A Delicate Truth (29 page)

Toby suggests the superintendent contact
Consular Section in the morning. The superintendent replies that such a delay might not
be in the best interests of the British Embassy. Toby asks why not.

‘This Englishman has no papers and no
money. All are stolen. Also no clothes. The owner of the establishment tells us he
was flagellated in the normal manner and regrettably became out of
control. However, the prisoner is telling us he is an important official of your
embassy, not your ambassador, maybe, but better.’

It takes Toby just three hours to reach the
doorstep of the Davidwache, having driven at top speed down the autobahn through clouds
of ground mist. Oakley is lolling half awake in the superintendent’s office
wearing a police dressing gown. His hands, bloodied at the fingertips, are bandaged to
the arms of his chair. His mouth is swollen in a crooked pout. If he recognizes Toby, he
gives no sign of it. Toby gives none in return.

‘You
know
this man, Mr
Bell?’ the superintendent enquires, in a heavily suggestive tone. ‘Maybe you
decide you have never seen him before in your life, Mr Bell?’

‘This man is a complete stranger to
me,’ Toby replies obediently.

‘He is an imposter, perhaps?’
the superintendent suggests, again too knowingly by half.

Toby concedes that the man may indeed be an
imposter.

‘Then maybe you should take this
imposter
back to Berlin and interrogate him sharply?’

‘Thank you. I will.’

From the Reeperbahn, Toby drives Oakley, now
in a police tracksuit, to a hospital on the other side of town. No broken bones but the
body a mess of lacerations that could be whip marks. At a crowded superstore, he buys
him a cheap suit, then calls Hermione to explain that her husband has had a minor car
accident. Nothing grave, he says, Giles was sitting in the back of a limousine without
his seat belt. On the return journey to Berlin, Oakley speaks not a word. Neither does
Hermione, when she comes to unload him from Toby’s car.

And from Toby, also not a word, and none
from Giles Oakley either, beyond the three hundred euros in an envelope that
Toby found lying in his embassy mailbox in payment for the new
suit.

‘And that’s the monument there,
look!’ the driver called Gwyneth exclaimed, pointing her ample arm out of the
window and slowing down to give Toby a better view. ‘Forty-five men, a thousand
feet down, God help them.’

‘What caused it, Gwyneth?’

‘One falling stone, boy. One little
spark was all it ever took. Brothers, fathers and sons. Think of the women,
though.’

Toby did.

After another sleepless night, and in
defiance of every principle he had held dear from the day he entered the Foreign
Service, he had pleaded a raging toothache, taken a train to Cardiff and a taxi for the
fifteen-mile journey to what Charlie Wilkins had called Jeb’s unpronounceable
address. The valley was a graveyard of abandoned collieries. Pillars of blue-black rain
rose above the green hills. The driver was a voluble woman in her fifties. Toby sat
beside her in the front seat. The hills drew together and the road narrowed. They passed
a football field and a school, and behind the school an overgrown aerodrome, a collapsed
control tower and the skeleton of a hangar.

‘If you’d just put me down at
the roundabout,’ Toby said.

‘Now I thought you said you was
visiting a friend,’ Gwyneth replied accusingly.

‘So I am.’

‘Well, why don’t you want me to
drop you at your friend’s house then?’

‘Because I want to surprise them,
Gwyneth.’

‘Not many surprises left in this
place, I can tell you, boy,’ she said, and handed him her card for when he wanted
to go back.

The rain had eased to a fine drizzle. A
red-haired boy of eight or
so was riding a brand-new bicycle up and
down the road, honking an antiquated brass horn that had been screwed to the handlebars.
Black-and-white cattle grazed amid a forest of pylons. To his left ran a row of
prefabricated houses with hooped green roofs and the same shed in each front garden. He
guessed they were once the quarters of married servicemen. Number ten was the last of
the row. A whitewashed flagpole stood in the front garden, but no flag flew from it. He
unlatched the gate. The boy on the bicycle came skidding to a halt beside him. The front
door was of stippled glass. No doorbell. Watched by the boy, he tapped on the glass. A
woman’s shadow appeared. The door sprang open. Blonde, his own age, no make-up,
curled fists, a set jaw and angry as all hell.

‘If you’re press, you can bugger
off! I’ve had my fill of the lot of you!’

‘I’m not press.’

‘Then what the fuck d’you
want?’ – her voice not Welsh but old-fashioned fighting Irish.

‘Are you Mrs Owens, by any
chance?’

‘What if I am?’

‘My name’s Bell. I wondered
whether I could have a word with your husband, Jeb.’

Leaning his bicycle against the fence, the
boy squeezed past him and stood at the woman’s side, one hand clasped possessively
round her thigh.

‘And about
what the fuck
are
you wishing to have a word with my husband,
Jeb
?’

‘I’m actually here on behalf of
a friend.
Paul
, his name is’ – watching for a reaction but seeing none –
‘Paul and Jeb had a date to meet last Wednesday. Jeb didn’t show up.
Paul’s worried for him. Thinks he may have had an accident with his van or
something. The cellphone number Jeb gave him doesn’t answer. I was coming up this
way, so he asked me to see if I could track him down,’ he explained lightly, or as
lightly as he could.

‘
Last
Wednesday?’

‘Yes.’

‘Like a week ago?’

‘Yes.’

‘Six fucking days?’

‘Yes.’

‘Appointment where?’

‘At his house.’

‘Where the fuck’s his house, for
Christ’s sake?’

‘In Cornwall. North
Cornwall.’

Her face rigid, the boy’s also.

‘Why didn’t your friend come
himself?’

‘Paul’s stuck at home. His
wife’s sick. He can’t leave her,’ Toby replied, beginning to wonder
how much of this he could do.

A big, ungainly, grey-haired man in a
buttoned woollen jacket and spectacles was looming at her shoulder, peering at him.

‘What seems to be our problem,
Brigid?’ he enquired in an earnest voice that Toby arbitrarily awarded to the far
north.

‘The man wants Jeb. He’s got a
friend called Paul had a date with Jeb in Cornwall last Wednesday. Wants to know why the
fuck Jeb didn’t show for it, if you can believe him.’

The man laid an avuncular hand on the
boy’s red head.

‘Danny, I think you should pop across
to Jenny’s for a play. And we mustn’t keep the gentleman standing on the
doorstep, must we, Mr –?’

‘Toby.’

‘And I’m Harry. How d’you
do, Toby?’

Curved ceiling, iron trusses holding it up.
The linoleum floor glistening with polish. In a kitchen alcove, artificial flowers on a
white tablecloth. And in the centre of the room facing a television set, a two-piece
sofa and matching armchairs. Brigid sat on an arm. Toby stood opposite her while Harry
pulled open
the drawer of a sideboard and extracted a buff army-style
folder. Holding it in both hands like a hymnal, he placed himself in front of Toby and
drew a breath as if he were about to sing.

‘Now did you know Jeb
personally
at all, then, Toby?’ he suggested, by way of a
precautionary introduction.

‘No. I didn’t. Why?’

‘So your friend Paul knew him but you
didn’t, is that correct, Toby?’ – making doubly sure.

‘Just my friend,’ Toby
confirmed.

‘So you never met Jeb at all. Not even
to set eyes on, as we may say.’

‘No.’

‘Well, this will come as a shock to
you, Toby, all the same, and no doubt a much bigger shock to your friend Paul, who is
sadly unable to be with us today. But poor Jeb very tragically passed away by his own
hand last Tuesday, and we’re still trying to come to terms with it, as you may
suppose. Not to mention Danny, naturally, although sometimes you have to wonder whether
children manage these things better than we adults do.’

‘It was splashed enough over the
papers, for fuck’s sake,’ Brigid said, speaking across Toby’s mumbled
protestations of condolence. ‘Everyone in the fucking world knows about it except
him and his friend Paul.’

‘Well, only
local
papers now,
Brigid,’ Harry corrected her, passing Toby the folder. ‘It’s not
everyone reads the
Argus
, is it?’

‘
And
the fucking
Evening
Standard
.’

‘Yes, well, not everyone reads the
Evening Standard
either, do they? Not now it’s free. People like to
appreciate what they buy, not what’s pressed on them for nothing. That’s
only human nature.’

‘I really am deeply sorry,’ Toby
managed to get in, opening the folder and staring at the cuttings.

‘Why? You didn’t bloody know
him,’ Brigid said.

WARRIOR’S LAST
BATTLE

Police are not looking for any other
suspect in the death by shooting of ex-Special Forces David Jebediah (Jeb) Owens
aged 34 who, in the words of the coroner, ‘fought a losing battle against
post-traumatic stress disorder and its associated forms of clinical
depression …’

SPECIAL FORCES HERO ENDS OWN
LIFE

… served gallantly in Northern
Ireland, where he met his future wife, Brigid, of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
Later served in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan …

‘Would you like to telephone your
friend, Toby?’ said Harry hospitably. ‘There’s a conservatory at the
back if you require the privacy, and we’ve a good signal, thanks to the radar
station nearby, I shouldn’t wonder. We had the cremation for him yesterday,
didn’t we, Brigid? Family only, no flowers. Your friend wouldn’t have been
missed, tell him, so no cause to reproach himself.’

‘What else are you going to tell your
friend, Mr Bell?’ Brigid demanded.

‘What I’ve read here. It’s
awful news.’ He tried again: ‘I’m dreadfully sorry, Mrs Owens.’
And to Harry: ‘Thanks, but I think I’d rather break it to him
personally.’

‘Quite understood, Toby. And
respectful, if I may say so.’

‘Jeb blew his fucking brains out, Mr
Bell, if it’s of interest to your friend at all. In his van. They didn’t put
that bit in the papers; they’re considerate. Some time last Tuesday evening, they
think he did it, between six and ten o’clock. He was parked in the corner of a
flat field near Glastonbury, Somerset, what they call the Levels. Six hundred yards from
the nearest human habitation – they paced it. He used a 9mm Smith & Wesson, his
weapon of choice, short barrel. I never knew he had a fucking Smith
& Wesson, and as a matter of fact he hated handguns, which is paradoxical, but there
it was in his hand, they say, short barrel and all. “Can we trouble you for an
official identification, Mrs Owens?” “No trouble at all, Officer. Any time.
Lead me to him.” Just as well I’d been in the constabulary. Straight through
the fucking right temple. Small hole on the right side and not much of his face at all
on the other. That’s exit wounds for you. He didn’t miss. He wouldn’t,
not Jeb. He was always a lovely shot. Won prizes, Jeb did.’

‘Yes, well, reliving it doesn’t
bring him back, does it, Brigid?’ said Harry. ‘I think Toby here deserves a
cup of tea, don’t you, Toby? Coming all this way for his friend, that’s what
I call loyalty. And a piece of Danny’s shortbread that you made with him,
Brigid.’

‘They couldn’t wait to cremate
him either. Suicides jump the queue, Mr Bell, in case you should ever have the
problem.’ She had flopped from the arm into the chair, and was thrusting her
pelvis at him in some kind of sexual contempt. ‘I had the pleasure of washing his
fucking van out, didn’t I? Soon as they’d had their way with it. “Here
you are, Mrs Owens, it’s all yours now.” Nice polite people, mind you, in
Somerset. Very courteous to a lady. Treated me like a colleague too. There was a couple
from the Met there. Directing operations for their country brothers.’

‘Brigid didn’t phone me, not
till dinner time, she wouldn’t,’ Harry explained. ‘I’d lessons
back to back. She knew that, which was very considerate on your part, wasn’t it,
Brigid? You can’t let fifty children run wild for two hours, can you?’

‘Lent me their fucking hose too, which
was nice. You’d think cleaning it out would be part of the service, wouldn’t
you? But not with the austerity, not in Somerset. “Now are you quite sure
you’ve done all your forensics?” I asked them, “because I don’t
want to be the one to wash away the clues, now.” “We’ve all the
clues we need, thank you, Mrs Owens, and here’s a scrubbing
brush for you, in case you need it.”’

‘You’re just upsetting yourself,
Brigid,’ Harry warned from the kitchen alcove, filling a kettle and putting out
pieces of shortbread.

‘I’m not upsetting Mr Bell,
though, am I? Look at him. He’s a model of composure. I’m a woman playing
catch-up on my dead husband, who is a dead stranger to me, you see, Mr Bell. Until three
years ago I knew Jeb very well indeed, and so did Danny. The man we knew three years ago
would not have killed himself with a fucking short-barrelled pistol, or a long-barrelled
one for that matter. He’d never have left his son without a fucking father or his
wife without a husband. Danny was the world to him. Even after Jeb turned bloody mad, it
was Danny, Danny. Shall I tell you something about suicide that isn’t generally
known, Mr Bell?’

‘Toby doesn’t need this, Brigid.
I’m sure he’s a well-informed young gentleman who’s familiar with the
psychology and suchlike. Am I not right, Toby?’

‘It’s fucking murder is what
suicide is, Mr Bell. Never mind you murder yourself along with it. It’s other
people you’re after killing. Three years ago I’d a great marriage going to
the man of my dreams. I wasn’t bad myself, which he was good enough to comment on
frequently. I’m a good fuck and he loved me full on, or so he said. Gave me every
reason to believe him. I still do. I believe him. I love him. Always did. But I
don’t believe the bastard who shot himself to kill us, and I don’t love him
either. I hate him. Because if he did that, he
is
a bastard, I don’t care
what the fucking cause was.’