A Delicate Truth A Novel

a two-year secondment to Defence, bringing himinto almost daily contact with Quinn, whereas Toby was virgin – which is to say, he brought no such murky baggage from the past.
    The focus session drags to its inconclusive end. The room empties. Toby and Gregory remain by tacit agreement at the table. For Toby the moment provides a welcome opportunity to mend fences; Gregory is less sweetly disposed.
    ‘Getting along all right with King Fergie, are we?’ he enquires.
    ‘Fine, thanks, Gregory, just fine. A few wrinkles here and there, only to be expected. How’s life as Resident Clerk these days? Must be pretty eventful.’
    But Gregory is not keen to discuss life as a Resident Clerk, which he regards as a poor second to Private Secretary to the new Minister.
    ‘Well, watch out he doesn’t flog the office furniture out the back door is all I can say,’ he advises with a humourless smirk.
    ‘Why? Is that his thing? Flogging furniture? He’d have a bit of a problem, humping his new desk down three floors, even him!’ Toby replies, determined not to rise.
    ‘And he hasn’t signed you up to one of his highly profitable business companies yet?’
    ‘Is that what he did to you?’
    ‘No way, old sport ’ – with improbable geniality – ‘not me. I stayed clear. Good men are scarce, I say. Others weren’t so fly.’
    And here without warning Toby’s patience snaps, which in Gregory’s company is what it tends to do.
    ‘Actually, what the hell are you trying to tell me, Gregory?’ he demands. And when all he gets is Gregory’s big, slow grin again: ‘If you’re warning me – if this is something I should know – then come out with it or go to Human bloody Resources.’
    Gregory affects to weigh this suggestion.
    ‘Well, I suppose if it was anything you needed to know , oldsport, you could always have a quiet word with your guardian angel Giles, couldn’t you?’
     
    *
     
    A self-righteous sense of purpose now swept over Toby which, even in retrospect, seated at his rickety coffee table on a sunny pavement in Soho, he could still not wholly justify to himself. Perhaps, he reflected, it was nothing more complicated than a case of pique at being denied a truth owed to him and shared by those around him. And certainly he would have argued that, since Diana had ordered him to stick like glue to his new master and not let him make puddles, he had a right to find out what puddles the man had made in the past. Politicians, in his limited experience of the breed, were repeat offenders. If and when Fergus Quinn offended in the future, it would be Toby who would have to explain why he had let his master off the lead.
    As to Gregory’s jibe that he should go running to his guardian angel Giles Oakley: forget it. If Giles wanted Toby to know something, Giles would tell him. And if Giles didn’t, nothing on God’s earth was going to make him.
    Yet something else, something deeper and more troubling, is driving Toby. It is his master’s near-pathological reclusiveness.
    What in Heaven’s name does a man so seemingly extrovert do all day, cloistered alone in his Private Office with classical music booming out and the door locked not only against the outer world but against his very own staff? What’s inside those plump, hand-delivered, double-sealed, waxed envelopes that pour in from the little back rooms of Downing Street marked STRICTLY PERSONAL & PRIVATE which Quinn receives, signs for and, having read, returns to the same intractable couriers who brought them?
    It’s not only Quinn’s past I’m being cut out of. It’s his present.
     
    *
     
    His first stop is Matti, career spy, drinking pal and former embassy colleague in Madrid. Matti is currently kicking his heels between postings in his Service’s headquarters across the river in Vauxhall. Perhaps the enforced inactivity will make him more forthcoming than usual. For arcane reasons – Toby suspects operational – Matti is also a member of the Lansdowne Club off Berkeley Square. They meet for squash. Matti is gangly, bald and bespectacled and has wrists of steel. Toby loses four–one. They shower, sit in the bar overlooking the swimming pool and watch the pretty girls. After a few desultory exchanges, Toby comes to the point:
    ‘So give me the story, Matti, because nobody else will. What went wrong at Defence when my minister was in the saddle?’
    Matti does some slow-motion nodding of his long, goatish head:
    ‘Yes, well. There’s not