The Constant Gardener (17 page)

“Somebody had a quiet word with them before I did,” Lesley explains.

•      •      •

Hearing a man's voice behind him, Justin swung round. But it was only the flight steward inquiring after his bodily comforts. Did Mr. Brown require a spot of help with the controls on his seat at all? Thank you, Mr. Brown preferred to remain upright. Or his video machine? Thank you, no, I have no need of it. Then would he like to have the blind across his window drawn at all? No, thank you—emphatically—Justin preferred his window open to the cosmos. Then what about a nice warm blanket for Mr. Brown? Out of incurable politeness, Justin accepted a blanket and returned his gaze to the black window in time to see Gloria barging into the dining room without knocking, carrying a tray of paste sandwiches. Setting it on the table, she sneaks a look at whatever Lesley has written in her notebook: fruitlessly, as it happens, for Lesley has deftly turned to a fresh page.

“You won't overwork our poor houseguest, will you, darlings? He's got quite enough on his plate as it is, haven't you, Justin?”

And a kiss on the cheek for Justin, and a music-hall exit for everyone, as the three of them with one mind spring to open the door for their jailer as she departs with the spent tea tray.

•      •      •

For a while after Gloria's intrusion the talk is piecemeal. They munch their sandwiches, Lesley opens a different notebook, a blue one, while Rob with his mouth full fires off a seemingly unrelated stream of questions.

“Know anyone who smokes Sportsman cigarettes incessantly, do we?”—in a tone to suggest that smoking Sportsmans is a capital offense.

“Not that I'm aware of, no. We both detested cigarette smoke.”

“I meant out and about, not just at home.”

“Still no.”

“Know anyone owns a green long-wheelbase safari truck, good condition, Kenyan plates?”

“The High Commissioner boasts an armored jeep of some sort, but I don't imagine that's what you have in mind.”

“Know any blokes in their forties, wellbuilt military types, polished shoes, tanned complexions?”

“Nobody who comes to mind, I'm afraid,” Justin confesses, smiling in his relief to be clear of the danger zone.

“Ever heard of a place called Marsabit, at all?”

“Yes, I think so. Yes, Marsabit. Of course. Why?”

“Oh. Right. Good. We have heard of it. Where is it?”

“On the edge of the Chalbi desert.”

“East of Lake Turkana then?”

“As memory serves, yes. It's an administrative center of some sort. A meeting place for wanderers from all over the northern region.”

“Ever been there?”

“Alas, no.”

“Know anyone who has?”

“No, I don't believe so.”

“Any idea of the facilities available to the careworn traveler at Marsabit?”

“I believe there is accommodation there. And a police post. And a national reserve.”

“But you've never been there.” Justin has not. “Or sent anyone there? Two anyones, for instance?” Justin has not. “So how come you know all about the place then? Psychic, are you?”

“When I am posted to a country I make it my business to study the map.”

“We're getting stories of a green longwheelbase safari truck that stopped over at Marsabit two nights before the murder, Justin,” Lesley explains, when this ritual display of aggression has run its course. “Two white men aboard. They sound like white hunters. Fit, your sort of age, khaki drills, shiny shoes, like Rob says. Didn't talk to anyone except each other. Didn't flirt with a bevy of Swedish girls at the bar. Bought stores from the shop. Fuel, fags, water, beer, rations. The fags were Sportsmans, the beer was Whitecap in bottles. Whitecap only comes in bottles. They left next morning, headed west across the desert. If they kept driving they could have hit Turkana shore next evening. They might even have made it to Allia Bay. The empty beer bottles we found near the murder scene were Whitecaps. The fag ends were Sportsmans.”

“Is it simplistic of me to ask whether the hotel at Marsabit keeps a register?” Justin inquires.

“Page missing,” Rob declares triumphantly, barging his way back. “Untimely ripped. Plus the Marsabit staff don't remember them from shit. They're so scared they can't remember their own names. Someone had a quiet word with them too, we assume. Same people as had a word with the staff at the hospital.”

But this is Rob's swansong in his role of Justin's hangman, a truth that he himself seems to recognize, for he scowls and yanks at his ear and very nearly looks apologetic, but Justin meanwhile is quickening. His gaze travels restlessly from Rob to Lesley and back again. He waits for the next question and, when none is forthcoming, asks one of his own.

“What about the vehicle registration office?”

The suggestion drew a hollow laugh from the two officers.

“In Kenya?” they ask.

“The motor insurance companies, then. The importers, the suppliers. There can't be that many long-wheelbase green safari trucks in Kenya. Not if you sift through them.”

“The Blue Boys are working on it flat out,” says Rob. “By the next millennium, if we're very nice, they may come up with an answer. The importers haven't been all that clever either, to be frank,” he goes on, with a sly look at Lesley. “Little firm called Bell, Barker and Benjamin, known otherwise as ThreeBees—heard of them? President for Life, one Sir Kenneth K. Curtiss, golfer and crook, Kenny K to his friends?”

“Everyone in Africa has heard of ThreeBees,” says Justin, pulling himself sharply back into line. If in doubt, lie. “And of Sir Kenneth, obviously. He's a character.”

“Loved?”

“Admired, I suppose is the word. He owns a popular Kenyan football team. And wears a baseball cap back to front,” he adds, with a distaste that makes them laugh.

“ThreeBees have shown a lot of what I'd call alacrity all right, but not a lot of results,” Rob resumes. “Very helpful, not a lot of help. ”No problem, Officer! You'll have it by lunchtime, Officer!“ But that was lunchtime a week ago.”

“I'm afraid that's the way with quite a few people round here,” Justin laments with a weary smile. “Have you tried the motor insurance companies?”

“ThreeBees do motor insurance too. Well, they would, wouldn't they? Free third-party cover when you buy one of their vehicles. Still, that hasn't been a lot of help either. Not when it comes to green safari trucks in good condition.”

“I see,” says Justin blandly.

“Tessa never had them in her sights at all, did she?” Rob asks, in his ever-so-casual tone. “ThreeBees? Kenny K does seem rather close to the Moi throne, which can usually be relied on to get her dander up. Did she?”

“Oh I expect so,” says Justin with equal vagueness. “At one time or another. Bound to have.”

“Which might account for why we're not getting that extra bit of help we're after from the noble House of ThreeBees on the matter of the mystery vehicle and one or two other matters not directly related to it. Only they're big in other fields too, aren't they? Everything from cough syrup to executive jets, they told us, didn't they, Les?”

Justin smiles distantly, but does not advance the topic of conversation—not even, though he is tempted, with an amusing reference to the borrowed glory of Napoleon, or the absurd coincidence of Tessa's connection with the island of Elba. And he makes no reference whatever to the night he brought her home from the hospital, and to those bastards in ThreeBees who killed Wanza with their poison.

“But they weren't on Tessa's blacklist, you say,” Rob continues. “Which is surprising really, considering what's been said about them by their many critics. ”The iron fist in the iron glove,“ was how one Westminster MP recently described them if I remember rightly, apropos some forgotten scandal. I don't expect he'll be getting a free safari in a hurry, will he, Les?” Les said no way. “Kenny K and his ThreeBees. Sounds like a rock group. But Tessa hadn't declared one of her fatwas against them, as far as you know?”

“Not to my knowledge, no,” says Justin, smiling at “fatwa.”

Rob doesn't let it go. “Based on—I don't know—some bad experience she and Arnold had in their fieldwork, say—malpractice of some kind—of the pharmaceutical sort? Only she was pretty big on the medical side of things, wasn't she? And so's Kenny K, when he's not on the golf course with Moi's Boys or buzzing round in his Gulf-stream buying a few more companies.”

“Oh indeed,” says Justin—but with such an air of detachment, if not downright disinterest, that there is clearly no prospect of further enlightenment.

“So if I told you that Tessa and Arnold had made repeated representations to numerous departments of the far-flung House of ThreeBees over recent weeks—had written letters, made phone calls and appointments and had persistently been given the runaround for their trouble—you would still be saying this was not something that had come to your notice in any shape or form. That's a question.”

“I'm afraid I would.”

“Tessa writes a string of furious letters to Kenny K personally. They're hand-delivered or registered. She phones his secretary three times a day and bombards him with e-mails. She attempts to doorstep him at his farm at Lake Naivasha and at the entrance to his illustrious new offices, but his boys tip him off in time and he uses the back stairs, to the great entertainment of his staff. All this would be total news to you, so help you God?”

“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 honor he had compelled himself not to hear, but that 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 rumors 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 antiNapoleonic 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 environment and favors 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 overaged 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.