A Delicate Truth (33 page)

‘Are
you
part of the original
problem?’

‘No. Just a guilty
bystander.’

‘And when you’ve put your case
together, what will you be then?’

‘Out of a job, most likely,’ he
says, and in an effort at light relief reaches out for the cat, which has been sitting
all this while at her feet, but it ignores him.

‘What time does your father get up in
the morning?’ he asks.

‘Kit does early. Mum lies
in.’

‘Early being what?’

‘Sixish.’

‘And the Marlows, how about
them?’

‘Oh, they’re up at crack of
dawn. Jack milks for Farmer Phillips.’

‘And how far from the Manor is the
Marlows’ house?’

‘No distance. It’s the old Manor
cottage. Why?’

‘I think Kit should be told about
Jeb’s death as soon as possible.’

‘Before he gets it from anyone else
and blows a gasket?’

‘If you put it like that.’

‘I do.’

‘The problem is, we can’t use
the landline to the Manor. Or his cellphone. And certainly not email. That’s very
much Kit’s opinion too. He made a point of it when he wrote to me.’

He paused, expecting her to speak, but her
gaze remained on him, challenging him to go on.

‘So I’m suggesting you call Mrs
Marlow first thing in the morning and ask her to pop over to the Manor and bring Kit to
the phone in the cottage. That’s assuming you’d like to break the news to
him yourself rather than have me do it.’

‘What lie do I tell her?’

‘There’s a fault on the Manor
line. You can’t get through direct. No panic, but there’s something special
you need to talk to Kit about. I thought you could use one of these. They’re
safer.’

She picks up the black burner and, like
someone who’s never seen a cellphone before, turns it speculatively in her long
fingers.

‘If it makes it any easier, I can hang
around,’ he says, careful to indicate the meagre sofa.

She looks at him, looks at her watch: 2 a.m.
She fetches an eiderdown and a pillow from her bedroom.

‘Now you’ll be too cold,’
he objects.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she
replies.

A stubborn Cornish mist had settled itself
in the valley. For two days now no westerly had managed to drive it away. The arched
brick windows of the stable that Kit had made his office should by rights have been full
of budding leaves. Instead they were blanked out with the deadly whiteness of a shroud:
or so it seemed to him as he quartered the harness room in his agitation, much as three
years ago he had pounded his hated prison bedroom in Gibraltar waiting for the call to
arms.

It was half past six in the morning and he
was still wearing the wellingtons he’d put on to hurry across the orchard at Mrs
Marlow’s urging to take the phone call from Emily on the spurious grounds that she
couldn’t get through on the Manor line. Their conversation, if you could call it
that, was with him now, albeit out of sequence: part information, part exhortation, and
all of it a knife thrust through the gut.

And just as in Gibraltar, so here in the
stables he was muttering and cursing at himself, half aloud:
Jeb. Jesus Christ, man.
Utter bloody nonsense
 … 
We were on a
roll
 … 
Everything to go for
– all of this interspersed by
imprecations of
bastards, bloody murderous bastards
and the like.

‘You’ve got to lie low, Dad, for
Mum’s sake, not just for yours. And for Jeb’s widow. It’s only for a
few days, Dad. Just believe whatever Jeb’s psychiatrist said to you, even if she
wasn’t Jeb’s psychiatrist. Dad, I’m going to hand you over to Toby. He
can say it better than me.’

Toby? What the hell’s she doing with
that sneaky bugger Bell at six in the morning?

‘Kit? It’s me. Toby.’

‘Who shot him, Bell?’

‘Nobody. It was suicide. Official. The
coroner’s signed off on it, the police aren’t interested.’

Well, they ought to be bloody
interested!
But he hadn’t said that. Not at the time. Didn’t feel
he’d said
anything
much at the time, apart from
yes
, and
no
, and
oh well
,
yes
,
right
,
I see
.

‘Kit?’ – Toby again.

‘Yes. What is it?’

‘You told me you’d been putting
together a draft document in anticipation of Jeb’s visit to the Manor. Your own
account of what happened from your perspective three years back, plus a memorandum of
your conversation with him at your club, for him to sign off on. Kit?’

‘What’s wrong with that? Gospel
truth, the whole bloody thing,’ Kit retorts.

‘Nothing’s wrong with it, Kit.
I’m sure it will be extremely useful when the time comes for a démarche.
It’s just: could you please find somewhere clever to put it for a few days? Out of
harm’s way. Not in a safe or anywhere obvious. Maybe in the attic of one of the
outhouses. Or perhaps Suzanna would have a brainwave. Kit?’

‘Have they buried him?’

‘Cremated.’

‘That’s a bit bloody quick,
isn’t it? Who put them up to that? More jiggery-pokery, by the sound of it.
Christ Almighty
.’

‘Dad?’

‘Yes, Em. Still here. What is
it?’

‘Dad? Just do what Toby says. Please.
Don’t ask any more questions. Just do nothing, find somewhere safe for your opus,
and take care of Mum. And leave Toby to do whatever he’s got
to do up here, because he’s really working on this from every angle.’

I’ll bet he is, sneaky
bastard
– but he manages not to say that, which is surprising given that, with
the devious Bell telling him what he should or shouldn’t be doing, and Emily
backing him to the hilt, and Mrs Marlow with her ear to the parlour door, and poor Jeb
dead with a bullet through his head, he might have said any bloody thing.

Wrestling for sanity, he goes back to the
beginning yet again.

He’s standing in Mrs Marlow’s
kitchen in his wellingtons and the washing machine’s going, and he’s told
her to switch the bloody thing off or he won’t be able to hear a word.

Dad, this is Emily.

I know it’s Emily, for God’s
sake! Are you all right? What’s going on? Where are you?

Dad, I’ve got really sad news for
you. Jeb’s dead. Are you listening, Dad? Dad?

Holy God.

Dad? It was suicide, Dad. Jeb shot
himself. With his own handgun. In his van.

No, he didn’t. Bloody nonsense. He
was on his way here. When?

On Tuesday night. A week ago.

Where?

In Somerset.

He can’t have done. Are you
telling me he killed himself that night? That bogus doctor woman called me on
Friday.

Afraid so, Dad.

Has he been identified?

Yes.

Who by? Not that bogus bloody doctor, I
trust?

His wife.

Christ Almighty.

Sheba was whimpering. Stooping to her, Kit
gave her a consoling pat then glowered into the distance while he listened to
Jeb’s parting words murmured to him on the club landing at first light:

You get to think you’re abandoned,
sometimes. Cast out, like. Plus the child and her mother, lying there in your head.
You feel responsible, like. Well, I don’t feel that any more, do I? So if you
don’t mind, Sir Christopher, I’ll give your hand a shake.

Offering me the hand he’s supposed to
have shot himself with. A good firm shake, along with a
See you first thing
Wednesday at the Manor then
, and me promising to be short-order chef and run
him up scrambled eggs for his breakfast, which he said was his favourite.

And wouldn’t call me Kit although I
told him to. Didn’t think it was respectful, not to Sir Christopher. And me saying
I never deserved a bloody knighthood in the first place. And him blaming himself for
horrors he never committed. And now he’s being blamed for another horror he
didn’t bloody commit: to wit, killing himself.

And what am I being asked to do about it?
Sweet Fanny Adams. Go and hide the draft document in some hayloft, leave everything to
the devious Bell and keep my stupid mouth shut.

Well, maybe I’ve kept it shut a bit
too bloody much.

Maybe that’s what was wrong with me.
Too willing to blast off about things that don’t matter a fart, and not quite
willing enough to ask a few awkward questions like:
what actually happened down
there on the rocks behind the houses?
Or:
why am I being handed a cushy
retirement posting in the Caribbean when there are
half a dozen
chaps above me who deserve it a bloody sight more than I do?

Worst of all, it was his own daughter
telling him to keep his mouth shut, led on by young Bell, who seemed to have a knack of
wearing two hats at once and getting away with it and – the rage rising in him again –
getting away with old Em too, and
persuading
her,
totally against her
better judgement by the sound of her
, to poke her nose into matters she
doesn’t know the first bloody thing about, except what she’s overheard or
picked up from her mother and shouldn’t have done.

And just for the record: if
anybody
was going to dish old Em the dirt about
Operation Wildlife
and related matters,
it wasn’t going to be the devious Bell, whose sole qualification appeared to be
spying on his minister, and it wasn’t going to be Suzanna.
It was going to be
her own bloody father, in his own time and in his own way.

And with these uncoordinated thoughts
resounding furiously in his head he strode back across the fog-ridden courtyard to the
house.

Deploying all available stealth lest he rouse
Suzanna from her morning sleep, Kit shaved and put on a dark town suit, as opposed to
the country effort he had mistakenly worn for that shit Crispin, whose role in this
affair he would drag into the daylight if it cost him his pension and his
knighthood.

Surveying himself in the wardrobe mirror, he
pondered whether to add a black tie out of respect for Jeb and decided: too
demonstrative, sends the wrong message. With an antique key that he had recently added
to his key-ring, he unlocked a drawer of the commander’s desk and extracted the
envelope to which he had consigned Jeb’s flimsy receipt and, from beneath it, a
folder marked
DRAFT
containing his handwritten document.

Pausing for a moment, he discovered almost
to his relief that
he was weeping hot tears of grief and anger. A
quick glance at the title of his document, however, restored his spirits and
determination:

‘
Operation Wildlife
, Part I:
Eyewitness account by HM Minister’s Acting Representative in Gibraltar, in the
light of additional information supplied by Field Commander, UK Special
Force’.

Part II, subtitled ‘Field
Commander’s Eyewitness Account’ would remain forever pending, so Part I
would have to do double duty.

Progressing softly over dust sheets to the
bedroom, he gazed in shame and marvel at his sleeping wife, but took good care not to
wake her. Gaining the kitchen – and the one telephone in the house from which it was
possible to speak without being overheard in the bedroom – he went to work with a
precision worthy of the devious Bell.

Call Mrs Marlow.

He does, keeping his voice down; and yes, of
course, she will be more than happy to spend the night at the Manor, just as long as
it’s what Suzanna wants, because that’s the main thing, isn’t it? –
and is the Manor telephone working again, because it sounds perfectly all right to
her
?

Call Walter and Anna, dull but sweet
friends.

He does, and wakes Walter up, but
nothing’s too much trouble for Walter. Yes, of course he and Anna will be happy to
drop by this evening and make sure Suzanna isn’t feeling neglected if Kit
can’t make it back from his business appointment till tomorrow, and is Suzanna
watching
Sneakers
on Sky, because they are?

Take deep breath, sit down at kitchen table,
write non-stop as follows, no self-editing, crossings-out, marginal notes, et
cetera:

Darling Suki,

A lot has come up regarding our
soldier friend while you were asleep, and the net result is, I’ve got to
trolley up to London as a
matter of urgency. With luck the
whole thing will be thrashed out in time for me to catch the five o’clock
back, but if not I’ll take the night sleeper even if I can’t get a
berth.

Then his pen started running away with him,
and he let it:

Dearest You, I love you terribly,
but the time has come for me to stand up and be counted, and if you were able to
know the circumstances you would agree wholeheartedly. In fact you’d do
the job a sight better than I ever could, but it’s time I rose to your
standards of courage instead of dodging bullets.