Read The Constant Gardener Page 17


  “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 honour he had compelled himself not to hear, but 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 rumours 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 anti-Napoleonic 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 environ-ment and favours 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 over-aged 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 unauthorised 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 short-course, 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, grey 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 noticeboard 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 annexe. 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 K
enya. 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 on to.”

  “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 labours without even a goodbye; 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 verandah, 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 noticeboard. 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 noticeboard. 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 noticeboard? 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 noticeboard? 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 sceptically.

  “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 humour 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 morni
ng.”

  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.