A Delicate Truth (39 page)

‘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 fucked. 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 fuck-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? Fuck 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.