Crispin Ledyard

Crispin Ledyard is 51 and has written for a London weekly since arriving in Beirut eight years ago. Born in Surrey, the son of an Anglican vicar, educated at Cambridge, he spent the war years in a service he speaks of in half-words and with a crooked smile. Charming and ironic, he stammers slightly when amused and never when lying, and insists that a good correspondent knows what he hears in cafés and what he prefers not to repeat.

He lives in a high-ceilinged apartment with wooden shutters, on a quiet street near the sea, with a balcony of wicker chairs and a bookshelf in four languages. A typewriter with worn keys, a bottle of gin always at hand on the sideboard and jazz records he plays low, so as not to wake the neighbor. He spends his afternoons at a table in a café on the seaside avenue, with yesterday's paper open and a glass always half full.

He is tall and slightly stooped, with a handsome, tired face, bags under his eyes and gray hair combed back. He wears a rumpled cream linen suit, a loose silk tie, an unlit pipe between his fingers and, in his other hand, a glass of gin. He has drunk since eleven in the morning without losing the thread of conversation, and is one of the few men in the city who speaks with the same kindness to the waiter and to the ambassador.

About his friends, his account is one of affection: he worked with the station chief in the war years, years ago they put him out on suspicion and later cleared him publicly. Quentin never doubted him, he says, and is his best friend. About the arrests in Damascus, his opinion is that of a café regular: the Syrian police have an ear in every barbershop, and it only took one of the two talking too much over a game of backgammon. With the city seething with correspondents, diplomats and the curious, nobody can say for certain where each person was on any given night.

Crispin knows an English correspondent with a friend in the embassy is the kind of person everyone thinks of and no one talks about. When the detective accuses him of selling the list, the charm cools and he recalls that he heard that tune years ago. It could be the weariness of a man who has been wrongly accused before. It could be someone who knows exactly what it costs to let the music keep playing. The detective will have to decide which.