A Delicate Truth

by John le Carré

Dear Brigid,

  I’m real Sorry to hear bad News regarding Jeb, same as I’m sorry it ended so Bad between us. Jeb was the Best of the Best, he always will be, never mind old squabbles, he’ll always be in my Memory as I know he will in yours. Plus Brigid, if you’re short of Cash in any way, call this mobile number attached and I will remit without fail. Plus Brigid, I will trouble you kindly to remit forthwith two Pics on loan which are Personal property of self. SAE attached.

  As ever in Grief, Jeb’s old Comrade, trust me,

  Shorty.

  Shouts of argument from outside the front door: Danny having a screaming fit, Harry vainly reasoning. Brigid makes to grab back the photographs.

  ‘Can’t I keep them?’

  ‘Can you fuck!’

  ‘Can I copy them?’

  ‘All right. Go on. Copy them,’ she replies, again without a moment’s hesitation.

  Beirut Man lays the full-plate photographs flat on the dining table and, ignoring the advice he gave to Emily only a couple of days ago, copies the photographs into his BlackBerry. Handing them back, he peers over Brigid’s shoulder at Shorty’s letter, then copies his cellphone number into his notebook.

  ‘What’s Shorty’s other name?’ he asks, while the din outside rises in a crescendo.

  ‘Pike.’

  He writes down Pike too, for safety’s sake.

  ‘He called me the day before,’ she says.

  ‘Pike did?’

  ‘Danny, shut the fuck up, for Christ’s sake! Jeb did, who d’you think? Tuesday, nine o’clock in the morning. Harry and Danny had just gone off on a school outing. I pick up the phone, it’s Jeb, like I never heard him these last three years. “I’ve found my witness, Brigid, the best you could ever think of. Him and me are going to set the record straight once and for all. Get rid of Harry, and as soon as I’m done we’ll start over again: you, me and Danny, same as old times.” That’s how depressed he was a few hours before he shot his fucking head off, Mr Bell.’

  *

  If a decade of diplomatic life had taught Toby one thing, it was to treat every crisis as normal and soluble. On the taxi ride back to Cardiff his mind might be a cauldron of unsorted fears for Kit, Suzanna and Emily; it might be in mourning for Jeb, and wrestling with the timing and method of his murder, and the complicity of the police in its cover-up, but outwardly he was the same chatty passenger and Gwyneth was the same chatty driver. Only on reaching Cardiff did he go about his dispositions exactly as if he’d spent the journey preparing them, which in truth he had.

  Was he under scrutiny? Not yet, but Charlie Wilkins’s warning words were not lost on him. At Paddington, he had bought his railway ticket with cash. He had paid Gwyneth cash and asked her to drop him off and pick him up at the roundabout. He had kept to himself the identity of the person he was visiting, although he knew it was a lost cause. More than likely, at least one of Brigid’s neighbours had a watching brief to tip off the police, in which case a description of his personal appearance would have been reported, although, with any luck, police incompetence would ensure that word would take its time to travel.

  Needing more cash than he’d reckoned on, he had no option but to draw some from a machine, thus advertising his presence in Cardiff. Some risks you just have to take. From an electronics shop a stone’s throw from the station he bought a new hard drive for his desktop and two second-hand cellphones, one black, one silver, with pay-as-you-go SIM cards and guaranteed fully charged batteries. In the world of downmarket electronics, he had been taught on his security courses, such cellphones were known as ‘burners’ because of the tendency of their owners to dispose of them after a few hours.

  In a café favoured by Cardiff’s unemployed he bought a cup of coffee and a piece of slab cake and took them to a corner table. Satisfied that the background sound suited his purpose, he touched Shorty’s number into the silver burner and pressed green. This was Matti’s world, not his. But he had been at the edge of it, and he was not a stranger to dissembling.

  The number rang and rang and he was reconciled to getting the messaging service when an aggressive male voice barked at him:

  ‘Pike here. I’m at work. What d’you want?’

  ‘Shorty?’

  ‘All right, Shorty. Who is this?’

  Toby’s own voice, but without its Foreign Office polish:

  ‘Shorty, this is Pete from the South Wales Argus. Hi. Look, the paper’s putting together a spread on Jeb Owens, who sadly killed himself last week, as you probably know. Death of our unsung hero stuff. We understand you were quite a mate of his, that right? I mean, like, best mate? His winger, kind of thing. You must be pretty cut up.’

  ‘How’d you get this number?’

  ‘Ah well, we have our methods, don’t we? Look, what we’re wondering is – what my editor’s wondering – can we do an interview, like what a fine soldier Jeb was, Jeb as his best mate knew him, kind of thing, a full-page splash? Shorty? You still there?’

  ‘What’s your other name?’

  ‘Andrews.’

  ‘This supposed to be off the record or on?’

  ‘Well, we’d like it on the record, naturally. And face to face. We can do deep background, but that’s always a pity. Obviously, if there are issues of confidentiality, we’d respect them.’

  Another protracted silence, with Shorty’s hand over the mouthpiece of his phone:

  ‘Thursday any good?’

  Thursday? The conscientious foreign servant mentally checks his appointments diary. Ten a.m., departmental meeting. Twelve thirty p.m., inter-services liaison officers’ working lunch at Londonderry House.

  ‘Thursday’s fine,’ he replied defiantly. ‘Where’ve you got in mind? No chance of you coming up to Wales at all, I suppose?’

  ‘London. Golden Calf Café, Mill Hill. Eleven a.m. Do you?’

  ‘How do I recognize you?’

  ‘I’m a midget, aren’t I? Two foot six in my boots. And come alone, no photography. How old are you?’

  ‘Thirty-one,’ he replied too quickly, and wished he hadn’t.

  *

  On the return train journey to Paddington, again using the silver burner, Toby sent his first text message to Emily: need consultation asap please advise on this number as old number no longer operative, Bailey.

  Standing in the corridor, he rang her surgery as a back-up and got the out-of-hours answering service:

  ‘Message for Dr Probyn, please. Dr Probyn, this is your patient Bailey asking for an appointment tonight. Please call me back on this number, as my old number no longer works. Thank you.’

  For an hour after that it seemed to him that he thought of nothing but Emily: which was to say that he thought of everything from Giles Oakley’s defection and back again, but wherever he went, Emily went too.

  Her reply to his text, barren though it was, lifted his spirits beyond anything he could have imagined:

  I’m on shift till midnight. Ask for urgent-care centre or triage unit.

  No signature. Not even an E.

  At Paddington it was gone eight when he alighted but by then he had a new wish list of operational supplies: a roll of packaging tape, wrapping paper, half a dozen A5 padded envelopes and a box of Kleenex tissues. The newsagent in the station concourse was closed, but in Praed Street he was able to buy everything he needed, and add a reinforced carrier bag, a handful of top-up vouchers for the burners and a plastic model of a London Beefeater to his collection.

  The Beefeater himself was surplus to requirements. What Toby needed was the cardboard box he came in.

  *

  His flat in Islington was on the first floor of a row of joined eighteenth-century houses that were identical save for the colour of their front doors, the condition of their window frames and the quality of their curtains. The night was dry and unseasonably warm. Taking the opposing pavement to his house, Toby first strolled past it, keeping a casual eye out for the classic telltale signs: the parked car with occupants, the bystanders o
n street corners chatting into cellphones, the men in overalls kneeling insincerely at junction boxes. As usual, his street contained all of these and more.

  Crossing to his own side, he let himself into the house and, having climbed the stairs and unlocked his front door as silently as he knew how, stood still in the hall. Surprised to find the heating on, he remembered it was Tuesday, and on Tuesdays Lula, the Portuguese cleaning woman, came from three till five, so perhaps she had been feeling the cold.

  All the same, Brigid’s calm announcement that her house had been professionally searched from top to bottom was still with him, and it was only natural that a sense of irregularity lingered in him as he went from room to room, sniffing the air for alien smells, poking at things, trying to remember how he’d left them and failing, pulling open cupboards and drawers to no effect. On his security training courses he had been told that professional searchers filmed their own progress in order to make sure they put everything back where they found it, and he imagined them doing that in his flat.

  But it wasn’t until he went to reclaim the back-up memory stick which, three years ago, he had pasted behind the framed photograph of his maternal grandparents on their wedding day, that he felt a real frisson. The picture was hanging where it had always hung: in a bit of dead corridor between the hall and the lavatory. Every time he had thought of moving it over the years, he had failed to come up with a darker or less conspicuous spot and in the end left it where it was.

  And the memory stick was still there now, secured beneath layers of industrial masking tape: no outward sign that it had been tampered with. The trouble was, the picture-glass had been dusted, and by Lula’s standards this was an all-time first. Not only its glass, but its frame. And not only its frame, if you please, but the top of the frame, which was situated well above the height of diminutive Lula’s natural reach.

  Had she stood on a chair? Lula? Had she, against all previous form, been seized by an urge to spring-clean? He was in the act of calling her – only to break out in derisive laughter at his own paranoia. Had he really forgotten that Lula had taken herself off on holiday at short notice, to be temporarily replaced by her infinitely more efficient and Junoesque friend Tina, all of five foot ten tall?

  Still smiling to himself, he did what he’d set his mind on doing before it went chasing after wild geese. He removed the masking tape and took the memory stick to the living room.

  *

  His desktop computer was a source of worry to him. He knew – had had it religiously dinned into him – that no computer ever was a safe hiding place. However deep you may think you’ve buried your secret treasure, today’s analyst with time on his side will dig it up. On the other hand, replacing the old hard drive with the new one that he had bought in Cardiff also had its risks: such as how to explain the presence of a brand-new drive with nothing on it? But any explanation, however implausible, was going to sound a lot better than the three-year-old voices of Fergus Quinn, Jeb Owens and Kit Probyn, as recorded days or even hours before the disastrous launch of Operation Wildlife.

  First retrieve the secret recording from the depths of the desktop. Toby did. Then make two more copies of it on separate memory sticks. He did that too. Next, remove hard disk. Essential equipment for the operation: one fine screwdriver, rudimentary technical understanding and neat fingers. Under pressure, Toby possessed them all. Now for the disposal of the hard disk. For this he needed the Beefeater’s box and the Kleenex tissues for padding. For an addressee, he selected his beloved Aunt Ruby, a solicitor who practised in Derbyshire under her married name, and not therefore by his calculation toxic. A short covering note – Ruby would expect no more – urged her to guard the enclosed with her life, explanations to follow.

  Seal box, inscribe to Ruby.

  Next, for that rainy day he prayed would never dawn, address two of the padded envelopes to himself, poste restante, to the central post offices of Liverpool and Edinburgh respectively. Flash-forward to visions of Toby Bell on the run, arriving panting at the counter of Edinburgh main post office with the forces of darkness hot on his heels.

  There remained the third, the original, the unconsigned memory stick. On his security courses there had always been a game of hide-and-seek:

  So, ladies and gentlemen, you have this highly secret and compromising document in your hands and the secret police are at your door. You have precisely ninety seconds from now before they will begin ransacking your apartment.

  Discount the places you first thought of: so NOT behind the cistern, NOT under the loose floorboard, NOT in the chandelier, the ice compartment of the fridge or the first-aid box, and absolutely NOT, thank you, dangling outside the kitchen window on a piece of string. So where? Answer: the most obvious place you can think of, among its most obvious companions. In the bottom drawer of the chest currently containing his unsorted junk from Beirut resided CDs, family snaps, letters from old girlfriends and – yes, even a handful of memory sticks with handwritten labels round their plastic cases. One caught his attention: UNI GRADUATION PARTY, BRISTOL. Removing the label, he wrapped it round the third memory stick and tossed it into the drawer with the rest of the junk.

  He then took Kit’s letter to the kitchen sink and set fire to it, broke the ash and washed it down the plughole. For good measure he did the same with the duplicate contract for his hire car from Bodmin Parkway railway station.

  Satisfied with progress so far, he showered, changed into fresh clothes, put the two burners in his pocket, packed the envelopes and parcel into the carrier bag and, observing the Security Department’s well-worn injunction never to accept the first cab on offer, hailed not the second cab but the third, and gave the driver the address of a mini-market in Swiss Cottage which he happened to know operated a late-night post-office counter.

  And in Swiss Cottage, breaking the chain yet again, he took a second cab to Euston station and a third to the East End of London.

  *

  The hospital rose out of the darkness like the hulk of a warship, windows ablaze, bridges and stairways cleared for action. The upper forecourt was given over to a car park and a steel sculpture of interlocking swans. At ground level, ambulances unloaded casualties in red blankets on to trolleys while health workers in scrubs took a cigarette break. Aware that video cameras stared at him from every rooftop and lamp post, Toby cast himself as an outpatient and walked with an air of self-concern.

  Following the stretcher trolleys, he entered a glistening hallway that served as some kind of collecting point. On one bench sat a group of veiled women; on another three very old men in skullcaps, bowed over their beads. Close by stood a minyan of Hasidic men in communal prayer.

  A desk offered Patient Advice & Liaison, but it was unmanned. A signpost directed him to Human Resources, Workforce Planning, Sexual Health and Children’s Day-stay, but none to where he needed to go. A notice screamed: STOP! ARE YOU HERE FOR A&E? But if you were, there was nobody to tell you what to do next. Selecting the brightest, widest corridor, he walked boldly past curtained cubicles until he came to an elderly black man seated at a desk in front of a computer.

  ‘I’m looking for Dr Probyn,’ he said. And when the grizzled head didn’t lift: ‘Probably in the Urgent Care unit. Could be triage. She’s on till midnight.’

  The old man’s face was slashed with tribal marks.

  ‘We don’t give out no names, son,’ he said, after studying Toby for a while. ‘Triage, that’s turn left and two doors down. Urgent Care, you gotta go back to the lobby, take the Emergency corridor.’ And seeing Toby produce his cellphone, ‘No good callin’, son. Mobiles just don’t work in here. Outside’s another story.’

  In the triage waiting room, thirty people sat staring at the same blank wall. A stern white woman in a green overall with an electronic key round her neck was studying a clipboard.

  ‘I’ve been informed that Dr Probyn needs to see me.’

  ‘Urgent Care,’ she replied to her clipboard.

  U
nder strips of sad white lighting, more rows of patients stared at a closed door marked ASSESSMENT. Toby tore off a ticket and sat with them. A lighted box gave the number of the patient being assessed. Some took five minutes, others barely one. Suddenly he was next, and Emily, with her brown hair bundled into a ponytail and no make-up, was looking at him from behind a table.

  She’s a doctor, he had been telling himself consolingly since early afternoon. Hardened to it. Does death every day.

  ‘Jeb committed suicide the day before he was due at your parents’ house,’ he begins without preamble. ‘He shot himself through the head with a handgun.’ And when she says nothing: ‘Where can we talk?’

  Her expression doesn’t change but it freezes. Her clasped hands rise to her face until the knuckles of her thumbs are jammed against her teeth. Only after recovering herself does she speak:

  ‘In that case I got him all wrong, didn’t I?’ she says. ‘I thought he was a threat to my father. He wasn’t. He was a threat to himself.’

  But Toby’s thinking: I got you all wrong, too.

  ‘Does anyone have any idea why he killed himself?’ she enquires, hunting for detachment and not finding it.

  ‘There was no note, no last phone call,’ Toby replies, hunting for his own. ‘And nobody he confided in, so far as his wife knows.’

  ‘He was married then. Poor woman’ – the self-possessed doctor at last.

  ‘A widow and a small son. For the last three years he couldn’t live with them and couldn’t live without them. According to her.’

  ‘And no suicide note, you say?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘Nobody blamed? Not the cruel world? Not anyone? Just shot himself. Like that?’

  ‘It seems so.’

  ‘And he did it just before he was due to sit down with my father and prepare to blow the whistle on whatever they had both got up to?’

  ‘It seems so.’

  ‘Which is hardly logical.’