The Constant Gardener (20 page)

“Only to the police.”

She let this go. “And you won't. Obviously. Don't even say ”no comment.“ In your state, you're perfectly entitled to put the phone down on them.”

“I'm sure that won't be hard.”

Prod. Pause. Study screen again. Study Justin. Return eyes to screen. “And you've no papers or materials that belong to us? That are —how shall I say it?—our intellectual property? You've been asked, but I'm to ask you again in case something has come up, or comes up in the future. Has anything come up?”

“Of Tessa's?”

“I'm referring to her extramarital activities.” She took her time before defining what these might be. And while she did so, it dawned on Justin, a little late perhaps, that Tessa was some kind of monstrous insult to her, a disgrace to their schools and class and sex and country and the Service she had defiled; and that by extension Justin was the Trojan horse who had smuggled her into the citadel. “I'm thinking of any research papers she may have acquired, legitimately or otherwise, in the course of her investigations or whatever she called them,” she added with frank distaste.

“I don't even know what I'm supposed to be looking for,” Justin complained.

“Neither do we. And really it's very hard for us here to understand how she ever got into this position in the first place.” Suddenly the anger that had been simmering was forcing its way out of her. She hadn't meant it to, he was sure; she had gone to great lengths to contain it. But it had evidently slipped from her control. “It's really quite extraordinary, looking at what's since come to light, that Tessa was ever allowed to become that person. Porter has been an excellent Head of Mission in his way but I can't help feeling he must share a good deal of the blame for this.”

“For what exactly?”

Her dead stop took him by surprise. It was as if she had hit the buffers. She came to a halt, her eyes firmly on her screen. She held the crochet needle at the ready, but made no move with it. She laid it softly on the table as if grounding her rifle at a military funeral.

“Yes, well, Porter,” she conceded. But he had made no point for her to concede.

“What's happened to him?” Justin asked.

“I think it's absolutely marvelous the way the two of them sacrificed everything for that poor child.”

“I do too. But what have they sacrificed now?”

She seemed to share his bewilderment. To need him as an ally, if only while she was denigrating Porter Coleridge. “Terribly, terribly hard, in this job, Justin, to know where to put one's foot down. One wants to treat people as individuals, one longs to be able to fit each person's circumstances into the general picture.” But if Justin thought she was tempering her assault on Porter, he was dead wrong. She was simply reloading. “But Porter—we have to face it—was on the spot and we weren't. We can't act if we're kept in the dark. It's no good asking us to pick up the pieces ex post facto if we haven't been informed a priori. Is it?”

“I suppose not.”

“And if Porter was too starry-eyed, too tied up with his awful family problems—nobody disputes that—to see what was developing under his nose—the Bluhm thing and so on, I'm sorry-he had an absolutely first-class lieutenant in Sandy, with a very safe pair of hands, at his elbow, any-time, to spell it out for him in words a foot high. Which Sandy did. Ad nauseam, one gathers. But to no effect. So I mean it's perfectly clear that the child—obviously-the poor girl—Rosie or whatever its name is —claims all their out-of-hours attention. Which isn't necessarily what one appoints a High Commissioner for. Is it?”

Justin made a meek face, indicating his sympathy with her dilemma.

“I'm not prying, Justin. I'm asking you. How is it possible—how was it possible—forget Porter for a moment—for your wife to engage in a range of activities of which, by your account, you knew nothing? All right. She was a modern woman. Jolly good luck to her. She led her life, she had her relationships.” Pointed silence. “I'm not suggesting you should have restrained her, that would be sexist. I'm asking you how, in reality, you remained totally ignorant of her activities—her inquiries—her—how shall I put it? I'd like to say meddling, actually.”

“We had an arrangement,” Justin said.

“Of course you did. Equal and parallel lives. But in the same house, Justin! Are you really saying she told you nothing, showed you nothing, shared nothing? I find that awfully hard to believe.”

“I do too,” Justin agreed. “But I'm afraid it's what happens when you put your head in the sand.”

Prod. “So now did you share her computer?”

“Did I what?”

“The question is perfectly clear. Did you share, or otherwise have access to, Tessa's laptop computer? You may not know it, but she addressed some very strong documents to the Office, among others. Raising grave allegations about certain people. Accusing them of awful things. Making trouble of a potentially very damaging kind.”

“Potentially damaging to whom, actually, Alison?” Justin asked, delicately fishing for any free gifts of information she might care to bestow.

“It's not a matter of whom, Justin,” she replied severely. “It's whether you have Tessa's laptop computer in your possession and, if not, where is it, physically at this moment in time and what does it contain?”

“We never shared it, is the answer to your first question. It was hers and hers alone. I wouldn't even know how to get into it.”

“Never mind getting into it. You have it in your possession, that's the main thing. Scotland Yard asked you for it, but you, very wisely and loyally, concluded that it was better in the Office's hands than theirs. We're grateful for that. It's been noted.”

It was a statement, it was a binary question. Tick box A for yes I have it, box B for no I haven't. It was an order and a challenge. And judging by her crystal stare, it was a threat.

“And disks, obviously,” she added while she waited. “She was an efficient woman, which makes it all so odd, a lawyer. She's sure to have made copies of whatever was important to her. In the circumstances these disks also constitute a breach of security and we'd like them as well, please.”

“There aren't any disks. Weren't.”

“Of course there were. How can she have run a computer without keeping disks?”

“I looked high and low. There weren't any.”

“How very bizarre.”

“Yes, isn't it?”

“So I think the best thing you can do, Justin, on reflection, is bring everything you've got into the Office as soon as you've unpacked it, and let us handle it from then on. To spare you the pain and the responsibility. Yes? We can do a deal. Anything that isn't relevant to our concerns belongs to you exclusively. We'll print it out, and give it to you, and nobody here will read it or evaluate it or commit it to memory in any way. Shall we send somebody with you now? Would that help? Yes?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Not sure you want a second person? You should be. A sympathetic colleague of your own grade? Someone you can trust entirely? Now are you sure?”

“It was Tessa's, you see. She bought it, she used it.”

“So?”

“So I'm not sure you should be asking me to do that. Give you her property to be plundered just because she's dead.” Feeling sleepy, he closed his eyes a moment, then shook his head to wake himself. “Anyway, it's not an issue, is it?”

“Why not, pray?”

“Because I haven't got it.” He stood up, taking himself by surprise, but he needed a stretch and some fresh air. “The Kenyan police probably stole it. They steal most things. Thank you, Alison. You've been very kind.”

Recovering the Gladstone from the head janitor took a little longer than was natural.

“Sorry to be premature,” Justin said while he waited.

“You're not premature at all, sir,” the head janitor retorted, and flushed.

•      •      •

“Justin, my dear fellow!”

Justin had started to give his name to the club porter at the door, but Pellegrin was ahead of him, pounding down the steps to claim him, smiling his decent chap's smile and calling out, “He's mine, Jimmy, shove his bag in your glory hole and put him down to me,” before grasping Justin's hand and flinging his other arm round Justin's shoulders in a powerful un-English gesture of friendship and commiseration.

“You're up to this, are you?” he asked confidingly, first making sure no one was within earshot. “We can take a walk in the park if you'd rather. Or do it another time. Just say.”

“I'm fine, Bernard. Really.”

“The Beast of Landsbury didn't wear you out?”

“Not a bit.”

“I've booked us in the dining room. There's a bar lunch, but it's eat off your crotch and a lot of ex-Office wrinklies moaning about Suez. Need a pee?”

The dining room was a risen catafalque with painted cherubs posturing in a ceiling of blue sky. Pellegrin's chosen place of worship was a corner sheltered by a polished granite pillar and a sad dracaena palm. Round them sat the timeless Whitehall brethren in chemical gray suits and school haircuts. This was my world, Justin explained to her. When I married you, I was still one of them.

“Let's get rid of the hard work first,” Pellegrin proposed masterfully, when a West Indian waiter in a mauve dinner jacket had handed them menus shaped like Ping-Pong bats. And that was tactful of Pellegrin and typical of his decent chap's image, because by studying menus they were able to settle to each other and avoid eye contact. “Flight bearable?”

“Very, thank you. They upgraded me.”

“Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous girl, Justin,” Pellegrin murmured, over the parapet of his Ping-Pong bat. “Enough said.”

“Thank you, Bernard.”

“Great spirit, great guts. Bugger the rest. Meat or fish?—not a Monday—what have you been eating out there?”

Justin had known Bernard Pellegrin in snatches for most of his career. He had followed Bernard in Ottawa and they had briefly coincided in Beirut. In London they had attended a hostage survival course together and shared such gems as how to establish that you are being pursued by a group of armed thugs not afraid to die; how to preserve your dignity when they blindfold you and bind you hand and foot with sticky plaster and sling you into the boot of their Mercedes; and the best way to jump out of an upper-story window if you can't use the stairs but presumably have your feet free.

“All journalists are shits,” Pellegrin declared confidently, still from inside his menu. “Know what I'm going to do one day? Doorstep the buggers. Do what they did to you, but do it back to 'em. Rent a mob, picket the editor of the Grauniad and the Screws of the World while they're having it away with their floozies. Photograph their kids going to school. Ask their wives what their old men are like in bed. Show the shits what it feels like to be at the receiving end. Did you want to take a machine gun to the lot of 'em?”

“Not really.”

“Me too. Illiterate bunch of hypocrites. Herring fillet's all right. Smoked eel makes me fart. Sole meuniere's good if you like sole. If you don't, have it grilled.” He was writing on a printed pad. It had SIR BERNARD P printed in electronic capitals at the top, and the food options listed on the left side, and boxes to tick on the right, and space for the member's signature at the bottom.

“A sole would be fine.”

Pellegrin doesn't listen, Justin remembered. It's what got him his reputation as a negotiator.

“Grilled?”

“Meuniere.”

“Landsbury in form?”

“Fighting fit.”

“She tell you she was a Madeira cake?”

“I'm afraid she did.”

“She wants to watch that one. She talk to you about your future?”

“I'm in trauma and on indefinite sick leave.”

“Shrimps do you?”

“I think I'd prefer the avocado, thank you,” Justin said, and watched Pellegrin tick shrimp cocktail twice.

“The Foreign Office formally disapproves of drinking at lunchtime these days, you'll be relieved to hear,” Pellegrin said, surprising Justin with a full-beam smile. Then, in case the first application hadn't taken, a second one. And Justin remembered that the smiles were always the same: the same length, the same duration, the same degree of spontaneous warmth. “However, you're a compassionate case and it's my painful duty to keep you company. They do a passable sub-Meursault. You good for your half?” His silver propelling pencil ticked the appropriate box. “You're cleared, by the by. Off the hook. Sprung. Congratulations.” He tore off the chit and weighed it down with the saltcellar to prevent it from blowing away.

“Cleared of what?”

“Murder, what else? You didn't kill Tessa or her driver, you didn't hire contract killers in a den of vice, and you haven't got Bluhm swinging by his balls in your attic. You can leave the courtroom without a stain on your escutcheon. Courtesy of the coppers.” The order form had disappeared from underneath the saltcellar. The waiter must have taken it, but Justin in his out-of-body state had failed to spot the maneuver. “What sort of gardening you get up to out there by the by? Promised Celly I'd ask you.” Celly short for Celine, Pellegrin's terrifying wife. “Exotics? Succulents? Not my scene, I'm afraid.”

“Pretty well everything really,” Justin heard himself say. “The Kenyan climate is extremely benign. I didn't know there was a stain on my escutcheon, Bernard. There was a theory, I suppose. But it was only a remote hypothesis.”

“Had all sorts of theories, poor darlings. Theories far above their station, frankly. You must come down to Dorchester sometime. Talk to Celly about it. Do a weekend. Play tennis?”

“I'm afraid I don't.”

They had all sorts of theories, he was surreptitiously repeating to himself. Poor darlings. Pellegrin speaks about Rob and Lesley the way Landsbury spoke about Porter Coleridge. That turd Tom Somebody was about to get Belgrade, Pellegrin was saying, largely because the Secretary of State couldn't stand the sight of his beastly face in London, and who could? Dick Somebody Else was getting his K in the next Honors, then with any luck he'd be kicked upstairs to Treasury—God help the national economy, joke—but of course old Dick's been kissing New Labor arse for the last five years. Otherwise, it was business as usual. The Office continued to fill up with the same redbrick achievers from Croydon with offcolor accents and Fair Isle pullovers that Justin would remember from his pre-Africa days; in ten years' time there wouldn't be One of Us left. The waiter brought two shrimp cocktails. Justin watched their arrival in slow motion.