A Delicate Truth Read online

  ‘Elliot will say he wants to buy your house in Harrow. He won’t say he’s from Ethical or anywhere else. He’s seen the ads in the estate agent’s window or wherever, looked it over from the outside, likes it, but there are issues he needs to discuss. He’ll suggest a place and time to meet. You’re to go along with whatever he proposes. That’s the way these people work. Any further questions?’

  Has he asked any?

  ‘Meantime, you play totally normal man. Not a word to anyone. Not here in the Office, not at home. Is that clearly understood?’

  Not understood. Not from Adam. But a wholehearted, mystified ‘yes’ to all of it, and no very clear memory of how he got home that night, after a restorative Friday-evening visit to his Pall Mall club.

  *

  Bowed over his computer while wife and daughter chatter merrily in the next room, Paul Anderson elect searches for Ethical Outcomes. Do you mean Ethical Outcomes Incorporated of Houston, Texas? For want of other information, yes, he does.

  With our brand-new international team of uniquely qualified geopolitical thinkers, we at Ethical offer innovative, insightful, cutting-edge analyses of risk assessment to major corporate and national entities. At Ethical we pride ourselves on our integrity, due diligence, and up-to-the-minute cyber skills. Close protection and hostage negotiators available at immediate notice. Marlon will respond to your personal and confidential inquiries.

  Email address and box number also in Houston, Texas. Free-phone number for your personal and confidential enquiries of Marlon. No names of directors, officers, advisors or uniquely qualified geopolitical thinkers. No Elliot, first name or surname. The parent company of Ethical Outcomes is Spencer Hardy Holdings, a multinational corporation whose interests include oil, wheat, timber, beef, property development and not-for-profit initiatives. The same parent company also endows evangelical foundations, faith schools and Bible missions.

  For further information about Ethical Outcomes, enter your key-code. Possessing no such key-code, and assailed by a sense of trespass, he abandons his researches.

  A week passes. Each morning over breakfast, all day long in the office, each evening when he comes home from work, he plays Totally Normal Man as instructed, and waits for the great call that may or may not come, or come when it’s least expected: which is what it does early one morning while his wife is sleeping off her medication and he’s pottering in the kitchen in his check shirt and corduroys washing up last night’s supper things and telling himself he really must get a hold of that back lawn. The phone rings, he picks it up, gives a cheery ‘Good morning’ and it’s Elliot, who, sure enough, has seen the ads in the estate agent’s window and is seriously interested in buying the house.

  Except that his name isn’t Elliot but Illiot, thanks to the South African accent.

  *

  Is Elliot one of Ethical Outcomes’ brand-new international team of uniquely qualified geopolitical thinkers? It’s possible, though not apparent. In the bare office in a poky side street off Paddington Street Gardens where the two men sit a mere ninety minutes later, Elliot wears a sober Sunday suit and a striped tie with baby parachutes on it. Cabalistic rings adorn the three fattest fingers of his manicured left hand. He has a shiny cranium, is olive-skinned, pockmarked and disturbingly muscular. His gaze, now quizzing his guest in flirtatious flicks, now slipping sideways at the grimy walls, is colourless. His spoken English is so elaborate you’d think it was being marked for accuracy and pronunciation.

  Extracting a nearly new British passport from a drawer, Elliot licks his thumb and flips officiously through its pages.

  ‘Manila, Singapore, Dubai: these are but a few of the fine cities where you have attended statisticians’ conferences. Do you understand that, Paul?’

  Paul understands that.

  ‘Should a nosy individual sitting next to you on the plane enquire what takes you to Gibraltar, you tell them it’s yet another statisticians’ conference. After that you tell them to mind their fucking business. Gibraltar does a strong line in Internet gambling, not all of it kosher. The gambling bosses don’t like their little people talking out of turn. I must now ask you, Paul, very frankly, please, do you have any concerns whatever regarding your personal cover?’

  ‘Well, maybe just the one concern actually, Elliot, yes, I do,’ he admits, after due consideration.

  ‘Name it, Paul. Feel free.’

  ‘It’s just that being a Brit – and a foreign servant who’s been around the halls a bit – entering a prime British territory as a different Brit – well, it’s a bit’ – hunting for a word – ‘a bit bloody iffy, frankly.’

  Elliot’s small, circular eyes return to him, staring but not blinking.

  ‘I mean, couldn’t I just go as myself and take my chances? We both know I’m going to have to lie low. But should it happen that, contrary to our best calculations, I do bump into someone I know, or someone who knows me, more to the point, then at least I can be who I am. Me, I mean. Instead of –’

  ‘Instead of what exactly, Paul?’

  ‘Well, instead of pretending to be some phoney statistician called Paul Anderson. I mean, who’s ever going to believe a cock-and-bull story like that, if they know perfectly well who I am? I mean, honestly, Elliot’ – feeling the heat coming into his face and not able to stop it – ‘Her Majesty’s Government has got a bloody great tri-Services headquarters in Gibraltar. Not to mention a substantial Foreign Office presence and a king-sized listening station. And a Special Forces training camp. It only takes one chap we haven’t thought of to jump out of the woodwork and embrace me as a long-lost chum and I’m – well, scuppered. And what do I know about statistics, come to that? Bugger all. Don’t mean to question your expertise, Elliot. And of course I’ll do whatever it takes. Just asking.’

  ‘Is that the complete sum of your anxieties, Paul?’ Elliot enquires solicitously.

  ‘Of course. Absolutely. Just making the point.’ And wishing he hadn’t, but how the hell d’you throw logic out of the window?

  Elliot moistens his lips, frowns, and in carefully fractured English replies as follows:

  ‘It is a fact, Paul, that nobody in Gibraltar will give a five-dollar fuck who you are for as long as you flash your British passport at them and keep your head below the horizon at all times. However: it’s your balls that will be in the direct line of fire, should we strike worst-case scenario, which it is my bounden duty to consider. Let us take the hypothetical case of the operation aborting in a manner not foreseen by its expert planners of whom I pride myself as being one. Was there an inside man? they may ask. And who is this scholarly wanker Anderson who skulked in his hotel room reading books all day and all night? – they will start to wonder. Where is this Anderson to be found, in a colony no bigger than a fucking golf course? If that situation were to arise, I suspect you’d be grateful indeed not to have been the person you are in reality. Happy now, Paul?’

  Happy as a sandboy, Elliot. Couldn’t be happier. Totally out of my element, whole thing like a dream, but with you all the way. But then, noticing that Elliot looks a bit put out, and fearing that the detailed briefing he is about to receive will kick off on a bad note, he goes for a bit of bonding:

  ‘So where does a highly qualified chap like you fit into the scheme of things, if I may ask without being intrusive, Elliot?’

  Elliot’s voice acquires the sanctimoniousness of the pulpit:

  ‘I sincerely thank you for that question, Paul. I am a man of arms; it is my life. I have fought wars large and small, mostly on the continent of Africa. During these exploits I was fortunate enough to encounter a man whose sources of intelligence are legendary, not to say uncanny. His worldwide contacts speak to him as to no other in the safe knowledge that he will use their information in the furtherance of democratic principles and liberty. Operation Wildlife, the details of which I shall now unveil to you, is his personal brainchild.’

  And it is Elliot’s proud statement that elicits the obvious,
if sycophantic, question:

  ‘And may one ask, Elliot, whether this great man has a name?’

  ‘Paul, you are now and for evermore family. I will therefore tell you without restraint that the founder and driving force of Ethical Outcomes is a gentleman whose name, in strictest confidence, is Mr Jay Crispin.’

  *

  Return to Harrow by black cab.

  Elliot says, From now on, keep all receipts. Pay off cabbie, keep receipt.

  Google Jay Crispin.

  Jay is nineteen and lives in Paignton, Devon. She is a waitress.

  J. Crispin, Veneer Makers, began life in Shoreditch in 1900.

  Jay Crispin auditions for models, actors, musicians and dancers.

  But of Jay Crispin, the driving force of Ethical Outcomes and mastermind of Operation Wildlife, not a glimpse.

  *

  Stuck once more at the overlarge window of his hotel prison, the man who must call himself Paul emitted a weary string of mindless obscenities, more in the modern way than his own. Fuck – then double fuck. Then more fucks, loosed off in a bored patter of gunfire aimed at the cellphone on the bed and ending with an appeal – Ring, you little bugger, ring – only to discover that somewhere inside or outside his head the same cellphone, no longer mute, was chirruping back at him with its infuriating diddly-ah, diddly-ah, diddly-ah dee-dah-doh.

  He remained at the window, frozen in disbelief. It’s next-door’s fat Greek with a beard, singing in the shower. It’s those horny lovers upstairs: he’s grunting, she’s howling, I’m hallucinating.

  Then all he wanted in the world was to go to sleep and wake up when it was over. But by then he was at the bed, clutching the encrypted cellphone to his ear but, out of some aberrant sense of security, not speaking.

  ‘Paul? Are you there, Paul? It’s me. Kirsty, remember?’

  Kirsty the part-time minder he’d never set eyes on. Her voice the only thing he knew about her: pert, imperious, and the rest of her imagined. Sometimes he wondered whether he detected a 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 these days 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 ribbon and 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 anorak’s inside pocket, his super-encrypted cellphone. He could feel its weight on his left nipple – which didn’t prevent his fingers from making their own furtive exploration.

  A shiny Toyota four-by-four had joined the queue of arriving cars, and yes it was blue and yes there was a red sign saying CONFERENCE on the passenger side of the windscreen. Two white faces up front, the driver male, bespectacled and young. The girl compact and efficient, leaping out like a yachtswoman, hauling back the side door.

  ‘You’re Arthur, right?’ she yelled in best Australian.

  ‘No, I’m Paul, actually.’

  ‘Oh right, you’re Paul! Sorry about that. Arthur’s next stop. I’m Kirsty. Great to meet you, Paul. Hop right in!’

  Agreed safety formula. Typical over-production, but never mind. He hopped, and was alone on the rear seat. The side door slammed shut and the four-by-four nosed its way between the white gateposts, on to the cobbled road.

  ‘And this here’s Hansi,’ Kirsty said over the back of her seat. ‘Hansi’s part of the team. “Ever watchful” – right, Hansi? That’s his motto. Want to say hullo to the gentleman, Hansi?’

  ‘Welcome aboard, Paul,’ said Ever-Watchful Hansi, without turning his head. Could be an American voice, could be German. War’s gone corporate.

  They were driving between high stone walls and he was drinking in every sight and sound at once: the blare of jazz from a passing bar, the obese English couples quaffing tax-free booze at their outdoor tables, the tattoo parlour with its embroidered torso in low-slung jeans, the barber’s shop with sixties hairstyles, the bowed old man in a yarmulke wheeling a baby’s pram, and the curio shop selling statuettes of greyhounds, flamenco dancers, and Jesus and his disciples.

 
; Kirsty had turned to examine him by the passing lights. Her bony face, freckled from the outback. Short, dark hair tucked into the bush hat. No make-up, and nothing behind the eyes: or nothing for him. The jaw crammed into the crook of her forearm while she gave him the once-over. The body indecipherable under the bulk of a quilted bush jacket.

  ‘Left everything in your room, Paul? Like we told you?’

  ‘All packed up, as you said.’

  ‘Including the bird book?’

  ‘Including it.’

  Into a dark side street, washing slung across it. Decrepit shutters, crumbling plaster, graffiti demanding BRITS GO HOME! Back into the blaze of city lights.

  ‘And you didn’t check out of your room? By mistake or something?’

  ‘The lobby was chock-a-block. I couldn’t have checked out if I’d tried.’

  ‘How about the room key?’

  In my bloody pocket. Feeling an idiot, he dropped it into her waiting hand and watched her pass it to Hansi.

  ‘We’re doing the tour, right? Elliot says to show you the facts on the ground, so’s you have the visual image.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘We’re heading for Upper Rock, so we’re taking in the Queensway Marina on the way. That’s the Rosemaria out there now. She arrived an hour ago. See it?’

  ‘See it.’

  ‘That’s where Aladdin always anchors, and those are his personal steps to the dockside. Nobody’s allowed to use them except him: he has property interests in the colony. He’s still aboard, and his guests are running late, still powdering their noses before they go ashore for their slap-up dinner at the Chinese. Everybody eyeballs the Rosemaria, so you can, too. Just keep it relaxed. There’s no law says you can’t take a relaxed look at a thirty-million-dollar super-yacht.’

  Was it the excitement of the chase? Or just the relief of being got out of prison? Or was it the simple prospect of serving his country in a way he’d never dreamed of? Whatever it was, a wave of patriotic fervour swept over him as centuries of British imperial conquest received him. The statues to great admirals and generals, the cannons, redoubts, bastions, the bruised air-raid precaution signs directing our stoical defenders to their nearest shelter, the Gurkha-style warriors standing guard with fixed bayonets outside the Governor’s residence, the bobbies in their baggy British uniforms: he was heir to all of it. Even the dismal rows of fish-and-chip shops built into elegant Spanish façades were like a homecoming.