The Constant Gardener

A keen wind was rattling the awnings of the greengrocer's across the road, sending leaves and late shoppers scurrying along the pavement. But Justin, despite his lightweight suit, had too much inside him to be conscious of the cold. The tiled steps to the front door clanged as he stomped up them. Reaching the top he swung round and took a long stare back, he wasn't sure for what. A dosser lay bundled beneath the NatWest cash machine. An illegally parked man and woman sat arguing in their car. A thin man in a trilby hat and raincoat was leaning into his cell phone. In a civilized country you can never tell. The fan window over the front door was lit from inside. Not wishing to surprise anybody he pressed the bell and heard its familiar rusty sound, like a ship's klaxon, honking on the first-floor landing. Who's home? he wondered, waiting for a footstep. Aziz the Moroccan painter and his boyfriend Raoul. Petronilla, the Nigerian girl in search of God, and her fifty-year-old Guatemalan priest. Tall, chain-smoking Gazon, the cadaverous French doctor, who had worked with Arnold in Algeria and had Arnold's same regretful smile, and Arnold's way of halting in mid-sentence and half closing his eyes in painful memory, and waiting for his head to clear itself of heaven knew what nightmares before taking up the thread again.

Hearing no call or thump of feet, he turned the key and stepped into the hall, expecting smells of African cooking, the din of reggae over the radio and raucous coffee chatter from the kitchen.

"Hullo there!" he called. "It's Justin. Me."

No answering yell, no surge of music, no kitchen smells or voices. No sounds at all, beyond the shuffle of traffic from the street outside and the echo of his own voice climbing up the stairwell. All he saw instead was Tessa's head, cut at the neck from a newspaper and backed on cardboard, staring at him from a parade of jam jars filled with flowers. And amid the jam jars, a folded sheet of cartridge paper torn, he guessed, from Aziz's drawing book, with handwritten messages of sorrow, love and farewell from Tessa's vanished tenants: Justin, we didn't feel we could stay, dated last Monday.

He refolded the paper and replaced it among the jars. He stood to attention, eyes dead ahead as he blinked away his tears. Leaving the Gladstone on the hall floor, he made his way to the kitchen, using the wall to steady himself. He pulled open the fridge. Empty except for one forgotten bottle of prescription medicine, a woman's name on the label, unfamiliar. Annie somebody. Must be one of Gazon's. He groped his way down the corridor to the dining room and put on the lights.

Her father's hideous pseudo-Tudor dining room. Six scrolled and crested chairs for fellow megalomaniacs to either side of it. An embroidered carver head and tail for the royal couple. Daddy knew it was terribly ugly but he loved it, so I do too, she was telling him. Well, I don't, he was thinking, but God forbid I say so. In their first months together Tessa had talked of nothing but her father and mother, till under Justin's artful guidance she set to work exorcising their ghosts by filling the house with people of her own age, the crazier the merrier: Etonian Trotskyists, drunken Polish prelates and oriental mystics, plus half the freeloaders of the known world. But once she discovered Africa, her aim steadied, and number four became instead a haven for introverted aid workers and activists of every dubious shade. Still scanning the room, Justin's eye settled disapprovingly on a crescent of soot that lay around the marble fireplace, coating the firedogs and fender. Jackdaws, he thought. And let his eye continue drifting round the room until once more it settled on the soot. Then let his mind settle on it too. And stay settled while he argued with himself. Or with Tessa, which was much the same.

Which jackdaws?

When jackdaws?

The message in the hall is dated Monday.

Ma Gates comes on Wednesdays — Ma Gates being Mrs. Dora Gates, Tessa's old nanny, never anything but Ma.

And if Ma Gates is under the weather, her daughter Pauline comes.

And if Pauline can't make it, there's always her tarty sister Debbie.

And it was unthinkable that any one of these women would ignore such a conspicuous patch of soot.

Therefore the jackdaws launched their attack after Wednesday and before this evening.

So if the house emptied on the Monday — see message — and Ma Gates cleaned on Wednesday — why was there a crisp male-sized, heavily profiled footprint, probably a track shoe, in the soot?

A telephone stood on the sideboard, next to an address book. Ma Gates's number was scrawled in red crayon in Tessa's hand on the inside cover. He dialed it and got Pauline, who burst into tears and passed him to her mother.