The Constant Gardener (9 page)

“Know what?”

“What else Tessa and Bluhm got up to that's going to be headlines—tomorrow and for the next six weeks,” he ended, on a note of self-pity.

“Such as what?”

“Bluhm was her guru. Well, wasn't he? Whatever else he was.”

“So?”

“So they shared causes together. They sniffed out abuses. Human rights stuff. Bluhm has some kind of watchdog role—right? Or his employers have. So Tessa—” he was losing his way and Justin was watching him do it—“she helped him. Perfectly natural. In the circumstances. Used her lawyer's head.”

“D'you mind telling me where this is leading?”

“Her papers. That's all. Her possessions. Those you collected. We did. Together.”

“What of them?”

Woodrow pulled himself together: I'm your superior, for God's sake, not some bloody petitioner. Let's get our roles straight, shall we?

“I need your assurance, therefore—that any papers she assembled for her causes—in her capacity as your wife herewith diplomatic status —here on HMG'S ticket—will be handed to the Office. It was on that understanding that I took you to your house last Tuesday. We would not have gone there otherwise.”

Justin had not moved. Not a finger, not an eyelid flickered while Woodrow delivered himself of this untruthful afterthought. Backlit, he remained as still as Tessa's naked silhouette.

“The other assurance I'm to obtain from you is self-evident,” Woodrow went on.

“What other assurance?”

“Your own discretion in the matter. Whatever you know of her activities—her agitations—her so-called aid work that spun out of control.”

“Whose control?”

“I simply mean that wherever she ventured into official waters, you are as much bound by the rules of confidentiality as the rest of us. I'm afraid that's an order from on high.” He was trying to make a joke of it but neither of them smiled. “Pellegrin's order.”

And you're in good heart, are you, Sandy? Given that times are trying and you've got her husband in your guest room?

Justin was speaking at last. “Thank you, Sandy. I'm appreciative of all you've done for me. I'm grateful that you enabled me to visit my own house. But now I must collect the rent on Piccadilly, where I seem to own a valuable hotel.”

At which to Woodrow's astonishment he returned to the garden and, resuming his place next to Donohue, took up the game of Monopoly where he had left it.

The British police were absolute lambs. Gloria said so, and if Woodrow didn't agree with her, he didn't show it. Even Porter Coleridge, though parsimonious in describing his dealings with them, declared them “surprisingly civilized considering they were shits.” And the nicest thing about them was-Gloria reported to Elena from her bedroom after she had escorted them to the living room for the start of their second day with Justin—the nicest thing ever was, El, that you really felt they were here to help, not heap more pain and embarrassment onto poor dear Justin's shoulders. Rob the boy was dishy—well, man really, El, he must be twenty-five if a day! A bit of an actor in a nonflashy way, and awfully good at taking off the Nairobi Blue Boys they had to work alongside. And Lesley—who's a woman, darling, N.b., which took everybody by surprise, and shows you how little we know about the real England these days—clothes a little bit last season but, apart from that, well, frankly you'd never have guessed she didn't have our sort of education. Not by the voice, of course, because nobody speaks the way they're brought up anymore, they daren't. But totally at home in one's drawing room, very composed and selfassured, and cozy, with a nice warm smile and a bit of early gray in her hair which she very sensibly leaves, and what Sandy calls a decent quiet, so that you don't have to think of things to say all the time when they're having their pit stops and giving poor Justin a rest. The only problem was, Gloria had absolutely no idea what went on between them all, because she could hardly stand in the kitchen all day with her ear glued to the serving hatch, well, certainly not with the servants watching her, well, could she, El?

But if the matter of the discussions between Justin and the two police officers eluded her, Gloria knew even less about their dealings with her husband, for the good reason that he did not tell her they were taking place.

•      •      •

The opening exchanges between Woodrow and the two officers were courtesy itself. The officers said they understood the delicacy of their mission, they were not about to lift the lid on the white community in Nairobi, et cetera. Woodrow in return pledged the cooperation of his staff and all appropriate facilities, amen. The officers promised to keep Woodrow abreast of their investigations, so far as this was compatible with their instructions from the Yard. Woodrow genially pointed out that they were all serving the same Queen; and if first names were good enough for Her Majesty, they were good enough for us.

“So what's Justin's job description here in the High Commission then, Mr. Woodrow?” Rob the boy asked politely, ignoring this call to intimacy.

Rob was a London marathon runner, all ears and knees and elbows and true grit. Lesley, who could have been his smarter elder sister, carried a useful bag which Woodrow facetiously imagined to contain the things Rob needed at the trackside—iodine, salt tablets, spare laces for his running shoes—but which actually, so far as he could see, contained nothing but a tape recorder, cassettes and a colorful array of shorthand pads and notebooks.

Woodrow affected to consider. He wore the judicious frown that told you he was the professional. “Well, he's our in-house Old Etonian for a start,” he said, and everybody enjoyed this good joke. “Basically, Rob, he's our British representative on the East African Donors' Effectiveness Committee known otherwise by the acronym EADEC,” he went on, speaking with the clarity owed to Rob's limited intelligence. “The second E was originally for ”Efficacy“ but that wasn't a word many people were familiar with round here, so we changed it to something more user-friendly.”

“It does what, this committee?”

“EADEC is a relatively new consultative body, Rob, based here in Nairobi. It comprises representatives of all donor nations who provide aid, succor and relief to East Africa, in whatever form. Its members are drawn from the embassies and high commissions of each donor; the committee meets weekly and renders a fortnightly report.”

“To?” said Rob, writing.

“All member countries, obviously.”

“On?”

“On what the title says,” said Woodrow patiently, making allowances for the boy's manners. “It fosters efficacy, or effectiveness, in the aid field. In aid work, effectiveness is pretty much the gold standard. Compassion's a given,” he added with a disarming smile that said we were all compassionate people. “EADEC addresses the thorny question of how much of each dollar from each donor nation actually reaches its target, and how much wasteful overlap and unhelpful competition exists between agencies on the ground. It grapples, as we all do, alas, with the aid world's three R's: reduplication, rivalry, rationalization. It balances overheads against productivity and—” the smile of one bestowing wisdom—“makes the odd tentative recommendation, given that—unlike you chaps—it has no executive powers and no powers of enforcement.” A gracious tilting of the head announced the little confidence. “I'm not sure it was the greatest idea on earth, between ourselves. But it was the brainchild of our very own dear Foreign Secretary, it sat well with calls for greater transparency and an ethical foreign policy and other questionable nostrums of the day, so we pushed it for all it was worth. There are those who say the U.n. should do the job. Others say the U.n. already does it. Others again say the U.n. is part of the disease. Take your pick.” A deprecating shrug invited them to do just that.

“What disease?” said Rob.

“EADEC is not empowered to investigate at field level. Nevertheless, corruption is a major factor that has to be costed in as soon as you start to relate what is spent to what is achieved. Not to be confused with natural wastage and incompetence, but akin to them.” He reached for a common man's analogy. “Take our dear old British water grid, built 1890 or thereabouts. Water leaves the reservoir. Some of it, if you're lucky, comes out of your tap. But there are some very leaky pipes along the way. Now when that water is donated out of the goodness of the general public's heart, you can't just let it seep away into nowhere, can you? Certainly not if you're dependent on the fickle voter for your job.”

“Who does this committee job bring Justin into contact with?” Rob asked.

“Ranking diplomats. Drawn from the international community here in Nairobi. Mostly counselor and above. The odd First Secretary, but not many.” He seemed to think this required some explanation. “EADEC had to be exalted, in my judgment. Head in the clouds. Once it allowed itself to be dragged down to field level, it would end up as some kind of super nongovernmental organization—NGO to you, Rob —and be tarred with its own brush. I argued that strongly. All right: EADEC must be here in Nairobi, on the ground, locally aware. Obviously. But it's still a think tank. It must preserve the dispassionate overview. Absolutely vital that it remains—if you'll allow me to quote myself—an emotion-free zone. And Justin is the committee secretary. Nothing he's earned: it's our turn. He takes the minutes, collates the research and drafts the fortnightlies.”

“Tessa wasn't an emotion-free zone,” Rob objected after a moment's thought. “Tessa was emotion all the way, from what we hear.”

“I'm afraid you've been reading too many newspapers, Rob.”

“No, I haven't. I've been looking at her field reports. She was right in there with her sleeves rolled up. Shit up to her elbows, day and night.”

“And very necessary, no doubt. Very laudable. But hardly conducive to objectivity, which is the committee's first responsibility as an international consultative body,” said Woodrow graciously, ignoring this descent into gutter language, as—at a different level entirely —he ignored it in his High Commissioner.

“So they went their different ways,” Rob concluded, sitting back and tapping his teeth with his pencil. “He was objective, she was emotional. He played the safe center, she worked the dangerous edges. I get it now. As a matter of fact, I think I knew that already. So where does Bluhm fit in?”

“In what sense?”

“Bluhm. Arnold Bluhm. Doctor. Where does he fit into the scheme of things in Tessa's life and yours?”

Woodrow gave a little smile, forgiving this quirkish formulation. My life? What did her life have to do with mine? “We have a great variety of donor-financed organizations here, as I'm sure you know. All supported by different countries and funded by all sorts of charitable and other outfits. Our gallant President Moi detests them en bloc.”

“Why?”

“Because they do what his government would do if it was doing its job. They also bypass his systems of corruption. Bluhm's organization is modest, it's Belgian, it's privately funded and medical. That's all I can tell you about it, I'm afraid,” he added, with a candor that invited them to share his ignorance of these things.

But they were not so easily won.

“It's a watchdog outfit,” Rob informed him shortly. “Its physicians tour the other NGO'S, visit clinics, check out diagnoses and correct them. Like, ”Maybe this isn't malaria, doctor, maybe it's liver cancer.“ Then they check out the treatment. They also deal in epidemiology. What about Leakey?”

“What about him?”

“Bluhm and Tessa were on their way to his site—correct?”

“Purportedly.”

“Who is he exactly? Leakey? What's his bag?”

“He's by way of being a white African legend. An anthropologist and archaeologist who worked alongside his parents on the eastern shores of Turkana exploring the origins of mankind. When they died he continued their work. He directed the National Museum here in Nairobi and later took over wildlife and conservation.”

“But resigned.”

“Or was pushed. The story is complex.”

“Plus he's a thorn in Moi's breeches, right?”

“He opposed Moi politically and was badly beaten up for his pains. He is now undergoing some kind of resurrection as the scourge of Kenyan corruption. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are effectively demanding his presence in the government.” As Rob sat back and Lesley took her turn, it was clear that the distinction Rob had applied to the Quayles also defined the police officers' separate styles. Rob spoke in jerks, with the thickness of a man fighting to hold back his emotions. Lesley was the model of dispassion.

“So what sort of man is this Justin?” she mused, observing him as a distant character in history. “Away from his place of work and this committee of his? What are his interests, appetites, what's his lifestyle, who is he?”

“Oh my God, who are any of us?” Woodrow declaimed, perhaps a little too theatrically, at which Rob again rattled his pencil against his teeth and Lesley smiled patiently; and Woodrow, with charming reluctance, recited a checklist of Justin's meager attributes: a keen gardener—though, come to think of it, not so keen since Tessa lost her baby-loves nothing better than toiling in the flower beds on a Saturday afternoon—a gentleman, whatever that means—the right sort of Etonian-courteous to a fault in his dealings with locally employed staff, of course—kind of chap who can be relied on to dance with the wallflowers at the High Commissioner's annual bash—bit of an old bachelor in ways Woodrow couldn't immediately call to mind—not a golfer or a tennis player to his knowledge, not a shooter or a fisher, not an outdoor man at all, apart from his gardening. And of course, a first-rate, meat-and-potatoes professional diplomat—bags of field experience, two or three languages, safe pair of hands, totally loyal to London guidance. And—here's the cruel bit, Rob-by no fault of his own, caught in the promotion bulge.

“And he doesn't keep low company or anything?” Lesley asked, consulting her notebook. “You wouldn't see him whooping it up in the shady nightclubs while Tessa was out on her field trips?” The question was already a bit of a joke. “That wouldn't be his thing, I take it?”