The Constant Gardener

CHAPTER EIGHT

Rob lounges while Lesley again unpacks her toys: the colored notebooks, pencils, the little tape recorder that yesterday remained untouched, the piece of india rubber. Justin has a prison pallor and a web of hairline cracks around his eyes, which is how the mornings take him now. A doctor would prescribe fresh air.

"You said you had nothing to do with your wife's murder in the sense we're implying, Justin," Lesley reminds him. "What other sense is there, if you don't mind us asking?" And has to lean across the table to catch his words.

"I should have gone with her."

"To Lokichoggio?"

He shook his head.

"To Lake Turkana?"

"To anywhere."

"Is that what she told you?"

"No. She never criticized me. We never told each other what to do. We had one argument, and it was to do with method, not substance. Arnold was never an obstruction."

"What was the argument about, exactly?" Rob demands, clinging determinedly to his literal view of things.

"After the loss of our baby, I begged Tessa to let me take her back to England or Italy. Take her anywhere she wanted. She wouldn't think of it. She had a mission, thank God, a reason to survive, and it was here in Nairobi. She had come upon a great social injustice. A great crime; she called it both. That was all I was allowed to know. In my profession, studied ignorance is an art form." He turns to the window and peers out sightlessly. "Have you seen how people live in the slums here?"

Lesley shakes her head.

"She took me once. In a weak moment, she said later, she wanted me to inspect her workplace. Ghita Pearson came with us. Ghita and Tessa were naturally close. The affinities were ridiculous. Their mothers had both been doctors, their fathers lawyers, they'd both been brought up Catholic. We went to a medical center. Four concrete walls and a tin roof and a thousand people waiting to get to the door." For a moment he forgets where he is. "Poverty on that scale is a discipline of its own. It can't be learned in an afternoon. Nevertheless, it was hard for me, from then on, to walk down Stanley Street without — " he broke off again — "without the other image in my mind." After Woodrow's sleek evasions, his words ring out like the true gospel. "The great injustice — the great crime — was what kept her alive. Our baby was five weeks dead. Left alone in the house, Tessa would stare vacantly at the wall. Mustafa would telephone me at the High Commission — "Come home, Mzee, she is ill, she is ill." But it wasn't I who revived her. It was Arnold. Arnold understood. Arnold shared the secret with her. She'd only to hear his car in the drive and she became a different woman. "What have you got? What have you got?"' She meant news. Information. Progress. When he'd gone, she'd retreat to her little workroom and toil into the night."

"At her computer?"

A moment's wariness on Justin's part. Overcome. "She had her papers, she had her computer. She had the telephone, which she used with the greatest circumspection. And she had Arnold, whenever he was able to get away."

"And you didn't mind that then?" Rob sneers, in an ill-judged return to his hectoring tone. "Your wife sitting about mooning, waiting for Dr. Wonderful to show up?"

"Tessa was desolate. If she'd needed a hundred Bluhms, as far as I was concerned, she could have them all and on whatever terms she wished."

"And you didn't know anything about the great crime," Lesley resumed, unwilling to be persuaded. "Nothing. What it was about, who the victims and the main players were. They kept it all from you. Bluhm and Tessa together, and you stuck out there in the cold."

"I gave them their distance," Justin confirmed doggedly.

"I just don't see how you could survive like that," Lesley insists, putting down her notebook and opening her hands. "Apart, but together-the way you describe it — it's like — not being on speaking terms — worse."

"We didn't survive," Justin reminds her simply. "Tessa's dead."

* * *

Here they might have thought that the time for intimate confidences had run its course and a period of sheepishness or embarrassment would follow, even recantation. But Justin has only begun. He jolts himself upright, like a man raising his game. His hands fall to his thighs and stay there until otherwise ordered. His voice recovers its power. Some deep interior force is driving it to the surface, into the unfresh air of the Woodrows' fetid dining room, still rank with last night's gravy.

"She was so impetuous," he declares proudly, once more reciting from speeches he has made to himself for hours on end. "I loved that in her from the start. She was so desperate to have our child at once. The death of her parents must be compensated as soon as possible! Why wait till we were married? I held her back. I shouldn't have done. I pleaded convention — God knows why. "Very well," she said, "if we must be married in order to have a baby, let's get married immediately." So we went off to Italy and married immediately, to the huge entertainment of my colleagues." He is entertained himself. ""Quayle's gone mad! Old Justin's married his daughter! Has Tessa passed her A levels yet?"' When she became pregnant, after three years of trying, she wept. So did I."

He breaks off, but no one interrupts his flow.

"With pregnancy she changed. But only for the good. Tessa grew into motherhood. Outwardly she remained lighthearted. But inwardly a deep sense of responsibility was forming in her. Her aid work took on new meaning. I am told that's not unusual. What had been important now became a vocation, practically a destiny. She was seven months pregnant and still tending the sick and dying, then coming back for some fatuous diplomatic dinner party in town. The nearer the baby came, the more determined she was to make a better world for it. Not just for our child. For all children. By then she'd set her heart on an African hospital. If I'd forced her to go to some private clinic, she'd have done it, but I'd have betrayed her."

"How?" Lesley murmurs.

"Tessa distinguished absolutely between pain observed and pain shared. Pain observed is journalistic pain. It's diplomatic pain. It's television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set. Those who watch suffering and do nothing about it, in her book, were little better than those who inflicted it. They were the bad Samaritans."

"But she was doing something about it," Lesley objects.

"Hence the African hospital. In her extreme moments she talked of bearing her child in the slums of Kibera. Mercifully, Arnold and Ghita between them were able to restore her sense of proportion. Arnold has the authority of suffering. He not only treated torture victims in Algeria, he was tortured himself. He had earned his pass to the wretched of the earth. I hadn't."

Rob seizes on this, as if the point has not been made a dozen times before. "A bit hard to see where you came in, then, isn't it? Bit of a spare wheel, you were, sitting up there in the clouds with your diplomatic pain and your high-level committee, weren't you?"

But Justin's forbearance is limitless. There are times when he is simply too well bred to disagree. "She exempted me from active service, as she put it," he assents with a shameful dropping of the voice. "She invented specious arguments to put me at my ease. She insisted that the world needed both of us: me inside the system, pushing; herself outside it, in the field, pulling. "I'm the one who believes in the moral state," she would say. "If you lot don't do your job, what hope is there for the rest of us?"' It was sophistry and we both knew it. The system didn't need my job. Neither did I. What was the point of it? I was writing reports no one looked at and suggesting action that was never taken. Tessa was a stranger to deceit. Except in my case. For me, she deceived herself totally."

"Was she ever afraid?" Lesley asks, softly in order not to violate the atmosphere of confession.

Justin reflects, then allows himself a half smile of recollection. "She once boasted to the American Ambassadress that fear was the only four-letter word she didn't know the meaning of. Her Excellency was not amused."

Lesley smiles too, but not for long. "And this decision to have her baby in an African hospital," she asks, her eye on her notebook. "Can you tell us when and how it was taken, please?"

"There was a woman from one of the slum villages up north that Tessa regularly visited. Wanza, surname unknown. Wanza was suffering from a mystery illness of some sort. She had been singled out for special treatment. By coincidence they found themselves in the same ward at the Uhuru Hospital and Tessa befriended her."

Do they hear the guarded note that has entered his voice? Justin does.

"Know what illness?"

"Only the generality. She was ill and might become dangerously so."

"Did she have AIDS?"

"Whether her illness was AIDS'-related I have no idea. My impression was that the concerns were different."

"That's pretty unusual, isn't it, a woman from the slums giving birth in a hospital?"

"She was under observation."

"Whose observation?"

It is the second time that Justin censors himself. Deception does not come naturally to him. "I assume one of the health clinics. In her village. In a shantytown. As you see, I'm hazy. I marvel at how much I managed not to know."

"And Wanza died, didn't she?"

"She died on the last night of Tessa's stay at the hospital," Justin replies, gratefully abandoning his reserve in order to reconstruct the moment for them. "I'd been in the ward all evening but Tessa insisted I go home for a few hours' sleep. She'd told the same to Arnold and Ghita. We were taking alternate watches at her bedside. Arnold had supplied a safari bed. At four in the morning, Tessa telephoned me. There was no telephone in her ward so she used the Sister's. She was distressed. Hysterical is the more accurate description, but Tessa, when she is hysterical, does not raise her voice. Wanza had disappeared. The baby also. She had woken to find Wanza's bed empty and the baby's cot vanished. I drove to Uhuru Hospital. Arnold and Ghita arrived at the same moment. Tessa was inconsolable. It was as if she'd lost a second child in the space of a few days. Between the three of us, we persuaded her that it was time for her to convalesce at home. With Wanza dead and the baby removed, she felt no obligation to remain."

"Tessa didn't get to see the body?"

"She asked to see it but was told it was not appropriate. Wanza was dead and her baby had been taken to the mother's village by her brother. So far as the hospital was concerned, that was an end to the matter. Hospitals do not care to dwell on death," he adds, speaking with the experience of Garth.

"Did Arnold get to see the body?"

"He was too late. It had been sent to the morgue and lost."

Lesley's eyes widen in unfeigned astonishment while, on the other side of Justin, Rob leans quickly forward, grabs the tape recorder and makes sure the tape is turning in the little window.

"Lost? You don't lose bodies!" Rob exclaims.

"To the contrary, I'm assured that in Nairobi it happens all the time."

"What about the death certificate?"

"I can only tell you what I learned from Arnold and Tessa. I know nothing of a death certificate. None was mentioned."

"And no postmortem?" Lesley is back.

"To my knowledge, none."

"Did Wanza receive visitors at the hospital?"

Justin ponders this but evidently sees no reason not to reply. "Her brother Kioko. He slept beside her on the floor when he wasn't keeping the flies off her. And Ghita Pearson would make a point of sitting with her when she called on Tessa."

"Anyone else?"

"A white male doctor, I believe. I can't be sure."

"That he was white?"

"That he was a doctor. A white man in a white coat. And a stethoscope."

"Alone?"

The reserve again, falling like a shadow across his voice. "He was accompanied by a group of students. Or so I took them to be. They were young. They wore white coats."

With three golden bees embroidered on the pocket of each coat, he might have added, but his resolve held him back.

"Why do you say students? Did Tessa say they were students?"

"No."

"Did Arnold?"

"Arnold made no judgment about them in my hearing. It is pure presumption on my part. They were young."

"How about their leader? Their doctor, if that's what he was. Did Arnold say anything about him?"

"Not to me. If he had concerns, he addressed them to the man himself — the man with the stethoscope."

"In your presence?"

"But not in my hearing." Or almost not.

Rob like Lesley is craning forward to catch his every word. "Describe."

Justin is already doing so. For a brief truce he has joined their team. But the reserve has not left his voice. Caution and circumspection are written round his tired eyes. "Arnold took the man to one side. By the arm. The man with the stethoscope. They spoke to each other as doctors do. In low voices, apart."

"In English?"

"I believe so. When Arnold speaks French or kiSwahili he acquires a different body language." And when he speaks English he is inclined to raise his pitch a little, he might have added.

"Describe him — the bloke with the stethoscope," Rob commands.

"He was burly. A big man. Plump. Unkempt. I have a memory of suede shoes. I remember thinking it peculiar that a medical doctor should wear suede shoes, I am not sure why. But the memory of the shoes endures. His coat was grimy from nothing very particular. Suede shoes, a grimy coat, a red face. A showman of some kind. If it had not been for his white coat, an impresario." And three golden bees, tarnished but distinct, embroidered on his pocket, just like the nurse in the poster at the airport, he was thinking. "He seemed ashamed," he added, taking himself by surprise.

"What of?"

"Of his own presence there. Of what he was doing."

"Why do you say that?"

"He wouldn't look at Tessa. At either of us. He'd look anywhere else. Just not at us."

"Color of hair?"

"Fair. Fair to ginger. There was drink in his face. The reddish hair set it off. Do you know of him? Tessa was most curious about him."

"Beard? Mustache?"

"Clean-shaven. No. He was not. He had a day's stubble at least. It had a golden color to it. She asked him his name repeatedly. He declined to give it."

Rob comes crashing in again. "What kind of conversation did it look like?" he insists. "Was it an argument? Was it friendly? Were they inviting each other to lunch? What was going on?"

The caution back. I heard nothing. I only saw. "Arnold appeared to be protesting — reproaching. The doctor was denying. I had the impression — " he pauses, giving himself time to choose his words. Trust nobody, Tessa had said. Nobody but Ghita and Arnold. Promise me. I promise. "My impression was, this was not the first time a disagreement had taken place between them. What I was witnessing was part of a continuing argument. So I thought afterward, at least. That I had witnessed a resumption of hostilities between adversaries."

"You've thought about it a lot, then."

"Yes. Yes, I have," Justin agrees dubiously. "My other impression was that English was not the doctor's first language."

"But you didn't discuss any of this with Arnold and Tessa?"

"When the man had gone, Arnold returned to Tessa's bedside, took her pulse and spoke in her ear."

"Which again you didn't hear?"

"No and I was not intended to." Too thin, he thinks. Try harder. "It was a part I had become familiar with," he explains, avoiding their gaze. "To remain outside their circle."

"What medication was Wanza on?" Lesley asks.

"I've no idea."

He had every idea. Poison. He had fetched Tessa from the hospital and was standing two steps below her on the staircase to their bedroom, holding her night bag in one hand and the bag of Garth's first clothes and bedclothes and nappies in the other, but he was watching her like a wrestler because, being Tessa, she had to manage on her own. As soon as she started to crumple he let go the bags and caught her before her knees gave way, and he felt the awful lightness of her, and the shaking and despair as she broke into her lament, not about dead Garth, but about dead Wanza. They killed her! she blurted, straight into his face because he was holding her so close. Those bastards killed Wanza, Justin! They killed her with their poison. Who did, darling? he asked, smoothing her sweated hair away from her cheeks and forehead. Who killed her? Tell me. With his arm across her emaciated back he manhandled her gently up the stairs. What bastards, darling? Tell me who the bastards are. Those bastards in ThreeBees. Those phony bloody doctors. The ones that wouldn't look at us! What sort of doctors are we talking about? — lifting her up and laying her on the bed, not giving her the slightest second chance to fall. Do they have names, the doctors? Tell me.

From deep in his inner world, he hears Lesley asking him the same question in reverse. "Does the name Lorbeer mean anything to you, Justin?"

If in doubt, lie, he has sworn to himself. If in hell, lie. If I trust nobody — not even myself — if I am to be loyal only to the dead, lie.

"I fear not," he replies.

"Not overheard anywhere — on the phone? Bits of chitchat between Arnold and Tessa? Lorbeer, German, Dutch — Swiss perhaps?"

"Lorbeer is not a name to me in any context."

"Kovacs — Hungarian woman? Dark hair, said to be a beauty?"

"Does she have a first name?" He means no again, but this time it's the truth.

"Nobody does," Lesley replies in a kind of desperation. "Emrich. Also a woman. But blonde. No?" She tosses her pencil onto the table in defeat. "So Wanza dies," she says. "Official. Killed by a man who wouldn't look at you. And today, six months later, you still don't know what of. She just died."

"It was never revealed to me. If Tessa or Arnold knew the cause of her death, I did not."

Rob and Lesley flop in their chairs like two athletes who have agreed to take time out. Leaning back, stretching his arms wide, Rob gives a stage sigh while Lesley stays leaning forward, cupping her chin in her hand, an expression of melancholy on her wise face.

"And you haven't made this up, then?" she asks Justin through her knuckles. "This whole pitch about the dying woman Wanza, her baby, the so-called doctor who was ashamed, the so-called students in white coats? It's not a tissue of lies from end to end, for example?"

"What a perfectly ridiculous suggestion! Why on earth should I waste your time inventing such a story?"

"The Uhuru Hospital's got no record of Wanza," Rob explains, equally despondent, from his half-recumbent position. "Tessa existed, so did your poor Garth. Wanza didn't. She was never there, she was never admitted, she was never treated by a doctor, pseudo or otherwise, no one observed her, no one prescribed for her. Her baby was never born, she never died, her body was never lost because it never existed. Our Les here had a go at speaking to a few of the nurses but they don't know nuffink, do they, Les?"

"Somebody had a quiet word with them before I did," Lesley explains.

* * *

Hearing a man's voice behind him, Justin swung round. But it was only the flight steward inquiring after his bodily comforts. Did Mr. Brown require a spot of help with the controls on his seat at all? Thank you, Mr. Brown preferred to remain upright. Or his video machine? Thank you, no, I have no need of it. Then would he like to have the blind across his window drawn at all? No, thank you — emphatically — Justin preferred his window open to the cosmos. Then what about a nice warm blanket for Mr. Brown? Out of incurable politeness, Justin accepted a blanket and returned his gaze to the black window in time to see Gloria barging into the dining room without knocking, carrying a tray of paste sandwiches. Setting it on the table, she sneaks a look at whatever Lesley has written in her notebook: fruitlessly, as it happens, for Lesley has deftly turned to a fresh page.

"You won't overwork our poor houseguest, will you, darlings? He's got quite enough on his plate as it is, haven't you, Justin?"

And a kiss on the cheek for Justin, and a music-hall exit for everyone, as the three of them with one mind spring to open the door for their jailer as she departs with the spent tea tray.

* * *

For a while after Gloria's intrusion the talk is piecemeal. They munch their sandwiches, Lesley opens a different notebook, a blue one, while Rob with his mouth full fires off a seemingly unrelated stream of questions.

"Know anyone who smokes Sportsman cigarettes incessantly, do we?" — in a tone to suggest that smoking Sportsmans is a capital offense.

"Not that I'm aware of, no. We both detested cigarette smoke."

"I meant out and about, not just at home."

"Still no."

"Know anyone owns a green long-wheelbase safari truck, good condition, Kenyan plates?"

"The High Commissioner boasts an armored jeep of some sort, but I don't imagine that's what you have in mind."

"Know any blokes in their forties, wellbuilt military types, polished shoes, tanned complexions?"

"Nobody who comes to mind, I'm afraid," Justin confesses, smiling in his relief to be clear of the danger zone.

"Ever heard of a place called Marsabit, at all?"

"Yes, I think so. Yes, Marsabit. Of course. Why?"

"Oh. Right. Good. We have heard of it. Where is it?"

"On the edge of the Chalbi desert."

"East of Lake Turkana then?"

"As memory serves, yes. It's an administrative center of some sort. A meeting place for wanderers from all over the northern region."

"Ever been there?"

"Alas, no."

"Know anyone who has?"

"No, I don't believe so."

"Any idea of the facilities available to the careworn traveler at Marsabit?"

"I believe there is accommodation there. And a police post. And a national reserve."

"But you've never been there." Justin has not. "Or sent anyone there? Two anyones, for instance?" Justin has not. "So how come you know all about the place then? Psychic, are you?"

"When I am posted to a country I make it my business to study the map."

"We're getting stories of a green long wheelbase safari truck that stopped over at Marsabit two nights before the murder, Justin," Lesley explains, when this ritual display of aggression has run its course. "Two white men aboard. They sound like white hunters. Fit, your sort of age, khaki drills, shiny shoes, like Rob says. Didn't talk to anyone except each other. Didn't flirt with a bevy of Swedish girls at the bar. Bought stores from the shop. Fuel, fags, water, beer, rations. The fags were Sportsmans, the beer was Whitecap in bottles. Whitecap only comes in bottles. They left next morning, headed west across the desert. If they kept driving they could have hit Turkana shore next evening. They might even have made it to Allia Bay. The empty beer bottles we found near the murder scene were Whitecaps. The fag ends were Sportsmans."

"Is it simplistic of me to ask whether the hotel at Marsabit keeps a register?" Justin inquires.

"Page missing," Rob declares triumphantly, barging his way back. "Untimely ripped. Plus the Marsabit staff don't remember them from shit. They're so scared they can't remember their own names. Someone had a quiet word with them too, we assume. Same people as had a word with the staff at the hospital."

But this is Rob's swansong in his role of Justin's hangman, a truth that he himself seems to recognize, for he scowls and yanks at his ear and very nearly looks apologetic, but Justin meanwhile is quickening. His gaze travels restlessly from Rob to Lesley and back again. He waits for the next question and, when none is forthcoming, asks one of his own.

"What about the vehicle registration office?"

The suggestion drew a hollow laugh from the two officers.

"In Kenya?" they ask.

"The motor insurance companies, then. The importers, the suppliers. There can't be that many long-wheelbase green safari trucks in Kenya. Not if you sift through them."

"The Blue Boys are working on it flat out," says Rob. "By the next millennium, if we're very nice, they may come up with an answer. The importers haven't been all that clever either, to be frank," he goes on, with a sly look at Lesley. "Little firm called Bell, Barker and Benjamin, known otherwise as ThreeBees — heard of them? President for Life, one Sir Kenneth K. Curtiss, golfer and crook, Kenny K to his friends?"

"Everyone in Africa has heard of ThreeBees," says Justin, pulling himself sharply back into line. If in doubt, lie. "And of Sir Kenneth, obviously. He's a character."

"Loved?"

"Admired, I suppose is the word. He owns a popular Kenyan football team. And wears a baseball cap back to front," he adds, with a distaste that makes them laugh.

"ThreeBees have shown a lot of what I'd call alacrity all right, but not a lot of results," Rob resumes. "Very helpful, not a lot of help. "No problem, Officer! You'll have it by lunchtime, Officer!" But that was lunchtime a week ago."

"I'm afraid that's the way with quite a few people round here," Justin laments with a weary smile. "Have you tried the motor insurance companies?"

"ThreeBees do motor insurance too. Well, they would, wouldn't they? Free third-party cover when you buy one of their vehicles. Still, that hasn't been a lot of help either. Not when it comes to green safari trucks in good condition."

"I see," says Justin blandly.

"Tessa never had them in her sights at all, did she?" Rob asks, in his ever-so-casual tone. "ThreeBees? Kenny K does seem rather close to the Moi throne, which can usually be relied on to get her dander up. Did she?"

"Oh I expect so," says Justin with equal vagueness. "At one time or another. Bound to have."

"Which might account for why we're not getting that extra bit of help we're after from the noble House of ThreeBees on the matter of the mystery vehicle and one or two other matters not directly related to it. Only they're big in other fields too, aren't they? Everything from cough syrup to executive jets, they told us, didn't they, Les?"

Justin smiles distantly, but does not advance the topic of conversation — not even, though he is tempted, with an amusing reference to the borrowed glory of Napoleon, or the absurd coincidence of Tessa's connection with the island of Elba. And he makes no reference whatever to the night he brought her home from the hospital, and to those bastards in ThreeBees who killed Wanza with their poison.

"But they weren't on Tessa's blacklist, you say," Rob continues. "Which is surprising really, considering what's been said about them by their many critics. "The iron fist in the iron glove," was how one Westminster MP recently described them if I remember rightly, apropos some forgotten scandal. I don't expect he'll be getting a free safari in a hurry, will he, Les?" Les said no way. "Kenny K and his ThreeBees. Sounds like a rock group. But Tessa hadn't declared one of her fatwas against them, as far as you know?"

"Not to my knowledge, no," says Justin, smiling at "fatwa."

Rob doesn't let it go. "Based on — I don't know — some bad experience she and Arnold had in their fieldwork, say — malpractice of some kind — of the pharmaceutical sort? Only she was pretty big on the medical side of things, wasn't she? And so's Kenny K, when he's not on the golf course with Moi's Boys or buzzing round in his Gulf-stream buying a few more companies."

"Oh indeed," says Justin — but with such an air of detachment, if not downright disinterest, that there is clearly no prospect of further enlightenment.

"So if I told you that Tessa and Arnold had made repeated representations to numerous departments of the far-flung House of ThreeBees over recent weeks — had written letters, made phone calls and appointments and had persistently been given the runaround for their trouble — you would still be saying this was not something that had come to your notice in any shape or form. That's a question."

"I'm afraid I would."

"Tessa writes a string of furious letters to Kenny K personally. They're hand-delivered or registered. She phones his secretary three times a day and bombards him with e-mails. She attempts to doorstep him at his farm at Lake Naivasha and at the entrance to his illustrious new offices, but his boys tip him off in time and he uses the back stairs, to the great entertainment of his staff. All this would be total news to you, so help you God?"

"With or without God's help, it is news to me."

"Yet you don't seem surprised."

"Don't I? How odd. I thought I was astonished. Perhaps I am not betraying my emotions as I should," Justin retorts, with a mixture of anger and reserve that catches the officers off their guard, for their heads lift to him, almost in salute.

* * *

But Justin is not interested in their responses. His deceptions come from an entirely different stable to Woodrow's. Where Woodrow was busily forgetting, Justin is being assailed from all sides by half-recovered memories: shreds of conversation between Bluhm and Tessa that in honor he had compelled himself not to hear, but that now come drifting back to him; her exasperation, disguising itself as silence, whenever the omnipresent name of Kenny K is spoken in her hearing — for example, his imminent elevation to the House of Lords, which in the Muthaiga Club is predicted as a racing certainty — for example, the persistent rumors of a giant merger between ThreeBees and a multinational conglomerate even vaster than itself. He is remembering her implacable boycott of all ThreeBees products — her antiNapoleonic crusade, as she ironically dubbed it — from the household foods and detergents that Tessa's domestic army of down-and-outs was not allowed to buy on pain of death to the ThreeBees roadside cafeterias and gasoline stations, car batteries and oils that Justin was forbidden to make use of when they were out driving together — and her furious cursing whenever a ThreeBees billboard with Napoleon's stolen emblem leered at them from the hoardings.

"We're hearing radical a lot, Justin," Lesley announces, emerging from her notes to break into his thoughts once more. "Was Tessa radical? Radical's like militant where we come from. "If you don't like it, bomb it" sort of thing. Tessa wasn't into that stuff, was she? Nor was Arnold. Or were they?"

Justin's answer has the weary ring of repeated drafting for a pedantic Head of Department.

"Tessa believed that the irresponsible quest for corporate profit is destroying the globe, and the emerging world in particular. Under the guise of investment, Western capital ruins the native environment and favors the rise of kleptocracies. So ran her argument. It is scarcely a radical one these days. I have heard it widely canvassed in the corridors of the international community. Even in my own committee."

He pauses again while he recalls the unlovely sight of the vastly overweight Kenny K driving off from the first tee of the Muthaiga Club in the company of Tim Donohue, our overaged head spy.

"By the same argument, aid to the Third World is exploitation under another name," he resumes. "The beneficiaries are the countries that supply the money on interest, local African politicians and officials who pocket huge bribes, and the Western contractors and arms suppliers who walk away with huge profits. The victims are the man in the street, the uprooted, the poor and the very poor. And the children who will have no future," he ends, quoting Tessa and remembering Garth.

"Do you believe that?" Lesley asks.

"It's a little late for me to believe anything," Justin replies meekly, and there is a moment's quiet before he adds — less meekly — "Tessa was that rarest thing: a lawyer who believes in justice."

"Why were they heading for Leakey's place?" Lesley demands when she has silently acknowledged this statement.

"Perhaps Arnold had business up there for his NGO. Leakey is not one to disregard the welfare of native Africans."

"Perhaps," Lesley agrees, writing thoughtfully in a green-backed notebook. "Had she met him?"

"I do not believe so."

"Had Arnold?"

"I have no idea. Perhaps you should put the question to Leakey."

"Mr. Leakey never heard of either one of them till he turned on his television set last week," Lesley replies, in a tone of gloom. "Mr. Leakey spends most of his time in Nairobi these days, trying to be Moi's Mr. Clean and having a hard time getting his message over."

Rob glances at Lesley for her approval and receives a veiled nod. He cranes himself forward and gives the tape recorder an aggressive shove in Justin's direction: speak into this thing.

"So what's the white plague then, when it's at home?" he demands, implying by his hectoring tone that Justin is personally responsible for its spread. "The white plague," he repeats, when Justin hesitates. "What is it? Come on."

A stoical immobility has once more settled over Justin's face. His voice retreats into its official shell. Paths of connection are again opening before him, but they are Tessa's and he will walk them alone.

"The white plague was once a popular term for tuberculosis," he pronounces. "Tessa's grandfather died of the disease. As a child she witnessed his death. Tessa possessed a book of the same title." But he didn't add that the book had been lying at her bedside until he had transferred it to the Gladstone bag.

Now it is Lesley's turn to be cautious. "Did she take a special interest in TB for that reason?"

"Special I don't know. As you have just said, her work in the slums gave her an interest in a range of medical matters. Tuberculosis was one of them."

"But if her grandfather died of it, Justin — "

"Tessa particularly disliked the sentimentalism that attaches to the disease in literature," Justin goes on severely, talking across her. "Keats, Stevenson, Coleridge, Thomas Mann — she used to say that people who found TB romantic should have tried sitting at her grandfather's bedside."

Rob again consults Lesley with his eyes, and again receives her silent nod. "So would it surprise you to hear that in the course of an unauthorized search of Arnold Bluhm's apartment we found a copy of an old letter he had sent to the head of ThreeBees' marketing operation, warning him of the side effects of a new shortcourse, antituberculosis drug that ThreeBees are peddling?"

Justin does not hesitate for a second. The perilous line of questioning has reactivated his diplomatic skills. "Why should it surprise me? Bluhm's NGO takes a close professional interest in Third World drugs. Drugs are the scandal of Africa. If any one thing denotes the Western indifference to African suffering, it's the miserable shortage of the right drugs, and the disgracefully high prices that the pharmaceutical firms have been exacting over the last thirty years" — quoting Tessa but without attribution. "I'm sure Arnold has written dozens of such letters."

"This one was hidden away by itself," says Rob. "Rolled up with a lot of technical data that's beyond us."

"Well, let's hope you can ask Arnold to decipher it for you when he comes back," says Justin primly, not bothering to conceal his distaste at the notion that they had been foraging through Bluhm's possessions and reading his correspondence without his knowledge.

Lesley takes over again. "Tessa had a laptop, right?"

"Indeed she did."

"What make?"

"The name escapes me. Small, gray and Japanese is about all I can tell you." He is lying. Glibly. He knows it, they know it. To judge by their faces, an air of loss has entered the relationship, of friendship disappointed. But not on Justin's side. Justin knows only stubborn refusal, concealed within diplomatic grace. This is the battle he has steeled himself for over days and nights, while praying it may never be joined.

"She kept it in her workroom, right? Where she kept her notice board and her papers and research material."

"When she was not taking it with her, yes."

"Did she use it for her letters — documents?"

"I believe so."

"And e-mails?"

"Frequently."

"And she'd print out from it, right?"

"Sometimes."

"She wrote a long document about five or six months ago — around eighteen pages of letter and annex. It was some kind of protest about malpractice, we think medical or pharmaceutical or both. A case history, describing something very serious that was going on here in Kenya. Did she show it to you?"

"No."

"And you didn't read it — for yourself, without her knowledge?"

"No."

"You know nothing about it then. Is that what you're saying?"

"I'm afraid it is." Washed down with a regretful smile.

"Only we were wondering whether this was to do with the great crime she thought she'd got onto."

"I see."

"And whether ThreeBees might have something to do with that great crime."

"It's always possible."

"But she didn't show it to you?" Lesley insists.

"As I have told you several times, Lesley: no." He almost adds, "dear lady."

"Do you think it might have involved ThreeBees in any way?"

"Alas, I have absolutely no idea."

But he has every idea. It is the terrible time. It is the time when he feared he might have lost her; when her young face grew harder by the day and her young eyes acquired a zealot's light; when she crouched, night after night, at her laptop in her little office, surrounded by heaps of papers flagged and cross-referred like a lawyer's brief; the time when she ate her food without noticing what she was eating, then hurried back to her labors without even a good-bye; the time when shy villagers from the countryside came soundlessly to the side door of the house to visit her, and sat with her on the veranda, eating the food that Mustafa brought to them.

"So she never even discussed the document with you?" Lesley, acting incredulous.

"Never, I'm afraid."

"Or in front of you — with Arnold or Ghita, say?"

"In the last months, Tessa and Arnold kept Ghita at arm's length, I assume for her own good. As for myself, it was my perception that they actually mistrusted me. They believed that if I was caught in a conflict of interest, I would owe my first allegiance to the Crown."

"And would you?"

Never in a thousand years, he is thinking. But his answer reflects the ambivalence they expect of him. "Since I am not familiar with the document you refer to, I fear that is not a question I can answer."

"But the document would have been printed from her laptop, right? This eighteen-page job — even if she didn't show it to you."

"Possibly. Or Bluhm's. Or a friend's."

"So where is it now — the laptop? This minute?"

Seamless.

Woodrow could have learned from him.

No body language, no tremor in the voice or exaggerated pause for breath.

"I looked in vain for her laptop in the inventory of her possessions presented to me by the Kenyan police and, like a number of other things, regrettably it does not feature."

"Nobody at Loki saw her with a laptop," Lesley says.

"But then I don't suppose they inspected her personal luggage."

"Nobody at the Oasis saw her with one. Did she have it with her when you drove her to the airport?"

"She had the rucksack that she always carried on her field trips. That too has disappeared. She had an overnight bag which may also have contained her laptop. Sometimes it did. Kenya does not encourage lone women to display expensive electronic equipment in public places."

"But then she wasn't alone, was she?" Rob reminds him, after which a long silence intervenes — so long that it becomes a matter of suspense to see who breaks it first.

"Justin," says Lesley finally. "When you visited your house with Woodrow last Tuesday morning, what did you take away with you?"

Justin affects to assemble a mental list. "Oh… family papers… private correspondence relating to Tessa's family trust… some shirts, socks… a dark suit for the funeral… a few trinkets of sentimental value… a couple of ties."

"Nothing else?"

"Nothing that immediately springs to mind. No."

"Anything that doesn't?" asks Rob.

Justin smiles wearily but says nothing.

"We talked to Mustafa," says Lesley. "We asked him: "Mustafa, where's Miss Tessa's laptop?"' He gave out conflicting signals. One minute she'd taken it away with her. The next she hadn't. After that, the journalists had stolen it. The one person who hadn't taken it was you. We thought he might be trying to front for you and not succeeding very well."

"I'm afraid that's rather what you get when you bully domestic staff."

"We didn't bully him," Lesley comes back, angry at last. "We were extremely gentle. We asked him about her notice board. Why was it full of pins and pinholes but didn't have any notices on it? He'd tidied it, he said. Tidied it all by himself with no help from anyone. He can't read English, he's not allowed to touch her possessions or anything in the room, but he'd tidied the notice board. What had he done with the notices? we asked him. Burned them, he said. Who told him to burn them? Nobody. Who told him to tidy the notice board? Nobody. Least of all Mr. Justin. We think he was covering for you, not very well. We think you took the notices, not Mustafa. We think he's covering for you on the laptop too."

Justin has lapsed once more into that state of artificial ease that is the curse and virtue of his profession. "I fear you do not take into account our cultural differences here, Lesley. A more likely explanation is that the laptop went with her to Turkana."

"Plus the notices off her notice board? I don't think so, Justin. Did you help yourself to any disks during your visit?"

And here for a moment — but only here — Justin drops his guard. For while one side of him is engaged in bland denial, another is as anxious as his interrogators to obtain answers.

"No, but I confess I searched for them. Much of her legal correspondence was contained in them. She was in the habit of e-mailing her solicitor on a range of matters."

"And you didn't find them."

"They were always on her desk," Justin protests, now lavish in his desire to share the problem. "In a pretty lacquer box given her by the very same solicitor last Christmas — they're not just cousins but old friends. The box has Chinese lettering on it. Tessa had a Chinese aid worker translate it. To her delight, it turned out to be a tirade against loathsome Westerners. I can only suppose that it went the same way as the laptop. Perhaps she took the disks to Loki too."

"Why should she do that?" asks Lesley skeptically.

"I'm not literate in information technology. I should be, but I'm not. The police inventory said nothing of disks either," he adds, waiting for their help.

Rob reflects on this. "Whatever was on the disks, chances are it's on the laptop too," he pronounces. "Unless she downloaded onto a disk, then wiped the hard disk clean. But why would anyone do that?"

"Tessa had a highly developed sense of security, as I told you."

Another ruminative silence, shared by Justin.

"So where are her papers now?" asks Rob roughly.

"On their way to London."

"By diplomatic bag?"

"By whatever route I choose. The Foreign Office is being most supportive."

Perhaps it is the echo of Woodrow's evasions that brings Lesley to the edge of her chair in an outburst of unfeigned exasperation.

"Justin."

"Yes, Lesley."

"Tessa researched. Right? Forget the disks. Forget the laptop. Where are her papers — all her papers — physically and at this moment?" she demands. "And where are the notices off that board?"

Playing his artificial self again, Justin vouchsafes her a tolerant frown, implying that although she is being unreasonable, he will do his best to humor her. "Among my effects, no doubt. If you ask me which particular suitcase, I might be a little stumped."

Lesley waits, letting her breathing settle. "We'd like you to open all your luggage for us, please. We'd like you to take us downstairs now, and show us everything you took from your house on Tuesday morning."

She stands up. Rob does the same, and stations himself beside the door in readiness. Only Justin remains seated. "I'm afraid that is not possible," he says.

"Why not?" Lesley snaps.

"For the reason that I took the papers in the first place. They are personal and private. I do not propose to submit them to your scrutiny, or anybody else's, until I have had a chance to read them myself."

Lesley flushes. "If this was England, Justin, I'd slap a subpoena on you so fast you wouldn't even feel it."

"But this is not England, alas. You have no warrant and no local powers that I'm aware of."

Lesley ignores him. "If this was England, I'd get a warrant to search this house from top to bottom. And I'd take every trinket, piece of paper and disk that you lifted from Tessa's workroom. And the laptop. I'd go through them with a toothcomb."

"But you've already searched my house, Lesley," Justin protests calmly from his chair. "I don't think Woodrow would take kindly to your searching his as well, would he? And I certainly cannot give you permission to do to me what you have done to Arnold without his consent."

Lesley is scowling and pink like a woman wronged. Rob, very pale, stares longingly at his clenched fists.

"We'll see about that tomorrow then," Lesley says ominously as they leave.

But tomorrow never comes. Not for all her fiery words. Throughout the night and late into the morning Justin sits on the edge of his bed, waiting for Rob and Lesley to return as they have threatened, armed with their warrants, their subpoenas and their writs, and a posse of Kenyan Blue Boys to do their dirty work for them. He fruitlessly debates options and hiding places as he has done for days. Thinks like a prisoner of war, contemplating floors and walls and ceilings: where? Makes plans to recruit Gloria, drops them. Makes others involving Mustafa and Gloria's houseboy. Others again involving Ghita. But the only word of his inquisitors is a phone call from Mildren saying the police officers are required elsewhere, and no, there is no news of Arnold. And when the funeral comes, the police officers are still required elsewhere — or so it appears to Justin, when now and then he scans the mourners, counting absent friends.

* * *

The plane had entered a land of eternal predawn. Outside his cabin window, wave after wave of frozen sea rolled toward a colorless infinity. All round him, white-shrouded passengers slept in the unearthly postures of the dead. One had her arm thrown upward as if she had been shot while waving to someone. Another had his mouth open in a silent scream, and his dead man's hand across his heart. Upright and alone, Justin returned his gaze to the window. His face floated in it beside Tessa's, like the masks of people he once knew.