The Constant Gardener (22 page)

“You've gone pale,” Pellegrin said accusingly. “Something wrong, old boy?”

“I'm fine. All the better for seeing you, Bernard.”

“Get some sleep. You're running on empty. And we must do that weekend. Bring a chum. Someone who can play a bit.”

“Arnold Bluhm never hurt a living soul,” Justin said, carefully and clearly, as Pellegrin helped him into his raincoat and gave him back his bag. But whether he said this aloud, or to the thousand voices screaming in his head, he could not be absolutely sure.

It was the house he hated in his memory whenever he was away from it: big and shaggy and overbearingly parental, number four of a leafy Chelsea backwater, with a front garden that stayed as wild as it wanted, however much Justin pampered it when he had a bit of home leave. And the remains of Tessa's tree house stuck like a rotting life raft in the dead oak that she wouldn't let him cut down. And broken balloons of ancient vintage, and shreds of kite harpooned on the dead tree's wiry branches. And a rusted iron gate that, when he shoved it against a slough of rotting leaves, sent the neighbor's wall eyed tomcat slinking into the undergrowth. And a pair of ill-tempered cherry trees that he supposed he should worry about because they had peach curl.

It was the house he had dreaded all day long, and all last week while he was serving out his time in the lower ground, and all through his pounding westward walk through the lonely half dark of a London winter's afternoon, while his mind puzzled its way through the labyrinth of monstrosities in his head, and the Gladstone bag bumped against his leg. It was the house that held the parts of her he had never shared and now he never would.

A keen wind was rattling the awnings of the greengrocer's across the road, sending leaves and late shoppers scurrying along the pavement. But Justin, despite his lightweight suit, had too much inside him to be conscious of the cold. The tiled steps to the front door clanged as he stomped up them. Reaching the top he swung round and took a long stare back, he wasn't sure for what. A dosser lay bundled beneath the NatWest cash machine. An illegally parked man and woman sat arguing in their car. A thin man in a trilby hat and raincoat was leaning into his cell phone. In a civilized country you can never tell. The fan window over the front door was lit from inside. Not wishing to surprise anybody he pressed the bell and heard its familiar rusty sound, like a ship's klaxon, honking on the first-floor landing. Who's home? he wondered, waiting for a footstep. Aziz the Moroccan painter and his boyfriend Raoul. Petronilla, the Nigerian girl in search of God, and her fifty-year-old Guatemalan priest. Tall, chain-smoking Gazon, the cadaverous French doctor, who had worked with Arnold in Algeria and had Arnold's same regretful smile, and Arnold's way of halting in mid-sentence and half closing his eyes in painful memory, and waiting for his head to clear itself of heaven knew what nightmares before taking up the thread again.

Hearing no call or thump of feet, he turned the key and stepped into the hall, expecting smells of African cooking, the din of reggae over the radio and raucous coffee chatter from the kitchen.

“Hullo there!” he called. “It's Justin. Me.”

No answering yell, no surge of music, no kitchen smells or voices. No sounds at all, beyond the shuffle of traffic from the street outside and the echo of his own voice climbing up the stairwell. All he saw instead was Tessa's head, cut at the neck from a newspaper and backed on cardboard, staring at him from a parade of jam jars filled with flowers. And amid the jam jars, a folded sheet of cartridge paper torn, he guessed, from Aziz's drawing book, with handwritten messages of sorrow, love and farewell from Tessa's vanished tenants: Justin, we didn't feel we could stay, dated last Monday.

He refolded the paper and replaced it among the jars. He stood to attention, eyes dead ahead as he blinked away his tears. Leaving the Gladstone on the hall floor, he made his way to the kitchen, using the wall to steady himself. He pulled open the fridge. Empty except for one forgotten bottle of prescription medicine, a woman's name on the label, unfamiliar. Annie somebody. Must be one of Gazon's. He groped his way down the corridor to the dining room and put on the lights.

Her father's hideous pseudo-Tudor dining room. Six scrolled and crested chairs for fellow megalomaniacs to either side of it. An embroidered carver head and tail for the royal couple. Daddy knew it was terribly ugly but he loved it, so I do too, she was telling him. Well, I don't, he was thinking, but God forbid I say so. In their first months together Tessa had talked of nothing but her father and mother, till under Justin's artful guidance she set to work exorcising their ghosts by filling the house with people of her own age, the crazier the merrier: Etonian Trotskyists, drunken Polish prelates and oriental mystics, plus half the freeloaders of the known world. But once she discovered Africa, her aim steadied, and number four became instead a haven for introverted aid workers and activists of every dubious shade. Still scanning the room, Justin's eye settled disapprovingly on a crescent of soot that lay around the marble fireplace, coating the firedogs and fender. Jackdaws, he thought. And let his eye continue drifting round the room until once more it settled on the soot. Then let his mind settle on it too. And stay settled while he argued with himself. Or with Tessa, which was much the same.

Which jackdaws?

When jackdaws?

The message in the hall is dated Monday.

Ma Gates comes on Wednesdays—Ma Gates being Mrs. Dora Gates, Tessa's old nanny, never anything but Ma.

And if Ma Gates is under the weather, her daughter Pauline comes.

And if Pauline can't make it, there's always her tarty sister Debbie.

And it was unthinkable that any one of these women would ignore such a conspicuous patch of soot.

Therefore the jackdaws launched their attack after Wednesday and before this evening.

So if the house emptied on the Monday-see message—and Ma Gates cleaned on Wednesday—why was there a crisp male-sized, heavily profiled footprint, probably a track shoe, in the soot?

A telephone stood on the sideboard, next to an address book. Ma Gates's number was scrawled in red crayon in Tessa's hand on the inside cover. He dialed it and got Pauline, who burst into tears and passed him to her mother.

“I'm very, very sorry, dear,” said Ma Gates, slowly and clearly. “Sorrier than you or I can say, Mr. Justin. Or ever will be able to.”

His interrogation of her began: long and tender as it had to be, with a lot more listening than asking. Yes, Ma Gates had come as usual on the Wednesday, nine till twelve, she'd wanted to … It was a chance to be with Miss Tessa all alone … she'd cleaned the way she'd always cleaned, nothing skimped or forgotten … And she'd had a cry and a pray … And if it was all right by him, she'd like to continue coming as before, please, Wednesdays just like when Miss Tessa was alive, it wasn't the money, it was the memory …

Soot? Certainly not! There'd been no soot on the dining room floor Wednesday or she'd have seen it for sure, and cleared it up before it got trodden in. London soot's so greasy! With those big fireplaces she always had an eye for soot! And no, Mr. Justin, the chimney sweep certainly didn't have a key.

And did Mr. Justin know whether they had found Dr. Arnold yet, because of all the gentlemen who ever used the house, Dr. Arnold was the one she cared about the most, whatever you read in the papers, they only make it up …

“You're very kind, Mrs. Gates.”

Switching on the chandelier in the drawing room, he allowed himself a glimpse of the things that were forever Tessa: the riding rosettes from her childhood; Tessa after her First Communion; their wedding portrait on the steps of the tiny church of Sant' Antonio, Elba. But the fireplace was what he was thinking about hardest. The hearth was of slate, the grate a low Victorian affair, brass and steel mixed, with brass claws to hold the fire irons. Hearth and grate were coated in soot. The same soot lay in black lines along the steel shafts of the tongs and poker.

So here's a fine mystery of nature then, he told Tessa: two unrelated colonies of jackdaws elect at the identical moment to hurl soot down two unconnected chimneys. What do we make of that? You a lawyer and me a protected species?

But in the drawing room, no footprint. Whoever searched the dining room fireplace had obligingly left a footprint. Whoever searched the drawing room fireplace—whether the same man or a different one—had not.

Yet why should anyone search a fireplace, let alone two? True, ancient fireplaces traditionally provide hiding places for love letters, wills, shameful diaries and bags of gold sovereigns. True also, according to legend, that chimneys were inhabited by spirits. True that the wind used old chimneys to tell stories, many of them secret. And a cold wind was blowing this evening, snapping at shutters and rattling locks. But why search these fireplaces? Our fireplaces? Why number four? Unless of course the chimneys were part of a more general search of the entire house-sideshows, as it were, to the main thrust.

At the half landing, he paused to study Tessa's medicine chest, an old Italian spice cabinet of no merit screwed into the angle of the stairwell and marked with a green cross hand-stenciled by herself. Not for nothing was she a doctor's daughter. The door of the cabinet was ajar. He poked it open the rest of the way.

Pillaged. Tins of plaster, tipped open, lint and packets of boracic powder strewn about in an angry mess. He was closing the door on it as the landing telephone shrieked beside his head.

It's for you, he told Tessa. I'll have to say you're dead. It's for me, he told her. I'll have to listen to condolences. It's the Madeira Cake asking whether I've got everything I need to keep me safe and quiet in my trauma. It's somebody who had to wait until the line was clear after my five-mile conversation with Ma Gates.

He lifted the receiver and heard a busy woman. Tinny voices echoed behind her, footsteps chimed. A busy woman in a busy place with a stone floor. A humorously spoken, busy cockney woman with a voice like a barrow girl's.

“Now then! Can I speak to a Mr. Justin Quayle, please, if he's at home?” Delivered with ceremony, as if she were about to perform a card trick. “He's in, darling, I can hear”—aside.

“This is Quayle.”

“Do you want to talk to him yourself, darling?” Darling didn't. “Only it's Jeffrey's the florists here, Mr. Quayle, in the King's Road. We've got a lovely floral arrangement of I-won't-say-whats to be delivered to you personally without fail this evening if you're in, as soon as possible, and I'm not to say who from—right, darling?” It evidently was. “So how would it be if I send the boy round now is the question, Mr. Quayle. Two minutes he'll be there, won't you, Kevin? One, if you give him a nice drink.”

Then send him, said Justin distractedly.

•      •      •

He was facing the door to Arnold's room, so named because when Arnold stayed in the house he never failed to leave behind a wistful claim to permanence —a pair of shoes, an electric razor, an alarm clock, a pile of papers on the abysmal failure of medical aid to the Third World. The sight of Arnold's camel-hair cardigan sprawled over the back of his chair nevertheless stopped Justin short, and he was close to calling Arnold's name as he advanced on the desk.

Ransacked.

Drawers prized open, papers and stationery yanked out and slung carelessly back.

The klaxon was honking. He raced downstairs, steadying himself as he reached the front door. Kevin the flower boy was red-cheeked and small, a Dickensian flower boy shiny from the winter cold. The irises and lilies across his arms were as big as he was. A white envelope was tied to the wire that bound the stems. Rummaging through a fistful of Kenyan shillings, Justin found two English pounds, gave them to the boy and closed the door on him. He opened the envelope and took out a white card wrapped in thick paper so that the writing wouldn't show through the envelope. The message was electronically printed.

Justin. Leave your house at seven-thirty tonight. Bring a briefcase stuffed with newspaper. Walk to the Cineflex theater in the King's Road. Buy a ticket for screen two and watch the film till nine o'clock. Leave with your briefcase by the side (western) exit. Look for a parked blue minibus close to the exit. You will recognize the driver. Burn this.

No signature.

He examined the envelope, sniffed it, sniffed the card, smelled nothing, didn't know what he was expecting to smell. He took the card and envelope to the kitchen, set a match to them and, in the best traditions of the Foreign Service security course, put them in the sink to burn. When they had burned, he broke the ash and coaxed the fragments into the disposal unit, which he ran for longer than necessary. He started back up the stairs, two at a time till he reached the top of the house. It was not haste that drove him but determination: Don't think, act. A locked attic door faced him. He held a key ready. His expression was resolute but apprehensive. He was a desperate man steeling himself for the leap. He flung back the door and strode into the tiny hall. It led to a run of attic rooms set amid jackdawinfested chimney pots and secret bits of flat roof for growing potted plants and making love. He barged forward, eyes wrinkled into slits to resist the glare of memory. Not an object, picture, chair or corner but Tessa owned it, dwelled in it, spoke from it. Her father's pompous desk, made over to him on her wedding day, stood in its familiar alcove. He threw back the top. What did I tell you? Pillaged. He yanked open her clothes cupboard and saw her winter coats and frocks, torn from their hangers and left to die with their pockets inside out. Honestly, darling, you could have hung them up. You know perfectly well that I did, and someone pulled them down. Delving beneath them he unearthed Tessa's old music case, the nearest he could get to a briefcase.

“Let's do this together,” he told her, aloud now.

About to leave, he paused to spy on her through the open bedroom door. She had come out of the bathroom and was standing naked in front of the mirror, head to one side as she combed out her wet hair. One bare foot was turned ballet-style toward him, which was what it always seemed to do when she was naked. One hand was lifted to her head. Watching her, he felt the same inexpressible estrangement from her that he had felt when she was alive. You're too perfect, too young, he told her. I should have left you in the wild. Bullshit, she replied sweetly, and he felt much better.

Descending to the ground-floor kitchen he found a heap of old copies of the Kenyan Standard, Africa Confidential, the Spectator and Private Eye. He stuffed them into her music case, returned to the hall, took a last look at her makeshift shrine and the Gladstone. I'm leaving it where they can find it in case they're not satisfied with their work this morning at the Office, he explained to her, and stepped into the freezing dark. The walk to the cinema took him ten minutes. Screen two was three-quarters empty. He paid no attention to the film. Twice he had to slink to the men's lavatory, music case in hand, to consult his wristwatch unobserved. At five to nine he left by the western exit to find himself in a bitterly cold side street. A parked blue minibus stared at him, and he had an absurd moment of imagining it was the green safari truck from Marsabit. Its headlights winked. An angular figure in a seaman's cap lounged in the driver's seat.

“Back door,” Rob ordered.

Justin walked to the rear of the bus and saw the door already open, and Lesley's arm outstretched to receive the music case. Landing on a wooden seat in pitch blackness, he was in Muthaiga again, on the slatted bench of the Volkswagen van, with Livingstone at the wheel and Woodrow sitting opposite him giving orders.

“We're following you, Justin,” Lesley explained. Her voice in the darkness was urgent, yet mysteriously despondent. It was as if she too had suffered a great loss. “The surveillance team followed you to the cinema and we're part of it. Now we're covering the side exit in case you come out that way. There's always a possibility that the quarry gets bored and leaves early. You just did. In five minutes, that's what we'll report to mission control. Which way are you heading?”

“East.”

“So you'll hail a cab and go east. We'll report the number of your cab. We won't follow you because you'd recognize us. There's a second surveillance car waiting for you at the front of the cinema and a spare lying up in the King's Road for contingencies. If you decide to walk or take a tube, they'll drop a couple of pedestrians behind you. If you catch a bus, they'll be grateful because there's nothing easier than getting stuck behind a London bus. If you go into a phone box and make a call, they'll listen to it. They have a Home Office warrant and it works wherever you happen to phone from.”

“Why?” Justin asked.

His eyes were growing accustomed to the light. Rob had draped his long body over the back of the driver's seat, making himself part of the conversation. His manner was as abject as Lesley's but more hostile.

“Because you crapped on us,” he said.

Lesley was dragging newspaper out of Tessa's music case and stuffing it into a plastic carrier bag. A wad of large envelopes lay at her feet, perhaps a dozen. She began loading them into the music case.

“I don't understand,” Justin said.

“Well, try,” Rob advised. “We're under sealed orders, right? We tell Mr. Gridley what you do. Someone up there says why you do it, but not to us. We're the help.”

“Who searched my house?”

“In Nairobi or Chelsea?” Rob countered sardonically.

“Chelsea.”

“Not ours to inquire. The team was stood down for four hours while whoever did it did it. That's all we know. Gridley put one uniformed copper on the doorstep in case anyone tried to wander in off the street. If they did, his job was to tell them that our officers were investigating a burglary of the premises, so bugger off. If he was a copper at all, which I doubt,” Rob added, snapping his mouth shut.

“Rob and me are off the case,” Lesley said. “Gridley would assign us to traffic duties in the Orkney Islands if he could, except he daren't.”

“We're off everything,” Rob put in. “We're unpersons. Thanks to you.”

“He wants us where he can see us,” Lesley said.

“Inside the tent, pissing out,” said Rob.

“He's sent two new officers to Nairobi to help and advise the local police in the search for Bluhm and that's all,” said Lesley. “No looking under stones, no deviations. Period.”

“No Marsabit Two, no more grief about dying nigger women and phantom doctors,” Rob said. “Gridley's own lovely words. And our replacements aren't allowed to talk to us in case they catch our disease. They're a couple of nobrains with a year to go, same as Gridley.”

“It's a top security situation and you're part of it,” Lesley said, closing the clasp on the music case but hugging it to her lap. “What part is anybody's guess. Gridley wants your life story. Who you meet, where, who comes to your house, who you phone, what you eat, who with. Every day. You're a material player in a top secret operation is all we're allowed to know. We're to do what we're told and mind our own business.”

“We'd not been back in the Yard ten minutes before he was yelling for all notebooks, tapes and exhibits on his desk now,” said Rob. “So we gave them to him. The original set, complete and uncut. After we'd made copies, naturally.”

“The glorious House of ThreeBees is never to be mentioned again and that's an order,” Lesley said. “Not their products, their operations or their staff. Nothing's allowed to rock the boat. Amen.”

“What boat?”

“Lots of boats,” Rob cut in. “Take your pick. Curtiss is untouchable. He's halfway to brokering a bumper British arms deal with the Somalis. The embargo's a nuisance but he's found ways of getting round it. He's front-runner in the race to provide a stateof-the-art East African telecom system using British high tech.”

“And I'm standing in the way of all that?”

“You're in the way, period,” Rob replied venomously. “If we'd been able to get past you, we'd have had them cold. Now we're on the pavement, back at day one of our careers.”

“They think you know whatever Tessa knew,” Lesley explained. “It could be bad for your health.”

“They?”

But Rob's anger was not to be contained. “It was a setup from day one and you were part of it. The Blue Boys laughed at us, so did the bastards in ThreeBees. Your friend and colleague Mr. Woodrow lied to us all ways up. So did you. You were the only chance we had and you kicked us in the teeth.”

“We've got one question for you, Justin,” Lesley came in, scarcely less bitterly. “You owe us one straight answer. Have you got somewhere to go? A safe place you can sit and read? Abroad is best.”

Justin prevaricated. “What happens when I go home to Chelsea and put out my bedroom light? Do you people stay outside my house?”

“The team sees you home, it sees you to bed. The watchers grab a few hours' sleep, the listeners stay tuned to your telephone. The watchers return bright and early next morning to get you up. Your best time is between one and four a.m.”

“Then I have somewhere I can go,” Justin said after a moment's thought.

“Fantastic,” said Rob. “We haven't.”

“If it's abroad, use land and sea,” Lesley said. “Once you're there, break the chain. Take country buses, local trains. Dress plain, shave every day, don't look at people. Don't hire cars, don't fly anywhere from anywhere, even inland. People say you're rich.”

“I am.”

“Then get yourself a lot of cash. Don't use credit cards or traveler's checks, don't touch a cell phone. Don't make a collect call or speak your name on the open line or the computers will kick in. Rob here's made you up a passport and a U.k. press card from the Telegraph. He nearly couldn't get your photo till he rang the FO and said we needed one for records. Rob's got friends in places where we're not supposed to have places, right, Rob?” No answer. “They're not perfect because Rob's friends didn't have the time, did they, Rob? So don't use them coming in and out of England. Is that a deal?”

“Yes,” said Justin.

“You're Peter Paul Atkinson, newspaper reporter. And never, whatever you do, carry two passports at the same time.”