A Delicate Truth A Novel

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 dispatchBrigid’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
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    ISBN: 978-0-241-96517-7