A Delicate Truth A Novel

a bark.
    ‘Yes, well, I think we could just settle for unsolicited document of record , actually,’ Lionel murmured to Frances helpfully.
    Frances was not to be appeased:
    ‘Would I be overstating the case, Sir Christopher, if I suggested that the whole burden of your testimony against Mr Crispin and others is derived from what Jeb Owens said to you between the hours of 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. on that one night in your club? I am excluding for the moment the so-called receipt that Jeb passed to your wife, and which I see you have added as an annexe of some sort.’
    For a moment Kit appeared too stunned to speak.
    ‘What about my bloody testimony? I was there , wasn’t I? On the hillside! In Gibraltar. The minister’s man on the spot. He wanted my advice. I gave it to him. Don’t tell me nobody was recording what was being said back and forth. There’s no case for going in . My words, loud and clear. And Jeb agreed with me. They all did. Shorty, every man jack of them. But they’d got the order to go, so they went. Not because they’re sheep. But because that’s what decent soldiers do! However bloody silly the orders are. Which they were. Bloody silly. No rational grounds? Never mind. Orders are orders,’ he added, for emphasis.
    Frances was scrutinizing another page of Kit’s document:
    ‘But surely everything you saw and heard in Gibraltar tallied precisely with the account you were afterwards given by those who had planned the operation, and were in a position to assess the outcome? Which you were patently not, were you? You had absolutely no idea of the outcome. You simply take your tune from other people. First you believe what the planners tell you. Then you believe what Jeb Owens tells you. On no more substantial evidence than your own preferences. Am I not right?’
    And providing Kit with no opportunity to answer that question, she asked another:
    ‘Can you tell me, please, how much alcohol you had consumed before you went upstairs that night?’
    Kit faltered, then blinked several times, like a man who has lost his sense of time and place, and is trying to recover them.
    ‘Not a lot,’ he said. ‘Soon wore off. I’m used to drink. You get a shock like that, you sober up bloody fast.’
    ‘Did you sleep at all?’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘In your club. In your club bedroom. During the passage of that night and early morning. Did you sleep or not?’
    ‘How the hell could I sleep? We were talking all the time!’
    ‘Your document suggests Jeb abandoned you at first light and spirited himself out of the club, we know not how. Did you go back to sleep after Jeb had disappeared so miraculously?’
    ‘I hadn’t slept in the first place, so how could I go back to sleep? And his departure wasn’t miraculous . It was professional. He’s a pro. Was. Knew all the tricks of the trade.’
    ‘And when you woke up – abracadabra, he wasn’t there any more.’
    ‘He’d gone already, I told you! There was no bloody abracadabra about it! It was stealth . The chap was a master of stealth ’ – as if propounding a concept that was new to him.
    Lionel chipped in, decent Lionel:
    ‘Kit – man to man – just tell us how much you and Jeb put away that night – give us a rough idea. Everybody balks about how much they actually drink, but if we’re going to get to the bottom of this, we need the whole story, warts and all.’
    ‘We drank warm beer ,’ Kit retorted contemptuously. ‘Jeb sipped his and left most of it. That satisfy you?’
    ‘But in fact ’ – Lionel looking at his gingery-haired fingers now, rather than at Kit – ‘when you really get down to it, we are talking two pints of beer, aren’t we? And Jeb, as you say, is no sort of drinker – or wasn’t, poor chap – so presumably you mopped up the rest. True?’
    ‘Probably.’
    Frances was once more talking to her notes.
    ‘So, effectively, two pints of beer on top of the very considerable quantity of alcohol you’d already drunk during and after dinner, not to mention two double eighteen-year-old Macallan whiskies consumed with Crispin at the Connaught before you ever reached your club. Calculated together, let us say eighteen to twenty units. One might also draw conclusions from the fact that, when you suborned the night porter, you specified one beer glass only. In effect, therefore, you were ordering for yourself. Alone.’
    ‘Have you been sniffing around my club ? That’s bloody disgraceful! Of course it was only one beer