The Constant Gardener

Pellegrin was smiling the first of his two smiles before Justin had finished speaking. "Fresh evidence, old boy. Conclusive, I'm afraid." He popped another piece of roll. "Coppers have found his clothes. Bluhm's. Buried at the lakeside. Not his safari jacket. He left that in the jeep as a blind. Shirt, trousers, underpants, socks, sneakers. Know what they found in the pocket of the trousers? Car keys. From the jeep. The ones he'd locked the jeep door with. Gives a new meaning to what the Yanks call closure these days. Very common thing with your crime of passion, I'm told. You kill somebody, lock the door behind you, lock up your mind. Thing never happened. Memory erased. Classic."

Distracted by Justin's incredulous expression, Pellegrin paused, then spoke in a voice of conclusion.

"I'm an Oswald man, Justin. Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy. Nobody helped him do it. Arnold Bluhm lost his rag and killed Tessa. The driver objected so Bluhm took a swing at him too. Then he chucked his head into the bushes for the jackals. Basta. There comes a moment, after all the wanking and fantasizing, when we're reduced to accepting the obvious. Sticky toffee pudding? Apple crumble?" He signaled to the waiter for coffee. "Mind if I give you one quiet word of warning between old friends?"

"Please do."

"You're on sick leave. You're in hell. But you're old Office, you know the rules and you're still an Africa man. And you're on my watch." And lest Justin might think this was some kind of romantic definition of his status: "Plenty of plums out there for a chap who's got himself sorted. Plenty of places I wouldn't be seen dead in. And if you're harboring so-called confidential information that you shouldn't have — in your head or anywhere else — it belongs to us, not you. Rougher world these days than the one we grew up in. Lot of mean chaps around with everything to go for and a lot to lose. Makes for bad manners."

As we have learned to our cost, thought Justin from far inside his glass capsule. He rose weightlessly from the table and was surprised to see his own image in a great number of mirrors at the same time. He saw himself from all angles, at all ages of his life. Justin the lost child in big houses, friend of cooks and gardeners. Justin the schoolboy rugby star, Justin the professional bachelor, burying his loneliness in numbers. Justin the Foreign Office white hope and nohoper, photographed with his friend the dracaena palm. Justin the newly widowed father of his dead and only son.

"You've been very kind, Bernard. Thank you."

Thank you for the master class in sophistry, he meant, if he meant anything. Thank you for proposing a film of my wife's murder and riding roughshod over every last sensitivity I had left. Thank you for her eighteen-page Armageddon scenario and her secret rendezvous with Woodrow, and other tantalizing additions to my awakening recollection. And thank you for the quiet word of warning, delivered with the glint of steel in your eye. Because when I look closely, I see the same glint in mine.

"You've gone pale," Pellegrin said accusingly. "Something wrong, old boy?"

"I'm fine. All the better for seeing you, Bernard."

"Get some sleep. You're running on empty. And we must do that weekend. Bring a chum. Someone who can play a bit."

"Arnold Bluhm never hurt a living soul," Justin said, carefully and clearly, as Pellegrin helped him into his raincoat and gave him back his bag. But whether he said this aloud, or to the thousand voices screaming in his head, he could not be absolutely sure.

CHAPTER TEN

It was the house he hated in his memory whenever he was away from it: big and shaggy and overbearingly parental, number four of a leafy Chelsea backwater, with a front garden that stayed as wild as it wanted, however much Justin pampered it when he had a bit of home leave. And the remains of Tessa's tree-house stuck like a rotting life raft in the dead oak that she wouldn't let him cut down. And broken balloons of ancient vintage, and shreds of kite harpooned on the dead tree's wiry branches. And a rusted iron gate that, when he shoved it against a slough of rotting leaves, sent the neighbor's wall eyed tomcat slinking into the undergrowth. And a pair of ill-tempered cherry trees that he supposed he should worry about because they had peach-curl.

It was the house he had dreaded all day long, and all last week while he was serving out his time in the lower ground, and all through his pounding westward walk through the lonely half dark of a London winter's afternoon, while his mind puzzled its way through the labyrinth of monstrosities in his head, and the Gladstone bag bumped against his leg. It was the house that held the parts of her he had never shared and now he never would.