The Constant Gardener

He didn't hear them leave. For a while he heard no sounds at all, except for the odd popping of the lake, and the putter of an occasional fishing boat. He heard a jackal howl, and a lot of backchat from a family of vultures that had commandeered a doum palm down on the lakeside. And he heard Tessa telling him that if she had it all to do again, this was still where she would want to do her dying, in Africa, on her way to heading off a great injustice. He drank some water, stood up, stretched and wandered over to the paint marks because that was where he knew for a surety that he was close to her. It didn't take much working out. If he put his hands on the marks he was about eighteen inches from her, if you discounted the width of the car door. Or maybe twice that much if you imagined Arnold in between. He even managed to have a bit of a laugh with her because he'd always had the devil's own job persuading her to wear her seat belt. On potholed African roads, she had argued, with her usual stubbornness, you were better off hanging loose: at least you could weave and dodge around inside the car instead of being plonked like a sack of potatoes into every bloody crater. And from the paint marks he made his way to the bottom of the gully and, hands in pockets, stood beside the dried-up riverbed, staring back at the spot where the jeep had come to rest and imagining poor Arnold being hauled senseless from it, to be taken to his place of prolonged and terrible execution.

Then, as a methodical man, he returned to the boulder he had chosen as his sitting place when he first came here, and sat down on it again, and devoted himself to the study of a small blue flower not unlike the phlox that he had planted in the front garden of their house in Nairobi. But the problem was, he was not absolutely sure the flower belonged to the place where he was seeing it, or whether in his mind he had transplanted it from Nairobi or, come to think of it, from the meadows surrounding his hotel in the Engadine. Also his interest in flora generally was at a low ebb. He no longer wished to cultivate the image of a sweet chap passionately interested in nothing except phlox, asters, freesias and gardenias. And he was still reflecting on this transition in his nature when he heard the sound of an engine from the direction of the shore, first the little explosion of it as it sprang to life, then its steady chugging as it faded into the distance. Mickie's decided to have a go after all, he thought; for your true fisherman, rising fish at dusk are an irresistible temptation. And after that, he remembered his attempts to persuade Tessa to go fishing with him, which invariably ended with no fish but a lot of undisciplined lovemaking, which was perhaps why he was so keen on persuading her. And he was still humorously contemplating the logistics of making love in the bottom of a small boat when he had a different idea about Mickie's fishing expedition, namely that it wasn't happening.

Mickie didn't mess about, change his mind, give in to whims.

That wasn't Mickie at all.

The thing about Mickie that you knew the moment you set eyes on him, and Tessa had said the same, was that this fellow was your born family retainer, which was why, to be honest, it was easy to confuse him with Mustafa.

So Mickie hadn't gone fishing.

But he'd gone. Whether he'd taken the poisonous Abraham with him was a moot point. But Mickie had gone, and the boat had gone. Back across the lake — that boat's engine had faded and faded.

So why had he gone? Who had told him to go? Paid him to go? Ordered him to go? Threatened him if he didn't go? What message had Mickie received, over his boat's radio, or man to man from another boat or somebody on the shore, that had persuaded him, against all the natural lines of his good face, to walk out on a job when he hadn't been paid for it? Or had Markus Lorbeer the compulsive Judas taken out some more insurance with his friends in the industry? He was still mulling over this possibility when he heard another engine, this time from the direction of the road. The dusk was falling quickly by now, and the light already fickle, so he might have expected a passing car at this hour to put on its sidelights at the very least, but this one — car or whatever — hadn't done so, which was a puzzle to him.