A Delicate Truth A Novel

Kit fucks up, and I don’t want my mother living through a fucked-up manhunt.’
    Unfolding herself from the rush chair, she strolled over to him and held the phone deliberately to his face.
    ‘I’m not putting this into my own phone,’ Toby said. ‘Kit doesn’t want electronic. I don’t either.’
    He had a pen but nothing to write on. She produced a piece of paper from a drawer. He wrote down the registration number of Jeb’s van.
    ‘If you give me your cellphone number, perhaps I can tell you how my enquiries are going,’ he suggested, by now recovered.
    She gave him her cellphone number. He wrote that down too.
    ‘And you might as well have my surgery number and hospital roster,’ she said, and watched him add it all to his collection.
    ‘But we say absolutely nothing specific to each other over the phone, all right?’ he warned her severely. ‘No winks and nods or arch references’ – remembering his security training – ‘and if I text you or need to leave a message for you, I’ll be Bailey, after the Fayre.’
    She gave a shrug, as if to humour him.
    ‘And will I be disturbing you if I have to call you late at night?’ he enquired finally, doing his best to sound, if anything, even more practical and down-to-earth.
    ‘I live alone, if that’s what you’re asking,’ she said.
    It was.



5
    On the slow train back to London, through the hours of half-sleep in his flat, and on the bus to work on the Monday morning, Toby Bell, not for the first time in his life, pondered his motives for putting his career and freedom at risk.
    If his future had never looked rosier, which was what Human Resources were forever telling him, why go back to his past? Was this his old conscience he was dealing with – or a newly invented one? And you’re not settling some old score? Emily had asked him: and what was that supposed to mean? Did she imagine he was on some kind of vengeance kick against the Fergus Quinns and Jay Crispins of this world, two men of such glaring mediocrity in his eyes as to be not worth a second thought? Or was she externalizing some hidden motive of her own? Was it Emily who was settling an old score – against the entire race of men, her father included? There had been moments when she’d given him that impression, just as there had been others, admittedly short-lived, when she had seemed to come over to his side, whatever that side was.
    Yet for all this fruitless soul-searching – perhaps even because of it – Toby’s performance on his first day at his new desk was exemplary. By eleven o’clock he had interviewed every member of his new staff, defined their areas of responsibility, cut potential overlap and streamlined consultation and control. By midday he was delivering a well-received mission statement to a meeting of managers. And by lunchtime he was sitting in his regional director’s office, munching a sandwich with her. It was not till his day’s work was well and truly done that, pleading anexternal appointment, he took a bus to Victoria station, and from there, at the height of the rush-hour bustle, telephoned his old friend Charlie Wilkins.
     
    *
     
    Every British Embassy should have its Charlie Wilkins, they used to say in Berlin, for how could they ever have managed without this genial, unflappable sixty-something English ex-copper with half a lifetime of diplomatic protection under his belt? A bollard jumped out at your car, did it, as you were leaving the Bastille Day bash at the French Embassy? Shame on it! An overzealous German policeman took it into his head to breathalyse you? The liberty! Charlie Wilkins will have a quiet word with his certain friends in the Bundespolizei and see what can be done.
    But in Toby’s case the boot, unusually, was on the other foot because he was one of the few people in the world who had actually managed to do a favour for Charlie and his German wife, Beatrix. Their daughter, a budding cellist, had lacked the academic qualifications for an audition at a grand music college in London. The principal of the college turned out to be a bosom friend of Toby’s maternal aunt, herself a music teacher. Phone calls were hastily made, auditions arranged. No Christmas had gone by since but Toby, wherever he was stationed, had received a box of Beatrix’s home-made Zuckergebäck and a gilded card proudly reporting their brilliant daughter’s progress. And when Charlie and Beatrix retired gracefully to Brighton, the Zuckergebäck