The Constant Gardener

CHAPTER FIVE

Woodrow was not easily unmanned. In his diplomatic career he had been obliged to carry off any number of humiliating situations, and had learned by experience that the soundest course was to refuse to recognize that anything was amiss. He applied this lesson now as, in curt sentences, he gave a minimalist's rendering of the scene in the hospital ward. Yes, he agreed — mildly surprised that they should be so interested in the minutiae of Tessa's confinement — he distantly remembered that a fellow patient of Tessa's was asleep or comatose. And that since she was not able to feed her own baby, Tessa was acting as the child's wet nurse. Tessa's loss was the child's gain.

"Did the sick woman have a name?" Lesley asked.

"Not that I recall."

"Was there anybody with the sick woman — a relative or friend?"

"Her brother. A teenaged boy from her village. That is how Tessa told it, but given her state, I do not regard her as a reliable witness."

"D'you know the brother's name?"

"No."

"Or the name of the village?"

"No."

"Did Tessa tell you what was wrong with the woman?"

"Most of what she said was incoherent."

"So the rest was coherent," Rob pointed out. An eerie forbearance was settling over him. His gangling limbs had found a resting place. He suddenly had all day to kill. "In her coherent moments, what did Tessa tell you about the sick woman across the ward from her, Mr. Woodrow?"

"That she was dying. That her illness, which she did not name, derived from the social conditions in which she lived."

"AIDS?"

"That's not what she said."

"Makes a change, then."

"Indeed."

"Was anyone treating the woman for this unnamed illness?"

"Presumably. Why else would she be in hospital?"

"Was Lorbeer?"

"Who?"

"Lorbeer." Rob spelled it. ""Lor" like "Lor" help us, "beer" like Heineken. Dutch mongrel. Red-haired or blonde. Mid-fifties. Fat."

"I've never heard of the man," Woodrow retorted with absolute facial confidence while his bowels churned.

"Did you see anyone treat her?"

"No."

"Do you know how she was being treated? What with?"

"No."

"You never saw anybody give her a pill or inject her with anything?"

"I told you already: no hospital staff appeared in the ward during my presence."

In his newfound leisure Rob found time to contemplate this reply, and his response to it. "How about non'-hospital staff?"

"Not in my presence."

"Out of it?"

"How should I know that?"

"From Tessa. From what Tessa told you when she was being coherent," Rob explained, and smiled so broadly that his good humor became a disturbing element, the precursor of a joke they had yet to share. "Was the sick woman in Tessa's ward — whose baby she was feeding — receiving any medical attention from anyone, according to Tessa?" he asked patiently, composing his words to fit some unspecified parlor game. "Was the sick woman being visited — or examined — or observed — or treated — by anyone, male or female, black or white, be they doctors, nurses, nondoctors, outsiders, insiders, hospital sweepers, visitors or plain people?" He sat back: wriggle out of that one.

Woodrow was becoming aware of the scale of his predicament. How much more did they know that they weren't revealing? The name Lorbeer had sounded in his head like a death knell. What other names were they about to throw at him? How much more could he deny and stay upright? What had Coleridge told them? Why was he withholding comfort, refusing to collude? Or was he confessing all, behind Woodrow's back?

"She had some story about the woman being visited by little men in white coats," he replied disdainfully. "I assumed she had dreamed it. Or was dreaming it while she related it. I gave it no credence." And nor should you, he was saying.

"Why were the white coats visiting her? According to Tessa's story. In what you call her dream."

"Because the men in white coats had killed the woman. At one point she called them the coincidences." He had decided to tell the truth and ridicule it. "I think she also called them greedy. They wished to cure her, but were unable to do so. The story was a load of rubbish."

"Cure her how?"

"That was not revealed."

"Killed her how, then?"

"I'm afraid she was equally unclear on that point."

"Had she written it down at all?"

"The story? How could she?"

"Had she made notes? Did she read to you from notes?"

"I told you. To my knowledge she had no notebook."

Rob tilted his long head to one side in order to observe Woodrow from a different angle, and perhaps a more telling one. "Arnold Bluhm doesn't think the story was a load of rubbish. He doesn't think she was incoherent. Arnold reckons she was bang on target with everything she said. Right, Les?"

* * *

The blood had drained from Woodrow's face, he could feel it. Yet even in the aftershock of their words he remained as steady under fire as any other seasoned diplomat who must hold the fort. Somehow he found the voice. And the indignation. "I'm sorry. Are you saying you've found Bluhm? That's utterly outrageous."

"You mean you don't want us to find him?" Rob inquired, puzzled.

"I mean nothing of the kind. I mean that you're here on terms, and that if you have found Bluhm or spoken to him, you're under a clear obligation to share that knowledge with the High Commission."

But Rob was already shaking his head. "No way we've found him, sir. Wish we had. But we've found a few papers of his. Useful bits and pieces, as you might say, lying around his flat. Nothing sensational, unfortunately. A few case notes, which I suppose might interest someone. Copies of the odd rude letter the doctor sent to this or that firm, laboratory, or teaching hospital around the world. And that's about it, isn't it, Les?"

"Lying around's a bit of an exaggeration, actually," Lesley admitted. "Stashed is more like. There was one batch pasted to the back of a picture frame, another underneath the bathtub. Took us all day. Well, most of one, anyway." She licked her finger and turned a page of her notebook.

"Plus the whoevers had forgotten his car," Rob reminded her.

"More like a rubbish tip than a flat by the time they'd finished with it," Lesley agreed. "No art to it. Just smash and grab. Mind you, we get that in London these days. Someone's posted missing or dead in the papers, the villains are round there the same morning, helping themselves. Our crime prevention people are getting quite bothered about it. Mind if we bounce a couple more names off you a minute, Mr. Woodrow?" she inquired, raising her gray eyes and turning them steadily upon him.

"Make yourselves at home," said Woodrow, as if they hadn't.

"Kovacs — believed Hungarian — woman-young. Raven-black hair, long legs-he'll be giving us her vital statistics next — first name unknown, researcher."

"You'd remember her all right," said Rob.

"I'm afraid I don't."

"Emrich. Medical doctor, research scientist, first qualified in Petersburg, took a German degree at Leipzig, did research work in Gdansk. Female. No description available. Name to you?"

"I've never heard of such a person in my life. Nobody of that description, nobody of that name, nobody of that origin or qualification."

"Blimey. You really haven't heard of her, have you?"

"And our old friend Lorbeer," Lesley came in apologetically. "First name unknown, origins unknown, probably half Dutch or Boer, qualifications also a mystery. We're quoting from Bluhm's notes, that's the problem, so we're at his mercy, as you might say. He's got the three names ringed together like a flow chart, with itsy-bitsy descriptions inside each balloon. Lorbeer and the two women doctors. Lorbeer, Emrich, Kovacs. Quite a mouthful. We'd have brought you a copy but we're a bit queasy about using copiers at the moment. You know what the local police are like. And copy shops — well, we wouldn't trust them to copy the Lord's Prayer, frankly, would we, Rob?"

"Use ours," said Woodrow too quickly.

A ruminative silence followed, which to Woodrow was like a deafness where no cars went by, and no birds sang, and nobody walked down the corridor outside his door. It was broken by Lesley doggedly describing Lorbeer as the man they would most like to question.

"Lorbeer's a floater. He's believed to be in the pharmaceutical business. He's believed to have been in and out of Nairobi a few times in the last year but the Kenyans can't trace him, surprisingly. He's believed to have visited Tessa's ward in the Uhuru Hospital when she was confined there. Bullish, that's another description we've had. I thought that was the Stock Exchange. And you're sure you've never come across a reddish-haired medical Lorbeer of bullish appearance at all, may be a doctor? Anywhere in your travels?"

"Never heard of the man. Or anyone like him."

"We're getting that quite a lot, actually," Rob commented from the wings.

"Tessa knew him. So did Bluhm," said Lesley.

"That doesn't mean I knew him."

"So what's the white plague when it's at home?" Rob asked.

"I've absolutely no idea."

They left as they had left before: on an ever-growing question mark.

* * *

As soon as he was safely clear of them, Woodrow picked up the internal phone to Coleridge and, to his relief, heard his voice.

"Got a minute?"

"I suppose so."

He found him sitting at his desk, one splayed hand to his brow. He was wearing yellow braces with horses on them. His expression was wary and belligerent.

"I need to be assured that we have London's backing in this," Woodrow began, without sitting down.

"We being who exactly?"

"You and I."

"And by London, you mean Pellegrin, I take it."

"Why? Has anything changed?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Is it going to?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Well, does Pellegrin have backing? Put it that way."

"Oh, Bernard always has backing."

"So do we go on with this, or don't we?"

"Go on lying, you mean? Of course we do."

"Then why can't we agree on — on what we say?"

"Good point. I don't know. If I were a God man, I'd sneak off and pray. But it's not as fucking easy as that. The girl's dead. That's one part of it. And we're alive. That's another part."

"So have you told them the truth?"

"No, no, good Lord no. Memory like a sieve, me. Terribly sorry."

"Are you going to tell them the truth?"

"Them? No, no. Never. Shits."

"Then why can't we agree our stories?"

"That's it. Why not? Why not indeed. You've put your finger on it, Sandy. What's stopping us?"

* * *

"It's about your visit to the Uhuru Hospital, sir," Lesley began crisply.

"I thought we'd rather done that one in our last session."

"Your other visit. Your second one. A bit later. More a follow — up."

"Follow-up? Follow-up of what?"

"A promise you made to her, apparently."

"What are you talking about? I don't understand you."

But Rob understood her perfectly, and said so. "Sounded pretty good English to me, sir. Did you have a second meeting with Tessa at the hospital? Like four weeks after she'd been discharged, for instance? Like meet her in the anteroom to the postnatal clinic where she had an appointment? Because that's what it says you did in Arnold's notes, and he hasn't been wrong so far, not from what us ignorant folk can understand of them."

Arnold, Woodrow recorded. Not Bluhm anymore.

The soldier's son was debating with himself, and he was doing so with the glacial calculation that in crisis was his muse, while in his memory he was following the scene in the crowded hospital as if it had happened to someone else. Tessa is carrying a tapestry bag with cane handles. It is the first time he has seen it, but from now on and for the rest of her short life it is part of the tough image that she had formed of herself while she was lying in hospital with her dead baby in the morgue and a dying woman in the bed opposite her and the dying woman's baby at her breast. It goes with the less makeup and the shorter hair and the glower that is not so very different from the disbelieving stare that Lesley was bestowing on him this minute, while she waited for his edited version of the event. The light, as everywhere in the hospital, is fickle. Huge shafts of sunlight bisect the half dark of the interior. Small birds glide among the rafters. Tessa is standing with her back against a curved wall, next to an ill — smelling coffee shop with orange chairs. There is a crowd milling in and out of the sunbeams but he sees her immediately. She is holding the tapestry bag in both hands across her lower belly and standing the way tarts used to stand in doorways when he was young and scared. The wall is in shadow because the sunbeams don't reach the edges of the room and perhaps that's why Tessa has chosen this particular spot.

"You said you would listen to me when I was stronger," she reminds him in a low, harsh voice he scarcely recognizes.

It is the first time they have spoken since his visit to the ward. He sees her lips, so fragile without the discipline of lipstick. He sees the passion in her gray eyes, and it scares him as all passion scares him, his own included.

"The meeting you are referring to was not social," he told Rob, avoiding Lesley's unrelenting gaze. "It was professional. Tessa claimed to have stumbled on some documents which, if genuine, were politically sensitive. She asked me to meet her at the clinic so that she could hand them over."

"Stumbled how?" asked Rob.

"She had outside connections. That's all I know. Friends in the aid agencies."

"Such as Bluhm?"

"Among others. It was not the first time she had approached the High Commission with stories of high scandal, I should add. She made quite a habit of it."

"By High Commission, you mean you?"

"If you mean me in my capacity as Head of Chancery, yes."

"Why didn't she give them to Justin to hand over?"

"Justin must remain out of the equation. That was her determination, and presumably his." Was he explaining too much, another peril? He plunged on. "I respected that in her. To be frank, I respected any sign of scruple in her at all."

"Why didn't she give them to Ghita?"

"Ghita is new and young and locally employed. She would not have been a suitable messenger."

"So you met," Lesley resumed. "At the hospital. In the anteroom to the postnatal clinic. Wasn't that a rather conspicuous meeting place: two whites among all those Africans?"

You've been there, he thought, with another lurch into near-panic. You've visited the hospital. "It wasn't Africans she was afraid of. It was whites. She was not to be reasoned with. When she was among Africans she felt safe."

"Did she say that?"

"I deduced it."

"What from?" — Rob.

"Her attitude during those last months. After the baby. To me, to the white community. To Bluhm. Bluhm could do no wrong. He was African and handsome and a doctor. And Ghita's half Indian" — a little wildly.

"How did Tessa make the appointment?" Rob asked.

"Sent a note to my house, by hand of her houseboy Mustafa."

"Did your wife know you were meeting her?"

"Mustafa gave the note to my houseboy, who passed it to me."

"And you didn't tell your wife?"

"I regarded the meeting as confidential."

"Why didn't she phone you?"

"My wife?"

"Tessa."

"She distrusted diplomatic telephones. With reason. We all do."

"Why didn't she simply send the documents with Mustafa?"

"There were assurances she required of me. Guarantees."

"Why didn't she bring the papers to you here?" Still Rob, pressing, pressing.

"For the reason I have already given you. She had reached a point where she did not trust the High Commission, did not wish to be tainted by it, did not wish to be seen entering or leaving it. You speak as if her actions were logical. It's hard to apply logic to Tessa's final months."

"Why not Coleridge? Why did it have to be you all the time? You at her bedside, you at the clinic? Didn't she know anyone else here?"

For a perilous moment, Woodrow joined forces with his inquisitors. Why me indeed? he demanded of Tessa in a surge of angry self-pity. Because your bloody vanity would never let me go. Because it pleased you to hear me promise my soul away, when both of us knew that on the day of reckoning I wouldn't deliver it and you wouldn't accept it. Because grappling with me was like meeting head-on the English sicknesses you loved to hate. Because I was some kind of archetype for you, "all ritual and no faith" — your words. We are standing face-to-face and half a foot apart and I am wondering why we are the same height till I realize that a raised step runs round the base of the curved wall and that, like other women there, you have climbed onto it, waiting to be spotted by your man. Our faces are at the same level, and despite your new austerity, it is Christmas again and I am dancing with you, smelling the sweet warm grass in your hair.

"So she gave you a bundle of papers," Rob was saying. "What were they about?"

I am taking the envelope from you and feeling the maddening contact of your fingers as you give it to me. You are deliberately reviving the flame in me, you know it and can't help it, you are taking me over the edge again, although you know you will never come with me. I am wearing no jacket. You watch me while I undo my shirt buttons, slide the envelope against my naked skin and work it downward until its lower edge is stuck between the waistband of my trousers and my hip. You watch me again as I refasten the buttons, and I have the same shameful sensations that I would have if I had made love to you. As a good diplomat I offer you a cup of coffee in the shop. You decline. We stand face-to-face like dancers waiting for music to justify our proximity.

"Rob asked you what the papers were about," Lesley was reminding Woodrow from outside his field of consciousness.

"They purported to describe a major scandal."

"Here in Kenya?"

"The correspondence was classified."

"By Tessa?"

"Don't be damn silly. How could she classify anything?" Woodrow snapped, and too late regretted his heat.

You must force them to act, Sandy, you are urging me. Your face is pale with suffering and courage. Your theatrical impulses have not been dimmed by the experience of real tragedy. Your eyes are brimming with the tears that, since the baby, swim in them all the time. Your voice urges, but it caresses too, working the scales the way it always did. We need a champion, Sandy. Someone outside us. Someone official and capable. Promise me. If I can keep faith with you, you can keep faith with me.

So I say it. Like you, I am carried away by the power of the moment. I believe. In God. In love. In Tessa. When we are onstage together, I believe. I swear myself away, which is what I do every time I come to you, and what you want me to do because you also are an addict of impossible relationships and theatrical scenes. I promise, I say, and you make me say it again. I promise, I promise. I love you and I promise. And that is your cue to kiss me on the lips that have spoken the shameful promise: one kiss to silence me and seal the contract; one quick hug to bind me and let me smell your hair.

"The papers were sent by bag to the relevant undersecretary in London," Woodrow was explaining to Rob. "At which point, they were classified."

"Why?"

"Because of the serious allegations they contained."

"Against?"

"Pass, I'm afraid."

"A Company? An Individual?"

"Pass."

"How many pages in the document, d'you reckon?"

"Fifteen. Twenty. There was an annex of some sort."

"Any photographs, illustrations, exhibits at all?"

"Pass."

"Any tape recordings? Disks — taped confessions, statements?"

"Pass."

"Which undersecretary did you send them to?"

"Sir Bernard Pellegrin."

"Did you keep a copy locally?"

"It is a matter of policy to keep as little sensitive material here as possible."

"Did you keep a copy or not?"

"No."

"Were the papers typed?"

"By whom?"

"Were they typed or written by hand?"

"Typed."

"What by?"

"I am not an expert on typewriters."

"Electronic type? Off a word processor? A computer? Do you remember the sort of type? The font?"

Woodrow gave an ill-tempered shrug that was close to violence.

"It wasn't italicized, for instance?" Rob persisted.

"No."

"Or that fake, half-joined-up handwriting they do?"

"It was perfectly ordinary roman type."

"Electronic."

"Yes."

"Then you do remember. Was the annex typed?"

"Probably."

"The same type?"

"Probably."

"So fifteen to twenty pages, give or take, of perfectly ordinary electronic roman type.

Thank you. Did you hear back from London?"

"Eventually."

"From Pellegrin?"

"It may have been Sir Bernard, it may have been one of his subordinates."

"Saying?"

"No action was required."

"Any reason given at all?" Still Rob, throwing his questions like punches.

"The so-called evidence offered in the document was tendentious. Any inquiries on the strength of it would achieve nothing and prejudice our relations with the host nation."

"Did you tell Tessa that was the answer — no action?"

"Not in as many words."

"What did you tell her?" Lesley asked.

Was it Woodrow's new policy of truth telling that made him reply as he did — or some weaker instinct to confess? "I told her what I felt would be acceptable to her, given her condition-given the loss she had suffered, and the importance she attached to the documents."

Lesley had switched off the tape recorder and was packing away her notebooks. "So what lie was acceptable to her, sir? In your judgment?" she asked.

"That London was on the case. Steps were being taken."

For a blessed moment Woodrow believed the meeting was over. But Rob was still in there, slugging away.

"One more thing, if you don't mind, Mr. Woodrow. Bell, Barker and Benjamin. Known otherwise as ThreeBees."

Woodrow's posture did not alter by a fraction.

"Ads all over town. "ThreeBees, Busy for Africa." "Buzzing for You, Honey! I Love ThreeBees." Headquarters up the road. Big new glass building, looks like a Dalek."

"What of them?"

"Only we pulled out their company profile last night, didn't we, Les? Quite an amazing outfit, you don't realize. Finger in every African pie but British to the core. Hotels, travel agencies, newspapers, security companies, banks, extractors of gold, coal and copper, importers of cars, boats and trucks — I could go on forever. Plus a fine range of drugs. "ThreeBees Buzzing for Your Health." We spotted that one as we drove here this morning, didn't we, Les?"

"Just back down the road," Lesley agreed.

"And they're hugger-mugger with Moi's Boys too, from all we hear. Private jets, all the girls you can eat."

"I assume this is getting us somewhere."

"Not really. I just wanted to watch your face while I talked about them. I've done it now. Thank you for your patience."

Lesley was still busy with her bag. For all the interest she had shown in this exchange, she might not have heard it at all.

"People like you should be stopped, Mr. Woodrow," she mused aloud, with a puzzled shake of her wise head. "You think you're solving the world's problems but actually you're the problem."

"She means you're a fucking liar," Rob explained.

This time, Woodrow did not escort them to the door. He remained at his post behind the desk, listening to the fading footsteps of his departing guests, then he called the front desk and asked, in the most casual tone, to be advised when they had cleared the building. On learning they had, he made his way swiftly to Coleridge's private office. Coleridge, he well knew, was away from his desk, conferring with the Kenyan Ministry of External Affairs. Mildren was speaking on the internal telephone, looking unpleasantly relaxed.

"This is urgent," Woodrow said, in contrast to whatever Mildren thought he was doing.

Seated at Coleridge's empty desk, Woodrow watched Mildren extract a white lozenge from the High Commissioner's personal safe and insert it officiously in the digital phone.

"Who do you want, anyway?" Mildren asked, with the insolence peculiar to lower-class private secretaries to the great.

"Get out," Woodrow said.

And as soon as he was alone, dialed the direct number of Sir Bernard Pellegrin.

* * *

They sat on the veranda, two Service colleagues enjoying an after-dinner nightcap under the relentless glare of intruder lights. Gloria had taken herself to the drawing room.

"There's no good way of saying this, Justin," Woodrow began. "So I'll say it anyway. The very strong probability is, she was raped. I'm terribly, terribly sorry. For her and for you."

And Woodrow was sorry, he must be. Sometimes you don't have to feel something to know you feel it. Sometimes your senses are so trampled that another appalling piece of news is just one more tiresome detail to administer.

"This is ahead of the postmortem of course, so it's premature and off the record," he went on, avoiding Justin's eye. "But they seem to have no doubt." He felt a need to offer practical consolation. "The police feel it's actually quite thought-clearing — to have a motive at least. It helps them with the broad thrust of the case, even if they can't point a finger yet."

Justin was sitting to attention, holding his brandy glass in front of him with both hands, as if someone had handed it to him as a prize.

"Only a probability?" he objected at last. "How very strange. How can that be?"

Woodrow had not imagined that, once again, he would be subjected to questioning but in some ghastly way he welcomed it. A devil was driving him.

"Well, obviously they do have to ask themselves whether it could have been consensual. That's routine."

"Consensual with whom?" Justin inquired, puzzled.

"Well, whoever — whoever they have in mind. We can't do their job for them, can we?"

"No. We can't. Poor you, Sandy. You seem to get all the dirty jobs. And now I am sure we should pay attention to Gloria. How right she was to leave us to ourselves. Sitting outside with the entire insect kingdom of Africa would be more than that fair English skin of hers could bear." Developing a sudden aversion to Woodrow's proximity, he had stood up and pushed open the French window. "Gloria, my dear, we have been neglecting you."