A Delicate Truth A Novel

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. Shehad 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 grippinghis 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