The Constant Gardener (11 page)

“She had some story about the woman being visited by little men in white coats,” he replied disdainfully. “I assumed she had dreamed it. Or was dreaming it while she related it. I gave it no credence.” And nor should you, he was saying.

“Why were the white coats visiting her? According to Tessa's story. In what you call her dream.”

“Because the men in white coats had killed the woman. At one point she called them the coincidences.” He had decided to tell the truth and ridicule it. “I think she also called them greedy. They wished to cure her, but were unable to do so. The story was a load of rubbish.”

“Cure her how?”

“That was not revealed.”

“Killed her how, then?”

“I'm afraid she was equally unclear on that point.”

“Had she written it down at all?”

“The story? How could she?”

“Had she made notes? Did she read to you from notes?”

“I told you. To my knowledge she had no notebook.”

Rob tilted his long head to one side in order to observe Woodrow from a different angle, and perhaps a more telling one. “Arnold Bluhm doesn't think the story was a load of rubbish. He doesn't think she was incoherent. Arnold reckons she was bang on target with everything she said. Right, Les?”

•      •      •

The blood had drained from Woodrow's face, he could feel it. Yet even in the aftershock of their words he remained as steady under fire as any other seasoned diplomat who must hold the fort. Somehow he found the voice. And the indignation. “I'm sorry. Are you saying you've found Bluhm? That's utterly outrageous.”

“You mean you don't want us to find him?” Rob inquired, puzzled.

“I mean nothing of the kind. I mean that you're here on terms, and that if you have found Bluhm or spoken to him, you're under a clear obligation to share that knowledge with the High Commission.”

But Rob was already shaking his head. “No way we've found him, sir. Wish we had. But we've found a few papers of his. Useful bits and pieces, as you might say, lying around his flat. Nothing sensational, unfortunately. A few case notes, which I suppose might interest someone. Copies of the odd rude letter the doctor sent to this or that firm, laboratory, or teaching hospital around the world. And that's about it, isn't it, Les?”

“Lying around's a bit of an exaggeration, actually,” Lesley admitted. “Stashed is more like. There was one batch pasted to the back of a picture frame, another underneath the bathtub. Took us all day. Well, most of one, anyway.” She licked her finger and turned a page of her notebook.

“Plus the whoevers had forgotten his car,” Rob reminded her.

“More like a rubbish tip than a flat by the time they'd finished with it,” Lesley agreed. “No art to it. Just smash and grab. Mind you, we get that in London these days. Someone's posted missing or dead in the papers, the villains are round there the same morning, helping themselves. Our crime prevention people are getting quite bothered about it. Mind if we bounce a couple more names off you a minute, Mr. Woodrow?” she inquired, raising her gray eyes and turning them steadily upon him.

“Make yourselves at home,” said Woodrow, as if they hadn't.

“Kovacs—believed Hungarian—woman-young. Raven black hair, long legs-he'll be giving us her vital statistics next —first name unknown, researcher.”

“You'd remember her all right,” said Rob.

“I'm afraid I don't.”

“Emrich. Medical doctor, research scientist, first qualified in Petersburg, took a German degree at Leipzig, did research work in Gdansk. Female. No description available. Name to you?”

“I've never heard of such a person in my life. Nobody of that description, nobody of that name, nobody of that origin or qualification.”

“Blimey. You really haven't heard of her, have you?”

“And our old friend Lorbeer,” Lesley came in apologetically. “First name unknown, origins unknown, probably half Dutch or Boer, qualifications also a mystery. We're quoting from Bluhm's notes, that's the problem, so we're at his mercy, as you might say. He's got the three names ringed together like a flow chart, with itsy-bitsy descriptions inside each balloon. Lorbeer and the two women doctors. Lorbeer, Emrich, Kovacs. Quite a mouthful. We'd have brought you a copy but we're a bit queasy about using copiers at the moment. You know what the local police are like. And copy shops —well, we wouldn't trust them to copy the Lord's Prayer, frankly, would we, Rob?”

“Use ours,” said Woodrow too quickly.

A ruminative silence followed, which to Woodrow was like a deafness where no cars went by, and no birds sang, and nobody walked down the corridor outside his door. It was broken by Lesley doggedly describing Lorbeer as the man they would most like to question.

“Lorbeer's a floater. He's believed to be in the pharmaceutical business. He's believed to have been in and out of Nairobi a few times in the last year but the Kenyans can't trace him, surprisingly. He's believed to have visited Tessa's ward in the Uhuru Hospital when she was confined there. Bullish, that's another description we've had. I thought that was the Stock Exchange. And you're sure you've never come across a reddish-haired medical Lorbeer of bullish appearance at all, may be a doctor? Anywhere in your travels?”

“Never heard of the man. Or anyone like him.”

“We're getting that quite a lot, actually,” Rob commented from the wings.

“Tessa knew him. So did Bluhm,” said Lesley.

“That doesn't mean I knew him.”

“So what's the white plague when it's at home?” Rob asked.

“I've absolutely no idea.”

They left as they had left before: on an evergrowing question mark.

•      •      •

As soon as he was safely clear of them, Woodrow picked up the internal phone to Coleridge and, to his relief, heard his voice.

“Got a minute?”

“I suppose so.”

He found him sitting at his desk, one splayed hand to his brow. He was wearing yellow braces with horses on them. His expression was wary and belligerent.

“I need to be assured that we have London's backing in this,” Woodrow began, without sitting down.

“We being who exactly?”

“You and I.”

“And by London, you mean Pellegrin, I take it.”

“Why? Has anything changed?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Is it going to?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Well, does Pellegrin have backing? Put it that way.”

“Oh, Bernard always has backing.”

“So do we go on with this, or don't we?”

“Go on lying, you mean? Of course we do.”

“Then why can't we agree on—on what we say?”

“Good point. I don't know. If I were a God man, I'd sneak off and pray. But it's not as fucking easy as that. The girl's dead. That's one part of it. And we're alive. That's another part.”

“So have you told them the truth?”

“No, no, good Lord no. Memory like a sieve, me. Terribly sorry.”

“Are you going to tell them the truth?”

“Them? No, no. Never. Shits.”

“Then why can't we agree our stories?”

“That's it. Why not? Why not indeed. You've put your finger on it, Sandy. What's stopping us?”

•      •      •

“It's about your visit to the Uhuru Hospital, sir,” Lesley began crisply.

“I thought we'd rather done that one in our last session.”

“Your other visit. Your second one. A bit later. More a follow—up.”

“Follow-up? Follow-up of what?”

“A promise you made to her, apparently.”

“What are you talking about? I don't understand you.”

But Rob understood her perfectly, and said so. “Sounded pretty good English to me, sir. Did you have a second meeting with Tessa at the hospital? Like four weeks after she'd been discharged, for instance? Like meet her in the anteroom to the postnatal clinic where she had an appointment? Because that's what it says you did in Arnold's notes, and he hasn't been wrong so far, not from what us ignorant folk can understand of them.”

Arnold, Woodrow recorded. Not Bluhm anymore.

The soldier's son was debating with himself, and he was doing so with the glacial calculation that in crisis was his muse, while in his memory he was following the scene in the crowded hospital as if it had happened to someone else. Tessa is carrying a tapestry bag with cane handles. It is the first time he has seen it, but from now on and for the rest of her short life it is part of the tough image that she had formed of herself while she was lying in hospital with her dead baby in the morgue and a dying woman in the bed opposite her and the dying woman's baby at her breast. It goes with the less makeup and the shorter hair and the glower that is not so very different from the disbelieving stare that Lesley was bestowing on him this minute, while she waited for his edited version of the event. The light, as everywhere in the hospital, is fickle. Huge shafts of sunlight bisect the half dark of the interior. Small birds glide among the rafters. Tessa is standing with her back against a curved wall, next to an ill—smelling coffee shop with orange chairs. There is a crowd milling in and out of the sunbeams but he sees her immediately. She is holding the tapestry bag in both hands across her lower belly and standing the way tarts used to stand in doorways when he was young and scared. The wall is in shadow because the sunbeams don't reach the edges of the room and perhaps that's why Tessa has chosen this particular spot.

“You said you would listen to me when I was stronger,” she reminds him in a low, harsh voice he scarcely recognizes.

It is the first time they have spoken since his visit to the ward. He sees her lips, so fragile without the discipline of lipstick. He sees the passion in her gray eyes, and it scares him as all passion scares him, his own included.

“The meeting you are referring to was not social,” he told Rob, avoiding Lesley's unrelenting gaze. “It was professional. Tessa claimed to have stumbled on some documents which, if genuine, were politically sensitive. She asked me to meet her at the clinic so that she could hand them over.”

“Stumbled how?” asked Rob.

“She had outside connections. That's all I know. Friends in the aid agencies.”

“Such as Bluhm?”

“Among others. It was not the first time she had approached the High Commission with stories of high scandal, I should add. She made quite a habit of it.”

“By High Commission, you mean you?”

“If you mean me in my capacity as Head of Chancery, yes.”

“Why didn't she give them to Justin to hand over?”

“Justin must remain out of the equation. That was her determination, and presumably his.” Was he explaining too much, another peril? He plunged on. “I respected that in her. To be frank, I respected any sign of scruple in her at all.”

“Why didn't she give them to Ghita?”

“Ghita is new and young and locally employed. She would not have been a suitable messenger.”

“So you met,” Lesley resumed. “At the hospital. In the anteroom to the postnatal clinic. Wasn't that a rather conspicuous meeting place: two whites among all those Africans?”

You've been there, he thought, with another lurch into near-panic. You've visited the hospital. “It wasn't Africans she was afraid of. It was whites. She was not to be reasoned with. When she was among Africans she felt safe.”

“Did she say that?”

“I deduced it.”

“What from?”—Rob.

“Her attitude during those last months. After the baby. To me, to the white community. To Bluhm. Bluhm could do no wrong. He was African and handsome and a doctor. And Ghita's half Indian”—a little wildly.

“How did Tessa make the appointment?” Rob asked.

“Sent a note to my house, by hand of her houseboy Mustafa.”

“Did your wife know you were meeting her?”

“Mustafa gave the note to my houseboy, who passed it to me.”

“And you didn't tell your wife?”

“I regarded the meeting as confidential.”

“Why didn't she phone you?”

“My wife?”

“Tessa.”

“She distrusted diplomatic telephones. With reason. We all do.”

“Why didn't she simply send the documents with Mustafa?”

“There were assurances she required of me. Guarantees.”

“Why didn't she bring the papers to you here?” Still Rob, pressing, pressing.

“For the reason I have already given you. She had reached a point where she did not trust the High Commission, did not wish to be tainted by it, did not wish to be seen entering or leaving it. You speak as if her actions were logical. It's hard to apply logic to Tessa's final months.”

“Why not Coleridge? Why did it have to be you all the time? You at her bedside, you at the clinic? Didn't she know anyone else here?”

For a perilous moment, Woodrow joined forces with his inquisitors. Why me indeed? he demanded of Tessa in a surge of angry self-pity. Because your bloody vanity would never let me go. Because it pleased you to hear me promise my soul away, when both of us knew that on the day of reckoning I wouldn't deliver it and you wouldn't accept it. Because grappling with me was like meeting head-on the English sicknesses you loved to hate. Because I was some kind of archetype for you, “all ritual and no faith” —your words. We are standing face-to-face and half a foot apart and I am wondering why we are the same height till I realize that a raised step runs round the base of the curved wall and that, like other women there, you have climbed onto it, waiting to be spotted by your man. Our faces are at the same level, and despite your new austerity, it is Christmas again and I am dancing with you, smelling the sweet warm grass in your hair.

“So she gave you a bundle of papers,” Rob was saying. “What were they about?”

I am taking the envelope from you and feeling the maddening contact of your fingers as you give it to me. You are deliberately reviving the flame in me, you know it and can't help it, you are taking me over the edge again, although you know you will never come with me. I am wearing no jacket. You watch me while I undo my shirt buttons, slide the envelope against my naked skin and work it downward until its lower edge is stuck between the waistband of my trousers and my hip. You watch me again as I refasten the buttons, and I have the same shameful sensations that I would have if I had made love to you. As a good diplomat I offer you a cup of coffee in the shop. You decline. We stand face-to-face like dancers waiting for music to justify our proximity.