The Constant Gardener (31 page)

“Then it's nothing. You didn't lose any,” said Guido serenely in his computer interglot, andwitha few more gentle taps, nursed the machine back to health. “Can we go on-line now? Please?” he begged.

“Why should we?”

“To get her mail, for Chrissakes! There's hundreds of people out there sent her e-mails every day and you won't read them. What about the people who want to send you their love and sympathy? Don't you want to know what they said? There's e-mails from me in there she never answered! Maybe she never read them!”

Guido was on the verge of tears. Taking him gently by the shoulders, Justin sat him on the stool before the keyboard.

“Tell me what the risk is,” he suggested. “Give me the worst case.”

“We risk nothing. Everything's saved. There isn't a worst case. We're doing the absolutely simplest things with this computer. If we crash, it's like before. I'll save any new e-mails. Tessa saved everything else. Trust me.”

Guido attaches the laptop to its modem and offers Justin one end of a length of flex. “Pull out the telephone line and plug this in. Then we're all hooked up.”

Justin does as he is told. Guido taps and waits. Justin is looking over his shoulder. Hieroglyphics, a window, more hieroglyphics. A pause for prayer and contemplation, followed by a full-screen message switching off and on like an illuminated sign, and an exclamation of disgust from Guido.

Hazardous Zone!! THIS IS A HEALTH WARNING.

DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT. CLINICAL TRIALS HAVE ALREADY INDICATED THAT FURTHER RESEARCH CAN ATTRACT FATAL SIDE EFFECTS. FOR YOUR SAFETY AND COMFORT YOUR HARD DISK HAS BEEN CLEANSED OF TOXIC MATTER.

For a deluded few seconds Justin has no serious concerns. He would have liked, in better circumstances, to sit down at the counting table and pen an angry letter to the manufacturers objecting to their hyperbolic style. On the other hand, Guido has just demonstrated that their bark is worse than their bite. So he is about to exclaim something like, “Oh it's them again, they really are the limit,” when he sees that Guido's head has sunk into his neck as if he has been hit by a bully, and his upturned fingers have bunched like dead spiders either side of the laptop, and his face, what Justin can see of it, has returned to its pretransfusion pallor.

“Is it bad?” Justin asks softly.

Flinging himself eagerly forward like an air pilot in crisis, Guido clicks through his emergency procedures. In vain apparently, for he flings himself upright again, slaps a palm to his forehead, closes his eyes, and lets out a frightful groan.

“Just tell me what's happening,” Justin pleads. “Nothing is this serious, Guido. Tell me.” And when Guido still does not reply, “You've switched off. Right?”

Transfixed, Guido nods.

“And now you're unplugging the modem.”

Another nod. The same transfixion.

“Why do you do this?”

“I'm rebooting.”

“What does that mean?”

“We wait one minute.”

“Why?”

“Maybe two.”

“What will that do?”

“Give it time to forget. Settle it down. This is not natural, Justin. This is real bad.” He has reverted to computer American. “This isn't a bunch of socially inadequate young males having some fun. Very sick people have done this to you, believe me.”

“To me or to Tessa?”

Guido shakes his head. “It's like somebody hates you.” He switches the computer on again, lifts himself on his stool, draws a long breath like a sigh in reverse. And Justin to his delight sees the familiar line of happy black kids waving at him from the screen.

“You've done it,” he exclaims. “You're a genius, Guido!”

But even as he says this the kids are replaced by a jaunty little hourglass impaled by a white, diagonal arrow. Then they too disappear, leaving only a blue-black infinity.

“They killed it,” Guido whispers.

“How?”

“They put a bug on you. They told the bug to wipe the hard disk clean and they left you a message telling you what they'd done.”

“Then it's not your fault,” says Justin earnestly.

“Did she download?”

“Whatever she printed out, I've read.”

“I'm not talking printing! Did she make disks?”

“We can't find them. We think she may have taken them up north.”

“What's up north? Why didn't she email them up north? Why does she have to carry disks up north? I don't read it. I don't get it.”

Justin is remembering Ham and thinking of Guido. Ham's computer had a virus too.

“You said she e-mailed you a lot,” he says.

“Like once a week. Twice. If she forgot one week, twice the next.” He is speaking Italian. He is a child again, as lost as the day when Tessa found him.

“Have you looked at your e-mail since she was killed?”

Guido shakes his head in vigorous denial. It was too much for him. He couldn't.

“So maybe we could go back to your house, and you could see what's there. Would you mind? I'm not interfering?”

Driving up the hill and into the darkening trees, Justin thought of nothing and nobody but Guido. Guido was a wounded friend and Justin's one aim was to take him safely home to his mother, and restore his calm and make sure that from here on Guido was going to stop moping, and get on with being a healthy, arrogant little genius of twelve instead of a cripple whose life had ended with Tessa's death. And if, as he suspected, they—whoever they were —had done to Guido's computer what they had done to Ham's and Tessa's, then Guido must be consoled and, so far as it was possible, have his mind set at rest. That was Justin's sole priority, excluding all other aims and emotions, because to entertain them meant anarchy. It meant deflecting himself from the path of rational inquiry and confusing the quest for vengeance with the quest for Tessa.

He parked andwitha sense of last things put his hand under Guido's arm. And Guido, somewhat to Justin's surprise, did not shake himself free. His mother had made a stew with fresh-baked bread that she was proud of, so on Justin's insistence they ate it first, the two of them, and praised it while she kept guard over them. Then Guido fetched his computer from his bedroom and for a while they didn't go on-line, but sat shoulder to shoulder, the two of them, reading Tessa's bulletins about the sleepy lions she had seen on her travels, and the TERRIBLY playful elephants that would have sat on her jeep and squashed it if she had given them half a chance and the really DISDAINFUL giraffes who are NEVER happy unless somebody is admiring their elegant necks.

“You want a disk of all her e-mails?” Guido asked, sensing correctly that Justin had seen as much of this as he could take.

“That would be very kind,” said Justin very politely. “Then I want you to make copies of your work so that I can read it at my leisure and write to you: essays, your homework and all the things you would have wanted Tessa to see.”

The disks duly made, Guido replaced the telephone flex with the flex attached to the modem, and they watched a fine herd of Thomson's gazelles in full gallop before the screen went dark. But when Guido tried to click back to the desktop he was forced to declare in a husky voice that the hard disk had been wiped clean just like Tessa's, but without that crazy message about clinical trials and toxicity.

“And she didn't send you anything to keep for her,” Justin asked, sounding to himself like a customs officer.

Guido shook his head.

“Nothing that you were to pass on to anyone—she didn't use you as a post office or anything like that?”

More shakes of the head.

“So what material have you lost that is important to you?”

“Only her last messages,” Guido whispered.

“Well, that makes two of us.” Or three if you include Ham, he was thinking. “So if I can handle it, you can. Because I was married to her. OK? Perhaps there was some bug in her machine that infected your machine. Is that possible? She picked something up and passed it on to you by mistake. Yes? I don't know what I'm talking about, do I? I'm guessing. What I'm really telling you is, we'll never know. So we might just as well say ”tough luck“ and get on with our lives. Both of us. Yes? And you'll order whatever you need to get yourself set up again. Yes? I'll tell the office in Milan that's what you're going to do.”

Reasonably confident that Guido was restored, Justin took his leave; which was to say he drove down the hill again to the villa, and parked the jeep in the courtyard where he had found it, and from the oil room carried her laptop to the seashore. He had been told on various training courses, and he was willing to believe, that there were clever people who could retrieve the text from computers supposedly wiped clean. But such people were on the official side of life to which he no longer belonged. It crossed his mind to contact Rob and Lesley somehow and prevail on them to assist him, but he was reluctant to embarrass them. And besides, if he was honest, there was something contaminated about Tessa's computer, something obscene that he would like to be rid of in a physical sense.

By the light of a half-hidden moon, therefore, he walked the length of a rickety jetty, passing on his way an ancient and rather hysterical notice declaring that whoever ventured further did so at their peril. Having reached the jetty's end, he then consigned her raped laptop to the deep before returning to the oil room to write his heart out until dawn. •      •      • Dear Ham,

Here's the first of what I hope will be a long line of letters to your kind aunt. I don't want to appear maudlin but if I go under a bus I would like you please to hand all the documents personally to the most bloody-minded, unclubbable member of your profession, pay him the earth and start the ball rolling. That way we'll both be doing Tessa a good turn. As ever, Justin

Until late into the evening, when the whisky finally got the better of him, Sandy Woodrow had remained loyally at his post in the High Commission, shaping, redrafting and honing his forthcoming performance at tomorrow's Chancery meeting; passing it upward into the hierarchy of his official mind, then downward into that other mind that, like an erratic counterweight, dragged him without warning through a bedlam of accusing ghosts, forcing him to shout louder than they did: you do not exist, you are a series of random episodes; you are not related in any way to Porter Coleridge's abrupt departure for London with wife and child, on the questionable grounds that they had decided on the spur of the moment to take some home leave and find Rosie a special school.

And sometimes his thoughts had gone off on their own entirely, to be discovered addressing such subversive matters as divorce by mutual consent, and whether Ghita Pearson or that new girl called Tara Something in Commercial Section would make an appropriate life partner and, if so, which of them the boys would prefer. Or whether after all he was better off living this lone-wolf existence, dreaming of connection, finding none, watching the dream slip further and further from his reach. Driving home with locked doors and closed windows, however, he was able once more to see himself as the loyal family breadwinner and husband —all right, still discreetly open to suggestions, and what man wasn't?—but ultimately the same decent, stalwart, levelheaded soldier's son that Gloria had fallen head over heels in love with all those years ago. As he entered his house, he was therefore surprised, not to say hurt, to discover that Gloria had not by some act of telepathy divined his good intentions and waited up for him, but left him instead to forage for food in the refrigerator. After all, dammit, I am acting High Commissioner, I'm entitled to a little respect, even in my own house.

“Anything on the news?” he called up to her pathetically, eating his cold beef in unstately solitude.

The dining room ceiling, which was one plank of concrete thin, was also the floor to their bedroom.

“Don't you get news at the shop?” Gloria bawled back.

“We don't sit there listening to the radio all day, if that's what you mean,” Woodrow replied, rather suggesting that Gloria did. And again waited, his fork poised halfway to his lips.

“They've killed two more white farmers in Zimbabwe, if that's news,” Gloria announced, after an apparent breakdown in transmission.

“Don't I know it! We've had the Pellegrin on our backs the whole damn day. Why can't we persuade Moi to put the brakes on Mugabe, if you please? For the same reason we can't persuade Moi to put the brakes on Moi, is the answer to that one.” He waited for a “Poor you, darling,” but all he got was cryptic silence.

“Nothing else?” he asked. “On the news. Nothing else?”

“What should there be?”

Hell's come over the bloody woman? he marveled sulkily, pouring himself another glass of claret. Never used to be like this. Ever since her widowed lover boy took himself back to England, she's been moping round the house like a sick cow. Won't drink with me, won't eat with me, won't look me in the eye. Won't do the other thing either, not that it was ever high on her list. Hardly bothers with her makeup, amazingly.

All the same, he was pleased she had heard no news. At least he knew something she didn't for once. Not often London manages to sit on a red-hot story without some idiot in Information Department bubbling it to the media ahead of the agreed deadline. If they could just hold their water till tomorrow morning he'd get a clear run, which was what he'd asked Pellegrin for.

“It's a morale issue, Bernard,” he'd warned him, in his best military tone. “Couple of people here are going to take it rather badly. I'd like to be the one to break it to them. Particularly with Porter away.”

Always good to remind them who was in charge too. Circumspect but unflappable, that's what they look for in their high fliers. Not to make an issue of it, naturally; much better to let London notice for themselves how smoothly things are handled when Porter isn't around to agonize over every comma.

Very trying, this will-they-won't-they standoff, if he was honest. Probably what's getting her down. There's the High Commissioner's residence a hundred yards up the road, staffed and ready to go, Daimler in the garage, but no flag flying. There's Porter Coleridge, our absentee High Commissioner. And there's little me here doing Coleridge's job for him, rather better than Coleridge has been doing it, waiting night and day to hear whether, having stepped into his shoes, I can wear them not as his stand-in but as his official, formal, fully accredited successor, with trappings to match—to wit, the residence, the Daimler, the private office, Mildren, another thirty-five thousand pounds' worth of allowances and several notches nearer to a knighthood.

But there was a major snag. The Office was traditionally reluctant to promote a man en poste. They preferred to bring him home, pack him off somewhere new. There'd been exceptions, of course, but not many …

His thoughts drifted back to Gloria. Lady Woodrow: that'll sort her out. Restless, that's what she is. Not to say idle. I should have given her a couple more kids to keep her busy. Well, she won't be idle if she's installed in the residence, that's for sure. One free night a week, if she's lucky. Quarrelsome too. Flaming row with Juma last week about some totally trivial thing like tarting up the lower ground. And on Monday, though he never dreamed he'd live to see the day, she'd engineered some kind of bust-up with the Archbitch Elena, casus belli unknown.

“Isn't it about time we had the Els to dinner, darling?” he'd suggested chivalrously. “We haven't pushed the boat out for the Els for months.”

“If you want them, ask them,” Gloria had advised icily, so he hadn't.

But he felt the loss. Gloria without a woman friend was an engine without cogs. The fact-the extraordinary fact—that she'd formed some kind of armed truce with doe-eyed Ghita Pearson consoled him not at all. Only a couple of months ago Gloria was dismissing Ghita as neither one thing nor the other. “I can't be doing with English-educated Brahmins' daughters who talk like us and dress like dervishes,” she'd told Elena in Woodrow's hearing. “And that Quayle girl is exerting a bad influence on her.” Well, now the Quayle girl was dead and Elena had been sent to Coventry. And Ghita who dressed like a dervish had been signed up to take Gloria on a conducted tour of Kibera slum with the advertised intention of finding her voluntary work with one of the aid agencies. And this, moreover, at the very time when Ghita's own behavior was causing Woodrow serious concern.

First there had been her display at the funeral. Well, there was no rule book on how to behave at funerals, it was true. Nevertheless, Woodrow considered her performance self-indulgent. Then there was what he would call a period of aggressive mourning, during which she wandered round Chancery like a zombie, refusing point-blank to make eye contact with him, whereas in the past he had regarded her as—well, a candidate, let's say. Then last Friday, without giving the smallest explanation, she'd asked for the day off, although, as a brand-new member of Chancery—and the most junior—she had not yet technically earned her entitlement. Yet out of the goodness of his heart he had said, “Well, fine, Ghita, all right, I suppose so, but don't wear him out”—nothing abusive, just an innocent joke between an older married man and a pretty young girl. But if looks could kill, he'd have been dead at her feet.

And what had she done with the time he'd given her —without so much as a by-your-leave? Flown up to Lake bloody Turkana in a chartered plane with a dozen other female members of the selfconstituted Tessa Quayle supporters' club, and laid a wreath, and banged drums and sung hymns, at the spot where Tessa and Noah had been murdered! The first that Woodrow knew of this was breakfast on the Monday when he opened his Nairobi Standard and saw her photograph, posed center stage between two enormous African women he vaguely remembered from the funeral.

“Well, Ghita Pearson, get you, I must say,” he had snorted, shoving the paper across the table at Gloria. “I mean, for God's sake, it's time to bury the dead, not dig them up every ten minutes. I always thought she was carrying a torch for Justin.”

“If we hadn't had the Italian Ambassador I'd have flown up there with them,” Gloria replied, in a voice dripping with reproach.

The bedroom light was out. Gloria was pretending to be asleep.

•      •      •

“So shall we all sit down, please, ladies and gents?”

A power drill was whining from the floor above. Woodrow dispatched Mildren to silence it while he ostentatiously busied himself with papers on his desk. The whining stopped. Taking his time, Woodrow looked up again to find everybody gathered before him, including a breathless Mildren. Exceptionally, Tim Donohue and his assistant Sheila had been asked to put in an appearance. With no High Commissioner's meetings to rally the full complement of diplomatic staff, Woodrow was insisting on a full turnout. Hence also the Defense and Service Attaches and Barney Long from Commercial Section. And poor Sally Aitken, complete with stammer and blushes, on secondment from the Min of Ag and Fish. Ghita, he noticed, was in her usual corner where, since Tessa's death, she had done her best to make herself invisible. To his irritation she still sported the black silk scarf round her neck that recalled the soiled bandage around Tessa's. were her oblique glances flirtatious or disdainful? With Eurasian beauties, how did you tell?

“Bit of a sad story, I'm afraid, guys,” he began breezily. “Barney, would you mind getting the door, as we say in America? Don't bring it to me, just locking it will do.”

Laughter—but of the apprehensive sort.

He went straight into it, exactly as he had planned. Bull-by-the-horns stuff—we're all professionals—necessary surgery. But also something tacitly courageous in your acting High Commissioner's bearing as he first scans his notes, then taps the blunt end of his pencil on them and braces his shoulders before addressing the parade.

“There are two things I have to tell you this morning. The first is embargoed till you hear it on the news, British or Kenyan, whoever breaks it first. At twelve hundred hours today the Kenyan police will issue a warrant for the arrest of Dr. Arnold Bluhm for the willful murder of Tessa Quayle and the driver Noah. The Kenyans have been in touch with the Belgian government and Bluhm's employers will be informed in advance. We're ahead of the game because of the involvement of Scotland Yard, who will be passing their file to Interpol.”

Scarcely a chair creaks after the explosion. No protest, no gasp of astonishment. Just Ghita's enigmatic eyes fixed on him at last, admiring or hating him.

“I know this'll be a hell of a shock to you all, particularly those of you who knew Arnold and liked him. If you want to tip off your partners, you have my permission to do so at your discretion.” Quick flash of Gloria, who until Tessa's death had dismissed Bluhm as a jumped-up gigolo but was now mysteriously concerned for his well-being. “I can't pretend I'm delighted myself,” Woodrow confessed, becoming the tight-lipped master of understatement. “There'll be the usual facile press explanations of motive, of course. The Tessa-Bluhm relationship will be raked over ad infinitum. And if they ever catch him, there'll be a noisy trial. So from the point of view of this Mission the news could hardly be worse. I've no information at this stage regarding the strength of the evidence. I'm told it's cast iron, but they would say that, wouldn't they?” The same hint of grit inside the humor. “Questions?”

None apparently. The news seemed to have taken the wind out of everybody's sails. Even Mildren, who had had it since last night, could find nothing better to do than scratch an itch on the tip of his nose.

“My second piece of news is not unrelated to the first, but it's a damn sight more delicate. Partners will not be informed without my prior consent. Junior staff will be selectively informed where necessary, on a strictly controlled basis. By myself or by the High Commissioner as and when he returns. Not by you, please. Am I clear so far?”

He was. There were nods of expectation this time, not just cowlike stares. All eyes were on him and Ghita's had never left him. My God, suppose she's fallen for me: how will I ever get out of it? He followed the thought through. Of course! That's why she's making up to Gloria! First it was Justin she was after, now it's me! She's a couple cruiser, never safe unless she's got the wife aboard as well! He squared himself and resumed his manly newscast.

“I am extremely sorry to have to tell you that our er/while colleague Justin Quayle has gone walkab. You probably know he refused all reception facilities when he arrived in London, saying he'd prefer to paddle his own canoe, et cetera. He did manage a meeting with Personnel on his arrival, he did manage a luncheon appointment with the Pellegrin the same day. Both describe him as overwrought, sullen and hostile, poor chap. He was offered sanctuary and counseling and declined them. Meanwhile he's jumped ship.”

Now it was Donohue that Woodrow was discreetly favoring, no longer Ghita. Woodrow's gaze, by careful design, was fixed on neither one of them, of course. Ostensibly it oscillated between the middle air and the notes on his desk. But in reality he was focusing on Donohue and persuading himself with increasing conviction that once again Donohue and his scrawny Sheila had received prior warning of Justin's defection.

“On the same day that he arrived in Britain —the same night, more accurately—Justin sent a somewhat disingenuous letter to the Head of Personnel advising her that he was taking leave to sort out his wife's affairs. He used the ordinary mail, which in effect gave him three days to get clear. By the time Personnel moved to put a restraining hand on him—for his own good, I may add—he'd disappeared from everybody's screens. Signs are, he went to considerable lengths to conceal his movements. He's been traced to Elba, where Tessa had estates, but by the time the Office got on the scent he'd moved on. Where to, God knows, but there are suspicions. He'd made no formal leave application, of course, and the Office, for its part, was in the throes of deciding how it could best help him back on his feet—find him a slot where he could nurse his wounds for a year or two.” A shrug to suggest there wasn't a lot of gratitude in the world. “Well, whatever he's doing, he's doing it alone. And he's certainly not doing it for us.”

He glanced grimly at his audience, then went back to his notes.

“There's a security aspect to this that I obviously can't share with you, so the Office is doubly exercised about where he's going to pop up next and how. They're also decently worried for him, as I'm sure we all are. Having shown a lot of bearing and self-control while he was here, he seems to have gone to pieces from the strain.” He was coming to the hard part but they were steeled for it. “We have various readings from the experts, none of them, from our point of view, pleasant.”