“So who did you say it to?” Lesley asked while she jotted in a notebook.
“It’s not as simple as that. There was more to it than just one episode—one dialogue.”
Lesley leaned forward, checking as she did so that the spool was turning in her tape recorder. “Between you and Tessa?”
“Tessa was a brilliantly designed engine with half the cogs missing. Before she lost her baby boy, she was a bit wild. All right.” About to make his betrayal of Tessa absolute, Woodrow was remembering Porter Coleridge seated in his study furiously quoting Pellegrin’s instructions. “But afterwards—I have to say this—with enormous regret—she struck more than a few of us as pretty much unhinged.”
“Was she nympho?” Rob asked.
“I’m afraid that question is a little above my pay grade,” Woodrow replied icily.
“Let’s just say she flirted outrageously,” Lesley suggested. “With everyone.”
“If you insist”—no man could have sounded more detached— “it’s hard to tell, isn’t it? Beautiful girl, belle of the ball, older husband—is she flirting? Or is she just being herself, having a good time? If she wears a low dress and flounces, people say she’s fast. If she doesn’t, they say she’s a bore. That’s white Nairobi for you. Perhaps it’s anywhere. I can’t say I’m an expert.”
“Did she flirt with you?” asked Rob, after another infuriating tattoo of the pencil on his teeth.
“I’ve told you already. It was impossible to tell whether she was flirting or merely indulging her high spirits,” said Woodrow, reaching new levels of urbanity.
“So, er, did you by any chance have a bit of a flirt back?” Rob enquired. “Don’t look like that, Mr Woodrow. You’re forty-something, menopausal, heading for injury time, same as Justin is. You had the hots for her, why not? I’ll bet I would have.”
Woodrow’s recovery was so quick that it had happened almost before he was aware of it. “Oh my dear chap. Thought of nothing else. Tessa, Tessa, night and day. Obsessed by her. Ask anyone.”
“We did,” said Rob.
Next morning, it seemed to the beleaguered Woodrow, his interrogators were indecent in their haste to get at him. Rob set the tape recorder on the table, Lesley opened a large red notebook at a double page marked by an elastic band and led the questioning.
“We have reason to believe you visited Tessa in the Nairobi hospital soon after she lost her baby, sir, is that correct?”
Woodrow’s world rocked. Who in God’s name told them that? Justin? He can’t have done, they haven’t seen him yet, I’d know.
“Hold everything,” he ordered sharply.
Lesley’s head came up. Rob unravelled himself and, as if about to flatten his face with his palm, extended one long hand and laid it upright against his nose, then studied Woodrow over the tips of his extended fingers.
“Is this to be our topic for the morning?” Woodrow demanded.
“It’s one of them,” Lesley conceded.
“Then can you tell me, please—given that time is short for all of us—what on earth visiting Tessa in hospital has to do with tracking down her murderer—which I understand is the purpose of your being here?”
“We’re looking for a motive,” said Lesley.
“You told me you had one. Rape.”
“Rape doesn’t fit any more. Not as motive. Rape was a side-effect. Maybe a blind, to make us think we’re looking at a random killing, not a planned one.”
“Premeditation,” Rob explained, his big brown eyes fixing Woodrow in a lonely stare. “What we call a corporate job.”
At which, for a brief but terrifying moment, Woodrow thought of absolutely nothing at all. Then he thought corporate. Why did he say corporate?
Corporate as performed by a corporation? Outrageous! Too far-fetched to be worthy of consideration by a reputable diplomat!
After that his mind became a blank screen. No words, not even the most banal and meaningless, came to rescue him. He saw himself, if at all, as some kind of computer, retrieving, assembling and then rejecting a train of heavily encrypted connections from a cordoned-off area of his brain.
Corporate nothing. It was random. Unplanned. A blood feast, African style.
“So what took you to the hospital?” he heard Lesley saying, as he caught up with the soundtrack. “Why did you go and see Tessa after she lost her baby boy?”
“Because she asked me to. Through her husband. In my capacity as Justin’s superior.”
“Anyone else invited to the party?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Maybe Ghita?”
“You mean Ghita Pearson?”
“D’you know a different one?”
“Ghita Pearson was not present.”
“So just you and Tessa,” Lesley noted aloud, writing in her notebook. “What’s you being his superior got to do with it?”
“She was concerned for Justin’s welfare and wished to reassure herself that all was well with him,” Woodrow replied, deliberately taking his time rather than respond to her quickening rhythm. “I had tried to persuade Justin to take leave of absence, but he preferred to remain at his post. The EADEC annual conference of ministers was coming up and he was determined to prepare for it. I explained this to her and promised to continue to keep an eye on him.”
“Did she have her laptop with her?” Rob cut in.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Why’s that so difficult? Did she have her laptop with her?— beside her, on a table, under the bed, in it? Her laptop. Tessa loved her laptop. She e-mailed people with it. She e-mailed Bluhm. She e-mailed Ghita. She e-mailed a sick kid in Italy she was looking after, and some old boyfriend she had in London. She e-mailed half the world all the time. Did she have the laptop with her?”
“Thank you for being so explicit. No, I saw no laptop.”
“What about a notebook?”
A hesitation while he searched his memory and composed the lie. “None that I saw.” “Any you didn’t?”
Woodrow did not deign to answer. Rob leaned back and studied the ceiling in a falsely leisured way.
“So how was she in herself?” he enquired.
“Nobody’s at her best after producing a stillborn baby.”
“So how was she?”
“Weak. Rambling. Depressed.”
“And that was all you talked about. Justin. Her beloved husband.”
“So far as I remember, yes.”
“How long were you with her?”
“I didn’t time myself, but I would imagine something in the region of twenty minutes. Obviously I didn’t want to tire her.”
“So you talked about Justin for twenty minutes. Whether he’s eating his porridge and that.”
“The conversation was intermittent,” Woodrow replied, colouring. “When someone is feverish and exhausted and has lost her child, it is not easy to have a lucid exchange.”
“Anyone else present?”
“I told you already. I went alone.”
“That’s not what I asked you. I asked whether anyone else was present?”
“Such as who?”
“Such as whoever else was present. A nurse, a doctor. Another visitor, a friend of hers. Girlfriend. Man friend. African friend. Like Dr Arnold Bluhm, for instance. Why do I have to drag it out of you, sir?”
As evidence of his annoyance, Rob unwound himself like a javelin-thrower, first flinging a hand in the air, then tortuously repositioning his long legs. Woodrow meanwhile was again visibly consulting his memory: bringing his eyebrows together in an amused and rueful frown.
“Now you come to mention it, Rob, you’re right. How very clever of you. Bluhm was there when I arrived. We greeted each other and he left. I would imagine we overlapped by the better part of twenty seconds. For you, twenty-five.”
But Woodrow’s careless demeanour was hard won. Who the devil told him Bluhm was at her bedside? But his apprehension went further. It reached into the darkest crevices of hi
s other mind, touching again on that chain of causality he refused to acknowledge, and Porter Coleridge had furiously ordered him to forget.
“So what was Bluhm doing there, do you suppose, sir?”
“He offered no explanation, neither did she. He’s a doctor, isn’t he? Apart from anything else.”
“What was Tessa doing?”
“Lying in the bed. What did you expect her to be doing?” he retorted, losing his head for a moment. “Playing tiddlywinks?”
Rob stretched his long legs in front of him, admiring his huge feet down the length of them in the manner of a sunbather. “I don’t know,” he said. “What do we expect her to be doing, Les?” he asked of his fellow officer. “Not tiddlywinks, for sure. There she is lying in bed. Doing what? we ask ourselves.”
“Feeding a black baby, I should think,” Lesley said. “While its mother died.”
For a while the only sounds in the room came from passing footsteps in the corridor, and cars racing and fighting in the town across the valley. Rob reached out a gangly arm and switched off the tape recorder.
“As you pointed out, sir, we’re all short of time,” he said courteously. “So kindly don’t fucking waste it by dodging questions and treating us like shit.” He switched the tape recorder back on. “Be so good as to tell us in your own words about the dying woman in the ward and her little baby boy, Mr Woodrow, sir,” he said. “Please. And what she died of, and who was trying to cure her of it and how, and anything else you happen to know in that regard.”
Cornered and resentful in his isolation, Woodrow reached instinctively for the support of his Head of Mission, only to be reminded that Coleridge was playing hard to get. Last night, when Woodrow had tried to reach him for a private word, Mildren had advised that his master was cloistered with the American Ambassador and could be reached only in emergency. This morning Coleridge was reportedly “conducting business from the Residence.”
5
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 recognise 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 blond. 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 new-found 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 humour 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 parlour 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, non-doctors, 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 enquired, 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, la
boratory, 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 enquired, raising her grey 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?”