A Delicate Truth A Novel

to you. After the signal, please.’
    Has Kit prepared his simple message of no more than two minutes in duration? During the long night, he evidently has:
    ‘This is Paul and I need to speak to Elliot . Elliot, this is Paul, from three years ago. Something pretty unpleasant has cropped up, not of my making, I may say. I need to talk to you urgently, obviously not on my home number. You’ve got my personal cellphone number, it’s the same old one as before, not encrypted, of course. Let’s fix a date to meet as soon as possible. If you can’t make it, perhaps you’d put me in touch with somebody I’m authorized to talk to. I mean by that somebody who knows the background and can fill in some rather disturbing blanks. I look forward to hearing from you very soon. Thank you. Paul.’
    With a sense of a tricky job well done in under two minutes, he rings off and sets out along a pony track with Sheba at his heels. But after a couple of hundred yards his sense of achievement deserts him. How long will he have to wait before anyone calls back? And, above all, where will he wait? In St Pirran there’s no cellphone signal – you can be on Orange, Vodafone or whatever. If he goes home now, all he’ll be thinking of will be how to get out again. Obviously, in due course he will be offering his womenfolk some unclassified account of what he’s achieved – but not until he’s achieved it.
    So the question is: is there a middle way, a stopgap cover story that will keep him within range of Marlon but out of range of his women? Answer: the tedious solicitor in Truro he recently engaged to sort out various piddling family trusts. Suppose, for argument’s sake, something has cropped up: a knotty legal matter that needs to be thrashed out in a hurry? And suppose Kit in the rush of events has completely forgotten all about the appointment till now? It plays. Next move, call Suzanna, which will take nerve, but he’s ready for her.
    Summoning Sheba, he returns to the Land Rover, slots his cellphone into its housing, switches on the ignition and isstartled by the deafening shriek of an incoming call on maximum sound.
    ‘Is that Kit Probyn?’ a male voice blurts.
    ‘This is Probyn. Who’s that?’ – hastily adjusting the volume.
    ‘My name’s Jay Crispin from Ethical. Heard marvellous things about you. Elliot’s off the radar at the moment, a-chasing the deer, as we say. How’s about I stand in for him?’
    Within seconds, as it seems to him, the thing is settled: they will meet. And not tomorrow but tonight. No beating about the bush, no umming and ahhing. A forthright British voice, educated, one of us, and not in the least defensive, which of itself speaks volumes. The kind of man that in other circumstances it would be a pleasure to get to know – all of which he duly reported to Suzanna in suitably coded terms while they hurriedly dressed him in time to catch the ten forty-one from Bodmin Parkway station:
    ‘And you’ll be strong , Kit,’ Suzanna urged him, embracing him with all the power in her frail body. ‘It’s not that you’re weak. You’re not. It’s that you’re kind and trusting and loyal. Well, Jeb was loyal too. You said he was. Didn’t you?’
    Did he? Probably he did. But then, as he reminded her sagely, people do change, darling, even the best of us, you know. And some of us go clean off the rails.
    ‘And you’ll ask your Mister Big, whoever he is, straight out: “Was poor Jeb telling the truth and did an innocent woman and her child die?” I don’t want to know what it’s about. I know I never shall. But if what Jeb wrote on that beastly receipt is true, and that’s why we got the Caribbean, we must face up to it. We can’t live a lie, however much we might like to. Can we, darling? Or I can’t,’ she added, as an afterthought.
    And from Emily, more baldly, as they pulled into the station forecourt:
    ‘Whatever it is, Dad, Mum’s going to need proper answers.’
    ‘ Well, so am I! ’ he had snapped back at her in a moment of angry pain that he instantly regretted.
     
    *
     
    The Connaught Hotel in the West End of London was not an establishment that had come Kit’s way but, seated alone amid the bustle of waiters in the post-modern splendour of its lounge, he rather wished it had; for in that case he would not have chosen the elderly country suit and cracked brown shoes that he had snatched from his wardrobe.
    ‘If my plane’s late, just tell ’em you’re waiting