The Constant Gardener

"Oh I expect so," says Justin with equal vagueness. "At one time or another. Bound to have."

"Which might account for why we're not getting that extra bit of help we're after from the noble House of ThreeBees on the matter of the mystery vehicle and one or two other matters not directly related to it. Only they're big in other fields too, aren't they? Everything from cough syrup to executive jets, they told us, didn't they, Les?"

Justin smiles distantly, but does not advance the topic of conversation — not even, though he is tempted, with an amusing reference to the borrowed glory of Napoleon, or the absurd coincidence of Tessa's connection with the island of Elba. And he makes no reference whatever to the night he brought her home from the hospital, and to those bastards in ThreeBees who killed Wanza with their poison.

"But they weren't on Tessa's blacklist, you say," Rob continues. "Which is surprising really, considering what's been said about them by their many critics. "The iron fist in the iron glove," was how one Westminster MP recently described them if I remember rightly, apropos some forgotten scandal. I don't expect he'll be getting a free safari in a hurry, will he, Les?" Les said no way. "Kenny K and his ThreeBees. Sounds like a rock group. But Tessa hadn't declared one of her fatwas against them, as far as you know?"

"Not to my knowledge, no," says Justin, smiling at "fatwa."

Rob doesn't let it go. "Based on — I don't know — some bad experience she and Arnold had in their fieldwork, say — malpractice of some kind — of the pharmaceutical sort? Only she was pretty big on the medical side of things, wasn't she? And so's Kenny K, when he's not on the golf course with Moi's Boys or buzzing round in his Gulf-stream buying a few more companies."

"Oh indeed," says Justin — but with such an air of detachment, if not downright disinterest, that there is clearly no prospect of further enlightenment.

"So if I told you that Tessa and Arnold had made repeated representations to numerous departments of the far-flung House of ThreeBees over recent weeks — had written letters, made phone calls and appointments and had persistently been given the runaround for their trouble — you would still be saying this was not something that had come to your notice in any shape or form. That's a question."

"I'm afraid I would."

"Tessa writes a string of furious letters to Kenny K personally. They're hand-delivered or registered. She phones his secretary three times a day and bombards him with e-mails. She attempts to doorstep him at his farm at Lake Naivasha and at the entrance to his illustrious new offices, but his boys tip him off in time and he uses the back stairs, to the great entertainment of his staff. All this would be total news to you, so help you God?"

"With or without God's help, it is news to me."

"Yet you don't seem surprised."

"Don't I? How odd. I thought I was astonished. Perhaps I am not betraying my emotions as I should," Justin retorts, with a mixture of anger and reserve that catches the officers off their guard, for their heads lift to him, almost in salute.

* * *

But Justin is not interested in their responses. His deceptions come from an entirely different stable to Woodrow's. Where Woodrow was busily forgetting, Justin is being assailed from all sides by half-recovered memories: shreds of conversation between Bluhm and Tessa that in honor he had compelled himself not to hear, but that now come drifting back to him; her exasperation, disguising itself as silence, whenever the omnipresent name of Kenny K is spoken in her hearing — for example, his imminent elevation to the House of Lords, which in the Muthaiga Club is predicted as a racing certainty — for example, the persistent rumors of a giant merger between ThreeBees and a multinational conglomerate even vaster than itself. He is remembering her implacable boycott of all ThreeBees products — her antiNapoleonic crusade, as she ironically dubbed it — from the household foods and detergents that Tessa's domestic army of down-and-outs was not allowed to buy on pain of death to the ThreeBees roadside cafeterias and gasoline stations, car batteries and oils that Justin was forbidden to make use of when they were out driving together — and her furious cursing whenever a ThreeBees billboard with Napoleon's stolen emblem leered at them from the hoardings.

"We're hearing radical a lot, Justin," Lesley announces, emerging from her notes to break into his thoughts once more. "Was Tessa radical? Radical's like militant where we come from. "If you don't like it, bomb it" sort of thing. Tessa wasn't into that stuff, was she? Nor was Arnold. Or were they?"

Justin's answer has the weary ring of repeated drafting for a pedantic Head of Department.