“It does what, this committee?”
“EADEC is a relatively new consultative body, Rob, based here in Nairobi. It comprises representatives of all donor nations who provide aid, succour and relief to East Africa, in whatever form. Its members are drawn from the Embassies and High Commissions of each donor; the committee meets weekly and renders a fortnightly report.”
“To?” said Rob, writing.
“All member countries, obviously.”
“On?”
“On what the title says,” said Woodrow patiently, making allowances for the boy’s manners. “It fosters efficacy, or effectiveness, in the aid field. In aid work, effectiveness is pretty much the gold standard. Compassion’s a given,” he added with a disarming smile that said we were all compassionate people. “EADEC addresses the thorny question of how much of each dollar from each donor nation actually reaches its target, and how much wasteful overlap and unhelpful competition exists between agencies on the ground. It grapples, as we all do, alas, with the aid world’s three Rs: Reduplication, Rivalry, Rationalisation. It balances overheads against productivity and—”the smile of one bestowing wisdom—“makes the odd tentative recommendation, given that—unlike you chaps—it has no executive powers and no powers of enforcement.” A gracious tilting of the head announced the little confidence. “I’m not sure it was the greatest idea on earth, between ourselves. But it was the brainchild of our very own dear Foreign Secretary, it sat well with calls for greater transparency and an ethical foreign policy and other questionable nostrums of the day, so we pushed it for all it was worth. There are those who say the UN should do the job. Others say the UN already does it. Others again say the UN is part of the disease. Take your pick.” A deprecating shrug invited them to do just that.
“What disease?” said Rob.
“EADEC is not empowered to investigate at field level. Nevertheless, corruption is a major factor that has to be costed in as soon as you start to relate what is spent to what is achieved. Not to be confused with natural wastage and incompetence, but akin to them.” He reached for a common man’s analogy. “Take our dear old British water grid, built 1890 or thereabouts. Water leaves the reservoir. Some of it, if you’re lucky, comes out of your tap. But there are some very leaky pipes along the way. Now when that water is donated out of the goodness of the general public’s heart, you can’t just let it seep away into nowhere, can you? Certainly not if you’re dependent on the fickle voter for your job.”
“Who does this committee job bring him into contact with?” Rob asked.
“Ranking diplomats. Drawn from the international community here in Nairobi. Mostly counsellor and above. The odd first secretary, but not many.” He seemed to think this required some explanation. “EADEC had to be exalted, in my judgment. Head in the clouds. Once it allowed itself to be dragged down to field level, it would end up as some kind of super Non-Governmental Organisation—NGO to you, Rob—and be tarred with its own brush. I argued that strongly. All right: EADEC must be here in Nairobi, on the ground, locally aware. Obviously. But it’s still a think-tank. It must preserve the dispassionate overview. Absolutely vital that it remains—if you’ll allow me to quote myself—an emotion-free zone. And Justin is the committee secretary. Nothing he’s earned: it’s our turn. He takes the minutes, collates the research and drafts the fortnightlies.”
“Tessa wasn’t an emotion-free zone,” Rob objected after a moment’s thought. “Tessa was emotion all the way, from what we hear.”
“I’m afraid you’ve been reading too many newspapers, Rob.”
“No, I haven’t. I’ve been looking at her field reports. She was right in there with her sleeves rolled up. Shit up to her elbows, day and night.”
“And very necessary, no doubt. Very laudable. But hardly conducive to objectivity, which is the committee’s first responsibility as an international consultative body,” said Woodrow graciously, ignoring this descent into gutter language, as—at a different level entirely—he ignored it in his High Commissioner.
“So they went their different ways,” Rob concluded, sitting back and tapping his teeth with his pencil. “He was objective, she was emotional. He played the safe centre, she worked the dangerous edges. I get it now. As a matter of fact, I think I knew that already. So where does Bluhm fit in?”
“In what sense?”
“Bluhm. Arnold Bluhm. Doctor. Where does he fit into the scheme of things in Tessa’s life and yours?”
Woodrow gave a little smile, forgiving this quirkish formulation. My life? What did her life have to do with mine? “We have a great variety of donor-financed organisations here, as I’m sure you know. All supported by different countries and funded by all sorts of charitable and other outfits. Our gallant President Moi detests them en bloc.”
“Why?”
“Because they do what his government would do if it was doing its job. They also bypass his systems of corruption. Bluhm’s organisation is modest, it’s Belgian, it’s privately funded and medical. That’s all I can tell you about it, I’m afraid,” he added, with a candour that invited them to share his ignorance of these things.
But they were not so easily won.
“It’s a watchdog outfit,” Rob informed him shortly. “Its physicians tour the other NGOs, visit clinics, check out diagnoses and correct them. Like ‘maybe this isn’t malaria, doctor, maybe it’s liver cancer.’ Then they check out the treatment. They also deal in epidemiology. What about Leakey?”
“What about him?”
“Bluhm and Tessa were on their way to his site—correct?”
“Purportedly.”
“Who is he exactly? Leakey? What’s his bag?”
“He’s by way of being a white African legend. An anthropologist and archaeologist who worked alongside his parents on the eastern shores of Turkana exploring the origins of mankind. When they died he continued their work. He directed the National Museum here in Nairobi and later took over wildlife and conservation.”
“But resigned.”
“Or was pushed. The story is complex.”
“Plus he’s a thorn in Moi’s breeches, right?”
“He opposed Moi politically and was badly beaten up for his pains. He is now undergoing some kind of resurrection as the scourge of Kenyan corruption. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are effectively demanding his presence in the government.” As Rob sat back and Lesley took her turn, it was clear that the distinction Rob had applied to the Quayles also defined the police officers’ separate styles. Rob spoke in jerks, with the thickness of a man fighting to hold back his emotions. Lesley was the model of dispassion.
“So what sort of man is this Justin?” she mused, observing him as a distant character in history. “Away from his place of work and this committee of his? What are his interests, appetites, what’s his lifestyle, who is he?”
“Oh my God, who are any of us?” Woodrow declaimed, perhaps a little too theatrically, at which Rob again rattled his pencil against his teeth, Lesley smiled patiently and Woodrow, with charming reluctance, recited a checklist of Justin’s meagre attributes: a keen gardener—though, come to think of it, not so keen since Tessa lost her baby—loves nothing better than toiling in the flower beds on a Saturday afternoon—a gentleman, whatever that means—the right sort of Etonian—courteous to a fault in his dealings with locally employed staff, of course—kind of chap who can be relied on to dance with the wallflowers at the High Commissioner’s annual bash—bit of an old bachelor in ways Woodrow couldn’t immediately call to mind—not a golfer or a tennis player to his knowledge, not a shooter or a fisher, not an outdoor man at all, apart from his gardening. And, of course, a first-rate, meat-and-potatoes professional diplomat—bags of field experience, two or three languages, safe pair of hands, totally loyal to London guidance. And—here’s the cruel bit, Rob—by no fault of his own, caught in the promotion bulge.
“And he doesn’t keep low company or anything?” Lesley asked, consulting h
er notebook. “You wouldn’t see him whooping it up in the shady nightclubs while Tessa was out on her field trips?” The question was already a bit of a joke. “That wouldn’t be his thing, I take it?”
“Nightclubs? Justin? What a wonderful thought! Annabel’s, maybe, twenty-five years ago. Whatever gave you that idea?” Woodrow exclaimed with a heartier laugh than he had had for days.
Rob was happy to enlighten him. “Our Super, actually. Mr Gridley, he did a spell in Nairobi on liaison. He says the nightclubs are where you’d hire a hit-man if you had a mind to. There’s one on River Road, a block away from the New Stanley, which is handy if you’re staying there. Five hundred US and they’ll whack out anyone you want. Half down, half afterwards. Less in some clubs, according to him, but then you don’t get the quality.”
“Did Justin love Tessa?” Lesley asked, while Woodrow was still smiling.
In the relaxed spirit that was growing up between them, Woodrow threw up his arms and offered a muted cry to Heaven. “Oh my God! Who loves whom in this world and why?” And when Lesley did not immediately relieve him of the question: “She was beautiful. Witty. Young. He was forty-something when he met her. Menopausal, heading for injury time, lonely, infatuated, wanting to settle down. Love? That’s your call, not mine.”
But if this was an invitation to Lesley to chime in with her own opinions, she ignored it. She appeared, like Rob beside her, more interested in the subtle transfiguration of Woodrow’s features; in the tightening of the skin lines in the upper cheeks, the faint blotches of colour that had appeared at the neck; in the tiny, involuntary puckerings of the lower jaw.
“And Justin wasn’t angry with her—like about her aid work for instance?” Rob suggested.
“Why should he be?”
“It didn’t get up his nose when she banged on about how certain Western companies, British included, were ripping off the Africans—overcharging them for technical services, dumping overpriced out-of-date medicines on them? Using Africans as human guinea pigs to try out new drugs, which is sometimes implied if seldom proved, so to speak?”
“I’m sure Justin was very proud of her aid work. A lot of our wives here tend to sit back. Tessa’s involvement redressed the balance.”
“So he wasn’t angry with her,” Rob pressed.
“Justin is simply not given to anger. Not in the normal way. If he was anything at all, he was embarrassed.”
“Were you embarrassed? I mean, you here at the High Commission?”
“What on earth by?”
“Her aid work. Her special interests. Did they conflict at all with HM interests?”
Woodrow composed his most puzzled and disarming frown. “Her Majesty’s government could never be embarrassed by acts of humanity, Rob. You should know that.”
“We’re learning it, Mr Woodrow,” Lesley cut in quietly. “We’re new.” And having examined him for a while without for one second relaxing her nice smile, she loaded her notebooks and tape recorder back into her bag and, pleading engagements in the town, proposed they resume their deliberations tomorrow at the same hour.
“Did Tessa confide in anyone, do you know?” Lesley asked, in a by-the-by tone as they all three moved in a bunch towards the door.
“Apart from Bluhm, you mean?”
“I meant women friends, actually.”
Woodrow ostentatiously searched his memory. “No. No, I don’t think so. Nobody comes specifically to mind. But I don’t suppose I’d know really, would I?”
“You might if it were someone on your staff. Like Ghita Pearson or somebody,” said Lesley helpfully.
“Ghita? Oh well, obviously, yes, Ghita. And they’re looking after you all right, are they? You’ve got transport and everything? Good.”
A whole day passed, and a whole night, before they came again.
This time it was Lesley not Rob who opened the proceedings, and she did so with a freshness that suggested encouraging things had happened since they last met. “Tessa had had recent intercourse,” she announced in a bright start-the-day sort of voice as she set out her properties like court exhibits—pencils, notebooks, tape recorder, a piece of india rubber. “We suspect rape. That’s not for publication, though I expect we’ll all be reading it in tomorrow’s newspapers. It’s only a vaginal swab they’ve taken at this stage and peeked through a microscope to see whether the sperm was alive or dead. It was dead, but they still think it may be more than one person’s sperm. Maybe a whole cocktail. Our view is they’ve got no way to tell.”
Woodrow sank his head into his hands.
“We’ll have to wait for our own boffins to pronounce before it’s a hundred per cent,” Lesley said, watching him.
Rob, as yesterday, was nonchalantly tapping his pencil against his big teeth.
“And the blood on Bluhm’s tunic was Tessa’s,” Lesley continued in the same frank tone. “Only provisional, mind. They only do the basic types here. Anything else, we’ll have to do back home.”
Woodrow had risen to his feet, a thing he did quite often at informal meetings to put everyone at their ease. Strolling languidly to the window he took up a position at the other end of the room and affected to study the hideous city skyline. There was freak thunder about, and that indefinable smell of tension that precedes the magical African rain. His manner, by contrast, was repose itself. Nobody could see the two or three drops of hot sweat that had left his armpits and were crawling like fat insects down his ribs.
“Has anyone told Quayle yet?” he asked, and wondered, as perhaps they did, why a raped woman’s widower suddenly becomes a Quayle and not a Justin.
“We thought it would be better coming from a friend,” Lesley replied.
“You,” Rob suggested.
“Of course.”
“Plus it is just possible—like Les here said—that she and Arnold had one last one for the road. If you want to mention that to him. It’s up to you.”
What’s my last straw? he wondered. What more has to happen before I open this window and jump out? Perhaps that was what I wanted her to do for me: take me beyond the limits of my own acceptance.
“We really like Bluhm,” Lesley broke out in chummy exasperation, as if she needed Woodrow to like Bluhm too. “All right, we’ve got to be on the lookout for the other Bluhm, the beast in human shape. And where we come from, the most peaceable people will do the most terrible things when they’re pushed. But who pushed him—if he was pushed? Nobody, unless she did.”
Lesley paused here, inviting Woodrow’s comment, but he was exercising his right to remain silent.
“Bluhm’s as close as you’ll ever get to a good man,” she insisted, as if good man were a finite condition like Homo sapiens. “He’s done a lot of really, really good things. Not for display, but because he wanted to. Saved lives, risked his own, worked in awful places for no money, hidden people in his attic. Well, don’t you agree, sir?”
Was she goading him? Or merely seeking enlightenment from a mature observer of the Tessa–Bluhm relationship?
“I’m sure he has a fine record,” Woodrow conceded.
Rob gave a snort of impatience, and a disconcerting writhe of his upper body. “Look. Forget his record. Personally: do you like him, yes or no? Simple as that.” And flung himself into a fresh position on his chair.
“My God,” said Woodrow over his shoulder, careful this time not to overdo the histrionics, but allowing nonetheless a note of exasperation to enter his voice. “Yesterday it was define love, today it’s define like. We do rather chase our absolute definitions in Cool Britannia these days, don’t we?”
“We’re asking your opinion, sir,” said Rob.
Perhaps it was the sirs that turned the trick. At their first meeting it was Mr Woodrow, or when they felt bold, Sandy. Now it was sir, advising Woodrow that these two junior police officers were not his colleagues, not his friends, but lower-class outsiders poking their noses into the exclusive club that had given him standing and protection these seventeen
years. He linked his hands behind his back and braced his shoulders, then turned on his heel until he faced his interrogators.
“Arnold Bluhm is persuasive,” he declared, lecturing them down the length of the room. “He has looks, charm of a sort. Wit, if you like that type of humour. Some sort of aura—perhaps it’s that neat little beard. To the impressionable, he’s an African folk hero.” After which he turned away from them, as if waiting for them to pack and leave.
“And to the unimpressionable?” asked Lesley, taking advantage of his turned back to reconnoitre him with her eyes: the hands nonchalantly comforting one another behind him, the unweighted knee lifted in self-defence.
“Oh, we’re in the minority, I’m sure,” Woodrow replied silkily.
“Only I imagine it could be very worrying for you—vexing too, in your position of responsibility as Head of Chancery—seeing all this happening under your nose and knowing there’s nothing you can do to stop it. I mean you can’t go up to Justin, can you, and say, ‘Look at that bearded black man over there, he’s carrying on with your wife,’ can you? Or can you?”
“If scandal threatens to drag the good name of the Mission into the gutter, I’m entitled—indeed obliged—to interpose myself.”
“And did you?”—Lesley speaking.
“In a general way, yes.”
“With Justin? Or with Tessa directly?”
“The problem was, obviously, that her relationship with Bluhm had cover, as one might say,” Woodrow replied, contriving to ignore the question. “The man’s a ranking doctor. He’s well regarded in the aid community. Tessa was his devoted volunteer. On the surface, all perfectly above-board. One can’t just sail in and accuse them of adultery on no evidence. One can only say—look here, this is giving out the wrong signals, so please be a little more circumspect.”