A Delicate Truth A Novel

scent. Jesus. You never know.
    He tried wiring up the tape recorder on the kitchen table but the flex was too short. He uncoupled an extension lead from the living room and attached it.
    Grunting and whimpering, the great Hebbelian Wheel of Life began to turn.
     
    *
     
    You know what you are, don’t you? You’re a bloody little drama queen.
    No titles, no credits. No soothing introductory music. Just the minister’s unopposed, complacent assertion, delivered to the beat of his bespoke suede boots by Lobb at a thousand pounds a foot, as he advances across the Private Office, presumably to his desk.
    You’re a drama queen, you understand? D’you even know what a drama queen is? You don’t. Well, that’s because you’re pig-ignorant, isn’t it?
    Who the hell’s he talking to? Did I come in too late? Did I set the timer wrong?
    Or is Quinn addressing his Jack Russell bitch Pippa, an election accessory that he sometimes brings in to amuse the girls?
    Or has he paused in front of the gilt-framed looking-glass and he’s giving himself the New Labour mirror test, and soliloquizing while he does it?
    Preparatory honking of ministerial throat. It’s Quinn’s habit to clear his throat before a meeting, then wash his mouth with Listerine with his loo door open. Evidently, the drama queen – whoever he or she is – is being berated in absentia , and probably in the mirror.
    Squeak of leather as he lowers himself into his executive throne, ordered from Harrods on the same day he took office, along with new blue carpet and a clutch of encrypted phones.
    Unidentified scratching sounds from desk area. Probably tinkering with the four empty red ministerial despatch boxes he insists on keeping at his elbow, as opposed to the full ones Toby isn’t allowed to open.
    Yes. Well. Good of you to come, anyway. Sorry to fuck up your weekend. Sorry you fucked up mine as a matter of fact, but you don’t give a shit about that, do you? How’ve you been? Lady wife in good form? Glad to hear it. And the little brats all well? Give them a kick up the arse from me.
    Footsteps approaching, faint but getting louder. Party the first is arriving.
    The footsteps have passed through the unmanned, unlocked side entrance, traversed unmonitored corridors, scaled staircases, without pausing to pee: all just as Toby did yesterday in his role of ministerial guinea pig. The footsteps approaching the anteroom. One pair only. Hard soles. Leisured, nothing stealthy. These are not young feet.
    And they’re not Crispin’s feet either. Crispin marches as to war. These are peaceful feet. They are feet that take their time, they’re a man’s and – why does Toby think he knows this, but hedoes – they’re a stranger’s. They belong to someone he hasn’t met.
    At the door to the anteroom they hesitate but don’t knock. These feet have been instructed not to knock. They cross the anteroom, passing – oh, mother! – within two feet of Toby’s desk and the recorder grinding away inside it with its pin-light on.
    Will the feet hear it? Apparently they won’t. Or if they do, they make nothing of it.
    The feet advance. The feet enter the presence without knocking, presumably because that too is what they’ve been told to do. Toby waits for the squeak of the ministerial chair, doesn’t hear it. He is briefly assailed by a dreadful thought: what if the visitor, like cultural attaché Hester, has brought his own music?
    Heart in mouth, he waits. No music, just Quinn’s offhand voice:
    ‘You weren’t stopped? Nobody questioned you? Bothered you?’
    It’s minister to inferior, and they already know each other. It’s minister to Toby on an off day.
    ‘At no stage was I bothered or in any way molested, Minister. Everything went like clockwork, I’m glad to say. Another fault-free round.’
    Another? When was the last fault-free round? And what’s with the equestrian reference? Toby has no time to linger.
    ‘Sorry about screwing up your weekend,’ Quinn is saying, in a familiar refrain. ‘Not of my doing, I can assure you. Case of first-night wobblies on the part of our intrepid friend.’
    ‘It’s of no consequence whatever, Minister, I assure you. I had no plans beyond clearing out my attic, a promise I am only too happy to defer.’
    Humour. Not appreciated.
    ‘You saw Elliot, then. That went off all right. He filled you in. Yes?’
    ‘Insofar as Elliot was able to fill me in, Minister, I’m sure he did.’
    ‘It’s called