A Delicate Truth A Novel - By John Le Carre Page 0,47

resourceful you are, Toby. I seem to remember your telling me you didn’t listen at keyholes. For a moment, I had the very vivid feeling you had been present at the meeting. Don’t,’ he commanded, and for a moment, neither man spoke.

‘Listen to me, dear man,’ he resumed, in an altogether softer tone. ‘Whatever information you imagine you possess – hysterical, anecdotal, electronic, don’t tell me – destroy it before it destroys you. Every day, all across Whitehall, idiotic plans are aired and abandoned. Please, for your own future, accept that this was another.’

Had the lapidary voice faltered? What with the bustling shadows of pedestrians, the passing lights and din of river traffic, Toby could not be sure.

*

Alone in the kitchen of his Islington flat, Toby first played the analogue tapes on his replica recorder, at the same time making a digital recording. He transferred the digital recording to his desktop, then to a memory stick for back-up. Then buried the recording as deep in the desktop as it would go, while aware that if the technicians ever got their hooks on it nothing was going to be buried deep enough and the only thing to do in that unhappy eventuality was to smash the hard drive with a hammer and distribute the fragments over a wide area. With a strip of industrial-quality masking tape conveniently left behind by an odd-job man, he pasted the memory stick behind a foxed photograph of his maternal grandparents on their wedding day which hung in the darkest corner of the hallway, next to the coat hooks, and tenderly consigned it to them for safekeeping. How to dispose of the original tape? Wiping it clean wasn’t enough. Having cut it into small pieces, he set fire to them in the sink, nearly setting fire to the kitchen in the process, then flushed what remained down the sink disposal unit.

His posting to Beirut followed five days later.

3

The sensational arrival of Kit and Suzanna Probyn in the remote North Cornish village of St Pirran did not at first receive the ecstatic welcome that it merited. The weather was foul and the village of a mood to match: a dank February day of dripping sea-mist, and every footstep clanking down the village street like a judgement. Then at evening around pub time, the disturbing news: the gyppos were back. A camper – new, most likely stolen – with an upcountry registration and curtains in the side windows had been sighted by young John Treglowan from his father’s tractor as he drove his cows to milking:

‘They was up there, bold as brass, on Manor parkland, the exact same spot they was last time, proud of that clump of old pines.’

Any brightly coloured washing on the line then, John?

‘In this weather? Not even gyppos.’

Children at all, John?

‘None as I did see, but most likely they was hid away till they knowed the coast was clear.’

Horses then?

‘No horses,’ John Treglowan conceded. ‘Not yet.’

And still only the one camper, then?

‘You wait till tomorrow, and we’ll have half a dozen of the buggers, see if we don’t.’

They duly waited.

And come the following evening were still waiting. A dog had been spotted, but not a gyppo dog, or not to look at, it being a plump yellow Labrador accompanied by a big-striding bloke in a broad mackintosh hat and one of those Driza-Bone raincoats down to his ankles. And the bloke didn’t look any more gyppo than the dog did – with the result that John Treglowan and his two brothers, who had been spoiling to go up there and have a quiet word with them, same as last time, were restrained.

Which was as well, because next morning the camper with its curtains and upcountry registration and yellow Labrador in the back rolled up at the post-office mini-market, and a nicer spoken pair of retired foreigners you couldn’t wish to ask for, according to the postmistress – foreigner being anyone who had the ill taste to come from east of the Tamar river. She didn’t go as far as to declare they were ‘gentry’ but there was a clear hint of quality in her description.

But that don’t solve the question, do it?

Not by a long way, it don’t.

Don’t begin to.

Because what right has anyone to go camping up the Manor in the first place? Who’s given them permission then? The commander’s bone-headed trustees over to Bodmin? Or those shark lawyers up in London? And how about if they’re paying rent then? What would