A Delicate Truth A Novel

her: pert, imperious, and the rest of her imagined. Sometimes he wondered whether he detecteda smothered Australian accent – a pair to Elliot’s South African. And sometimes he wondered what kind of body the voice might have, and at others whether it had a body at all.
    Already he could catch its sharpened tone, its air of portent:
    ‘You still okay up there, Paul?’
    ‘Very much so, Kirsty. You, too, I trust?’
    ‘Ready for some night-birding, owls a speciality?’
    It was part of Paul Anderson’s fatuous cover that his hobby was ornithology.
    ‘Then here’s the update. It’s all systems go. Tonight. The Rosemaria left harbour bound for Gib five hours ago. Aladdin has booked his on-board guests into the Chinese on the Queensway Marina for a big lash-up tonight. He’s going to settle his guests in, then slide off on his own. His tryst with Punter confirmed for 2330. How’s about I pick you up from your hotel at 2100 hours cold? That’s 9 p.m. on the dot. Yes?’
    ‘When do I join up with Jeb?’
    ‘As soon as maybe, Paul,’ she retorted, with the extra edge in her voice for whenever the name Jeb was mentioned between them. ‘It’s all arranged. Your friend Jeb will be waiting. You dress for the birds. You do not check out. Agreed?’
    It had been agreed all of two days ago.
    ‘You bring your passport and your wallet. You pack up your possessions nicely, but you leave them in your room. You hand your room key in at the desk like you’re going to be back late. Want to stand on the hotel steps so’s you don’t have to hang around the lobby and get stared at by the tour groups?’
    ‘Fine. I’ll do that. Good idea.’
    They’d agreed that, too.
    ‘Look out for a blue Toyota four-by-four, shiny, new. Red sign on the passenger-side windscreen saying CONFERENCE .’
    For the third time since he had arrived, she insisted they compare watches, which he considered a needless excursion in thesedays of quartz, until he realized he’d been doing the same thing with the bedside clock. One hour and fifty-two minutes to go.
    She had rung off. He was back in solitary. Is it really me? Yes, it is. It’s me the safe pair of hands, and they’re sweating.
    He peered round him with a prisoner’s perplexity, taking stock of the cell that had become his home: the books he had brought with him and hadn’t been able to read a line of. Simon Schama on the French Revolution. Montefiore’s biography of Jerusalem: by now, in better circumstances, he’d have devoured them both. The handbook of Mediterranean birds they’d forced on him. His eye drifted to his arch-enemy: The Chair That Smelt Of Piss. He’d sat half of last night in it after the bed had ejected him. Sit in it one more time? Treat himself to another watch of The Dam Busters ? Or might Laurence Olivier’s Henry V do a better job of persuading the God of Battles to steel his soldier’s heart? Or how about another spot of Vatican-censored soft porn to get the old juices flowing?
    Yanking open the rickety wardrobe, he fished out Paul Anderson’s green wheelie-bag plastered with travel labels and set to work packing into it the junk that made up an itinerant birdwatching statistician’s fictional identity. Then he sat on the bed watching the encrypted phone recharge, because he had an unappeasable fear it would run out on him at the crucial moment.
     
    *
     
    In the lift a middle-aged couple in green blazers asked him if he came from Liverpool. Alas, he didn’t. Then was he one of the group? Afraid not: what group would that be? But by then his posh voice and eccentric outdoor gear were enough for them and they left him to himself.
    Arriving at the ground floor, he stepped into a seething, howling hubbub of humanity. Amid festoons of green ribbonand balloons, a flashing sign proclaimed St Patrick’s Day. An accordion was screeching out Irish folk music. Burly men and women in green Guinness bonnets were dancing. A drunken woman with her bonnet askew seized his head, kissed him on the lips and told him he was her lovely boy.
    Jostling and apologizing, he fought his way to the hotel steps, where a cluster of guests stood waiting for their cars. He took a deep breath and caught the scents of bay and honey mingled with the oil fumes. Above him, the shrouded stars of a Mediterranean night. He was dressed as he’d been told to dress: stout boots, and don’t forget your anorak, Paul, the Med at night gets nippy. And zipped over his heart in the