The Constant Gardener

He had been on the island for two nights and two days, but if somebody had proved it was a week he would not have been surprised. He had taken the channel ferry to Boulogne, bought a train ticket for cash, and somewhere along his route a second ticket to a different destination, long before the first ticket was used up. He had shown his passport, to the best of his awareness, only once and cursorily, as he crossed into Italy from Switzerland by way of some precipitous and very beautiful mountain ravine. And it was his own passport. Of that too he was certain. Obedient to Lesley's instructions, he had sent Mr. Atkinson's ahead of him via Ham rather than risk being caught with two. But as to which ravine or which train — for that, he would have had to study a map, and make a guess at the town where he had boarded.

For much of the journey Tessa had ridden alongside him, and now and then they had shared a good joke together — usually after some deflating and irrelevant comment of Tessa's, delivered sotto voce. Other times, they had reminisced, shoulder to shoulder, heads back and eyes closed like an old couple, until abruptly she left him again, and the pain of grief overtook him like a cancer he had known all the time was there, and Justin Quayle mourned his dead wife with an intensity that exceeded his worst hours in Gloria's lower ground, or the funeral in Langata, or the visit to the mortuary, or the top floor of number four.

Finding himself standing on the railway station platform in Turin, he had taken a hotel room to clean up, then from a secondhand luggage shop purchased two anonymous canvas suitcases to contain the papers and objects that he had come to regard as her reliquary. And si

, Signor Justin, the black-suited young lawyer, heir to the Manzini half of the partnership, had assured him — amid protestations of sympathy that were all the more painful for their sincerity — the hatboxes had arrived safely and on schedule, together with orders from Ham to hand over numbers five and six unopened to Justin personally — and if there was

anything, but anything further at all that the young man could do, of a legal or professional or any other

nature, then it went without saying that loyalty to the Manzini family did not end with the tragic death of the signora, et cetera. Oh, and of course there was the money, he added disdainfully — and counted out fifty thousand U.S. dollars in cash against Justin's signature. After which Justin withdrew to the privacy of an empty conference room, where he transferred Tessa's reliquary and Mr. Atkinson's passport to their new resting-place in the canvas suitcases and, soon afterward, took a taxi to Piombino where, by fortuitous timing, he was able to board a garish high-rise hotel, calling itself a ship, bound for Portoferraio on the island of Elba.

Seated as far from the king-sized television set as he could get, the only guest in a gigantic plastic self-service dining room on the sixth deck, with the suitcases either side of him, Justin treated himself indiscriminately to a seafood salad, a salami baguette and half a bottle of really bad red wine. Docking at Portoferraio, he was afflicted by a familiar sense of weightlessness as he fought his way through the unlit bowels of the ship's lorry park while foul-mannered drivers revved their engines or simply drove straight at him, shoving him and his suitcases against the bolted iron casing of the hull to the amusement of unemployed porters looking on.

It was dusk and deep winter and bitterly cold as he scrambled shivering and furious onto the quayside, and the few pedestrians moved with unaccustomed haste. Fearful of being recognized or worse still pitied, his hat pulled low over his brow, he dragged his suitcases to the nearest waiting taxi and established to his relief that the driver's face was unfamiliar to him. On the twenty-minute journey the man inquired whether he was German and Justin replied that he was Swedish. The unpremeditated answer served him well, for the man asked no further questions.