The Constant Gardener

Her house was new and rich, part of a luxury lakeside development built to accommodate the favorite sons and daughters of Messrs. Karel Vita Hudson of Basel, Vancouver and Seattle. She poured him a whisky and for herself a vodka, she showed him the Jacuzzi, and demonstrated the sound system and the eye-level multi-functional supermicrowave oven and, with the same wry detachment, indicated the point along her fence where the Organy parked when they came to watch over her, which happened most days a week, she said, usually from around eight in the morning, depending on the weather, until nightfall unless there was an important hockey match in which case they left earlier. She showed him the absurd night sky in her bedroom, the cupola of white plaster that was pierced with tiny lights to imitate the stars, and the dimmer that turned them up or down to the whim of the occupants of the great round bed beneath it. And there was a moment that they both watched come and go when it seemed possible they might themselves become the occupants — two outlaws from the system consoling one another, and what could be more reasonable than that? But Tessa's shadow came between them and the moment passed without either of them commenting on it. Justin commented on the icons instead. She had half a dozen of them: Andrew, Paul and Simon Peter and John and the Virgin Mother herself, with tin haloes and their attenuated hands at prayer or held up to bestow a blessing or signify the Trinity.

"I suppose Markus gave you those," he said, acting confused by this renewed display of unlikely religiosity.

She put on her gloomiest scowl.

"It is a totally scientific position. If God exists, he will be grateful. If not, it is irrelevant." And blushed when he laughed, then laughed too.

The spare bedroom was in the basement. With its barred window looking into the garden it reminded him of Gloria's lower ground. He slept till five, wrote to Ham's aunt for an hour, dressed and crept upstairs intending to leave a note for Lara and take his chances of a lift into town. She was sitting in the window bay smoking a cigarette and wearing the clothes she had worn last night. The ashtray beside her was full.

"You may take a bus to the train station from the top of the road," she said. "It will leave in one hour."

She made him coffee and he drank it at a table in the kitchen. Neither of them seemed disposed to discuss the night's events.

"Probably just a bunch of crazy muggers," he said once, but she remained sunk in her own meditations.

Another time he asked her about her plans. "How much longer have you got this place for?"

A few days, she replied distractedly. Maybe a week.

"What will you do?"

It would depend, she replied. It was not important. She would not starve.

"Go now," she said suddenly. "It is better that you wait at the bus stop."

As he left she stood with her back to him and her head tipped tensely forward, as if she were listening to a suspicious sound.

"You will be merciful with Lorbeer," she announced.

But whether this was a prediction or a command, he couldn't tell.

CHAPTER TWENTY

"What the fuck does your man Quayle think he's playing at, Tim?" Curtiss demanded, swinging his huge body round on one heel to challenge Donohue down the echoing room. It was big enough for a good-sized chapel, with teak poles for rafters, and doors with prison hinges and tribal shields on the log-cabin walls.

"He's not our man, Kenny. He never was," Donohue replied stoically. "He's straight Foreign Office."

"Straight? What's straight about him? He's the most devious sod I ever heard of. Why doesn't he come to me if he's worried about my drug? The door's wide open. I'm not a monster, am I? What does he want? Money?"

"No, Kenny. I don't think so. I don't think money's what's on his mind."

That voice of his, thought Donohue, while he waited to learn why he had been sent for. I'll never get rid of it. Bullying and wheedling. Lying and self-pitying. But bullying its favorite mode by far. Rinsed but never laundered. The shadow of his Lancashire backstreet still peeping through, to the despair of all those elocution tutors who came and left at night.

"What's bugging him then, Tim? You know him. I don't."

"His wife, Kenny. She had an accident. Remember?"

Curtiss swung back to the great picture window and lifted his hands, palms upmost, appealing to the African dusk for reason. Beyond the bulletproof glass lay darkening lawns, at the end of them a lake. Lights twinkled on the hillsides. A few early stars penetrated the deep-blue evening mist.

"So his wife gets hers," Curtiss reasoned, in the same plaintive tone. "A bunch of bad boys went wild on her. Her piece of the black stuff did her over, what do I know? The way she was carrying on, she was asking for it. This is Turkana we're talking about, not fucking Surrey. But I'm sorry, yes? Very, very sorry."

But not perhaps as sorry as you ought to be, thought Donohue.