A Delicate Truth A Novel

planning and dreading all night: to wit, retrace his steps to the ministerial anteroom, collect the tape and spirit it out of the Foreign Office under the noses of the security guards in the manner of the vilest spy.
    He still had a choice. He had worked that out, too, in the long, wild reaches of the night. For as long as he sat at this tin table, he could argue that nothing untoward had happened. No security officer in his right mind would consider checking out an age-old tape recorder mouldering in the bottom of his desk drawer. And in the distant possibility that the tape was discovered, well, he had his answer ready: in the stressful run-up to an ultra-secret meeting of immense national importance, Minister Quinn had remembered the existence of a covert audio system and instructed Toby to activate it. Later, with his head full of affairs of state, Quinn would deny that he had given such an order. Well, an aberration of that kind, for those who knew the man, would by no means be out of character; and for those who remembered the tribulations of Richard Nixon, all too familiar.
    Toby peered round for the pretty waitress and, through the café doorway, saw her leaning over the counter, flirting with the waiter.
    She gave him a lovely smile and came trotting out to him, still flirting.
    Seven pounds, please. He gave her ten.
    He stood on the kerb, watching the happy world brush past him.
    Turn left for the Foreign Office, I’m on my way to prison. Turn right to Islington, I go home to a blessedly empty flat. But already, in the brightness of the morning, he was striding purposefully down Whitehall.
    ‘Back again, Mr Bell? They must be running you ragged,’ said the senior guard, who liked a chat.
    But the younger ones only glowered at their screens.
    The mahogany door was closed, but don’t trust anything: Quinn may have snuck in early or, for all Toby knew, been in there all night, hunkered down with Jay Crispin, Roy Stormont-Taylor and Mr Music Brad.
    He banged on the door, called ‘Minister?’ – banged again. No answer.
    He strode to his desk, yanked open the bottom drawer and to his horror saw a pin-light burning. Christ Almighty: if anybody had spotted it!
    He wound back the tape, coaxed it from its housing, returned switch and timer to their previous settings. With the tape wedged under his armpit he set out on his return journey, not forgetting a wave of ‘Cheerio’ to the older guard and a ‘fuck you’ nod of authority to the younger ones.
     
    *
     
    It is only minutes later, but already a calm of sleep has descended over Toby, and for a while he is standing still and everything is passing him by. When he wakes, he is in the Tottenham Court Road, eying the windows of second-hand electronics dealers and trying to decide which of them is the least likely to remember a thirty-something bloke in a baggy black jacket and chinos who wanted to buy a clapped-out second-hand family-sized tape recorder for cash.
    And somewhere along the way he must have stopped at a cashpoint, bought himself a copy of the day’s Observer , and also a carrier bag with a Union Jack on it, because the tape is nestling inside the bag between the pages of the newspaper.
    And probably he has already dropped in on two or three shops before he lucked out with Aziz, who has this brother in Hamburg whose line of business is shipping scrap electronic equipment to Lagos by the container load. Old fridges, computers, radios and clapped-out giant tape recorders: this brothercan’t get enough of them, which is how Aziz comes to be keeping this pile of old stuff in his back room for his brother to collect.
    And it is also how Toby, by a miracle of luck and persistence, becomes the owner of a replica of the Cold War-era tape recorder in the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk, except that this version was coloured a sleek pearl-grey and came in its original box which, as Aziz regretfully explained, made it a collector’s item and therefore ten quid more, plus I’m afraid it’s got to be another sixteen for the adaptor if you’re going to wire it up to anything.
    Manhandling his booty into the street, Toby was accosted by a sad old woman who had mislaid her bus pass. Discovering he had no loose change, he astonished her with a five-pound note.
    Entering his flat, he was brought to a dead halt by Isabel’s scent. The bedroom door was ajar. Nervously he pushed it open, then the door to the bathroom.
    It’s all right. It’s just her