Dear Ham,
Here’s the first of what I hope will be a long line of letters to your kind aunt. I don’t want to appear maudlin but if I go under a bus I would like you please to hand all the documents personally to the most bloody-minded, unclubbable member of your profession, pay him the earth and start the ball rolling. That way we’ll both be doing Tessa a good turn.
As ever,
Justin
15
Until late into the evening, when the whisky finally got the better of him, Sandy Woodrow had remained loyally at his post in the High Commission, shaping, redrafting and honing his forthcoming performance at tomorrow’s Chancery meeting; passing it upwards into the hierarchy of his official mind, then downwards into that other mind that, like an erratic counterweight, dragged him without warning through a bedlam of accusing ghosts, forcing him to shout louder than they did: you do not exist, you are a series of random episodes; you are not related in any way to Porter Coleridge’s abrupt departure for London with wife and child, on the questionable grounds that they had decided on the spur of the moment to take some home leave and find Rosie a special school.
And sometimes his thoughts had gone off on their own entirely, to be discovered addressing such subversive matters as divorce by mutual consent, and whether Ghita Pearson or that new girl called Tara Something in Commercial Section would make an appropriate life partner and, if so, which of them the boys would prefer. Or whether after all he was better off living this lone-wolf existence, dreaming of connection, finding none, watching the dream slip further and further from his reach. Driving home with locked doors and closed windows, however, he was able once more to see himself as the loyal family breadwinner and husband—all right, still discreetly open to suggestions, and what man wasn’t?—but ultimately the same decent, stalwart, level-headed soldier’s son that Gloria had fallen head-over-heels in love with all those years ago. As he entered his house, he was therefore surprised, not to say hurt, to discover that Gloria had not by some act of telepathy divined his good intentions and waited up for him, but left him instead to forage for food in the refrigerator. After all, dammit, I am acting High Commissioner. I’m entitled to a little respect, even in my own house.
“Anything on the news?” he called up to her pathetically, eating his cold beef in unstately solitude.
The dining room ceiling, which was one plank of concrete thin, was also the floor to their bedroom.
“Don’t you get news at the shop?” Gloria bawled back.
“We don’t sit there listening to the radio all day, if that’s what you mean,” Woodrow replied, rather suggesting that Gloria did. And again waited, his fork poised halfway to his lips.
“They’ve killed two more white farmers in Zimbabwe, if that’s news,” Gloria announced, after an apparent breakdown in transmission.
“Don’t I know it! We’ve had the Pellegrin on our backs the whole damn day. Why can’t we persuade Moi to put the brakes on Mugabe? if you please. For the same reason we can’t persuade Moi to put the brakes on Moi, is the answer to that one.” He waited for a “Poor you, darling,” but all he got was cryptic silence.
“Nothing else?” he asked. “On the news. Nothing else?”
“What should there be?”
Hell’s come over the bloody woman? he marvelled sulkily, pouring himself another glass of claret. Never used to be like this. Ever since her widowed lover-boy took himself back to England, she’s been moping round the house like a sick cow. Won’t drink with me, won’t eat with me, won’t look me in the eye. Won’t do the other thing either, not that it was ever high on her list. Hardly bothers with her make-up, amazingly.
All the same, he was pleased she had heard no news. At least he knew something she didn’t for once. Not often London manages to sit on a red-hot story without some idiot in Information Department bubbling it to the media ahead of the agreed deadline. If they could just hold their water till tomorrow morning he’d get a clear run, which was what he’d asked Pellegrin for.
“It’s a morale issue, Bernard,” he’d warned him, in his best military tone. “Couple of people here are going to take it rather badly. I’d like to be the one to break it to them. Particularly with Porter away.”
Always good to remind them who was in charge too. Circumspect but unflappable, that’s what they look for in their high flyers. Not to make an issue of it, naturally; much better to let London notice for themselves how smoothly things are handled when Porter isn’t around to agonise over every comma.
Very trying, this will-they-won’t-they stand-off, if he was honest. Probably what’s getting her down. There’s the High Commissioner’s Residence a hundred yards up the road, staffed and ready to go, Daimler in the garage, but no flag flying. There’s Porter Coleridge, our absentee High Commissioner. And there’s little me here doing Coleridge’s job for him, rather better than Coleridge has been doing it, waiting night and day to hear whether, having stepped into his shoes, I can wear them not as his stand-in but as his official, formal, fully accredited successor, with trappings to match—to wit, the Residence, the Daimler, the private office, Mildren, another thirty-five thousand pounds’ worth of allowances and several notches nearer to a knighthood.
But there was a major snag. The Office was traditionally reluctant to promote a man en poste. They preferred to bring him home, pack him off somewhere new. There’d been exceptions, of course, but not many . . .
His thoughts drifted back to Gloria. Lady Woodrow: that’ll sort her out. Restless, that’s what she is. Not to say idle. I should have given her a couple more kids to keep her busy. Well, she won’t be idle if she’s installed in the Residence, that’s for sure. One free night a week, if she’s lucky. Quarrelsome too. Flaming row with Juma last week about some totally trivial thing like tarting up the lower ground. And on Monday, though he never dreamed he’d live to see the day, she’d engineered some kind of bust-up with the Archbitch Elena, casus belli unknown.
“Isn’t it about time we had the Els to dinner, darling?” he’d suggested chivalrously. “We haven’t pushed the boat out for the Els for months.”
“If you want them, ask them,” Gloria had advised icily, so he hadn’t.
But he felt the loss. Gloria without a woman friend was an engine without cogs. The fact—the extraordinary fact—that she’d formed some kind of armed truce with doe-eyed Ghita Pearson consoled him not at all. Only a couple of months ago Gloria was dismissing Ghita as neither one thing nor the other. “I can’t be doing with English-educated Brahmin’s daughters who talk like us and dress like dervishes,” she’d told Elena in Woodrow’s hearing. “And that Quayle girl is exerting a bad influence on her.” Well, now the Quayle girl was dead and Elena had been sent to Coventry. And Ghita who dressed like a dervish had been signed up to take Gloria on a conducted tour of Kibera slum with the advertised intention of finding her voluntary work with one of the aid agencies. And this, moreover, at the very time when Ghita’s own behaviour was causing Woodrow serious concern.
First there had been her display at the funeral. Well, there was no rule book on how to behave at funerals, it was true. Nevertheless, Woodrow considered her performance self-indulgent. Then there was what he would call a period of aggressive mourning, during which she wandered round Chancery like a zombie, refusing point blank to make eye-contact with him, whereas in the past he had regarded her as—well, a candidate, let’s say. Then last Friday, without giving the smallest explanation, she’d asked for the day off, although, as a brand-new member of Chancery—and the most junior—she had not yet technically earned her entitlement. Yet out of the goodness of his heart he had said, “Well, fine, Ghita, all right, I suppose so, but don’t wear him out”—nothing abusive, just an innocent joke between an older married man and a pretty young girl. But if looks could kill, he’d have been dead at her feet.
And what had she done with the time he’d given her—without so much as a by-your-leave? Flown up to Lake bloody Turkana in a chartered
plane with a dozen other female members of the self-constituted Tessa Quayle supporters’ club, and laid a wreath, and banged drums and sung hymns, at the spot where Tessa and Noah had been murdered! The first that Woodrow knew of this was breakfast on the Monday when he opened his Nairobi Standard and saw her photograph, posed centre stage between two enormous African women he vaguely remembered from the funeral.
“Well, Ghita Pearson, get you, I must say,” he had snorted, shoving the paper across the table at Gloria. “I mean, for God’s sake, it’s time to bury the dead, not dig them up every ten minutes. I always thought she was carrying a torch for Justin.”
“If we hadn’t had the Italian Ambassador I’d have flown up there with them,” Gloria replied, in a voice dripping with reproach.
The bedroom light was out. Gloria was pretending to be asleep.
“So shall we all sit down, please, ladies and gents?”
A power drill was whining from the floor above. Woodrow despatched Mildren to silence it while he ostentatiously busied himself with papers on his desk. The whining stopped. Taking his time, Woodrow looked up again to find everybody gathered before him, including a breathless Mildren. Exceptionally, Tim Donohue and his assistant Sheila had been asked to put in an appearance. With no High Commissioner’s meetings to rally the full complement of diplomatic staff, Woodrow was insisting on a full turnout. Hence also the Defence and Service Attachés and Barney Long from Commercial Section. And poor Sally Aitken, complete with stammer and blushes, on secondment from the Min of Ag and Fish. Ghita, he noticed, was in her usual corner where, since Tessa’s death, she had done her best to make herself invisible. To his irritation she still sported the black silk scarf round her neck that recalled the soiled bandage around Tessa’s. Were her oblique glances flirtatious or disdainful? With Eurasian beauties, how did you tell?
“Bit of a sad story, I’m afraid, guys,” he began breezily. “Barney, would you mind getting the door, as we say in America? Don’t bring it to me, just locking it will do.”
Laughter—but of the apprehensive sort.
He went straight into it, exactly as he had planned. Bull-by-the-horns stuff—we’re all professionals—necessary surgery. But also something tacitly courageous in your acting High Commissioner’s bearing as he first scans his notes, then taps the blunt end of his pencil on them and braces his shoulders before addressing the parade.
“There are two things I have to tell you this morning. The first is embargoed till you hear it on the news, British or Kenyan, whoever breaks it first. At twelve hundred hours today the Kenyan police will issue a warrant for the arrest of Dr Arnold Bluhm for the wilful murder of Tessa Quayle and the driver Noah. The Kenyans have been in touch with the Belgian government and Bluhm’s employers will be informed in advance. We’re ahead of the game because of the involvement of Scotland Yard, who will be passing their file to Interpol.”
Scarcely a chair creaks after the explosion. No protest, no gasp of astonishment. Just Ghita’s enigmatic eyes fixed on him at last, admiring or hating him.
“I know this’ll be a hell of a shock to you all, particularly those of you who knew Arnold and liked him. If you want to tip off your partners, you have my permission to do so at your discretion.” Quick flash of Gloria, who until Tessa’s death had dismissed Bluhm as a jumped-up gigolo but was now mysteriously concerned for his well-being. “I can’t pretend I’m delighted myself,” Woodrow confessed, becoming the tight-lipped master of understatement. “There’ll be the usual facile press explanations of motive, of course. The Tessa–Bluhm relationship will be raked over ad infinitum.
And if they ever catch him, there’ll be a noisy trial. So from the point of view of this Mission the news could hardly be worse. I’ve no information at this stage regarding the strength of the evidence. I’m told it’s cast iron, but they would say that, wouldn’t they?” The same hint of grit inside the humour. “Questions?”
None apparently. The news seemed to have taken the wind out of everybody’s sails. Even Mildren, who had had it since last night, could find nothing better to do than scratch an itch on the tip of his nose.
“My second piece of news is not unrelated to the first, but it’s a damn sight more delicate. Partners will not be informed without my prior consent. Junior staff will be selectively informed where necessary, on a strictly controlled basis. By myself or by the High Commissioner as and when he returns. Not by you, please. Am I clear so far?”
He was. There were nods of expectation this time, not just cow-like stares. All eyes were on him and Ghita’s had never left him. My God, suppose she’s fallen for me: how will I ever get out of it? He followed the thought through. Of course! That’s why she’s making up to Gloria! First it was Justin she was after, now it’s me! She’s a couple-cruiser, never safe unless she’s got the wife aboard as well! He squared himself and resumed his manly newscast.
“I am extremely sorry to have to tell you that our erstwhile colleague Justin Quayle has gone walkabout. You probably know he refused all reception facilities when he arrived in London, saying he’d prefer to paddle his own canoe, et cetera. He did manage a meeting with Personnel on his arrival, he did manage a luncheon appointment with the Pellegrin the same day. Both describe him as overwrought, sullen and hostile, poor chap. He was offered sanctuary and counselling and declined them. Meanwhile he’s jumped ship.”
Now it was Donohue that Woodrow was discreetly favouring, no longer Ghita. Woodrow’s gaze, by careful design, was fixed on neither one of them, of course. Ostensibly it oscillated between the middle air and the notes on his desk. But in reality he was focusing on Donohue and persuading himself with increasing conviction that once again Donohue and his scrawny Sheila had received prior warning of Justin’s defection.
“On the same day that he arrived in Britain—the same night, more accurately—Justin sent a somewhat disingenuous letter to the Head of Personnel advising her that he was taking leave to sort out his wife’s affairs. He used the ordinary mail, which in effect gave him three days to get clear. By the time Personnel moved to put a restraining hand on him—for his own good, I may add— he’d disappeared from everybody’s screens. Signs are, he went to considerable lengths to conceal his movements. He’s been traced to Elba, where Tessa had estates, but by the time the Office got on the scent he’d moved on. Where to, God knows, but there are suspicions. He’d made no formal leave application, of course, and the Office, for its part, was in the throes of deciding how it could best help him back on his feet—find him a slot where he could nurse his wounds for a year or two.” A shrug to suggest there wasn’t a lot of gratitude in the world. “Well, whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it alone. And he’s certainly not doing it for us.”
He glanced grimly at his audience, then went back to his notes. “There’s a security aspect to this that I obviously can’t share with you, so the Office is doubly exercised about where he’s going to pop up next and how. They’re also decently worried for him, as I’m sure we all are. Having shown a lot of bearing and self-control while he was here, he seems to have gone to pieces from the strain.” He was coming to the hard part but they were steeled for it. “We have various readings from the experts, none of them, from our point of view, pleasant.”
The general’s son soldiers gallantly on.
“One likelihood, according to the clever people who read entrails in these cases, is that Justin is in denial—that’s to say, he refuses to accept that his wife is dead and he’s gone looking for her. It’s very painful, but we’re talking of the logic of a temporarily deranged mind. Or we hope it’s temporary. Another theory, equally likely or unlikely, says he’s on a vengeance trip, looking for Bluhm. It seems that the Pellegrin, with the best of intentions, let slip that Bluhm was under suspicion for Tessa’s murder. Maybe Justin took the ball and ran. Sad. Very sad indeed.”
For a moment, in his ever-fluctuating vision of himself, Woodrow became the embodiment of this sadness. He was the decent face of a caring Britis
h civil service. He was the Roman adjudicator, slow to judge, slower to condemn. He was your man of the world, not afraid of hard decisions but determined to let his best instincts rule. Emboldened by the excellence of his performance, he felt free to improvise.
“It seems that people in Justin’s condition very often have agendas they themselves may not be aware of. They’re on automatic pilot, waiting for an excuse to do what they’re unconsciously planning to do anyway. A bit like suicides. Somebody says something in jest and—and bang, they’ve triggered it.”
Was he talking too much? Too little? Was he straying from the point? Ghita was scowling at him like an angry sibyl, and there was something at the back of Donohue’s shaggy yellowed eyes that Woodrow couldn’t read. Contempt? Anger? Or just that permanent air of having a different purpose, of coming from a different place and going back to it?
“But the most likely theory of what’s in Justin’s head at the moment, I’m afraid—the one that best fits the known facts, and is favoured, I must tell you, by the Office shrinks—is that Justin has hit the conspiracy trail, which could be very serious indeed. If you can’t deal with the reality, then dream up a conspiracy. If you can’t accept that your mother died of cancer, then blame the doctor who was attending her. And the surgeons. And the anaesthetists. And the nurses. Who were all in league with each other, of course. And collectively conspired to do away with her. And that seems to be exactly what Justin’s saying to himself about Tessa. Tessa wasn’t just raped and murdered. Tessa was the victim of an international intrigue. She didn’t die because she was young and attractive and desperately unlucky, but because They wanted her dead. Who They are—I’m afraid that one’s up to you. It can be your neighbourhood greengrocer, or the Salvation Army lady who rang your doorbell and flogged you a copy of their magazine. They’re all in it. They all conspired to kill Tessa.”