The Constant Gardener

"I'm sure Justin was very proud of her aid work. A lot of our wives here tend to sit back. Tessa's involvement redressed the balance."

"So he wasn't angry with her," Rob pressed.

"Justin is simply not given to anger. Not in the normal way. If he was anything at all, he was embarrassed."

"Were you embarrassed? I mean, you here at the High Commission?"

"What on earth by?"

"Her aid work. Her special interests. Did they conflict at all with HM interests?"

Woodrow composed his most puzzled and disarming frown. "Her Majesty's government could never be embarrassed by acts of humanity, Rob. You should know that."

"We're learning it, Mr. Woodrow," Lesley cut in quietly. "We're new." And having examined him for a while without for one second relaxing her nice smile, she loaded her notebooks and tape recorder back into her bag and, pleading engagements in the town, proposed they resume their deliberations tomorrow at the same hour.

"Did Tessa confide in anyone, do you know?" Lesley asked, in a by-the-by tone as they all three moved in a bunch toward the door.

"Apart from Bluhm, you mean?"

"I meant women friends, actually."

Woodrow ostentatiously searched his memory. "No. No, I don't think so. Nobody comes specifically to mind. But I don't suppose I'd know really, would I?"

"You might if it were someone on your staff. Like Ghita Pearson or somebody," said Lesley helpfully.

"Ghita? Oh well, obviously, yes, Ghita. And they're looking after you all right, are they? You've got transport and everything? Good."

A whole day passed, and a whole night, before they came again.

* * *

This time it was Lesley not Rob who opened the proceedings, and she did so with a freshness that suggested encouraging things had happened since they last met. "Tessa had had recent intercourse," she announced in a bright start-the-day sort of voice as she set out her properties like court exhibits — pencils, notebooks, tape recorder, a piece of india rubber. "We suspect rape. That's not for publication, though I expect we'll all be reading it in tomorrow's newspapers. It's only a vaginal swab they've taken at this stage and peeked through a microscope to see whether the sperm was alive or dead. It was dead, but they still think it may be more than one person's sperm. Maybe a whole cocktail. Our view is they've got no way to tell."

Woodrow sank his head into his hands.

"We'll have to wait for our own boffins to pronounce before it's a hundred per cent," Lesley said, watching him.

Rob, as yesterday, was nonchalantly tapping his pencil against his big teeth.

"And the blood on Bluhm's tunic was Tessa's," Lesley continued in the same frank tone. "Only provisional, mind. They only do the basic types here. Anything else, we'll have to do back home."

Woodrow had risen to his feet, a thing he did quite often at informal meetings to put everyone at their ease. Strolling languidly to the window he took up a position at the other end of the room and affected to study the hideous city skyline. There was freak thunder about, and that indefinable smell of tension that precedes the magical African rain. His manner, by contrast, was repose itself. Nobody could see the two or three drops of hot sweat that had left his armpits and were crawling like fat insects down his ribs.

"Has anyone told Quayle yet?" he asked, and wondered, as perhaps they did, why a raped woman's widower suddenly becomes a Quayle and not a Justin.

"We thought it would be better coming from a friend," Lesley replied.

"You," Rob suggested.

"Of course."

"Plus it is just possible — like Les here said — that she and Arnold had one last one for the road. If you want to mention that to him. It's up to you."

What's my last straw? he wondered. What more has to happen before I open this window and jump out? Perhaps that was what I wanted her to do for me: take me beyond the limits of my own acceptance.

"We really like Bluhm," Lesley broke out in chummy exasperation, as if she needed Woodrow to like Bluhm too. "All right, we've got to be on the lookout for the other Bluhm, the beast in human shape. And where we come from, the most peaceable people will do the most terrible things when they're pushed. But who pushed him — if he was pushed? Nobody, unless she did."

Lesley paused here, inviting Woodrow's comment, but he was exercising his right to remain silent.

"Bluhm's as close as you'll ever get to a good man," she insisted, as if good man were a finite condition like Homo sapiens. "He's done a lot of really, really good things. Not for display, but because he wanted to. Saved lives, risked his own, worked in awful places for no money, hidden people in his attic. Well, don't you agree, sir?"

Was she goading him? Or merely seeking enlightenment from a mature observer of the Tessa ̶ Bluhm relationship?

"I'm sure he has a fine record," Woodrow conceded.