“We didn’t bloody give them a thing! They took it! At the end of a bloody gun! We gave them nothing—nothing!”
Woodrow swung sharply round. Gloria beside him did the same and so, from the other side of the aisle, did the Coleridges. A scream from outside the church had been followed by the smash of something big and glassy breaking. Through the open doorway Woodrow saw the forecourt gates being dragged shut by two frightened vergers in black suits as helmeted police formed a cordon along the railings, brandishing metal-tipped riot sticks in both hands, like baseball players limbering for a strike. In the street where the students had gathered a tree was burning and a couple of cars lay belly-up beneath it, their occupants too terrified to clamber out. To roars of encouragement from the crowd, a glistening black limousine, a Volvo like Woodrow’s, was rising shakily from the ground, borne aloft by a swarm of young men and women. It rose, it lurched, it flipped, first to its side, then onto its back, before falling with a huge bang, dead beside its fellows. The police charged. Whatever they had been waiting for till then, it had happened. One second they were lounging, the next they were hacking themselves a red path through the fleeing rabble, only pausing to rain more blows on those they had brought down. An armoured van drew up, half a dozen bleeding bodies were tossed into it.
“University’s an absolute tinderbox, old chap,” Donohue had advised when Woodrow had consulted him on risk. “Grants have stopped dead, staff aren’t being paid, places going to the rich and stupid, dormitories and classrooms packed out, loos all blocked, doors all pinched, fire risk rampant and they’re cooking over charcoal in the corridors. They’ve no power, and no electric light to study by, and no books to study in. The poorest students are taking to the streets because the government is privatising the higher education system without consulting anyone and education is strictly for the rich, plus the exam results are rigged and the government is trying to force students to get their education abroad. And yesterday the police killed a couple of students, which for some reason their friends refuse to take lightly. Any more questions?”
The church gates opened, the organ struck up again. God’s business could resume.
In the cemetery the heat was aggressive and personal. The grizzled old priest had ceased speaking but the clamour had not subsided and the sun beat through it like a flail. To one side of Woodrow a ghetto-blaster was playing a rock version of Hail Mary at full throttle to a group of black nuns in grey habits. To the other, a football squad of blazers was gathered round a coconut shy of empty beer cans while a soloist sang goodbye to a team-mate. And Wilson airport must have been holding some kind of air day, because brightly painted small planes were zooming overhead at twenty-second intervals. The old priest lowered his prayer book. The bearers stepped to the coffin. Each grasped an end of webbing. Justin, still alone, seemed to sway. Woodrow started forward to support him but Gloria restrained him with a gloved claw.
“He wants her to himself, idiot,” she hissed through her tears.
The press showed no such tact. This was the shot they had come for: black bearers lower murdered white woman into African soil, watched by husband she deceived. A pock-faced man with a crew-cut and cameras bouncing on his belly offered Justin a trowel laden with earth, hoping for a shot of the widower pouring it on the coffin. Justin brushed it aside. As he did so, his gaze fell on two ragged men who were trundling a wooden wheelbarrow with a flat tyre to the grave’s edge. Wet cement was slopping over its gunwales.
“What are you doing, please?” he demanded of them, so sharply that every face turned to him. “Will somebody kindly find out from these gentlemen what they are intending to do with their cement? Sandy, I need an interpreter, please.”
Ignoring Gloria, Woodrow the general’s son strode quickly to Justin’s side. Wiry Sheila from Tim Donohue’s department spoke to the men, then to Justin.
“They say they do it for all rich people, Justin,” Sheila said.
“Do what exactly? I don’t understand you. Please explain.”
“The cement. It’s to keep out intruders. Robbers. Rich people are buried in wedding rings and nice clothes. Wazungu are a favourite target. They say the cement’s an insurance policy.”
“Who instructed them to do this?”
“No one. It’s five thousand shillings.”
“They’re to go, please. Kindly tell them that, will you, Sheila? I do not wish their services and I shall pay them no money. They’re to take their barrow and leave.” But then, perhaps not trusting her to impart his message with sufficient vigour, Justin marched over to them and, placing himself between their barrow and the grave’s edge, struck out an arm, Moses-like, pointing over the heads of the mourners. “Go, please,” he ordered. “Leave at once. Thank you.”
The mourners parted to make a path along the line his outstretched arm commanded. The men with their barrow scuttled down it. Justin watched them out of sight. In the vibrating heat the men seemed to ride straight into the blank sky. Justin turned his body round, stiffly like a toy soldier, until he was addressing the press pack.
“I would like you all to go, please,” he said in the silence that had formed inside the din. “You have been very kind. Thank you. Goodbye.”
Quietly, and to the amazement of the rest, the journalists stowed their cameras and their notebooks and, with mumbles like “See you, Justin,” quit the field. Justin returned to his place of solitude at Tessa’s head. As he did so, a group of African women trooped forward and arranged themselves in a horseshoe round the foot of the grave. Each wore the same uniform: a blue-flowered frilly dress and headscarf of the same material. Separately they might have looked lost, but as a group they looked united. They began singing, at first softly. Nobody conducted them, there were no instruments to sing to, most of the choir were weeping but they didn’t let their tears affect their voices. They sang in harmony, in English and kiSwahili alternately, gathering power in the repetition: Kwa heri, Mama Tessa . . . Little Mama, goodbye . . . Woodrow tried to catch the other words. Kwa heri, Tessa . . . Tessa our friend, goodbye . . . You came to us, Mama Tessa, Little Mama, you gave us your heart . . . Kwa heri, Tessa, goodbye.
“Where the hell did they spring from?” he asked Gloria out of the corner of his mouth.
“Down the hill,” Gloria muttered, nodding her head towards Kibera slum.
The singing swelled as the coffin was lowered into the ground. Justin watched it descend, then winced as it struck bottom, then winced again as the first shovel-load of earth clattered onto the lid and a second crashed into the freesias, dirtying the petals. A frightful howl went up, as short as the shriek of a rusty hinge when a door is flung back, but long enough for Woodrow to watch Ghita Pearson collapse to her knees in slow motion, then roll onto one shapely hip as she buried her face in her hands; then, just as improbably, rise again on the arm of Veronica Coleridge and resume her mourner’s pose.
Did Justin call out something to Kioko? Or did Kioko act of his own accord? Light as a shadow, he had moved to Justin’s side and, in an unashamed gesture of affection, grasped his hand. Through a fresh flood of tears, Gloria saw their linked hands fidget till they found a mutually comfortable grip. Thus joined, the bereaved husband and bereaved brother watched Tessa’s coffin disappear beneath the soil.
Justin left Nairobi the same night. Woodrow, to Gloria’s eternal hurt, had given her no warning. The dinner table was laid for three, Gloria herself had uncorked the claret and put a duck in the oven to cheer us all up. She heard a footfall from the hall and assumed to her pleasure that Justin had decided on pre-dinner drinkies, just the two of us while Sandy reads Biggles to the boys upstairs. And suddenly there stood his scruffy Gladstone bag, accompanied by a mossy grey suitcase that Mustafa had brought for him, parked in the hall with labels on them, and Justin standing beside them with his raincoat over his arm and a night-bag on his shoulder, wanting to give her back the wine-store key.
“But Justin, you’re not off !”
“You’
ve all been immensely kind to me, Gloria. I shall never know how to thank you.”
“Sorry about this, darling,” Woodrow sang cheerfully, tripping down the stairs two at a time. “Bit cloak and dagger, I’m afraid. Didn’t want the servants gossiping. Only way to play it.”
At which moment there came a ping on the doorbell, and it was Livingstone the driver with a red Peugeot he’d borrowed from a friend to avoid telltale diplomatic licence plates at the airport. And slumped in the passenger seat, Mustafa, glowering ahead of him like his own effigy.
“But we must come with you, Justin! We must see you off! I insist! I’ve got to give you one of my watercolours! What’s going to happen to you the other end?” Gloria cried miserably. “We can’t just let you go off into the night like this—darling!—”
The darling was technically addressed to Woodrow, but it might as well have been meant for Justin, for as she blurted it she dissolved into uncontrollable tears, the last of a long and tearful day. Sobbing wretchedly, she grasped Justin against her, punching his back and rolling her cheek against him and whispering, “Oh don’t go, oh please, oh Justin,” and other less decipherable exhortations before bravely thrusting herself free of him, elbowing her husband out of the light and charging up the stairs to her bedroom and slamming the door.
“Bit overwrought,” Woodrow explained, grinning.
“We all are,” said Justin, accepting Woodrow’s hand and shaking it. “Thank you again, Sandy.”
“We’ll be in touch.”
“Indeed.”
“And you’re quite sure you don’t want a reception party the other end? They’re all busting to do their stuff.”
“Quite sure, thank you. Tessa’s lawyers are preparing for my arrival.”
And the next minute Justin was walking down the steps to the red car, with Mustafa one side of him with the Gladstone bag, and Livingstone carrying his grey suitcase on the other.
“I have left envelopes for you all with Mr Woodrow,” Justin told Mustafa as they drove. “And this is to be handed privately to Ghita Pearson. And you know I mean privately.”
“We know you will always be a good man, Mzee,” said Mustafa prophetically, consigning the envelope to the recesses of his cotton jacket. But there was no forgiveness in his voice for leaving Africa.
The airport, despite its recent face-lift, was in chaos. Travel-weary groups of scalded tourists made long lines, harangued tour guides and frantically bundled huge rucksacks into X-ray machines. Check-in clerks puzzled over every ticket and murmured interminably into telephones. Incomprehensible loudspeaker announcements spread panic while porters and policemen looked idly on. But Woodrow had arranged everything. Justin had barely emerged from the car before a male British Airways representative spirited him to a small office, safe from public gaze.
“I’d like my friends to come with me, please,” Justin said.
“No problem.”
With Livingstone and Mustafa hovering behind him, he was handed a boarding pass in the name of Mr Alfred Brown. He looked on passively while his grey suitcase was similarly labelled.
“And I shall take this one into the cabin with me,” he announced, as an edict.
The representative, a blond New Zealand boy, affected to weigh the Gladstone in his hand and let out an exaggerated grunt of exertion. “Family silver, is it, sir?”
“My host’s,” said Justin, duly entering into the joke, but there was enough in his face to suggest that the issue was not negotiable.
“If you can carry it, sir, so can we,” said the blond representative, passing the bag back to him. “Have a nice flight, Mr Brown. We’ll be taking you through the arrivals side, if it’s all the same to you.”
“You’re very kind.”
Turning to say his last goodbyes, Justin seized Livingstone’s enormous fists in a double handshake. But for Mustafa the moment was too much. Silently as ever, he had slipped away. The Gladstone firmly in his grasp, Justin entered the arrivals hall in the wake of his guide, to find himself staring at a giant buxom woman of no definable race grinning down at him from the wall. She was twenty feet tall and five feet across her widest point and she was the only commercial advertisement in the entire hall. She was dressed in a nurse’s uniform and had three golden bees on each shoulder. Three more were prominently displayed on the breast pocket of her white tunic, and she was offering a tray of pharmaceutical delicacies to a vaguely multi-racial family of happy children and their parents. The tray held something for each of them: bottles of gold-brown medicine that looked more like whisky for the dad, chocolate-coated pills just right for munching by the kiddies, and for the mum beauty products decorated with naked goddesses reaching for the sun. Blazoned across the top and bottom of the poster, violent puce lettering proclaimed the joyous message to all mankind:
ThreeBees
BUZZY FOR THE HEALTH OF AFRICA!
The poster held him.
Exactly as it had held Tessa.
Staring rigidly up at it, Justin is listening to her joyous protestations at his right side. Dizzy from travel, laden with last-minute hand luggage, the two of them have minutes earlier arrived here from London for the first time. Neither has set foot on the African continent before. Kenya—all Africa—awaits them. But it is this poster that commands Tessa’s excited interest.
“Justin, look! You’re not looking.”
“What is it? Of course I am.”
“They’ve hijacked our bloody bees! Somebody thinks he’s Napoleon! It’s absolutely brazen. It’s an outrage. You must do something!”
And so it was. An outrage. A hilarious one. Napoleon’s three bees, symbols of his glory, treasured emblems of Tessa’s beloved island of Elba where the great man had whittled away his first exile, had been shamelessly deported to Kenya and sold into commercial slavery. Pondering the same poster now, Justin could only marvel at the obscenity of life’s coincidence.
7
Perched stiffly in his upgraded seat at the front of the plane, the Gladstone bag above him in the overhead locker, Justin Quayle stared past his reflection into the blackness of space. He was free. Not pardoned, not reconciled, not comforted, not resolved. Not free of the nightmares that told him she was dead, and waking to discover they were true. Not free of the survivor’s guilt. Not free of fretting about Arnold. But free at last to mourn in his own way. Free of his dreadful cell. Of the gaolers he had learned to detest. Of circling his room like a convict, driven half crazy by the dazzlement of his mind and the squalor of his confinement. Free of the silence of his own voice, of sitting on the edge of his bed asking why? on and on. Free of the shameful moments when he was so low and tired and drained that he almost succeeded in convincing himself that he didn’t give a damn, the marriage had been a madness anyway and was over, so be thankful. And if grief, as he had read somewhere, was a species of idleness, then free of the idleness that thought of nothing but its grief.
Free also of his interrogation by the police, when a Justin he didn’t recognise strode to the centre of the stage and, in a series of immaculately sculpted sentences, laid his burden at the feet of his bemused interrogators—or as much of it as a puzzled instinct told him it was prudent to reveal. They began by accusing him of murder.
“There’s a scenario hanging over us here, Justin,” Lesley explains apologetically, “and we have to put it to you straight away, so that you’re aware of it, although we know it’s hurtful. It’s called a love triangle, and you’re the jealous husband and you’ve organised a contract killing while your wife and her lover are as far away from you as possible, which is always good for the alibi. You had them both killed, which was what you wanted for your vengeance. You had Arnold Bluhm’s body taken out of the jeep and lost so that we’d think Arnold Bluhm was the killer and not you. Lake Turkana’s full of crocodiles, so losing Arnold wouldn’t be a problem. Plus there’s a nice inheritance coming your way by all accounts, which doubles up the motive.”
They are watching him, he is w
ell aware, for signs of guilt or innocence or outrage or despair—for signs of something anyway— and watching him in vain, because, unlike Woodrow, Justin at first does absolutely nothing. He sits groomed and pensive and remote on Woodrow’s reproduction carving chair, his fingertips set to the table as if he has just played a chord of music and is listening to it fade away. Lesley is accusing him of murder, yet all she gets is a small frown linking him to his inner world.
“I had rather understood, from the little Woodrow has been good enough to tell me of the progress of your enquiries,” Justin objects, more in the plaintive manner of an academic than a grieving husband, “that your prevailing theory was of a random killing, not a planned affair.”
“Woodrow’s full of shit,” says Rob, keeping his voice down in deference to their hostess.
There is no tape recorder on the table yet. The notebooks of many colours lie untouched in Lesley’s useful bag. There is nothing to hurry or formalise the occasion. Gloria has brought a tray of tea and, after a lengthy dissertation on the recent demise of her bull terrier, reluctantly departed.
“We found the marks of a second vehicle parked five miles from the scene of the murder,” Lesley explains. “It was lying up in a gully south-west of the spot where Tessa was murdered. We found an oil patch, plus the remains of a fire.” Justin blinks, as if the daylight is a bit too bright, then politely inclines his head to show he is still listening. “Plus freshly buried beer bottles and cigarette ends,” she goes on, laying all this at Justin’s door. “When Tessa’s jeep drove by, the mystery wagon pulled out behind and tailed it. Then it pulled alongside. One of the front wheels of Tessa’s jeep was shot off with a hunting rifle. That doesn’t look like a random killing to us.”
“More like corporate murder, as we like to call it,” Rob explains. “Planned and executed by paid professionals at the behest of a person or persons unknown. Whoever tipped them off knew Tessa’s plans inside out.”