The Constant Gardener

Discovering he was now standing at the window overlooking the back garden, he poked aside the curtain and saw festoons of flowering shrubs, the pride of Justin's "open days" for junior staff when he served strawberries and cream and cold white wine and gave them the tour of his Elysium. "One year's gardening in Kenya is worth ten in England," he liked to claim as he made his comic little pilgrimages round Chancery, handing out his flowers to the boys and girls. It was the only subject, come to think of it, on which he had been known to boast. Woodrow squinted sideways along the shoulder of the hill. The Quayle house was no distance from his own. The way the hill ran, they could see one another's lights at night. His eye homed on the very window from which too often he had been moved to stare in this direction. Suddenly he was as near as he ever came to weeping. Her hair was in his face. He could swim in her eyes, smell her perfume and the scent of warm sweet grass you got from her when you were dancing with her at Christmas at the Muthaiga Club and by sheer accident your nose brushed against her hair. It's the curtains, he realized, waiting for his half tears to recede. They've kept her scent and I'm standing right up against them. On an impulse he grabbed the curtain in both hands, about to bury his face in it.

"Thank you, Sandy. Sorry to have kept you waiting."

He swung round, shoving the curtain away from him. Justin was looming in the doorway, looking as flustered as Woodrow felt and clutching a long, orange, sausage-shaped leather Gladstone bag, fully laden and very scuffed, with brass screws, brass corners and brass padlocks either end.

"All set then, old man? Debt of honor discharged?" Woodrow asked, taken aback but, as a good diplomat, recovering his charm immediately. "Jolly good. That's the way then. And you've got everything you came for, all that?"

"I believe so. Yes. To a point."

"You sound unsure."

"Really? I don't mean to. It was her father's," he explained, making a gesture with the bag.

"Looks more like an abortionist's," said Woodrow, to be chummy.

He offered a hand to help him, but Justin preferred to carry his booty for himself. Woodrow climbed into the van, Justin climbed after him, to sit with one hand curled over its old leather carrying handles. The taunts of journalists came at them through the thin walls:

"Do you reckon Bluhm topped her, Mr. Quayle?"

"Hey, Justin, my proprietor is offering mega-megabucks."

From the direction of the house, above the ringing of the telephone, Woodrow thought he heard a baby crying, and realized it was Mustafa.

CHAPTER THREE

Press coverage of Tessa's murder was at first not half as dire as Woodrow and his High Commissioner had feared. Arseholes who are expert at making something out of nothing, Coleridge cautiously observed, appeared equally capable of making nothing out of something. To begin with, that was what they did. "Bush Killers Slay British Envoy's Wife" ran the first reports, and this robust approach, written upward for the broadsheets and downward for the tabloids, served a discerning public well. The increasing hazards to aid workers around the globe were dwelled upon, there were stinging editorials on the failure of the United Nations to protect its own and the ever-rising cost of humanitarians brave enough to stand up and be counted. There was high talk of lawless tribesmen seeking whom they might devour, ritual killings, witchcraft and the gruesome trade in human skins. Much was made of the presence of roving gangs of illegal immigrants from Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia. But nothing at all of the irrefutable fact that Tessa and Bluhm, in full view of staff and guests, had shared a cabin on the night before her death. Bluhm was "a Belgian aid official" — right — "a United Nations medical consultant" — wrong — "an expert in tropical diseases" — wrong — and was feared abducted by the murderers, to be held for ransom or killed.