A Delicate Truth (40 page)

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 fucked 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 fuck’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 …