The Constant Gardener

"Hence the African hospital. In her extreme moments she talked of bearing her child in the slums of Kibera. Mercifully, Arnold and Ghita between them were able to restore her sense of proportion. Arnold has the authority of suffering. He not only treated torture victims in Algeria, he was tortured himself. He had earned his pass to the wretched of the earth. I hadn't."

Rob seizes on this, as if the point has not been made a dozen times before. "A bit hard to see where you came in, then, isn't it? Bit of a spare wheel, you were, sitting up there in the clouds with your diplomatic pain and your high-level committee, weren't you?"

But Justin's forbearance is limitless. There are times when he is simply too well bred to disagree. "She exempted me from active service, as she put it," he assents with a shameful dropping of the voice. "She invented specious arguments to put me at my ease. She insisted that the world needed both of us: me inside the system, pushing; herself outside it, in the field, pulling. "I'm the one who believes in the moral state," she would say. "If you lot don't do your job, what hope is there for the rest of us?"' It was sophistry and we both knew it. The system didn't need my job. Neither did I. What was the point of it? I was writing reports no one looked at and suggesting action that was never taken. Tessa was a stranger to deceit. Except in my case. For me, she deceived herself totally."

"Was she ever afraid?" Lesley asks, softly in order not to violate the atmosphere of confession.

Justin reflects, then allows himself a half smile of recollection. "She once boasted to the American Ambassadress that fear was the only four-letter word she didn't know the meaning of. Her Excellency was not amused."

Lesley smiles too, but not for long. "And this decision to have her baby in an African hospital," she asks, her eye on her notebook. "Can you tell us when and how it was taken, please?"

"There was a woman from one of the slum villages up north that Tessa regularly visited. Wanza, surname unknown. Wanza was suffering from a mystery illness of some sort. She had been singled out for special treatment. By coincidence they found themselves in the same ward at the Uhuru Hospital and Tessa befriended her."

Do they hear the guarded note that has entered his voice? Justin does.

"Know what illness?"

"Only the generality. She was ill and might become dangerously so."

"Did she have AIDS?"

"Whether her illness was AIDS'-related I have no idea. My impression was that the concerns were different."

"That's pretty unusual, isn't it, a woman from the slums giving birth in a hospital?"

"She was under observation."

"Whose observation?"

It is the second time that Justin censors himself. Deception does not come naturally to him. "I assume one of the health clinics. In her village. In a shantytown. As you see, I'm hazy. I marvel at how much I managed not to know."

"And Wanza died, didn't she?"

"She died on the last night of Tessa's stay at the hospital," Justin replies, gratefully abandoning his reserve in order to reconstruct the moment for them. "I'd been in the ward all evening but Tessa insisted I go home for a few hours' sleep. She'd told the same to Arnold and Ghita. We were taking alternate watches at her bedside. Arnold had supplied a safari bed. At four in the morning, Tessa telephoned me. There was no telephone in her ward so she used the Sister's. She was distressed. Hysterical is the more accurate description, but Tessa, when she is hysterical, does not raise her voice. Wanza had disappeared. The baby also. She had woken to find Wanza's bed empty and the baby's cot vanished. I drove to Uhuru Hospital. Arnold and Ghita arrived at the same moment. Tessa was inconsolable. It was as if she'd lost a second child in the space of a few days. Between the three of us, we persuaded her that it was time for her to convalesce at home. With Wanza dead and the baby removed, she felt no obligation to remain."

"Tessa didn't get to see the body?"

"She asked to see it but was told it was not appropriate. Wanza was dead and her baby had been taken to the mother's village by her brother. So far as the hospital was concerned, that was an end to the matter. Hospitals do not care to dwell on death," he adds, speaking with the experience of Garth.

"Did Arnold get to see the body?"

"He was too late. It had been sent to the morgue and lost."

Lesley's eyes widen in unfeigned astonishment while, on the other side of Justin, Rob leans quickly forward, grabs the tape recorder and makes sure the tape is turning in the little window.

"Lost? You don't lose bodies!" Rob exclaims.

"To the contrary, I'm assured that in Nairobi it happens all the time."

"What about the death certificate?"

"I can only tell you what I learned from Arnold and Tessa. I know nothing of a death certificate. None was mentioned."

"And no postmortem?" Lesley is back.

"To my knowledge, none."

"Did Wanza receive visitors at the hospital?"