“Not really.”
“Me too. Illiterate bunch of hypocrites. Herring fillet’s all right. Smoked eel makes me fart. Sole meunière’s good if you like sole. If you don’t, have it grilled.” He was writing on a printed pad. It had Sir Bernard P printed in electronic capitals at the top, and the food options listed on the left side, and boxes to tick on the right, and space for the member’s signature at the bottom.
“A sole would be fine.”
Pellegrin doesn’t listen, Justin remembered. It’s what got him his reputation as a negotiator.
“Grilled?”
“Meunière.”
“Landsbury in form?”
“Fighting fit.”
“She tell you she was a Madeira cake?”
“I’m afraid she did.”
“She wants to watch that one. She talk to you about your future?”
“I’m in trauma and on indefinite sick leave.”
“Shrimps do you?”
“I think I’d prefer the avocado, thank you,” Justin said, and watched Pellegrin tick shrimp cocktail twice.
“The Foreign Office formally disapproves of drinking at lunchtime these days, you’ll be relieved to hear,” Pellegrin said, surprising Justin with a full-beam smile. Then, in case the first application hadn’t taken, a second one. And Justin remembered that the smiles were always the same: the same length, the same duration, the same degree of spontaneous warmth. “However, you’re a compassionate case and it’s my painful duty to keep you company. They do a passable sub-Meursault. You good for your half?” His silver propelling pencil ticked the appropriate box. “You’re cleared, by the by. Off the hook. Sprung. Congratulations.” He tore off the chit and weighted it down with the salt cellar to prevent it from blowing away.
“Cleared of what?”
“Murder, what else? You didn’t kill Tessa or her driver, you didn’t hire contract killers in a den of vice, and you haven’t got Bluhm swinging by his balls in your attic. You can leave the courtroom without a stain on your escutcheon. Courtesy of the coppers.” The order form had disappeared from underneath the salt cellar. The waiter must have taken it, but Justin in his out-of-body state had failed to spot the manoeuvre. “What sort of gardening you get up to out there by the by? Promised Celly I’d ask you.” Celly short for Céline, Pellegrin’s terrifying wife. “Exotics? Succulents? Not my scene, I’m afraid.”
“Pretty well everything really,” Justin heard himself say. “The Kenyan climate is extremely benign. I didn’t know there was a stain on my escutcheon, Bernard. There was a theory, I suppose. But it was only a remote hypothesis.”
“Had all sorts of theories, poor darlings. Theories far above their station, frankly. You must come down to Dorchester some time. Talk to Celly about it. Do a weekend. Play tennis?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
They had all sorts of theories, he was surreptitiously repeating to himself. Poor darlings. Pellegrin speaks about Rob and Lesley the way Landsbury spoke about Porter Coleridge. That turd Tom Somebody was about to get Belgrade, Pellegrin was saying, largely because the Secretary of State couldn’t stand the sight of his beastly face in London, and who could? Dick Somebody Else was getting his K in the next Honours, then with any luck he’d be kicked upstairs to Treasury—God help the national economy, joke—but of course old Dick’s been kissing New Labour arse for the last five years. Otherwise, it was business as usual. The Office continued to fill up with the same red-brick achievers from Croydon with off-colour accents and Fair-Isle pullovers that Justin would remember from his pre-Africa days; in ten years’ time there wouldn’t be One of Us left. The waiter brought two shrimp cocktails. Justin watched their arrival in slow motion.
“But then they were young, weren’t they,” Pellegrin said indulgently, resuming his requiem mode.
“The new entrants? Of course they were.”
“Your little policemen people in Nairobi. Young and hungry, bless ’em. As we all were once.”
“I thought they were rather clever.”
Pellegrin frowned and chewed. “David Quayle any relation of yours?”
“My nephew.”
“We signed him up last week. Only twenty-one, but how else d’you beat the City to the draw these days? Godchild o’ mine started up at Barclays last week on forty-five grand a year plus treats. Thick as two planks and still wet behind the ears.”
“Good for David. I didn’t know.”
“Extraordinary choice for Gridley to have made, be honest, sending out a woman like that to Africa. Frank’s worked diplomats. Knows the scene. Who’s going to take a female copper seriously over there? Not Moi’s Boys, that’s for sure.”
“Gridley?” Justin repeated, as the mists in his head cleared. “That’s not Frank Arthur Gridley? The fellow who was in charge of diplomatic security?”
“The same, God help us.”
“But he’s an absolute ninny. We dealt with him when I was in Protocol Department.” Justin heard his voice rising above the club’s approved decibel level, and hastened to bring it down.
“Wood from the neck,” Pellegrin agreed cheerfully.
“So what on earth’s he doing investigating Tessa’s murder?” “Limogé to Serious Crime. Specialist in overseas cases. You know what coppers are like,” said Pellegrin, stacking his mouth with shrimps and bread and butter.
“I know what Gridley’s like.”
Masticating shrimp, Pellegrin lapsed into High Tory telegramese. “Two young police officers, one of ’em a woman. T’other thinks he’s Robin Hood. High-profile case, eyes of the world on ’em. Start to see their names going up in lights.” He adjusted the napkin at his throat. “So they cook up theories. Nothing like a good theory to impress a half-educated superior.” He drank, then hammered his mouth with a corner of his napkin. “Contract killers—bent African governments—multinational conglomerates—fabulous stuff! May even get a part in the movie, if they’re lucky.”
“What multinational did they have in mind?” Justin asked, contriving to ignore the disgusting notion of a film about Tessa’s death.
Pellegrin caught his eye, measured it a moment, smiled, then smiled again. “Turn of phrase,” he explained dismissively. “Not to be taken literally. Those young coppers were looking the wrong way from day one,” he resumed, diverting himself while the waiter refilled their glasses. “Deplorable, actually. De-fucking-plorable. Not you, Matthew, old chap—”this to the waiter, in a spirit of good fellowship towards ethnic minorities“—and not a member of this club either, I’m pleased to say.” The waiter fled. “Tried to pin it on Sandy for five minutes, if you can believe it. Some fatuous theory that he was in love with her, and had ’em both killed out of jealousy. When they couldn’t get anywhere with that one, they hit the conspiracy button. Easiest thing in the world. Cherry-pick a few facts, cobble ’em together, listen to a couple of disgruntled alarmists with an axe to grind, throw in a household name or two, you can put together any bloody story you want. What Tessa did, if you don’t mind my saying so. Well, you know all about that.”
Justin blindly shook his head. I’m not hearing this. I’m back on the plane and it’s a dream. “I’m afraid I don’t,” he said.
Pellegrin had very small eyes. Justin hadn’t noticed this before. Or perhaps they were a standard size, but had developed the art of dwindling under enemy fire—the enemy, so far as Justin could determine, being anyone who held Pellegrin to what he had just said, or took the conversation into territory not previously charted by him.
“Sole all right? You should have had the meunière. Not so dry.”
His sole was marvellous, Justin said, forbearing to add that meunière was what he had asked for. And the sub-Meursault also marvellous. Marvellous, like marvellous girl.
“She didn’t show it to you. Her great thesis. Their great thesis, if you’ll forgive me. That’s your story and you’re sticking to it. Right?”
“Thesis about what? The police asked me the same quest
ion. So did Alison Landsbury in a roundabout way. What thesis?” He was acting simple and beginning to believe himself. He was fishing again, but in disguise.
“She didn’t show it to you but she showed it to Sandy,” said Pellegrin, washing the information down with a pull of wine. “Is that what you want me to believe?”
Justin sat bolt upright. “She what?”
“Absolutely. Secret rendezvous, whole works. Sorry about that. Thought you knew.”
But you’re relieved I don’t, thought Justin, still staring at Pellegrin in mystification. “So what did Sandy do with it?” he asked.
“Showed it to Porter. Porter dithered. Porter takes decisions once a year with lots of water. Sandy sent it to me. Co-authored and marked confidential. Not by Sandy. By Tessa and Bluhm. Those aid heroes make me sick, by the way, if you feel like letting off steam. Teddy bears’ picnic for international bureaucrats. Diversion. Sorry.”
“So what did you do with it? For God’s sake, Bernard!”
I’m the deluded widower at the end of my tether. I’m the injured innocent, not quite as innocent as I’m sounding. I’m the indignant husband, cut out of the loop by my wandering wife and her lover. “Will somebody please finally tell me what this is about?” he went on, in the same querulous voice. “I’ve been Sandy’s reluctant house guest for the better part of an eternity. He never breathed a word to me about a secret rendezvous with Tessa or Arnold or anybody else. What thesis? Thesis about what?” Still prodding.
Pellegrin was smiling again. Once. Twice. “So it’s all news to you. Jolly good.”
“Yes. It is. I’m completely fogged.”
“Girl like that, half your age, stepping high, wide and loose, never crossed your mind to ask her what the fuck she’s up to.”
The Pellegrin is angry, Justin noted. As Landsbury was. As I am. We’re all angry and we’re all concealing it.
“No, it didn’t. And she wasn’t half my age.”
“Never looked in her diary, picked up the telephone extension by-mistake-on-purpose. Never read her mail or peeked in her computer. Zero.”
“Zero to all of it.”
Pellegrin was musing aloud, eyes on Justin. “So nothing got through to you. Hear no evil, see no evil. Amazing,” he said, barely managing to keep his sarcasm within bounds.
“She was a lawyer, Bernard. She wasn’t a child. She was a fully qualified, very smart lawyer. You forget.”
“Do I? Not sure I do.” He put on his reading spectacles in order to work his way to the lower half of his sole. When he had done so, he held up its spine with his knife and fork while he peered round like a helpless invalid for a waiter who could bring him a débris plate. “Just hope she confined her representations to Sandy Woodrow, that’s all. Pestered the main player, we know that.”
“What main player? You mean you?”
“Curtiss. Kenny K himself. The man.” A plate appeared and Pellegrin laid the spine on it. “Surprised she didn’t throw herself in front of his bloody racehorses while she was about it. Go sing it to Brussels. Go sing it to the United Nations. Go sing it on TV. Girl like that, mission to save the globe, goes wherever her fancy takes her and to hell with the consequences.”
“That’s not true at all,” said Justin, wrestling with astonishment and serious rage.
“Say again?”
“Tessa went to great pains to protect me. And her country.”
“By raking up muck? Blowing it out of all proportion? Importuning hubby’s boss? Barging in on overworked company executives with Bluhm on her arm—not my idea of protecting her chap. More like the fast lane to wrecking the poor sod’s chances if you ask me. Not that your chances were all that bright by then, if we’re honest.” A pull of fizzy water. “Ah. Got it now. I see what happened.” A double smile. “You really don’t know the back story. You’re sticking to that.”
“Yes. I am. I’m utterly bewildered. The police ask me, Alison asks me, you ask me—was I really in the dark? Answer, yes I was, and yes I still am.”
Pellegrin was already shaking his head in amused disbelief. “Old boy. How’s this? Listen a mo. I could live with this. So could Alison. They came to you. The two of ’em. Tessa and Arnold. Hand in hand. ‘Help us, Justin. We’ve found the smoking gun. Old-established, British-based company is poisoning innocent Kenyans, using ’em as guinea pigs, Christ knows what. Whole villages of corpses out there and here’s the proof. Read it.’ Right?”
“They did nothing of the kind.”
“Not done yet. Nobody’s trying to pin anything on you, right? It’s open doors round here. Everyone’s your chum.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
“You hear ’em out. Decent chap that you are. You read their eighteen-page Armageddon scenario and you tell ’em they’re out of their tiny minds. If they want to foul up Anglo-Kenyan relations for the next twenty years, they’ve found the ideal formula. Wise chap. If Celly had tried that one with me, I’d have given her a bloody good kick in the arse. And like you, I’d pretend the meeting never happened, which it didn’t. Right? We’ll forget it as fast as you did. Nothing on your file, nothing in Alison’s little black book. Deal?”
“They didn’t come to me, Bernard. Nobody pitched me a story, nobody showed me an Armageddon scenario, as you call it. Not Tessa, not Bluhm, not anyone. It’s all a total mystery to me.”
“Girl called Ghita Pearson, who the hell’s she?”
“A junior member of Chancery. Anglo-Indian. Very bright and locally employed. Mother’s a doctor. Why?”
“Apart from that.”
“A friend of Tessa’s. And mine.”
“Could she have seen it?”
“The document? I’m sure not.”
“Why?”
“Tessa would have kept it from her.”
“She didn’t keep it from Sandy Woodrow.”
“Ghita’s too fragile. She’s trying to make herself a career with us. Tessa wouldn’t have wanted to put her in an untenable position.”
Pellegrin needed more salt, which he distributed by putting a small pile of it in his left palm, taking pinches with his right forefinger and thumb, then brushing his two hands together.
“Anyway. You’re off the hook,” he reminded Justin as if this were a consolation prize. “We won’t be standing at the prison gates, shoving baguettes au fromage at you through the bars.”
“So you said. I’m glad to hear it.”
“That’s the good news. Bad news is—your chum Arnold. Yours and Tessa’s.”
“Have they found him?”
Pellegrin shook his head grimly. “They’ve rumbled him, but they haven’t found him. But they’re hoping.”
“Rumbled him for what? What are you talking about?”
“Deep waters, old boy. Very hard to navigate in your state of health. Wish we could be having this conversation in a few weeks’ time when you’ve got your bearings, but we can’t. Murder investigations are no respecters of persons unfortunately. They go at their own speed in their own way. Bluhm was your chum, Tessa was your wife. Not much fun for any of us to have to tell you chum killed wife.”
Justin stared at Pellegrin in unfeigned astonishment, but Pellegrin was too busy with his fish to notice. “But what about the forensic evidence?” he heard himself ask, from some frozen planet. “The green safari truck? The beer bottles and cigarette ends? The two men who were spotted in Marsabit? What about—I don’t know—ThreeBees, all the things the British police were asking me about?”
Pellegrin was smiling the first of his two smiles before Justin had finished speaking. “Fresh evidence, old boy. Conclusive, I’m afraid.” He popped another piece of roll. “Coppers have found his clothes. Bluhm’s. Buried at the lakeside. Not his safari jacket. He left that in the jeep as a blind. Shirt, trousers, underpants, socks, sneakers. Know what they found in the pocket of the trousers? Car keys. From the jeep. The ones he’d locked the jeep door with. Gives a new meaning to what the Yanks call closure these days. Very com
mon thing with your crime of passion, I’m told. You kill somebody, lock the door behind you, lock up your mind. Thing never happened. Memory erased. Classic.”
Distracted by Justin’s incredulous expression, Pellegrin paused, then spoke in a voice of conclusion.
“I’m an Oswald man, Justin. Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy. Nobody helped him do it. Arnold Bluhm lost his rag and killed Tessa. The driver objected so Bluhm took a swing at him too. Then he chucked his head into the bushes for the jackals. Basta. There comes a moment, after all the wanking and fantasising, when we’re reduced to accepting the obvious. Sticky toffee pudding? Apple crumble?” He signalled to the waiter for coffee. “Mind if I give you one quiet word of warning between old friends?”
“Please do.”
“You’re on sick leave. You’re in hell. But you’re old Office, you know the rules and you’re still an Africa man. And you’re on my watch.” And lest Justin might think this was some kind of romantic definition of his status: “Plenty of plums out there for a chap who’s got himself sorted. Plenty of places I wouldn’t be seen dead in. And if you’re harbouring so-called confidential information that you shouldn’t have—in your head or anywhere else—it belongs to us, not you. Rougher world these days than the one we grew up in. Lot of mean chaps around with everything to go for and a lot to lose. Makes for bad manners.”
As we have learned to our cost, thought Justin from far inside his glass capsule. He rose weightlessly from the table and was surprised to see his own image in a great number of mirrors at the same time. He saw himself from all angles, at all ages of his life. Justin the lost child in big houses, friend of cooks and gardeners. Justin the schoolboy rugby star. Justin the professional bachelor, burying his loneliness in numbers. Justin the Foreign Office white hope and no-hoper, photographed with his friend the dracaena palm. Justin the newly widowed father of his dead and only son.
“You’ve been very kind, Bernard. Thank you.”
Thank you for the master-class in sophistry, he meant, if he meant anything. Thank you for proposing a film of my wife’s murder and riding roughshod over every last sensitivity I had left. Thank you for her eighteen-page Armageddon scenario and her secret rendezvous with Woodrow, and other tantalising additions to my awakening recollection. And thank you for the quiet word of warning, delivered with the glint of steel in your eye. Because when I look closely, I see the same glint in mine.