A Delicate Truth A Novel

‘Jeb’s the only witness to the shootings. Right?’
    ‘Well, the only one willing to talk, so far as we know,’ Toby agrees, not quite liking the sound of what he has just said.
     
    *
     
    If he slept he wasn’t aware of it.
    Sometime in the few short hours in bed he heard a woman’s cry and supposed it was Suzanna’s. And after the cry, a flurry of feet across the dust sheets in the corridor below him, and they must have been Emily’s feet, hastening to her mother’s side, a theory borne out by the murmurings that followed.
    And after the murmurings, Emily’s bedside light shining up through the cracks in the floorboards – is she reading, thinking, or listening for her mother? – until either he or Emily went to sleep, and he supposed he went first because he didn’t remember her light going out.
    And when he woke later than he meant to, and hurried downstairs to breakfast: no Emily and no Sheba, just Kit in his church tweeds and Suzanna in her hat.
    ‘It was honourable of you, Toby,’ Suzanna said, grasping his hand and keeping it. ‘Wasn’t it, Kit? Kit was worried sick, we both were, and you came straight away. And poor Jeb’s honourable too. And Kit’s not good at sly , are you, darling? Not that you are, Toby, I don’t mean that at all. But you’re young and you’re clever, you’re in the Office, and you can delve without, well’ – little smile – ‘losing your pension.’
    Standing in the granite porch she fervently embraces him:
    ‘We never had a son, you see, Toby. We tried to, but we lost him.’
    Followed by a gruff ‘be in touch then’ from Kit.
     
    *
     
    Toby and Emily sat in the conservatory, Toby perched on an old sunlounger and Emily on a rush chair at the furthest end of the room. The distance between them was something they had tacitly agreed upon.
    ‘Good talk with Dad last night?’
    ‘If you can call it that.’
    ‘Perhaps you’d like me to go first,’ Emily suggested. ‘Then you won’t be tempted into some indiscretion you may regret.’
    ‘Thank you,’ Toby replied politely.
    ‘Jeb and my father are planning to produce a document about their exploits together, nature unknown. Their document will have earth-shaking consequences in official quarters. In other words, they will be whistle-blowers. At issue are a dead woman and her child, according to my mother. Or possibly dead. Or probably dead. We don’t know, but we fear the worst. Am I warm so far?’
    Receiving only a straight stare from Toby, she drew in her breath and went on:
    ‘Jeb fails to make the date. So no whistle. Instead, a woman doctor who is patently not a doctor and should have been a mancalls Kit, alias Paul, and tells him that Jeb has been confined in a mental hospital. Investigations reveal this to be untrue. I feel I’m talking to myself.’
    ‘I’m listening.’
    ‘Jeb, meanwhile, is unfindable. He has no surname, and is not in the habit of leaving a forwarding address. Official avenues of enquiry, such as the police, are closed – not for us frail women to reason why. You’re still listening, I hope?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And Toby Bell is some kind of player in this scenario. My mother likes you. My father prefers not to, but sees you as a necessary evil. Is that because he doubts your allegiance to the cause?’
    ‘You’d have to ask him that.’
    ‘I thought I’d ask you. Is he expecting you to find Jeb for him?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘For both of you, then?’
    ‘In a way.’
    ‘ Can you find him?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Do you know what you’ll do when you have found him? I mean, if Jeb’s about to blow the whistle on some great scandal, perhaps you might have a last-minute change of heart and feel bound to turn him over to the authorities. Might you?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘And I’m to believe that?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And you’re not settling some old score?’
    ‘Why the hell should I be doing that?’ Toby protested, but Emily graciously ignored this little display of temper.
    ‘I’ve got his registration number,’ she said.
    She had lost him. ‘You’ve what?’
    ‘Jeb’s.’ She was fumbling in the thigh pocket of her tracksuit. ‘I photographed his van while he was giving Dad grief atBailey’s. I photographed the licence disc, too’ – extracting an iPhone and fiddling with the icons – ‘Valid twelve months and paid eight weeks ago.’
    ‘Then why haven’t you given the registration number to Kit?’ Toby asked in bewilderment.
    ‘Because