A Delicate Truth (9 page)

At first sight, nonetheless, all augurs
well.

True, Fergus Quinn is no easy ride, but Toby
never expected different. He can be clever, obtuse, petulant, foul-mouthed and
dazzlingly considerate in the space of half a day, one minute all over you, the next a
brooder who locks himself up with his despatch boxes behind his heavy mahogany door. He
is a natural bully and, as advertised, makes no secret of his contempt for civil
servants; even those closest to him are not spared his tongue-lashings. But his greatest
scorn is reserved for Whitehall’s sprawling intelligence octopus, which he holds
to be bloated, elitist, self-regarding and in thrall to its own mystique. And this is
all the more unfortunate since part of Team Quinn’s remit requires it to
‘evaluate incoming intelligence materials from all sources and submit
recommendations for exploitation by the appropriate services’.

As to the scandal-at-Defence-that-never-was,
whenever Toby is tempted to edge alongside it, he bumps up against what feels
increasingly like a wall of silence deliberately constructed for his personal benefit:
case closed, mate
 … 
sorry, old boy, lips
sealed
 … And once, if only from a boastful clerk in Finance Section over
a Friday-evening pint in the Sherlock Holmes –
got away with daylight robbery,
didn’t he?
It takes the unlovable Gregory, seated by chance next to Toby
at a tedious Monday focus session of the Staffing and Management Committee, to set his
alarm bells ringing at full blast.

Gregory, a large and ponderous man older
than his years, is Toby’s exact contemporary and supposed rival. But it is a fact
known to all that, whenever the two of them are in line for an appointment, it’s
always Toby who pips Gregory at the post. And so it might have been in the recent race
for Private Secretary to the new Junior Minister, except that this time round the rumour
mill decreed that there was no proper contest. Gregory had served a two-year secondment
to Defence, bringing him
into almost daily contact with Quinn, whereas
Toby was virgin – which is to say, he brought no such murky baggage from the past.

The focus session drags to its inconclusive
end. The room empties. Toby and Gregory remain by tacit agreement at the table. For Toby
the moment provides a welcome opportunity to mend fences; Gregory is less sweetly
disposed.

‘Getting along all right with King
Fergie, are we?’ he enquires.

‘Fine, thanks, Gregory, just fine. A
few wrinkles here and there, only to be expected. How’s life as Resident Clerk
these days? Must be pretty eventful.’

But Gregory is not keen to discuss life as a
Resident Clerk, which he regards as a poor second to Private Secretary to the new
Minister.

‘Well, watch out he doesn’t flog
the office furniture out the back door is all I can say,’ he advises with a
humourless smirk.

‘Why? Is that his thing? Flogging
furniture? He’d have a bit of a problem, humping his new desk down three floors,
even him!’ Toby replies, determined not to rise.

‘And he hasn’t signed you up to
one of his highly profitable business companies yet?’

‘Is that what he did to
you?’

‘No way,
old sport
’ –
with improbable geniality – ‘not me. I stayed clear. Good men are scarce, I say.
Others weren’t so fly.’

And here without warning Toby’s
patience snaps, which in Gregory’s company is what it tends to do.

‘Actually, what the hell are you
trying to tell me, Gregory?’ he demands. And when all he gets is Gregory’s
big, slow grin again: ‘If you’re warning me – if this is something I should
know – then come out with it or go to Human bloody Resources.’

Gregory affects to weigh this
suggestion.

‘Well, I suppose if it was anything
you needed to
know
, old
sport, you could always have a quiet
word with your guardian angel Giles, couldn’t you?’

A self-righteous sense of purpose now swept
over Toby which, even in retrospect, seated at his rickety coffee table on a sunny
pavement in Soho, he could still not wholly justify to himself. Perhaps, he reflected,
it was nothing more complicated than a case of pique at being denied a truth owed to him
and shared by those around him. And certainly he would have argued that, since Diana had
ordered him to stick like glue to his new master and not let him make puddles, he had a
right to find out what puddles the man had made in the past. Politicians, in his limited
experience of the breed, were repeat offenders. If and when Fergus Quinn offended in the
future, it would be Toby who would have to explain why he had let his master off the
lead.

As to Gregory’s jibe that he should go
running to his
guardian angel
Giles Oakley: forget it. If Giles wanted Toby to
know something, Giles would tell him. And if Giles didn’t, nothing on God’s
earth was going to make him.

Yet something else, something deeper and
more troubling, is driving Toby. It is his master’s near-pathological
reclusiveness.

What in Heaven’s name does a man so
seemingly extrovert
do
all day, cloistered alone in his Private Office with
classical music booming out and the door locked not only against the outer world but
against his very own staff? What’s inside those plump, hand-delivered,
double-sealed, waxed envelopes that pour in from the little back rooms of Downing Street
marked
STRICTLY PERSONAL
&
PRIVATE
which Quinn
receives, signs for and, having read, returns to the same intractable couriers who
brought them?

It’s not only Quinn’s past
I’m being cut out of. It’s his present.

His first stop is Matti, career spy, drinking
pal and former embassy colleague in Madrid. Matti is currently kicking his heels between
postings in his Service’s headquarters across the river in Vauxhall. Perhaps the
enforced inactivity will make him more forthcoming than usual. For arcane reasons – Toby
suspects operational – Matti is also a member of the Lansdowne Club off Berkeley Square.
They meet for squash. Matti is gangly, bald and bespectacled and has wrists of steel.
Toby loses four–one. They shower, sit in the bar overlooking the swimming pool and watch
the pretty girls. After a few desultory exchanges, Toby comes to the point:

‘So give me the story, Matti, because
nobody else will. What went wrong at Defence when my minister was in the
saddle?’

Matti does some slow-motion nodding of his
long, goatish head:

‘Yes, well. There’s not a lot I
can offer you, is there?’ he says moodily. ‘Your man went off the
reservation, our lot saved his neck and he hasn’t forgiven us is about the long
and short of it – silly bugger.’

‘Saved his neck
how
, for
God’s sake?’

‘Tried to go it alone, didn’t
he?’ says Matti contemptuously.

‘Doing what? Who to?’

Matti scratches his bald head and does
another ‘Yes, well. Not my turf, you see. Not my area.’

‘I realize that, Matti. I accept it.
It’s not my area either. But I’m the bloody man’s minder, aren’t
I?’

‘All those bent lobbyists and arms
salesmen beavering away at the fault lines between the defence industry and
procurement,’ Matti complains, as if Toby is familiar with the problem.

But Toby isn’t, so he waits for
more:

‘Licensed, of course. That was half
the trouble. Licensed to rip off the Exchequer, bribe officials, offer them all the
girls they can eat, holidays in Bali. Licensed to go private, go public, go
any way they like, long as they’ve got a ministerial pass, which
they all have.’

‘And Quinn had his snout in the trough
with the rest of them, you’re saying?’

‘I’m not saying any bloody
thing,’ Matti retorts sharply.

‘I know that. And I’m not
hearing anything either. So Quinn stole. Is that it? All right, not exactly stole,
perhaps, but diverted funds to certain projects in which he had an interest. Or his wife
did. Or his cousin did. Or his aunt did. Is that it? Got caught, paid back the money,
said he was awfully sorry, and the whole thing was swept under the carpet. Am I
warm?’

A nubile girl bellyflops into the water to
shrieks of laughter.

‘There’s a creep around called
Crispin,’ Matti murmurs under the clamour. ‘Ever heard of him?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I haven’t either, so
I’ll thank you to remember that. Crispin. Dodgy bastard. Avoid.’

‘Any reason given?’

‘Not specific. Our lot used him for a
couple of jobs, then dropped him like a hot brick. Supposed to have led your man by the
nose while he was Defence. All I know. Could be crap. Now get off my back.’

And with this Matti resumes his brooding
contemplation of the pretty girls.

And as is often the way of life, from the
moment Matti lets the name
Crispin
out of the box, it seems unable to let Toby
go.

At a Cabinet Office wine and cheese party,
two mandarins talk head to head: ‘
Whatever happened to that shit Crispin, by
the by?
’ ‘
Saw him hanging around the Lords the other day,
don’t know how he has the gall
.’ But on Toby’s approach the
topic of their conversation turns abruptly to cricket.

At the close of an interministerial conference
on intelligence with
frenemy
liaisons, as the current buzzword has it, the name
acquires its own initial:
well, let’s just hope you people don’t do
another J. Crispin on us
, snaps a Home Office director at her hated opposite
number in Defence.

But is it really just a J? Or is it Jay like
Jay Gatsby?

After half a night’s googling while
Isabel sulks in the bedroom, Toby is none the wiser.

He will try Laura.

Laura is a Treasury boffin, fifty years old,
sometime Fellow of All Souls, boisterous, brilliant, vast and overflowing with good
cheer. When she descended unannounced on the British Embassy in Berlin as leader of a
surprise audit team, Giles Oakley had commanded Toby to ‘take her out to dinner
and charm the knickers off her’. This he had duly done, if not literally; and to
such effect that their occasional dinners had continued without Oakley’s guidance
ever since.

By good fortune, it’s Toby’s
turn. He selects Laura’s favourite restaurant off the King’s Road. As usual,
she has dressed with panache for the event, in a huge, flowing kaftan hung with beads
and bangles and a cameo brooch the size of a saucer. Laura loves fish. Toby orders a sea
bass baked in salt to share and an expensive Meursault to go with it. In her excitement
Laura seizes his hands across the table and shakes them like a child dancing to
music.

‘
Marvellous
, Toby,
darling,’ she blurts, ‘and high time too,’ in a voice that rolls like
cannon fire across the restaurant; and then blushes at her own loudness and drops her
voice to a genteel murmur.

‘So how was Cairo? Did the natives
storm the embassy and demand your head on a pike? I’d have been
utterly
terrified. Tell all.’

And after Cairo, she must hear about Isabel,
because as ever she insists on her rights as Toby’s agony aunt:

‘
Very
sweet,
very
beautiful, and a ninny,’ she rules when she has heard him out. ‘Only a ninny
marries a painter. As for
you
, you never could tell the difference between
brains and beauty, and I suppose that still applies. I’m sure the two of you are
perfectly suited,’ she concludes, with another hoot of laughter.

‘And the secret pulse of our great
nation, Laura?’ Toby enquires lightly in return, since Laura has no known love
life of her own that may be spoken of. ‘How are things in the oh-so-hallowed halls
of the Treasury these days?’

Laura’s generous face lapses into
despair, and her voice with it:

‘Grim, darling, just appalling.
We’re clever and nice, but we’re understaffed and underpaid and we want the
best for our country, which is old-fashioned of us. New Labour loves Big Greed, and Big
Greed has
armies
of amoral lawyers and accountants on the make and pays them
the earth to make rings round us. We can’t compete; they’re too big to fail
and too big to fight. Now I’ve depressed you. Good. I’m depressed
too,’ she says, taking a merry pull at her Meursault.

The fish arrives. Reverent quiet while the
waiter takes it off the bone and divides it.

‘Darling,
what
a
thrill,’ breathes Laura.

They tuck in. If Toby is to chance his arm,
this is his moment.

‘Laura.’

‘Darling.’

‘Who precisely is J. Crispin when
he’s at home? And J standing for what? There was some scandal at Defence while
Quinn was there. Crispin was mixed up in it. I hear his name all over town, I’m
being kept out of the loop and it frightens me. Somebody even described him as
Quinn’s Svengali.’

Laura studies him with her very bright eyes,
looks away, then
takes a second look, as if she isn’t comfortable
with what she’s seen there.

‘Is this why you asked me to dinner,
Toby?’

‘Partly.’

‘Wholly,’ she corrects him,
drawing a breath that is nearly a sigh. ‘And I think you could have had the
decency to tell me that was your fell purpose.’

A pause while they both collect themselves.
Laura resumes:

‘You’re out of the loop for the
very good reason that you’re not supposed to be in it. Fergus Quinn has been given
a fresh start. You’re part of it.’

‘I’m also his keeper,’ he
replies defiantly, recovering his courage.

Another deep breath, a hard look, before the
eyes turn downward and stay there.

‘I’ll tell you bits,’ she
decides finally. ‘Not all, but more than I should.’