The Constant Gardener (14 page)

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.

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 jailers 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 recognize strode to the center 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 straightaway, 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 organized 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 well 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 inquiries,” 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 colors lie untouched in Lesley's useful bag. There is nothing to hurry or formalize 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 southwest 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.”

“And the rape?” Justin inquires with feigned detachment, keeping his eyes fixed on his folded hands.

“Cosmetic or incidental,” Rob retorts crisply. “Villains lost their heads or did it with forethought.”

“Which brings us back to motive, Justin,” Lesley says.

“Yours,” says Rob. “Unless you've got a better idea.”

Their two faces are trained on Justin's like cameras, one to either side of him, but Justin remains as impervious to their double stare as he is to innuendo. Perhaps in his internal isolation he is not aware of either. Lesley lowers one hand to her useful bag in order to locate the tape recorder, but thinks better of it. The hand remains caught in flagrante, while the rest of her is turned to Justin, to this man of impeccably drafted sentences, this sitting committee of one.

“But I know no killers, you see,” he is objecting—pointing out the flaw in their argument as he peers ahead of him with emptied eyes. “I hired nobody, instructed nobody, I'm afraid. I had nothing whatever to do with my wife's murder. Not in the sense you are implying. I did not wish it, I did not engineer it.” His voice falters, and strikes an embarrassing kink. “I regret it beyond words.”

And this with such finality that for an instant the police officers appear to have nowhere to go, preferring to study Gloria's watercolors of Singapore, which hang in a row across the brick fireplace, each priced at “l199 and NO BLOODY VAT!” each with the same scrubbed sky and palm tree and flock of birds and her name in lettering loud enough to read across the road, plus a date for the benefit of collectors.

Until Rob, who has the brashness, if not the self-assurance of his age, throws up his long thin head and blurts, “So you didn't mind your wife and Bluhm sleeping together, I suppose? A lot of husbands could get a bit ratty about a thing like that.” Then snaps his mouth shut, waiting for Justin to do whatever Rob's righteous expectations require deceived husbands to do in such cases: weep, blush, rage against their own inadequacies or the perfidy of their friends. If so, Justin disappoints him.

“That is simply not the point,” he replies, with such force that he takes himself by surprise, and sits upright, and peers round him as if to see who has spoken out of turn, and reprimand the fellow. “It may be the point for the newspapers. It may be the point for you. It was never the point for me, and it is not the point now.”

“So what is the point?” Rob demands.

“I failed her.”

“How? Not up to it, you mean?”—a male sneer —“failed her in the bedroom, did you?”

Justin is shaking his head. “By detaching myself.” His voice fell to a murmur. “By letting her go it alone. By emigrating from her in my mind. By making an immoral contract with her. One that I should never have allowed. And nor should she.”

“What was that then?” Lesley asks sweet as milk after Rob's deliberate roughness.

“She follows her conscience, I get on with my job. It was an immoral distinction. It should never have been made. It was like sending her off to church and telling her to pray for both of us. It was like drawing a chalk line down the middle of our house and saying see you in bed.”

Unfazed by the frankness of these admissions, and the nights and days of self-recrimination suggested by them, Rob makes to challenge him. His lugubrious face is set in the same incredulous sneer, his mouth round and open like the muzzle of a large gun. But Lesley is quicker than Rob today. The woman in her is wide awake and listening to sounds that Rob's aggressively male ear can't catch. Rob turns to her, seeking her permission for something: to challenge him again with Arnold Bluhm perhaps, or with some other telling question that will bring him nearer to the murder. But Lesley shakes her head and, lifting her hand from the region of the bag, surreptitiously pats the air, meaning “slowly, slowly.”

“So how did the two of you get together in the first place, anyway?” she asks Justin, as one might ask a chance acquaintance on a long journey.

And this is genius on Lesley's part: to offer him a woman's ear and a stranger's understanding; to call a halt like this, and lead him from his present battlefield to the unthreatened meadows of his past. And Justin responds to her appeal. He relaxes his shoulders, half closes his eyes and in a distant, deeply private tone of recollection tells it the way it was, exactly as he had told it to himself a hundred times in as many tormented hours.

•      •      •

“So when is a state not a state, in your opinion, Mr. Quayle?” Tessa inquired sweetly, one idle midday in Cambridge four years ago, in an ancient attic lecture room with dusty sunbeams sloping through the skylight. They are the first words she ever addressed to him, and they trigger a burst of laughter from the languid audience of fifty fellow lawyers who, like Tessa, had enrolled themselves for a twoweek summer seminar on Law and the Administered Society. Justin repeats them now. How he came to be standing alone on the dais, in a threepiece gray flannel suit by Hayward, clutching a lectern in both hands, is the story of his life so far, he explains, speaking away from both of them, into the fake Tudor recesses of the Woodrow dining room. “Quayle will do it!” some acolyte in the permanent undersecretary's private office had cried, late last night, not eleven hours before the lecture was due to be given. “Get me Quayle!” Quayle the professional bachelor, he meant, postable Quayle, the aging debs' delight, last of a dying breed, thank God, just back from bloody Bosnia and marked for Africa but not yet. Quayle the spare male, worth knowing if you're giving a dinner party and stuck, perfect manners, probably gay—except he wasn't, as a few of the better-looking wives had reason to know, even if they weren't telling.

“Justin, is that you?—Haggarty. You were in College a couple of years ahead of me. Look here, the PUS is delivering a speech at Cambridge tomorrow to a bunch of aspiring lawyers, except he can't. He's got to leave for Washington in an hour—”

And Justin the good chap already talking himself into it with: “Well, if it's already written, I suppose—if it's only a matter of reading it—”

And Haggarty cutting him short with, “I'll have his car and driver standing outside your house at the stroke of nine, not a minute later. The lecture's crap. He wrote it himself. You can sap it up on the way down. Justin, you're a brick.”

So here he was, a fellow Etonian brick, having delivered himself of the dullest lecture he had read in his life-patronizing, puffy and verbose like its author, who by now presumably was relaxing in the lap of undersecretarial luxury in Washington, D.c. It had never occurred to him that he would be required to take questions from the floor, but when Tessa piped out hers, it never occurred to him to refuse her. She was positioned at the geometric center of the room, which was where she belonged. Locating her, Justin formed the foolish impression that her colleagues had deliberately left a space round her in deference to her beauty. The high neck of her legal white blouse reached, like a blameless choirgirl's, to her chin. Her pallor and spectral slimness made a waif of her. You wanted to roll her up in a blanket and make her safe. The sunbeams from the skylight shone so brightly on her dark hair that to begin with he couldn't make out the face inside. The most he got was a broad, pale brow, a pair of solemn wide eyes and a fighter's pebble jaw. But the jaw came later. In the meantime she was an angel. What he didn't know, but was about to discover, was that she was an angel with a cudgel.

“Well—I suppose the answer to your question is—” Justin began—“and you must please correct me if you think differently—” bridging the age gap and the gender gap and generally imparting an egalitarian air—“that a state ceases to be a state when it ceases to deliver on its essential responsibilities. Would that be your feeling, basically?”

“Essential responsibilities being what?” the angel-waif rapped back.

“Well—” said Justin again, not certain where he was heading anymore, and therefore resorting to those nonmating signals with which he imagined he was securing protection for himself, if not some kind of outright immunity—“Well—” troubled gesture of the hand, dab of the Etonian forefinger at graying sideburn, down again—“I would suggest to you that, these days, very roughly, the qualifications for being a civilized state amount to—electoral suffrage, ah—protection of life and property —um, justice, health and education for all, at least to a certain level—then the maintenance of a sound administrative infrastructure—and roads, transport, drains, et cetera—and-what else is there?—ah yes, the equitable collection of taxes. If a state fails to deliver on at least a quorum of the above—then one has to say that the contract between state and citizen begins to look pretty shaky —and if it fails on all of the above, then it's a failed state, as we say these days. An unstate.” Joke. “An ex-state.” Another joke, but still no one laughed. “Does that answer your question?”

He had assumed that the angel would require a moment's reflection to ponder this profound reply, and was therefore rattled when, barely allowing him time to bring the paragraph home, she struck again.