A Delicate Truth A Novel - By John Le Carre Page 0,82

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