The Constant Gardener

CHAPTER ELEVEN

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."

"Mr. Holmes is a great detective," Guido replied, also in English, but without a smile.

"And what about the computer the signora gave you?" Justin asked, reverting to Italian. "Tessa said you were a big star. A genius, she told me. You used to e-mail each other passionately. I got quite jealous. Don't tell me you've abandoned your computer, Guido!"

The question provoked an outburst from the kitchen. "Of course he has abandoned it! He has abandoned everything! Four million lire, it cost her! All day long he used to sit at that computer, tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. "You make yourself blind," I tell him, "you get sick from too much concentration." Now nothing. Even the computer must die."

Still holding Guido's hand, Justin peered into his averted eyes. "Is that true?" he asked.

It was.

"But that's awful, Guido. That's a real waste of talent," Justin complained, as Guido's smile began to dawn. "The human race is in serious need of good brains like yours. D'you hear me?"

"Maybe."

"So do you remember Signora Tessa's computer, the one she taught you on?"

Of course Guido did — and with an air of great superiority, not to say smugness.

"All right, so it's not as good as yours. Yours is a couple of years younger and cleverer. Yes?"

Yes. Very much yes. And the smile widening.

"Well, I'm an idiot, Guido, unlike you, and I can't even work her computer with any confidence. And my problem is, Signora Tessa left a stack of messages on it, some of them for me, and I'm frightened to death of losing them. And I think she would like you to be the person who made sure I didn't lose them. OK? Because she wanted very much to have a son like you. And so did I. So the question is, will you come down to the villa and help me to read whatever is in her laptop?"

"You got the printer?"

"I have."

"Disk drive?"

"That too."

"CD drive? Modem?"

"And the handbook. And the transformers. And the cables, and an adapter. But I'm still an idiot, and if there's a chance of making a hash of it I will."

Guido was already standing, but Justin tenderly drew him back to the table.

"Not this evening. Tonight you sleep, and tomorrow morning early, if you're willing, I'll come and fetch you in the villa jeep, but afterward you must go to school. Yes?"

"Yes."

"You are too tired, Signor Justin," Guido's mother murmured, setting coffee before him. "So much grief is bad for the heart."

* * *

He had been on the island for two nights and two days, but if somebody had proved it was a week he would not have been surprised. He had taken the channel ferry to Boulogne, bought a train ticket for cash, and somewhere along his route a second ticket to a different destination, long before the first ticket was used up. He had shown his passport, to the best of his awareness, only once and cursorily, as he crossed into Italy from Switzerland by way of some precipitous and very beautiful mountain ravine. And it was his own passport. Of that too he was certain. Obedient to Lesley's instructions, he had sent Mr. Atkinson's ahead of him via Ham rather than risk being caught with two. But as to which ravine or which train — for that, he would have had to study a map, and make a guess at the town where he had boarded.

For much of the journey Tessa had ridden alongside him, and now and then they had shared a good joke together — usually after some deflating and irrelevant comment of Tessa's, delivered sotto voce. Other times, they had reminisced, shoulder to shoulder, heads back and eyes closed like an old couple, until abruptly she left him again, and the pain of grief overtook him like a cancer he had known all the time was there, and Justin Quayle mourned his dead wife with an intensity that exceeded his worst hours in Gloria's lower ground, or the funeral in Langata, or the visit to the mortuary, or the top floor of number four.

Finding himself standing on the railway station platform in Turin, he had taken a hotel room to clean up, then from a secondhand luggage shop purchased two anonymous canvas suitcases to contain the papers and objects that he had come to regard as her reliquary. And si, Signor Justin, the black-suited young lawyer, heir to the Manzini half of the partnership, had assured him — amid protestations of sympathy that were all the more painful for their sincerity — the hatboxes had arrived safely and on schedule, together with orders from Ham to hand over numbers five and six unopened to Justin personally — and if there was anything, but anything further at all that the young man could do, of a legal or professional or any other nature, then it went without saying that loyalty to the Manzini family did not end with the tragic death of the signora, et cetera. Oh, and of course there was the money, he added disdainfully — and counted out fifty thousand U.S. dollars in cash against Justin's signature. After which Justin withdrew to the privacy of an empty conference room, where he transferred Tessa's reliquary and Mr. Atkinson's passport to their new resting-place in the canvas suitcases and, soon afterward, took a taxi to Piombino where, by fortuitous timing, he was able to board a garish high-rise hotel, calling itself a ship, bound for Portoferraio on the island of Elba.

Seated as far from the king-sized television set as he could get, the only guest in a gigantic plastic self-service dining room on the sixth deck, with the suitcases either side of him, Justin treated himself indiscriminately to a seafood salad, a salami baguette and half a bottle of really bad red wine. Docking at Portoferraio, he was afflicted by a familiar sense of weightlessness as he fought his way through the unlit bowels of the ship's lorry park while foul-mannered drivers revved their engines or simply drove straight at him, shoving him and his suitcases against the bolted iron casing of the hull to the amusement of unemployed porters looking on.

It was dusk and deep winter and bitterly cold as he scrambled shivering and furious onto the quayside, and the few pedestrians moved with unaccustomed haste. Fearful of being recognized or worse still pitied, his hat pulled low over his brow, he dragged his suitcases to the nearest waiting taxi and established to his relief that the driver's face was unfamiliar to him. On the twenty-minute journey the man inquired whether he was German and Justin replied that he was Swedish. The unpremeditated answer served him well, for the man asked no further questions.

The Manzini villa lay low against the island's northern shore. The wind was blowing straight off the sea, rattling palm trees, whipping over stone walls, slapping shutters and roof tiles and making the outbuildings creak like old rope. Alone in the faltering moonlight Justin remained standing where the cab had dropped him, at the entrance to a flagstoned courtyard with its ancient water pump and olive press, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. The villa loomed ahead of him. Two lines of poplar trees, planted by Tessa's grandfather, marked the walk from its front door to the sea's edge. One by one, Justin distinguished retainers' cottages, stone staircases, gateposts, and shadowy bits of Roman masonry. Not a light burned anywhere. The estate manager was in Naples, according to Ham, gadding with his fiancee. Housekeeping was entrusted to a pair of itinerant Austrian women who called themselves painters and were camped in a disused chapel on the other side of the estate. The two laborers' cottages, converted by Tessa's mother the dottoressa, a title the island preferred to contessa, and christened Romeo and Giulietta for the benefit of German tourists, were the responsibility of a letting agency in Frankfurt.

So welcome home, he told Tessa, in case she was a bit slow on the uptake after all the zigzag traveling.

The villa keys were kept on a ledge inside the wooden cladding of the water pump. First you take off the lid, darling — like so — then you reach your arm in and if you're lucky you hoick them out. Then you unlock the front door to the house and take your bride to the bedroom and make love to her, like so. But he didn't take her to the bedroom, he knew a better place. Picking up the canvas suitcases once more, he struck out across the courtyard. As he did so the moon obligingly lifted itself clear of the clouds, lighting his way for him and throwing white bars between the poplars. Reaching the farthest corner of the courtyard he passed by way of a narrow alley resembling an ancient Roman backstreet to an olive-wood door on which was carved a Napoleonic heraldic bee in honor — thus the family legend — of the great man himself who, treasuring the good conversation and even better wine of Tessa's great-great-grandmother, had appointed himself a frequent guest at the villa during his ten restless months of exile.

Justin selected the largest of the keys and turned it. The door groaned and yielded. This is where we counted our money, she is telling him severely, in her role of Manzini heiress, bride and tour guide. Today the superb Manzini olives are shipped to Piombino to be pressed like any other. But in my mother the dottoressa's time this room was still the Holy of Holies. It was where we recorded the oil, jar by jar, before we stored it at a preciously preserved temperature in the cantina downstairs. It was here that — you're not listening.

"That's because you are making love to me."

You are my husband and I shall make love to you whenever I wish. Pay close attention. In this room the weekly wage was counted into every peasant's hand, and signed for, usually with a cross, in a ledger larger than your English Doomsday Book.

"Tessa, I can't — "

You can't what? Of course you can. You are extremely resourceful. Here also we received our chain gangs of life prisoners from the house of correction on the other side of the island. Hence the spy hole in the door. Hence the iron rings in the wall where the prisoners could be fastened while they were waiting to be taken to the olive groves. Are you not proud of me? A descendant of slave masters?

"Immeasurably."

Then why are you locking the door? Am I your prisoner?

"Eternally."

The oil room was low and raftered, the windows set too high for prying eyes, whether money was being counted, or prisoners chained, or two newlyweds were making languorous love on the upright leather sofa that sat primly against the seaward wall. The counting table was flat and square. Two carpenter's workbenches loomed behind it in arched recesses. Justin needed all his strength to drag them over the flagstones and position them as wings either side of it. Above the door ran a line of ancient bottles scavenged from the estate. Fetching them down, he dusted each with his handkerchief before setting them on the table to use as paperweights. Time had stopped. He felt no thirst or hunger, no need of sleep. Placing one suitcase on each workbench he drew out his two most treasured bundles and laid them on the counting table, careful to choose the very center lest in grief or madness they took it into their heads to hurl themselves over the edge. Cautiously he began undressing the first bundle, layer by layer — her cotton housecoat, her angora cardigan, the one she had worn the day before she left for Lokichoggio, her silk blouse, still with her scent around the neck — until he held the unveiled prize in his hands: one sleek gray box twelve inches by ten with the logo of its Japanese maker blazoned on the lid. Unscathed by days and nights of hellish solitude and travel. From the second bundle, he extracted the accessories. When he had done this, he gingerly transported the whole assembly piece by piece to an old pine desk at the other end of the room.

"Later," he promised her aloud. "Patience, woman."

Breathing more easily, he took a radio alarm clock from his hand luggage and fiddled with it until he had the local wavelength for the BBC World Service. All through his journey he had kept abreast of the fruitless search for Arnold. Setting the alarm to the next hourly bulletin he turned his attention to the uneven heaps of letters, files, press cuttings, printouts and bundles of official-looking papers of the sort that, in another life, had been his refuge from reality. But not tonight, not by any stretch. These papers offered no refuge from anything, whether they were Lesley's police files, Ham's record of Tessa's imperious demands of him, or her own carefully ordered wads of letters, essays, newspaper cuttings, pharmaceutical and medical texts, messages to herself from the notice board in her workroom, or her fevered jottings in the hospital, retrieved by Rob and Lesley from their hiding place in Arnold Bluhm's apartment. The radio had switched itself on. Justin lifted his head and listened. Of the missing Arnold Bluhm, doctor of medicine, suspected killer of British envoy's wife Tessa Quayle, the announcer had once again nothing to say. His devotions over, Justin delved among Tessa's papers until he found the object he had determined to keep beside him throughout his explorations. She had brought it with her from the hospital — the only thing of Wanza's that they left behind. She had retrieved it from an unemptied waste bin next to Wanza's abandoned bed. For days and nights after her return, it had stood like an accusing sentinel on her workroom desk: one small cardboard box, red and black, five inches by three, empty. From there it had made its way to the center drawer, where Justin had found it during his overhasty search of her possessions. Not forgotten, not rejected. But relegated, flattened, shoved aside while she gave herself to more immediate matters. The name Dypraxa printed in a band on all four sides, the leaflet showing indications and contra-indications inside the box. And three jokey little gold bees in arrow formation on the lid. Opening it, restoring it to its status as a box, Justin placed it at the center of an empty shelf on the wall directly before him. Kenny K thinks he's Napoleon with his ThreeBees, she had whispered to him in her fever. And their sting is fatal, did you know that? No, darling, I didn't know, go back to sleep.

* * *

To read.

To travel.

To slow down his head.

To accelerate his wits.

To charge and yet stand still, to be as patient as a saint, and impulsive as a child.

Never in his life had Justin been so eager for knowledge. There was no more time for preparation. He had been preparing night and day ever since her death. He had withheld, but he had prepared. In Gloria's ghastly lower ground, he had prepared. In his interviews with the police, when the withholding had been at moments almost unbearable, still in some sleepless corner of his head, he had prepared. On the interminable flight home, in Alison Landsbury's office, in Pellegrin's club, in Ham's office and at number four, while a hundred other things were going on in his mind, he had prepared. What he needed now was one huge plunge into the heart of her secret world; to recognize each signpost and milestone along her journey; to extinguish his own identity and revive hers; to kill Justin, and bring Tessa back to life.

Where to begin?

Everywhere!

Which path to follow?

All of them!

The civil servant in him was in abeyance. Fired by Tessa's impatience, Justin ceased to be accountable to anyone but her. If she was scattershot, so would he be. Where she was methodical, he would submit to her method. Where she made an intuitive leap, he would take her hand and they would leap together. Was he hungry? If Tessa wasn't, neither was he. Was he tired? If Tessa could sit up half the night in her housecoat, huddled at her desk, then Justin could sit up the whole night, and all next day as well, and the next night too!

Once, prizing himself from his labors, he made a raid on the villa's kitchens, returning with salami, olives, crispbread, reggiano and bottled water. Another time — was it dusk or daybreak? — he had an impression of gray light — he was in the middle of her hospital diary, logging the attendances of Lorbeer and his acolytes at Wanza's bedside, when he woke to discover himself drifting round the walled garden. It was here, under Tessa's doting eye, that he had planted wedding lupins, wedding roses and, inevitably, wedding freesias for love of her. The weeds came up to his knees, drenching his trousers. A single rose was in bloom. Remembering he had left the oil room door open, he fled back across the flagstoned courtyard, only to find it safely locked and the key inside his jacket pocket.

* * *

Press cutting from the Financial Times:

ThreeBees Buzzing

Rumors are flying that whiz-kid playboy Kenneth K. Curtiss of the House of ThreeBees, Third World venturers, is planning a runaway marriage of convenience with Swiss-Canadian pharma-giant Karel Vita Hudson. Will KVH show up at the altar? Can ThreeBees come up with the dowry? Answer yes and yes so long as Kenneth K's typically daring pharmagamble pays off. In a deal believed unprecedented in the secretive and immensely profitable world of pharmaceuticals, ThreeBees Nairobi will reportedly take up one quarter of the estimated 500 million pounds research and development costs of KVH's innovative anti-Tb wonder drug DYPRAXA in exchange for all-Africa sale and distribution rights and an unnamed piece of the drug's worldwide profits…

ThreeBees' Nairobi-based spokesperson Vivian Eber is cautiously jubilant: "This is brilliant, typical, totally Kenny K. It's a humanitarian act, good for the company, good for shareholders, good for Africa. DYPRAXA is as easy to administer as a Smartie. ThreeBees will be at the forefront of the fight against the terrifying worldwide rise in new strains of TB."

KVH chairman Dieter Korn, speaking in Basel last night, was quick to echo Eber's optimism: "DYPRAXA converts six or eight months of laborious treatment into a twelve-hit swallow. We believe ThreeBees are the right people to be pioneering DYPRAXA in Africa."

Handwritten note, Tessa to Bluhm, presumably recovered from Arnold's flat:

Arnold heart:

You didn't believe me when I told you KVH were bad. I've checked. They're bad. Two years ago they were charged with polluting half Florida, where they have a huge facility, and got off with a caution. Undisputed evidence presented by plaintiffs showed that KVH had exceeded their permitted quota of toxic effluents by nine hundred percent, poisoning conservation areas, wetlands, rivers and beaches and probably the milk. KVH performed a similar public service in India, where two hundred children in the region of Madras allegedly died of related causes. The Indian court case will be heard in about fifteen years, or longer if KVH continue to pay off the right people. They're also famous as frontrunners in the pharma industry's humanitarian campaign to prolong the life of their patents in the interest of suffering white billionaires. Good night, darling. Never again doubt a word I say. I'm immaculate. So are you. T.

Press cutting from the financial pages of the Guardian, London:

Happy Bees

The dramatic rise (40 per cent in twelve weeks) in the value of ThreeBees Nairobi reflects growing market confidence in the company's recently acquired all-African franchise in the cheap and innovative cure for multi-resistant TB, Dypraxa. Speaking from his home in Monaco, ThreeBees CEO Kenneth K. Curtiss said: "What's good for ThreeBees is good for Africa. And what's good for Africa is good for Europe and America and the rest of the world."

Separate folder marked HIPPO in Tessa's hand containing some forty exchanges, first by letter, then by printed-out e-mail, between Tessa and a woman named Birgit, who works for an independently funded pharma-watch outfit called Hippo based in a small town called Bielefeld in north Germany. The logo at the top of her letter paper explains that her organization owes its name to Greek physician Hippocrates, born can. 460 B.C., whose oath all doctors swear. The correspondence begins formally but once the e-mails take over it softens. Key players quickly acquire nicknames. KVH becomes Giant, Dypraxa becomes Pill, Lorbeer becomes Goldmaker. Birgit's source on the activities of Karel Vita Hudson becomes "Our Friend" and Our Friend must be protected at all times, since "what she is telling us is completely against Swiss law."

E-mail printout Birgit to Tessa:

… for his two doctors Emrich and Kovacs, Goldmaker opened a company on Isle of Man, maybe two companies, because this was still Communist times. Our Friend says L put the companies in his own name so that the women wouldn't get bad trouble with the authorities. Since then there has been bad argument between the women. It is scientific, also personal. Nobody in Giant is allowed to know details. Emrich emigrated to Canada one year ago. Kovacs stays in Europe, mostly Basel. The elephant mobile you sent Carl drives him completely crazy with happiness and now he trumpets like an elephant every morning to tell me he is awake.

E-mail printout Birgit to Tessa:

Here is some more history regarding Pill. Five years ago when Goldmaker was looking for financial backing for the women's molecule not everything went easy for him. He tried to persuade some big German pharmas to sponsor but they are resisting strongly because they don't see big profits. The problem with the poor is always the same: they are not rich enough to buy expensive medicines! Giant came in late and only after big market researches. Also Our Friend says they were very clever in their deal with BBB. This was a masterstroke, to sell off poor Africa and keep the rich world for themselves! The plan is very simple, the timing perfect. It is to test Pill in Africa for two or three years, by which time KVH calculate that TB will have become a BIG PROBLEM in the West. Also in three years BBB will be so compromised financially that Giant will be able to buy them out for pennies! Therefore according to Our Friend, BBB have bought the wrong end of the horse and Giant have the whip. Carl is asleep beside me. Dear Tessa, I hope very much your baby will be as beautiful as Carl. He will be a great fighter like his mother, I am sure! Ciao, B.

Final entry in the Birgit/tessa file of correspondence:

Our Friend is reporting very secretive activities at Giant regarding BBB and Africa. Maybe you have stirred a wasps' nest? Kovacs will be flown in great secrecy to Nairobi where Goldmaker is waiting to receive her. Everyone speaks bad things about die schone Lara. She is a traitor, a bitch, etc. How does such a boring corporation become suddenly so passionate?! Take care of yourself, Tessa. I think you are a little bit waghalsig but it is late and my English does not translate this word so maybe you ask your good kind husband to translate it for you! B.

P.s. Come soon to Bielefeld, Tessa, it is a beautiful and very secret little town that you will love! B.

* * *

It is evening. Tessa is heavily pregnant. She is pacing the drawing room of the Nairobi house, now sitting, now standing. Arnold has told her she must not go down to Kibera until she has had the baby. Even sitting at her laptop is a tiresome chore for her. After five minutes of it she must prowl about again. Justin has come home early to keep her company in her travail.

"Who or what is waghalsig?" she demands of him, as soon as he opens the front door.

"Who is what?"

She pronounces the word with deliberate anglicization: wag like "wag" the dog, halsig like "hall-sick." She has to say it twice more before the penny drops.

"Reckless," Justin replies cautiously. "Daredevilish. Why?"

"Am I waghalsig?"

"Never. Impossible."

"Somebody's just called me it, that's all. Fat lot of dare deviling I can do in this condition."

"Don't you believe it," Justin replies devoutly, and they break out laughing simultaneously.

* * *

Letter from Messrs. Oakey, Oakey and Farmeloe, Solicitors of London, Nairobi, and Hong Kong, to Ms. T. Abbott, postbox Nairobi:

Dear Ms. Abbott,

We act for House of ThreeBees, Nairobi, who have passed to us your several letters addressed personally to Sir Kenneth Curtiss, chief executive officer of that company, and to other directors and officers of the managing board.

We are to advise you that the product to which you refer has passed all requisite clinical trials, many of them conducted to standards far higher than those laid down by national or international regulation. As you rightly point out, the product has been fully tested and registered in Germany, Poland and Russia. At the request of the Kenyan health authorities, that registration has also been independently verified by the World Health Organization, a copy of whose certificate is appended to this letter.

We must therefore advise you that any further representations made by you or your associates in this matter, whether directed at House of ThreeBees or some other quarter, will be interpreted as a malicious and unwarranted slur on this highly prestigious product, and on the good name and high standing in the marketplace of its distributors House of ThreeBees Nairobi. In such an eventuality, we are under standing instruction to institute legal proceedings with full vigor and without further reference to our clients.

Yours faithfully…

* * *

"Old chap. A quick word with you, if I may."

The speaker is Tim Donohue. The old chap is Justin himself, in whose memory the scene is playing. The game of Monopoly has been voted into temporary suspense while the Woodrow sons hurry late to their karate class and Gloria fetches drinkies from the kitchen. Woodrow has taken himself off to the High Commission in a huff. Justin and Tim are therefore seated alone and head to head at the garden table, surrounded by millions of imitation pounds.

"Mind if I tread on holy ground in the interests of the greater good?" Donohue inquires in a low, tight voice that travels no farther than it needs to.

"If you must."

"I must. It's this unseemly feud, old chap. The one your late lamented was conducting with Kenny K. Bearding him at his farm, poor fellow. Phone calls at unsociable hours. Rude letters left at his club."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Of course you don't. Not a good subject around the halls just now. Particularly where the coppers are concerned. Sweep it under the carpet, our advice. Not relevant. Ticklish times for all of us. Kenny included." His voice lifted. "You're bearing up marvelously. Nothing but boundless admiration for him, right, Gloria?"

"He's completely superhuman, aren't you, Justin, darling?" Gloria confirms as she sets down her tray of gin and tonic.

Our advice, Justin remembers, still staring at the solicitors' letters. Not his. Theirs.

* * *

E-mail printout Tessa to Ham:

Coz. Angel heart. My deep throat at BBB swears they are in much worse financial doodoo than anyone lets on. She says there are in-house rumors that Kenny K is considering mortgaging his entire nonpharma op to a shady South American syndicate based in Bogota! Question: can he mount a company sell-out without telling his shareholders in advance? I know even less company law than you do, which is saying a lot. Elucidate or else! Love, love, Tess.

But Ham had no time to elucidate, even if he was able to, immediately or otherwise, and neither did Justin. The clatter of an elderly car hauling itself up the drive, followed by a thundering on the door, brought Justin leaping to his feet and peering through the prisoners' spy hole, straight into the well-nourished features of Father Emilio Dell'Oro, parish priest, arranged in an expression of pitiful concern. Justin opened the door to him.

"But what are you doing, Signor Justin?" the priest cried in his operatic boom, embracing him. "Why must I hear it from Mario the taxi driver that the signora's grief-demented husband has locked himself in the villa and is calling himself a Swede? What is a priest for, in the name of heaven, if he is not the companion of the bereaved, a father to his stricken son?"

Justin mumbled something about needing solitude.

"But you are working!" — peering over Justin's shoulder at the piles of papers strewn about the oil room. "Even now, in your grief, you are serving your country! No wonder you English commanded a greater empire than Napoleon!"

Justin offered something fatuous about a diplomat's work never being done.

"Like a priest's, my son, like a priest's! For every soul that turns to God, there are a hundred that do not!" He drew closer. "But la signora was a believer, Signor Justin. As her mother the dottoressa was, even if they disputed it. With so much love for their fellowmen, how could they close their ears to God?"

Somehow Justin shooed the priest away from the doorway to the oil room, sat him in the salon of the freezing villa and, under the flaking frescoes of sexually precocious cherubs, plied him with a glass and then another of Manzini wine while sipping at his own. Somehow he accepted the good Father's assurances that Tessa was safely in the arms of God, and consented without demur to the celebration of a memorial mass to Tessa on her next saint's day and a handsome donation to the church's restoration fund, and another for the conservation of the island's superb hilltop castle, one of the gems of medieval Italy, which scholarly surveyors and archaeologists assure us is soon to fall down unless, with God's will, the walls and foundations are secured… Escorting the good man to his car, Justin was so keen not to detain him that he passively accepted his benediction before hastening back to Tessa.

She was waiting for him with her arms folded.

I refuse to believe in the existence of a God who permits the suffering of innocent children.

"So why are we getting married in a church?"

To melt his heart, she replied.

* * *

PIGBITCH. STOP SUCKING YOUR NIGGERDOCTOR'S COCK! GO BACK TO YOUR RIDICULOUS EUNUCH HUSBAND AND BEHAVE YOURSELF. GET YOUR SHITTY NOSE OUT OF OUR BUSINESS NOW! IF NOT, YOU WILL BE DEAD MEAT AND THAT'S A SOLEMN PROMISE.

The sheet of plain typing paper that he was holding in his trembling hands was not intended to melt anybody's heart. Its message was typed in thick black capitals half an inch high. The signature, unsurprisingly, omitted. The spelling, surprisingly, immaculate. And the impact upon Justin so violent, so accusing, so inflaming, that for a fearful few seconds he lost his temper with her completely.

Why didn't you tell me? Show me? I was your husband, your protector supposedly, your man, your other bloody half!

I give up. I resign. You receive a death threat, through the letter box. You pick it up. You read it — once. Ugh! Then if you're like me, you hold it away from you because it's so vile, so physically repellent that you don't want it coming near your face. But you read it again. And again. Till you're word perfect. Like me.

So then what do you do? Phone me — "Darling, something simply foul has happened, you've got to come home at once"? Leap in a car? Drive like Jehu to the High Commission, wave the letter at me, march me in to Porter? Do you hell. Not a bit of it. As usual, your pride comes first. You don't show me the letter, you don't tell me about it, you don't burn it. You keep it secret. You classify it and you file it. Deep in a drawer of your no-go-area desk. You do exactly what you would laugh at me for doing: you file it among your papers and you preserve what in me you would mockingly call a patrician discretion about the matter. How you live with yourself after this — how you live with me — is anybody's guess. God knows how you live with the threat, but that's your business. So thanks. Thanks a lot, OK? Thanks for delivering the ultimate in marital apartheid. Bravo. And thanks again.

The rage left him as quickly as it had seized him, to be replaced by a sweating shame and remorse. You couldn't bear it, could you? The idea of actually showing someone that letter. Starting a whole landslide you couldn't control. The stuff about Bluhm, the stuff about me. It was just too much. You were protecting us. All of us. Of course you were. Did you tell Arnold? Of course not. He'd try to talk you out of going on.

* * *

Justin took a mental step back from this benign line of reasoning.

Too sweet. Tessa was tougher than that. And when her dander was up, nastier.

Think lawyer's intellect. Think icy pragmatism. Think very tough young girl, closing in for the kill.

She knew she was getting warm. The death threat confirmed it. You don't issue death threats to people who don't threaten you.

To scream "Foul!" at this stage would mean handing herself over to the authorities. The British are helpless. They have no powers, no jurisdiction. Our only recourse is to show the letter to the Kenyan authorities.

But Tessa had no faith in the Kenyan authorities. It was her frequently repeated conviction that the tentacles of Moi's empire reached into every corner of Kenyan life. Tessa's faith, like her marital duty, was invested for better or worse in the Brits: witness her secret assignation with Woodrow.

The moment she went to the Kenyan police, she would have to provide a list of her enemies, real and potential. Her pursuit of the great crime would be stopped in its tracks. She would be forced to call off the hunt. She would never do that. The great crime was more important to her than her own life.

Well, it is for me too. Than mine.

* * *

As Justin struggles to recover his balance, his eye falls on a hand-addressed envelope which in an earlier life he had extracted in blind haste from the same middle drawer of Tessa's workroom desk in Nairobi in which he had found the empty Dypraxa box. The writing on the envelope is reminiscent, but not yet familiar. The envelope has been torn open. Inside is a single folded page of HM Stationery Office blue. The script is hectic, the text dashed off in haste as well as passion.

My darling Tessa, whom I love beyond all others and always shall,

This is my only absolute conviction, my one piece of self-knowledge as I write. You were terrible to me today, but not as terrible as I was to you. The wrong person was speaking out of both of us. I desire and worship you beyond bearing. I am ready if you are. Let's both chuck in our ridiculous marriages and bolt to wherever you want, as soon as you want. If it's to the end of the earth, so much the better. I love you, I love you and I love you.

But this time the signature was not omitted. It was written loud and clear in letters of a size to match the death threat: Sandy. My name is Sandy, he was saying, and you can tell the whole damn world.

Date and time also given. Even in the throes of great love, Sandy Woodrow remains a conscientious man.