The Constant Gardener (12 page)

“Rob asked you what the papers were about,” Lesley was reminding Woodrow from outside his field of consciousness.

“They purported to describe a major scandal.”

“Here in Kenya?”

“The correspondence was classified.”

“By Tessa?”

“Don't be damn silly. How could she classify anything?” Woodrow snapped, and too late regretted his heat.

You must force them to act, Sandy, you are urging me. Your face is pale with suffering and courage. Your theatrical impulses have not been dimmed by the experience of real tragedy. Your eyes are brimming with the tears that, since the baby, swim in them all the time. Your voice urges, but it caresses too, working the scales the way it always did. We need a champion, Sandy. Someone outside us. Someone official and capable. Promise me. If I can keep faith with you, you can keep faith with me.

So I say it. Like you, I am carried away by the power of the moment. I believe. In God. In love. In Tessa. When we are onstage together, I believe. I swear myself away, which is what I do every time I come to you, and what you want me to do because you also are an addict of impossible relationships and theatrical scenes. I promise, I say, and you make me say it again. I promise, I promise. I love you and I promise. And that is your cue to kiss me on the lips that have spoken the shameful promise: one kiss to silence me and seal the contract; one quick hug to bind me and let me smell your hair.

“The papers were sent by bag to the relevant undersecretary in London,” Woodrow was explaining to Rob. “At which point, they were classified.”

“Why?”

“Because of the serious allegations they contained.”

“Against?”

“Pass, I'm afraid.”

“A Company? An Individual?”

“Pass.”

“How many pages in the document, d'you reckon?”

“Fifteen. Twenty. There was an annex of some sort.”

“Any photographs, illustrations, exhibits at all?”

“Pass.”

“Any tape recordings? Disks—taped confessions, statements?”

“Pass.”

“Which undersecretary did you send them to?”

“Sir Bernard Pellegrin.”

“Did you keep a copy locally?”

“It is a matter of policy to keep as little sensitive material here as possible.”

“Did you keep a copy or not?”

“No.”

“Were the papers typed?”

“By whom?”

“Were they typed or written by hand?”

“Typed.”

“What by?”

“I am not an expert on typewriters.”

“Electronic type? Off a word processor? A computer? Do you remember the sort of type? The font?”

Woodrow gave an ill-tempered shrug that was close to violence.

“It wasn't italicized, for instance?” Rob persisted.

“No.”

“Or that fake, half-joined-up handwriting they do?”

“It was perfectly ordinary roman type.”

“Electronic.”

“Yes.”

“Then you do remember. Was the annex typed?”

“Probably.”

“The same type?”

“Probably.”

“So fifteen to twenty pages, give or take, of perfectly ordinary electronic roman type. Thank you. Did you hear back from London?”

“Eventually.”

“From Pellegrin?”

“It may have been Sir Bernard, it may have been one of his subordinates.”

“Saying?”

“No action was required.”

“Any reason given at all?” Still Rob, throwing his questions like punches.

“The so-called evidence offered in the document was tendentious. Any inquiries on the strength of it would achieve nothing and prejudice our relations with the host nation.”

“Did you tell Tessa that was the answer—no action?”

“Not in as many words.”

“What did you tell her?” Lesley asked.

Was it Woodrow's new policy of truth telling that made him reply as he did—or some weaker instinct to confess? “I told her what I felt would be acceptable to her, given her condition-given the loss she had suffered, and the importance she attached to the documents.”

Lesley had switched off the tape recorder and was packing away her notebooks. “So what lie was acceptable to her, sir? In your judgment?” she asked.

“That London was on the case. Steps were being taken.”

For a blessed moment Woodrow believed the meeting was over. But Rob was still in there, slugging away.

“One more thing, if you don't mind, Mr. Woodrow. Bell, Barker and Benjamin. Known otherwise as ThreeBees.”

Woodrow's posture did not alter by a fraction.

“Ads all over town. ”ThreeBees, Busy for Africa.“ ”Buzzing for You, Honey! I Love ThreeBees.“ Headquarters up the road. Big new glass building, looks like a Dalek.”

“What of them?”

“Only we pulled out their company profile last night, didn't we, Les? Quite an amazing outfit, you don't realize. Finger in every African pie but British to the core. Hotels, travel agencies, newspapers, security companies, banks, extractors of gold, coal and copper, importers of cars, boats and trucks—I could go on forever. Plus a fine range of drugs. ”ThreeBees Buzzing for Your Health.“ We spotted that one as we drove here this morning, didn't we, Les?”

“Just back down the road,” Lesley agreed.

“And they're hugger-mugger with Moi's Boys too, from all we hear. Private jets, all the girls you can eat.”

“I assume this is getting us somewhere.”

“Not really. I just wanted to watch your face while I talked about them. I've done it now. Thank you for your patience.”

Lesley was still busy with her bag. For all the interest she had shown in this exchange, she might not have heard it at all.

“People like you should be stopped, Mr. Woodrow,” she mused aloud, with a puzzled shake of her wise head. “You think you're solving the world's problems but actually you're the problem.”

“She means you're a fucking liar,” Rob explained.

This time, Woodrow did not escort them to the door. He remained at his post behind the desk, listening to the fading footsteps of his departing guests, then he called the front desk and asked, in the most casual tone, to be advised when they had cleared the building. On learning they had, he made his way swiftly to Coleridge's private office. Coleridge, he well knew, was away from his desk, conferring with the Kenyan Ministry of External Affairs. Mildren was speaking on the internal telephone, looking unpleasantly relaxed.

“This is urgent,” Woodrow said, in contrast to whatever Mildren thought he was doing.

Seated at Coleridge's empty desk, Woodrow watched Mildren extract a white lozenge from the High Commissioner's personal safe and insert it officiously in the digital phone.

“Who do you want, anyway?” Mildren asked, with the insolence peculiar to lower-class private secretaries to the great.

“Get out,” Woodrow said.

And as soon as he was alone, dialed the direct number of Sir Bernard Pellegrin.

•      •      •

They sat on the veranda, two Service colleagues enjoying an after-dinner nightcap under the relentless glare of intruder lights. Gloria had taken herself to the drawing room.

“There's no good way of saying this, Justin,” Woodrow began. “So I'll say it anyway. The very strong probability is, she was raped. I'm terribly, terribly sorry. For her and for you.”

And Woodrow was sorry, he must be. Sometimes you don't have to feel something to know you feel it. Sometimes your senses are so trampled that another appalling piece of news is just one more tiresome detail to administer.

“This is ahead of the postmortem of course, so it's premature and off the record,” he went on, avoiding Justin's eye. “But they seem to have no doubt.” He felt a need to offer practical consolation. “The police feel it's actually quite thought-clearing—to have a motive at least. It helps them with the broad thrust of the case, even if they can't point a finger yet.”

Justin was sitting to attention, holding his brandy glass in front of him with both hands, as if someone had handed it to him as a prize.

“Only a probability?” he objected at last. “How very strange. How can that be?”

Woodrow had not imagined that, once again, he would be subjected to questioning but in some ghastly way he welcomed it. A devil was driving him.

“Well, obviously they do have to ask themselves whether it could have been consensual. That's routine.”

“Consensual with whom?” Justin inquired, puzzled.

“Well, whoever—whoever they have in mind. We can't do their job for them, can we?”

“No. We can't. Poor you, Sandy. You seem to get all the dirty jobs. And now I am sure we should pay attention to Gloria. How right she was to leave us to ourselves. Sitting outside with the entire insect kingdom of Africa would be more than that fair English skin of hers could bear.” Developing a sudden aversion to Woodrow's proximity, he had stood up and pushed open the French window. “Gloria, my dear, we have been neglecting you.”

Justin Quayle buried his much-murdered wife in a beautiful African cemetery called Langata under a jacaranda tree between her stillborn son Garth and a five-year-old Kikuyu boy who was watched over by a plastercast kneeling angel with a shield declaring he had joined the saints. Behind her lay Horatio John Williams of Dorset, with God, and at her feet Miranda K. Soper, loved forever. But Garth and the little African boy, who was called Gitau Karanja, were her closest companions, and Tessa lay shoulder to shoulder with them, which was what Justin had wanted, and what Gloria, after an appropriate distribution of Justin's largesse, had obtained for him. Throughout the ceremony Justin stood apart from everyone, Tessa's grave to his left and Garth's to his right, and a full two paces forward of Woodrow and Gloria who until then had hovered protectively to either side of him, in part to give him comfort, in part to shield him from the attentions of the press, which, ever mindful of its duty to the public, was relentless in its determination to obtain pictures and copy concerning the cuckolded British diplomat and would-be father whose butchered white wife—thus the bolder tabloids—had borne a baby by her African lover and now lay beside it in a corner of a foreign field-to quote no less than three of them on the same day—that was forever England.

Beside the Woodrows and well clear of them stood Ghita Pearson in a sari, head forward and hands joined before her in the ageless attitude of mourning, and beside Ghita stood the deathly pale Porter Coleridge and his wife Veronica, and to Woodrow's eye it was as if they were lavishing on her the protection they would otherwise have lavished on their absent daughter Rosie.

Langata graveyard stands on a lush plateau of tall grass and red mud and flowering ornamental trees, both sad and joyful, a couple of miles from the town center and just a short step from Kibera, one of Nairobi's larger slums, a vast brown smear of smoking tin houses overhung with a pall of sickly African dust, crammed into the Nairobi river valley without a hand's width between them. The population of Kibera is half a million and rising, and the valley is rich in deposits of sewage, plastic bags, colorful strands of old clothing, banana and orange peel, corncobs, and anything else the city cares to dump in it. Across the road from the graveyard are the dapper offices of the Kenyan Tourist Board and the entrance to the Nairobi Game Park, and somewhere behind them the ramshackle hutments of Wilson Airport, Kenya's oldest.

To both of the Woodrows and many of Tessa's mourners there was something ominous as well as heroic in Justin's solitude as the moment of interment approached. He seemed to be taking leave not just of Tessa but of his career, of Nairobi, of his stillborn son, and of his entire life till now. His perilous proximity to the grave's edge appeared to signal this. There was the inescapable suggestion that a good deal of the Justin they knew, and perhaps all of it, was going with her to the hereafter. Only one living person seemed to merit his attention, Woodrow noticed, and that was not the priest, it was not the sentinel figure of Ghita Pearson, it was not the reticent and white-faced Porter Coleridge his Head of Mission, nor the journalists who jockeyed with each other for a better shot, a better view, nor the longjawed English wives locked in empathetic grief for their departed sister whose fate could so easily have been their own, not the dozen overweight Kenyan policemen who tugged at their leather belts.

It was Kioko. It was the boy who had been sitting on the floor of Tessa's ward in the Uhuru Hospital, watching his sister die; who had walked ten hours from his village to be with her at the end, and had walked ten more to be with Tessa today. Justin and Kioko saw each other at the same time and, having done so, held each other's gaze in a complicitous exchange. Kioko was the youngest person present, Woodrow noticed. In response to tribal tradition, Justin had requested that young people stay away.

White gateposts marked the graveyard's entrance as Tessa's cortege arrived. Giant cacti, red mud tracks and docile sellers of bananas, plantain and ice creams lined the path to her grave. The priest was black and old and grizzled. Woodrow had a recollection of shaking his hand at one of Tessa's parties. But the priest's love of Tessa was effusive, and his belief in the afterlife so fervent, and the din of road and air traffic so persistent—not to mention the proximity of other funerals and the blare of spiritual music from mourners' lorries and the competing orators with bullhorns who harangued the rings of friends and family picnicking on the grass around their loved ones' coffins—that it was not surprising that only a few of the holy man's winged words reached the ear of his audience. And Justin, if he heard them at all, showed no sign of having done so. Dapper as ever in the dark double-breasted suit he had mustered for the occasion, he kept his gaze fixed on the boy Kioko who, like Justin, had sought out his own bit of space apart from everyone, and appeared to have hanged himself in it, for his spindly feet scarcely touched the ground and his arms swung raggedly at his side and his long crooked head was craned in a posture of permanent inquiry.

Tessa's final journey had not been a smooth one, but neither Woodrow nor Gloria would have wished it to be. Each tacitly found it fitting that her last act should contain the element of unpredictability that had characterized her life. The Woodrow household had risen early although there was nothing to rise early for, except that in the middle of the night Gloria realized she had no dark hat. A crack-of-dawn phone call established that Elena had two, but they were both a bit twenties and aviatorlike, did Gloria mind? An official Mercedes was dispatched from her Greek husband's residence, conveying a black hat in a Harrods plastic carrier. Gloria returned it, preferring a black lace head scarf of her mother's: she would wear it like a mantilla. After all, Tessa was half Italian, she explained.