A Delicate Truth A Novel

them. He made to drop into a crouch, but Jeb was holding him upright with a grip so tight he gasped.
    ‘Nobody can spot us unless we move, see,’ he explained in his same comfortable Welsh undertone. ‘It’s a hundred metres up and pretty steep now, but not a bother for you, I’m sure. A bit ofa traverse, then we’re home. It’s only the three boys and me’ – as if there were nothing to be shy of.
    And steep it was, with thickets and slipping sand, and another catch-net to negotiate, and Jeb’s gloved hand waiting if he stumbled, but he didn’t. Suddenly they had arrived. Three men in combat gear and headsets, one of them taller than the rest, were lounging on a tarpaulin, drinking from tin mugs and watching computer screens as if they were watching Saturday-afternoon football.
    The hide was built into the steel frame of a catch-net. Its walls were of matted foliage and shrub. Even from a few feet away, and without Jeb to guide him, he might have walked clean past it. The computer screens were fixed at the end of pipe casings. You had to squint into the pipes to see them. A few misty stars glowed in the matted roof. A few strands of moonlight glinted on weaponry of a kind he’d never seen. Four packs of gear were lined up along one wall.
    ‘So this is Paul, lads. Our man from the ministry,’ said Jeb beneath the rattle of the wind.
    One by one, each man turned, drew off a leather glove, shook his hand too hard and introduced himself.
    ‘Don. Welcome to the Ritz, Paul.’
    ‘Andy.’
    ‘Shorty. Hullo, Paul. Make the climb all right, then?’
    Shorty because he’s a foot taller than the rest of them: why else? Jeb handing him a mug of tea. Sweet with condensed milk. A lateral arrow-slit was fringed by foliage. The computer pipes were fixed below it, allowing a clear view down the hillside to the coastline and out to sea. To his left the same pitch-black hills of Spain, bigger now, and closer. Jeb lining him up to look at the left-hand screen. A rolling sequence of shots from hidden cameras: the marina, the Chinese restaurant, the fairy-lit Rosemaria . Switch to a shaky hand-held shot inside theChinese restaurant. The camera at floor level. From the end of a long table in the window bay, an imperious fifty-year-old fat man in a nautical blazer and perfect hair gesticulates to his fellow diners. On his right, a sulky brunette half his age. Bare shoulders, showy breasts, diamond collar and a downturned mouth.
    ‘ Aladdin ’s a twitchy bugger, Paul,’ Shorty was confiding. ‘First he has a run-in with the head waiter in English because there isn’t any lobster. Now his lady friend’s getting it in Arabic, and him a Pole. I’m surprised he doesn’t give her a thick ear, the way she’s carrying on. It’s like at home, right, Jeb?’
    ‘Come over here a minute, Paul, please.’
    With Jeb’s hand on his shoulder to guide him, he made a wide step to the middle screen. Alternating aerial and ground shots. Were they courtesy of the Predator drone that was by no means beyond Mr Crispin’s operational budget? Or of the helicopter that he could hear idling overhead? A terrace of white houses, faced with weatherboarding, perched on the cliff’s edge. Stone staircases to the beach dividing them. The staircases leading down to a skimpy crescent of sand. A rock beach enclosed by jagged cliff. Orange street lamps. A metalled slip road leading from the terrace to the main coast road. No lights in the windows of the houses. No curtains.
    And through the arrow-slit, the same terrace in plain sight.
    ‘It’s a tear-down, see, Paul,’ Jeb was explaining in his ear. ‘A Kuwaiti company’s going to put up a casino complex and a mosque. That’s why the houses are empty. Aladdin , he’s a director of the Kuwaiti company. Well now, according to what he’s been telling his guests, he’s got a confidential meeting with the developer tonight. Very lucrative, it will be. Shaving off the profits for themselves, according to his lady friend. You wouldn’t think a man like Aladdin would be so leaky, like, but he is.’
    ‘Showing off,’ Shorty explained. ‘Typical fucking Pole.’
    ‘Is Punter already inside the house then?’ he asked.
    ‘Let’s say, if he is, we haven’t spotted him, Paul, put it that way,’ Jeb replied in the same steady, deliberately conversational tone. ‘Not from the outside, and there’s no coverage inside. There hasn’t been the opportunity, so we’re told. Well, you can’t