A Delicate Truth

by John le Carré

  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 …

  He read no further. Jamming the note to the back of the document, he avidly scanned the top page:

  OPERATION WILDLIFE – AFTERMATH AND RECOMMENDATIONS

  By now his heart was racing so fast, his breathing so uneven, he wondered whether, after all, he was about to die. Perhaps Emily was wondering too, because she had dropped on her knees beside him.

  ‘You opened the door. Then what?’ he stammered out, frantically leafing through the pages.

  ‘I opened the door’ – gently now, to humour him – ‘he stood there. He seemed surprised to see me and asked if you were in. He said he was a former colleague and friend of yours, and he had this parcel for you.’

  ‘And you said?’

  ‘I said yes, you were in. But you were unwell, and I was your doctor attending you. And I didn’t think you should be disturbed, and could I help?’

  ‘And he said? – go on!’

  ‘He asked what you were suffering from. I said I was sorry, I wasn’t allowed to tell him that without your permission but you were as comfortable as could be expected pending further examination. And I was about to call an ambulance, which I am. Are you hearing me, Toby?’

  He was hearing her, but he was also churning his way through the photocopied pages.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘He seemed a bit thrown, started to say something, looked at me again – a bit beadily, I thought – and then he said might he know my name?’

  ‘Give me his words. His actual words.’

  ‘Jesus, Toby.’ But she gave them anyway: ‘“Would I be impertinent if I were to ask you your name?” How’s that?’

  ‘And you told him your name. You said Probyn?’

  ‘Doctor Probyn. What do you expect me to say?’ – catching Toby’s stare. ‘Doctors are open, Toby. Real doctors give their names. Their real names.’

  ‘How did he take it?’

  ‘“Then kindly tell him that I admire his taste in medical advisors,” which I thought was a bit fresh of him. Then he handed me the package. For you.’

  ‘Me? How did he describe me?’

  ‘“For Toby!” How the fuck d’you think he described you?’

  Fumbling for the note that he had shoved to the back of the photocopied pages, he read the rest of its message:

  … you will not be surprised to learn that I have decided that a corporate life does not, after all, agree with me, and I have accordingly awarded myself a lengthy posting to distant parts.

  Yours as ever,

  Giles Oakley.

  PS. I enclose a memory stick containing the same material. Perhaps you will add it to the one I suspect you already have. G.O.

  PPS. May I also suggest that whatever you propose to do, it is done swiftly since there is every sign that others may act before you? G.O.

  PPPS. I shall refrain from our cherished diplomatic custom of renewing my assurances of the highest esteem, since I know they would fall on deaf ears. G.O.

  And in a transparent plastic capsule pasted to the top of the page, sure enough: a memory stick neatly marked SAME DOCUMENT.

  *

  He was standing at the kitchen window, uncertain how he had got there, craning his neck to look down into the street. Emily stood at his side, one hand to his arm to hold him steady. But of Giles Oakley, the diplomat who does everything by halves and had finally gone the whole hog, there was no sign. But what was the Kwik-Fit van doing, parked just thirty yards away on the opposite side of the street? And why did it take three burly men to change the front wheel of a Peugeot car?

  ‘Emily, please. Do something for me.’

  ‘After I’ve taken you to hospital.’

  ‘Rummage in the bottom drawer of that chest over there, and find the memory stick of my graduation party at Bristol University. Please.’

  While she rummaged, he punted himself along the wall until he came to his desk. With his undamaged hand he switched on the computer and nothing happened. He checked the cable, the mains switch, tried to reboot. Still nothing.

  Meanwhile, Emily’s rummaging was rewarded. She had found the memory stick, and was holding it aloft.

  ‘I’ve got to go out,’ he said, ungraciously seizing it from her.

  His heart was racing again. He felt nauseous, but clear-headed and precise.

  ‘Listen to me, please. There’s a shop called Mimi’s in the Caledonian Road. Opposite a tattoo parlour called Divine Canvas and an Ethiopian restaurant.’ Why was everything so clear to him? Was he dying? From the way she was staring at him, he might as well be.

  ‘What if there is?’ she asked him. But his eyes had gone back to the street.

  ‘Tell me first if they’re still out there. Three workers talking to each other about bugger all.’

  ‘People in the street talk about nothing all the time. What about Mimi’s? Who’s Mimi?’

  ‘An Internet café. I need shoes. They’ve crashed my computer. And my BlackBerry for the addresses. Top-left drawer of my desk. And socks. I’ll need socks. Then see if the men are still there.’

  She had found his anorak, which was crumpled but otherwise intact, and put his BlackBerry into the left side pocket. She had helped him put on his socks and shoes, and she had checked to see whether the men were still there. They were. She had given up saying ‘You can’t do this, Toby’ and was helping him to shuffle along the corridor.

  ‘Are you sure Mimi will be receiving at this hour?’ she asked, in an effort to be light-hearted.

  ‘Just get me down the stairs. Then go. You’ve done everything. You’ve been great. Sorry about the mess.’

  *

  The staircase might have been less of a nightmare if they could have agreed where Emily should place herself: above him to help guide his footsteps, or below to catch him if he plunged? Toby’s view was that below him was just bloody silly, she could never support his weight and they’d finish up in the hall on top of each other. Emily riposted that, if he started to fall, yelling in his ear from behind wasn’t going to stop him.

  But these exchanges came and went in flashes amid the business of manhandling him downstairs and into the street, then speculating – both of them now – why there was a uniformed policeman loitering at the corner of Cloudesley Road, because, these days, whoever saw a lone copper standing on a street corner, looking benign? And – Toby this time – why had the supposed Kwik-Fit team still not changed that bloody wheel? But whatever the explanation, he needed Emily out of sight and sound, clear of it all, for her own sake, please, because the last thing on earth he wanted to do was make her into an accomplice, which he explained to her very clearly and at length.

  So it surprised him to discover, as he prepared to launch himself into Copenhagen Street for the downhill sprint, that she had not only remained at his side but was actually steering him
, and probably holding him up as well, with one hand gripping his forearm with unladylike strength, and her other arm fastened like iron around his upper back, but somehow avoiding the bruising, which reminded him that by now she knew the geography of his body pretty well.

  They were at the junction when he stopped dead.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘What’s shit?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Can’t remember what, for goodness’ sake?’

  ‘Whether Mimi’s is left or right.’

  ‘Wait here for me.’

  She propped him on a bench and he waited dizzily for her while she made a hasty reconnaissance and returned with the news that Mimi’s was a stone’s throw away to the left.

  But she needed his promise first:

  ‘We get you to hospital as soon as this is done. Deal? Now what’s the matter?’

  ‘I’ve got no bloody money.’

  ‘Well, I have. Plenty.’

  We’re arguing like an old married couple, he thought, and we haven’t even kissed each other on the cheek. Perhaps he said it aloud, because she was smiling as she pushed open the door to a minuscule but scrupulously clean shop with a big plywood counter as you entered and nobody behind it and a bar at the far end selling coffee and refreshments and, on the wall, a poster offering to upgrade your PC, health-check it, recover lost data and remove any unfriendly virus. And beneath this poster, six computer booths and six customers perched upright before them, four black men and two blonde women. No booth free, so find somewhere to sit and wait.

  So he sat at a table and waited while Emily fetched two teas and spoke to the manager. Then she came and sat down opposite Toby, holding both his hands across the table – not entirely, he wanted to believe, for medical reasons – until one of the men dismounted from his bar stool, leaving a booth free.

  Toby’s head was reeling and the fingers of his right hand were in bad shape, so it was Emily in the end who was pushing home the memory sticks while he called up the addresses for her from his BlackBerry: Guardian, The New York Times, Private Eye, Reprieve, Channel 4 News, BBC News, ITN, and finally – not quite as a joke – the Press and Information Department of Her Majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

  ‘And one for my father,’ she said, and typed in Kit’s email address from memory, and pressed ‘send’, and included a copy to her mother in case Kit was still sulking in his tent and not opening his emails. Then, belatedly, Toby remembered the photographs that Brigid had let him copy into his BlackBerry, so he insisted Emily send them too.

  And Emily was still doing this when Toby heard a siren wailing and thought at first it was the ambulance coming for him, and that Emily must somehow have managed to call for one when he wasn’t listening, maybe back at the flat when she was outside his door talking to Oakley.

  Then he decided that she couldn’t possibly have done that without telling him, because if one thing was certain about Emily, it was that she didn’t have an ounce of guile in her bones. If Emily said, ‘I’ll call for an ambulance when we’ve done our work at Mimi’s,’ then that’s when she’d be calling for an ambulance and not a second before.

  Next he thought: it’s Giles they’re coming for, Giles has thrown himself under a bus; because when a man like Giles, in his fractured state of mind, tells you he’s about to award himself a posting to distant parts, you’re entitled to take it any way you want.

  Then it began to cross his mind that, by activating his BlackBerry in order to obtain the email addresses and dispatch Brigid’s photographs, he had sent up a signal that anyone with the necessary equipment could home on – he is briefly Beirut Man again – and if the spirit takes them, direct a rocket down the beam and blow the head off the unlucky user.

  The sirens multiplied and acquired a more emphatic, bullying tone. At first, they seemed to be approaching from one direction only. But as the chorus grew to a howl, and the car brakes screamed in the street outside, Toby couldn’t be certain any more – nobody could be certain, even Emily – which direction they were coming from.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to Danny, Jessica and Callum for enlivening my researches in Gibraltar; to Drs Jane Crispin, Amy Frost and John Eustace for advice on medical matters; to the journalist and writer Mark Urban for giving so freely of his military expertise; to writer, activist and founder of openDemocracy, Anthony Barnett, for educating me in the manners of New Labour in its dying days; and to Clare Algar and her colleagues at the legal charity Reprieve, for instructing me in the British Government’s latest assaults on our liberty, whether implemented or planned.

  Most of all I must thank Carne Ross, former British foreign servant and founder and director of the not-for-profit Independent Diplomat, who by his example demonstrated the perils of speaking a delicate truth to power. Without Carne’s example before me, and his pithy advice in my ear, this book would have been the poorer.

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  First published 2013

  Copyright © David Cornwell, 2013

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

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  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  ISBN: 978-0-241-96517-7