A Delicate Truth A Novel

gets himself put through to Ruislip General Hospital, asks for the mental-health wing, asks for Dr Costello.
    The male nurse couldn’t be more helpful:
    ‘Dr Costello’s attending a course, mate, back next week.’
    ‘How long’s she been away?’
    ‘Also a week, mate. It’s a he, actually. Joachim. Sounds more German to me, but he’s Portuguese.’
    Kit somehow keeps his head.
    ‘And Dr Costello has not come into the hospital during all that time?’
    ‘No, mate, sorry. Can anyone else help at all?’
    ‘Well, yes, actually, I’d like to talk to one of your inpatients, a chap named Jeb. Just tell him it’s Paul.’
    ‘ Jeb? Doesn’t ring a bell, mate, hang on a jiffy –’
    A different nurse comes to the phone, also male, but not so friendly:
    ‘No Jeb here. Got a John, got a Jack. That’s your lot.’
    ‘But I thought he was a regular,’ Kit protests.
    ‘Not here. Not Jeb. Try Sutton.’
    Now the same thought occurs simultaneously to both Kit and Suzanna: get on to Emily, fast.
    Best if Suzanna rings her. With Kit, just at the moment, she tends to be a bit scratchy.
    Suzanna calls Emily’s cellphone, leaves a message.
    By midday, Emily has called back twice. The sum of her enquiries is that a Dr Joachim Costello recently joined the mental-health unit at Ruislip as a temporary, but he’s a Portuguese citizen and the course he’s attending is to improve his English. Did their Costello sound Portuguese?
    ‘No she bloody didn’t!’ Kit roars at Toby, repeating the answer he gave Emily on the phone as he paces the stable floor. ‘And she was a bloody woman , and she sounded like an Essex schoolmistress with a plum up her arse, and Jeb hasn’t got a bloody mother and never did have, as he was pleased to tell me. I’m not a big chap for intimate revelations as a rule, but he was talking his heart out for the first time in three bloody years. Never met his mother,only thing he knows about her is her name: Caron. He fled the coop when he was fifteen and joined the army as an apprentice. Now tell me he made it all up!’
     
    *
     
    It is Toby’s turn to go to the window and, freed from Kit’s accusing stare, abandon himself to his thoughts.
    ‘By the time this Dr Costello rang off, had you given her any reason to think you didn’t believe her?’ he asks at last.
    Equally long deliberation by Kit:
    ‘No. I hadn’t. I played her along.’
    ‘Then as far as she’s concerned, or they are: mission accomplished.’
    ‘Probably.’
    But Toby isn’t about to be satisfied with ‘probably’:
    ‘So far as they’re concerned, whoever they are, you’ve been squared. Fobbed off. You’re on side ’ – gathering conviction as he speaks. ‘You believe the gospel according to Crispin, you believe Dr Costello even if she’s the wrong sex, and you believe Jeb is schizoid and a compulsive liar and is sitting in the isolation ward of a mental hospital in Ruislip and can’t be visited by his fear object.’
    ‘No, I bloody don’t,’ Kit snaps. ‘Jeb was telling me the literal truth. It shone out of him. It may be tearing him apart: that’s another matter. Man’s as sane as you or me.’
    ‘I absolutely accept that, Kit. I really do,’ Toby says at his most forbearing. ‘However, for Suzanna’s protection as well as your own, I suggest that the position you have very cleverly carved out for yourself in the eyes of the opposition is well worth preserving.’
    ‘Until when?’ Kit demands, unappeased.
    ‘How about until I find Jeb? Isn’t that why you asked me to come here? Or are you proposing to go and look for him yourself – thereby, incidentally, setting the whole howling mob on you?’ Toby demands, no longer quite so diplomatically.
    And to this, for a while at least, Kit can find no convincing answer, so instead chews at his lip, and grimaces, and gives himself a gulp of Scotch.
    ‘Anyway, you’ve got that tape you stole,’ he growls, by way of bitter consolation. ‘That meeting in the Private Office with Quinn, Jeb and me. Stored away somewhere. That’s proof, if it’s ever needed. It would scupper you , all right. Might scupper me as well. Not sure I care too much about that either.’
    ‘My stolen tape proves intent ,’ Toby replies. ‘It doesn’t prove the operation ever took place, and it certainly doesn’t address the outcome.’
    Kit grudgingly mulls this over.
    ‘So what you’re trying to tell me is ’ – as if Toby is somehow dodging the point –