The Constant Gardener (23 page)

“Why are you doing this?” Justin asked.

“What's it to you?” Rob countered furiously from the darkness. “We had a job to do, that's all. We didn't like losing it. So we've given it to you to fuck up. When they throw us out, maybe you'll let us clean your Rolls-Royce now and then.”

“Maybe we're doing it for Tessa,” Lesley said, dumping the music case in his arms. “On your way, Justin. You didn't trust us. Maybe you were right. But if you had, we might have got there. Wherever there is.” She reached for the door handle. “Look after yourself. They kill. But you've noticed that.”

He started down the street and heard Rob speaking into his microphone. Candy is emerging from the cinema. Repeat, Candy is emerging with her handbag. The minibus door slammed shut behind him. Closure, he thought. He walked a distance. Candy is hailing a cab, and she's a boy.

•      •      •

Justin stood at the long sash window of Ham's office, listening to the ten o'clock chimes above the night growl of the city. He was looking down into the street but standing back a little, at a point where it was easy enough to see, but less easy to be seen. A pallid reading light was burning on Ham's desk. Ham reclined in a corner, in a wing chair worn old by generations of unsatisfied clients. Outside, an icy mist had come up from the river, frosting the railings outside St. Etheldreda's tiny chapel, scene of Tessa's many unresolved arguments with her Maker. A lighted green notice board advised passersby that the chapel had been restored to the Ancient Faith by the Rosminian Fathers. Confessions, Benedictions and Weddings by Appointment. A trickle of late worshipers passed up and down the crypt steps. None was Tessa. On the floor of the office, heaped onto Ham's plastic tray, lay the former contents of the Gladstone. On the desk lay Tessa's music case and beside it, in files marked with his firm's name, Ham's diligent assembly of the printouts, faxes, photocopies, notes of phone conversations, postcards and letters that he had accumulated in the course of his correspondence with Tessa over the last year.

“Bit of a snafu, I'm afraid,” he confessed awkwardly. “Can't find her last lot of e-mails.”

“Can't find them?”

“Or anybody else's, for that matter. Computer's got a bug in the works. Bloody thing's gobbled up the mailbox and half the hard drive. Engineer's still working on it. When he gets it back, I'll let you have it.”

They had talked Tessa, then Meg, then cricket, where Ham's large heart was also invested. Justin was not a cricket fan but he did his best to sound enthusiastic. A flyblown travel poster of Florence lurked in the twilight.

“Do you still have that tame courier service back and forth to Turin every week, Ham?” Justin asked.

“Absolutely, old boy. Been taken over, of course. Who hasn't? Same people, just a bigger cock-up.”

“And you still use those nice leather hatboxes with the firm's name on them that I saw in your safe this morning?”

“Last bloody thing to go if I have anything to do with it.”

Justin squinted downward into the dimly lighted street. They're still there: one large woman in a bulky overcoat and one emaciated man with a curly trilby and bandy legs like a dismounted jockey's, and a skiing jacket with the collar rolled to his nose. They had been staring at St. Etheldreda's notice board for the last ten minutes, when anything it had to tell them on an ice-cold February night could be committed to memory in ten seconds. Sometimes, in a civilized society, you know after all.

“Tell me, Ham.”

“Anything you like, old boy.”

“Did Tessa have loose cash sitting around in Italy?”

“Pots. Want to see the statements?”

“Not very much. Is it mine now?”

“Always was. Joint accounts, remember? What's mine is his. Tried to talk her out of it. Told me to get lost. Typical.”

“Then your chap in Turin could send me some, couldn't he? To this or that bank. Wherever I was abroad, for instance.”

“No problem.”

“Or to anyone I named, really. As long as they produced their passport.”

“Your lolly, old boy. Do what you want with it. Enjoy it, that's the main thing.”

The dismounted jockey had turned his back to the notice board and was affecting to study the stars. The bulky overcoat was looking at her watch. Justin again remembered his tiresome instructor on the security course. Watchers are actors. The hardest thing for them to do is nothing.

“There's a chum of mine, Ham. I never talked to you about him. Peter Paul Atkinson. He has my absolute confidence.”

“Lawyer?”

“Of course not. I've got you. He's a journalist with the Daily Telegraph. Old friend from my undergraduate days. I want him to have complete power of attorney over my affairs. If you or your people in Turin should ever receive instructions from him, I'd like you to treat them in exactly the same way as if they came from me.”

Ham hawed and rubbed the end of his nose. “Can't be done just like that, old boy. Can't just wave a bloody wand. Have to have his signature and stuff. Formal authorization from you. Witnessed, probably.”

Justin crossed the room to where Ham was sitting, and gave him the Atkinson passport to look at.

“Maybe you could copy down the details from that,” he suggested.

Ham turned first to the photograph at the back and, without any discernible change in his expression at first, compared it with Justin's features. He took a second look and read the personal details. He flipped slowly through the much-stamped pages.

“Done a good bit of traveling, your chum,” he remarked phlegmatically.

“And will be doing a good deal more, I suspect.”

“I'll need a signature. Can't move without a signature.”

“Give me a moment and you shall have one.”

Ham got up and, handing the passport back to Justin, walked deliberately to his desk. He opened a drawer and extracted a couple of official-looking forms and some blank paper. Justin set the passport flat under the reading lamp and, with Ham peering officiously over his shoulder, made a few practice passes before signing over his affairs to one Peter Paul Atkinson, care of Messrs. Hammond Manzini of London and Turin.

“I'll have it notarized,” said Ham. “By me.”

“There's one more thing, if you don't mind.”

“Christ.”

“I'll need to write to you.”

“Anytime, old boy. Delighted to keep in touch.”

“But not here. Not in England at all. And not to your office in Turin either, if you don't mind. I seem to remember you have a bevy of Italian aunts. Might one of them receive mail for you and hang on to it safely till the next time you dropped by?”

“Got one old dragon lives in Milan,” said Ham with a shudder.

“An old dragon in Milan is just what we need. Perhaps you'd give me her address.”

•      •      •

It was midnight in Chelsea. Dressed in a blazer and gray flannels, Justin the dutiful desk officer sat at the hideous dining table under an Arthurian chandelier, writing once more. In fountain pen, on number four stationery. He had torn up several drafts before he was satisfied, but his style and handwriting remained unfamiliar to him.

Dear Alison,

I was grateful for your considerate suggestions at our meeting this morning. The Office has always shown its human face at critical moments, and today was no exception. I have given due thought to what you propose, and spoken at length with Tessa's lawyers. It appears that her affairs have been much neglected in recent months, and my immediate attention is needed. There are matters of domicile and taxation to resolve, not to mention the disposal of properties here and abroad. I have therefore decided that I must address these business matters first, and I suspect I may welcome the task.

I hope therefore that you will bear with me for a week or two before I respond to your proposals. As to sick leave, I do not feel I should trespass unnecessarily upon the Office's goodwill. I have taken no leave this year, and I believe I am owed five weeks' disembarkation leave in addition to my normal annual entitlement. I would prefer to claim what is due to me before asking your indulgence. My renewed thanks.

A hypocritical, dishonest placebo, he decided, with satisfaction. Justin the incurably civil servant fusses about whether it is proper for him to take sick leave while winding up his murdered wife's affairs. He went back to the hall and took another look at the Gladstone lying on the floor beneath the marble-topped side table. One padlock forced and no longer functional. The other padlock missing. The contents replaced at random. You're so bad, he thought in contempt. Then he thought: unless you're trying to scare me, in which case you're rather good. He checked his jacket pockets. My passport, genuine, to be used when leaving or entering Britain. Money. No credit cards. With an air of firm purpose, he set to work adjusting the house lights in the pattern that best suggested sleep.

The mountain stood black against the darkening sky, and the sky was a mess of racing cloud, perverse island winds and February rain. The snake road was strewn with pebbles and red mud from the sodden hillside. Sometimes it became a tunnel of overhanging pine branches and sometimes it was a precipice with a free fall to the steaming Mediterranean a thousand feet below. He would make a turn and for no reason the sea would rise in a wall in front of him, only to fall back into the abyss as he made another. But no matter how many times he turned, the rain came straight at him, and when it struck the windscreen he felt the jeep wince under him like an old horse no longer fit for heavy pulling. And all the time the ancient hill fort of Monte Capanne watched him, now from high above, now squatting at his right shoulder on some unexpected ridge, drawing him forward, fooling him like a false light.

“Where the hell is it? Somewhere off to the left, I swear,” he complained aloud, partly to himself and partly to Tessa. Reaching a crest, he pulled irritably into the side of the road and put his fingertips to his brow while he took a mental bearing. He was acquiring the exaggerated gestures of solitude. Below him lay the lights of Portoferraio. Ahead of him, across the sea, Piombino twinkled on the mainland. To left and right, a timber track cut a gully into the forest. This is where your murderers lay up in their green safari truck while they waited to kill you, he explained to her in his mind. This is where they smoked their beastly Sportsmans and drank their bottles of Whitecap and waited for you and Arnold to drive by. He had shaved and brushed his hair and put on a clean denim shirt. His face felt hot and there was a pulsing in his temples. He plumped for left. The jeep jogged over an unruly mat of twigs and pine needles. The trees parted, the sky lightened and it was nearly day again. Below him at the foot of a clearing lay a cluster of old farmhouses. I'll never sell them, I'll never rent them out, you told me, the first time you brought me here. I'll give them to people who matter, then later we'll come and die here.

Parking the jeep, Justin tramped through wet grass toward the nearest cottage. It was neat and low with freshly limed walls and old pink roof tiles. A light burned in the lower windows. He hammered on the door. A sedate plume of wood smoke, sheltered by the surrounding forest, rose vertically from the chimney into the evening light, only to be swept away as the wind seized it. Ragged blackbirds wheeled and argued. The door opened and a peasant woman in a garish head scarf let out a cry of pain, lowered her head and whispered something in a language he did not expect to understand. Her head still lowered, body sideways to him, she took his hand in both of hers and pressed it against each cheek in turn, before kissing it devoutly on the thumb.

“Where's Guido?” he asked in Italian as he followed her into the house.

She opened an inner door and showed him. Guido was seated at a long table under a wooden cross, a crooked, breathless old man of twelve, white-faced, bone thin with haunted eyes. His emaciated hands rested on the table and there was nothing in them, so that it was hard to think what he could have been doing before Justin walked in on him, alone in a low dark room with beams along the ceiling, not reading or playing or looking at anything. With his long head craned to one side and his mouth open, Guido watched Justin enter, then stood up and, using the table to help him, toppled toward Justin and made a crablike lunge to embrace him. But his aim was short and his arms flopped back to his sides as Justin caught him and held him steady.

“He wants to die like his father and the signora,” his mother complained. “”All the good people are in heaven,“ he tells me. ”All the bad people stay behind.“ Am I a bad person, Signor Justin? Are you a bad person? Did the signora bring us from Albania, buy him his treatment in Milan, put us in this house, just so that we should die of grief for her?” Guido hid his hollowed face in his hands. “First he faints, then he goes to bed and sleeps. He doesn't eat, doesn't take his medicine. Refuses school. This morning as soon as he comes out to wash himself I lock his bedroom door and hide the key.”

“And it's good medicine,” said Justin quietly, his eyes on Guido.

Shaking her head she took herself to the kitchen, clanked saucepans, put on a kettle. Justin led Guido back to the table and sat with him.

“Are you listening to me, Guido?” he asked in Italian.

Guido closed his eyes.

“Everything stays exactly as it was,” Justin said firmly. “Your school fees, the doctor, the hospital, your medicine, everything that is necessary while you recover your health. The rent, the food, your university fees when you get there. We're going to do everything she planned for you, exactly the way she planned it. We can't do less than she would wish, can we?”

Eyes down, Guido reflected on this before giving a reluctant shake of the head: no, we cannot do less, he conceded.

“Do you still play chess? Can we have a game?”

Another shake, this time a prudish one: it is not respectful of Signora Tessa's memory to play chess.

Justin took Guido's hand and held it. Then gently swung it, waiting for the glimmer of a smile. “So what do you do when you're not dying?” he asked in English. “Did you read the books we sent you? I thought you'd be an expert on Sherlock Holmes by now.”