The Constant Gardener

"Now you come to mention it, Rob, you're right. How very clever of you. Bluhm was there when I arrived. We greeted each other and he left. I would imagine we overlapped by the better part of twenty seconds. For you, twenty-five."

But Woodrow's careless demeanor was hard won. Who the devil told him Bluhm was at her bedside? But his apprehension went further. It reached into the darkest crevices of his other mind, touching again on that chain of causality he refused to acknowledge and Porter Coleridge had furiously ordered him to forget.

"So what was Bluhm doing there, do you suppose, sir?"

"He offered no explanation, neither did she. He's a doctor, isn't he? Apart from anything else."

"What was Tessa doing?"

"Lying in the bed. What did you expect her to be doing?" he retorted, losing his head for a moment. "Playing tiddlywinks?"

Rob stretched his long legs in front of him, admiring his huge feet down the length of them in the manner of a sunbather. "I don't know," he said. "What do we expect her to be doing, Les?" he asked of his fellow officer. "Not tiddlywinks, for sure. There she is lying in bed. Doing what? we ask ourselves."

"Feeding a black baby, I should think," Lesley said. "While its mother died."

For a while the only sounds in the room came from passing footsteps in the corridor, and cars racing and fighting in the town across the valley. Rob reached out a gangly arm and switched off the tape recorder.

"As you pointed out, sir, we're all short of time," he said courteously. "So kindly don't fucking waste it by dodging questions and treating us like shit." He switched the tape recorder back on. "Be so good as to tell us in your own words about the dying woman in the ward and her little baby boy, Mr. Woodrow, sir," he said. "Please. And what she died of, and who was trying to cure her of it and how, and anything else you happen to know in that regard."

Cornered and resentful in his isolation, Woodrow reached instinctively for the support of his Head of Mission, only to be reminded that Coleridge was playing hard to get. Last night, when Woodrow had tried to reach him for a private word, Mildren had advised that his master was cloistered with the American ambassador and could be reached only in emergency. This morning Coleridge was reportedly "conducting business from the residence."

CHAPTER FIVE

Woodrow was not easily unmanned. In his diplomatic career he had been obliged to carry off any number of humiliating situations, and had learned by experience that the soundest course was to refuse to recognize that anything was amiss. He applied this lesson now as, in curt sentences, he gave a minimalist's rendering of the scene in the hospital ward. Yes, he agreed — mildly surprised that they should be so interested in the minutiae of Tessa's confinement — he distantly remembered that a fellow patient of Tessa's was asleep or comatose. And that since she was not able to feed her own baby, Tessa was acting as the child's wet nurse. Tessa's loss was the child's gain.

"Did the sick woman have a name?" Lesley asked.

"Not that I recall."

"Was there anybody with the sick woman — a relative or friend?"

"Her brother. A teenaged boy from her village. That is how Tessa told it, but given her state, I do not regard her as a reliable witness."

"D'you know the brother's name?"

"No."

"Or the name of the village?"

"No."

"Did Tessa tell you what was wrong with the woman?"

"Most of what she said was incoherent."

"So the rest was coherent," Rob pointed out. An eerie forbearance was settling over him. His gangling limbs had found a resting place. He suddenly had all day to kill. "In her coherent moments, what did Tessa tell you about the sick woman across the ward from her, Mr. Woodrow?"

"That she was dying. That her illness, which she did not name, derived from the social conditions in which she lived."

"AIDS?"

"That's not what she said."

"Makes a change, then."

"Indeed."

"Was anyone treating the woman for this unnamed illness?"

"Presumably. Why else would she be in hospital?"

"Was Lorbeer?"

"Who?"

"Lorbeer." Rob spelled it. ""Lor" like "Lor" help us, "beer" like Heineken. Dutch mongrel. Red-haired or blonde. Mid-fifties. Fat."

"I've never heard of the man," Woodrow retorted with absolute facial confidence while his bowels churned.

"Did you see anyone treat her?"

"No."

"Do you know how she was being treated? What with?"

"No."

"You never saw anybody give her a pill or inject her with anything?"

"I told you already: no hospital staff appeared in the ward during my presence."

In his newfound leisure Rob found time to contemplate this reply, and his response to it. "How about non'-hospital staff?"

"Not in my presence."

"Out of it?"

"How should I know that?"