the Berlin Embassy,
Toby happens to be on night duty when a call comes in from the superintendent of the
Davidwache in Hamburg, the police station charged with monitoring the Reeperbahn’s
sex industry. The superintendent asks to speak to the most senior person available. Toby
replies that he himself is that person, which at 3 a.m. he is. Knowing that Oakley is in
Hamburg addressing an august body of ship-owners, he is immediately wary. There had been
talk of Toby tagging along for the experience, but Oakley had scotched it.

‘We have a
drunk Englishman
in our cells,’ the superintendent explains, determined to air his excellent
English. ‘It is unfortunately necessary to
arrest
him for causing a
serious disturbance at an extreme establishment. He also has many
wounds
,’ he adds. ‘On his torso, actually.’