The Truth (34 page)

‘Yes. For being a man of principle and not letting them bully you over the book. We are both very grateful.’

‘You’ve heard from him, then, your father?’

She nodded.

‘Well, that’s good to know. I thought you had no contact with him. I’ve been going through Wendy Lu in Singapore.’

‘She’s nice.’

‘You know her too?’

Ursula picked a strand of tobacco from the end of her tongue.

‘Oh yes.’

She stood abruptly and reached again for the packet of cigarettes.

‘There are a few things you are going to learn today that will surprise you. Maybe shock you. First of all I must apologise for misleading you.’

‘About what?’

‘You asked me if I ever saw my father and I said no. Well, that was because I didn’t want to give out any information. To anybody. For reasons you will soon understand. I am in touch with my father and have been for a while. He came to me for help.’

‘What’s wrong?’

She looked up towards a small window high on the wall which provided the only glimpse of the outside world.

‘I am telling you this in the strictest confidence. My father is in trouble.’

‘What kind of trouble?’

She tipped the packet and took out a cigarette.

‘Every fight my father joins, every cause he supports, makes him new enemies.’

‘I can imagine that.’

‘These enemies are now very powerful. And they are trying to destroy him once and for all. They have tried various ways to discredit what he does – we think the book you were paid to write was one of their strategies. But thanks to you it didn’t work. Now they are trying less sophisticated ways of silencing him.’

Mabbut took this in. It seemed oddly melodramatic to hear such a thing from Ursula and this worried him.

She raised a cigarette to her lips, but didn’t light it.

‘A week ago they put a grenade in the cabin where he and his team were working. Three of his men were killed.’

‘My God. Is he OK?’

Ursula laughed. Bitterly.

‘He was unharmed. Dodged the bullet as usual. But it shook him. Shook him hard. Made him stop and think.’

‘D’you know where he is? I’ve been trying to contact him.’

Ursula glanced at her watch, then she walked to the door and beckoned to him.

‘We’re about to open. I’ll take you somewhere quieter.’

He followed her back through reception – by now spotless, tidy and expectant – and out on to the small landing. She pressed the call button for the lift, and turned to him, both businesslike and apologetic.

‘I must get into my uniform. Fifth floor. I’ll join you later.’

The lift went only as far as the fourth floor, from which a short flight of steps led up into the eaves of the building. The decorative scheme was very different up here – cosier and more colourful, with big rugs in the corridors and Impressionist prints on the wall. A slim woman in her thirties with a blonde ponytail stepped out from what Mabbut could see was a small office. A half-dozen clipboards hung from hooks on the wall. Above a worktop was a bank of monitors.

‘Good morning, Mr Mabbut, my name is Tabitha.’

Seeing his quizzical look, she smiled and added, ‘Israeli.’

She opened an artfully concealed cupboard and produced a flat plastic-wrapped package.

‘You will be in a treatment area so I would ask you please to wear
the protective clothing, and to wash and disinfect your hands before entering.’

She indicated a line of cubicle doors to her right.

Mabbut donned the garments, which included an overall and plastic covers for his feet and head. Tabitha checked him carefully, then led him along a corridor and through a door with a thick rubber seal. Here the carpets and the cosiness ended, the temperature dropped and the walls were plain white again. She paused at another door and peered in through a small observation window. There was a name beneath it which Mabbut didn’t recognise. Then she pushed open the door, showed him in and left.

The only illumination in the room came from dim halogen lamps above a bed, from which hung a cluster of cables. These were attached to computer screens and monitors arranged on a glass-topped unit. On the bed lay a figure with a thick white dressing around the top of the head and a thickly bandaged right arm from which a red wire protruded.

The head turned towards him, catching the light from one of the lamps above.

‘Keith!’

The voice was weak but unmistakable.

‘Did I frighten you?’

‘Hamish?’

The bandaged head nodded.

‘I didn’t expect we’d see each other so soon.’

‘Are you hurt?’

‘Oh, could be worse.’

He gave a low chuckle, raised a hand and pointed.

‘There’s a chair over there somewhere. In the corner, I think.’

He pressed a button and the bed slowly raised him into a sitting position. Mabbut found a small metal stool and squatted on it, wanting to stare, but feeling able to take in what he saw only in quick, furtive glances. Melville’s biblically long hair was gone, and what he could see of his face was entirely clean shaven, giving him a look of gaunt asceticism. A black and purple mark spread out from beneath the bandage and there was a butterfly dressing across the bridge of his nose.

Melville attempted a wide, reassuring smile, but it was clearly uncomfortable for him.

‘I hope you don’t mind coming here. I asked Ursula to organise it for me. One of the few compensations of this . . . unfortunate business has been that I get to spend some time with my daughter.’

He indicated the instrument table by the bed.

‘D’you mind? There should be some water there.’

Mabbut found a plastic bottle with a stack of paper cups beside it. He was about to pour some out when Melville raised his hand.

‘Not yet!’

Melville felt beneath his pillow and produced a dark green quart bottle. Unmarked.

‘Scotch in first.’

He unscrewed it expertly and tipped a little into the cup.

‘
Now
the water.’

As Mabbut poured, Melville gave a rueful grin.

‘Another advantage of having your daughter on the case.’

He took a careful, almost laborious sip.

‘I asked her to contact you because I felt I owed you some thanks. You did a very difficult thing, walking away from that book, and I wanted to show my appreciation.’

‘The book was a smear job. A million miles from all those things we talked about together. I couldn’t have put my name to that.’

Melville nodded and then caught his breath sharply, as if in sudden pain.

Mabbut was alarmed.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes. It passes quickly.’

‘Ursula said you weren’t hurt in the attack?’

‘No, I wasn’t hurt, but three of my best boys were killed outright.’

‘So why . . .?’

His voice trailed off as Melville raised a hand towards him.

‘Keith, what I’m going to tell you will be difficult for both of us. All I ask is that you hear me out.’

‘Of course.’

‘It’s about the book.’

Mabbut edged a little closer.

‘As I said in my letter to you, Victor Trickett was indeed lying. Bettina was a saint.’

Mabbut nodded.

‘I sensed that. I sensed it all along.’

Melville took another sip of whisky, which provoked a short, hard cough. Then he turned his unnerving gaze towards Mabbut.

‘There were, however, quite a few other things that you missed, Keith.’

Mabbut felt that the room had grown perceptibly cooler. He caught the sharp smell of antiseptic.

‘I’m not sure what you mean . . .’

A brief smile flickered at the corner of Melville’s dry lips. When he spoke again it was softly and quickly and carefully.

‘For the past twenty years I have been paid money by a number of international interests – both governments and private companies – to monitor the depth of feeling among local communities in resource-rich areas. My job was to gauge how antagonistic or otherwise these communities might be to resource extraction. I also undertook to facilitate geological and other surveys in their area and to actively encourage and promote the interests of those local people deemed to be sympathetic to exploration and investment. This does not mean that I was oblivious to the welfare of the people I worked with. Quite the opposite. My instincts were always antiestablishment and I was never happier than in the company of different societies in distant countries. The farther from my own, the better. Nevertheless, there were times when, if you like, I worked for what might appear to be mutually exclusive interests. And there were times when, if I was unable to persuade either side to do the right thing, I pulled out, knowing I was leaving vulnerable people to their fate.’

‘Who . . . who were these—’

Melville held up his hand and spoke sharply.

‘Let me finish, then you can say anything you want. Or simply walk out.’

He took a deep breath and went on.

‘Things were working well until two years ago, when I took on a project in South America. I was conceited enough to think that I
could work for both sides in the Parcachua dam project. It was a very big deal. Eight thousand kilometres, fifty thousand displaced people. I was being paid to get it closed down in favour of another site my people were promoting. Instead I helped to get clearance, simply because the other side offered me more. I was greedy. Not for the money so much as for the power and the influence. I had begun to think I was invulnerable. That I knew best and that I could play the various interests off at will, winning for some, losing for others. I’d built up a formidable team, always coming out on top because none of these billionaires knew jackshit about the jungle or the mountains, or the people who lived there. There was no one in the world who could mix grass roots and Wall Street the way we did. And in my defence, what I did, or what I tried to do, was always to support the local people. If you’re feeling charitable you could see me as Robin Hood. Or possibly Che Guevara. If you aren’t I was more like Kurtz in
The Heart of Darkness
. But what I hadn’t noticed was just how fast the game was changing. With the Chinese and the Russians coming into the market, the sums that these big corporations are setting aside for exploration is staggering. They have their own armies. Lawyers, PR advisers, but also well-trained, highly paid paramilitaries. Over the years I’ve become used to receiving death threats, but usually from nothing more than arrows or blowpipes. Now they’re hiring professional hit-men, trained by the KGB or Mossad.’

He stopped, laid back his head, and moistened his lips.

‘Among the many apologies I owe you, Keith, is one for thinking, for a very short while, that you might be one of them. Probably not a hit-man but quite possibly a spy. Hence the less-than-warm welcome when you turned up in India, flattering me in your suspiciously fulsome way about my “international reputation”.’

He looked over at Mabbut and took in his look of stunned surprise with a hint of a smile.

‘As it turned out you were
not
only not a hired killer, you were a genuinely decent man, who reminded me, uncomfortably, of the ideals I had when I first got into all this. And that’s why Kowprah went down the pan, and why I’m here now.’

Mabbut was confused.

‘I thought the blockade was a big success.’

‘I was being paid to get the Masira and the Musa and the Gyara so angry at what was being done to them that they’d come out of the forest with pipes and arrows and set about the Astramex drivers. This would create a backlash in favour of the company and the issuing of mining permits all round. The double bluff misfired. There was no violence from the tribals, and they won an international propaganda victory and a government decision to stop the mining. Which is why I had to get out of Bhubaneswar pretty quickly.’

‘And Kinesh and Kumar and the others?’

Melville’s mouth tightened. He shook his head as vigorously as he could.

‘They were innocent, like you. They saw it all as something good. I was the only one who knew the bigger story. We’d worked together for years. We were like old friends. Whereas you, appearing out of the bush as it were, with your innocence and your ideals and your admiration, forced me to think my way back to the basics. You reflected back to me the person I once was. And that’s when things began to go belly up. Having an idealist like you in the camp reminded me of how far I’d come from what I once believed in. And that’s when I decided to water down the Kowprah blockade. Let it be big, threatening, but non-violent. The way Gandhi would have done it. Which is how it turned out. No one got hurt and the tribals looked good and Astramex looked bad and a few weeks later I was attacked with grenades by someone’s private army and lost three of the best workers I’ve ever had.’

There was silence in the room. Mabbut felt a mix of very different emotions: disbelief, embarrassment, anger, betrayal. He reached out a hand and sought the reassuring cool of the stainless-steel trolley beside him. Melville looked exhausted. Yet there were still things that Mabbut needed to know. He cleared his throat.