The Constant Gardener

The oil room was low and raftered, the windows set too high for prying eyes, whether money was being counted, or prisoners chained, or two newlyweds were making languorous love on the upright leather sofa that sat primly against the seaward wall. The counting table was flat and square. Two carpenter's workbenches loomed behind it in arched recesses. Justin needed all his strength to drag them over the flagstones and position them as wings either side of it. Above the door ran a line of ancient bottles scavenged from the estate. Fetching them down, he dusted each with his handkerchief before setting them on the table to use as paperweights. Time had stopped. He felt no thirst or hunger, no need of sleep. Placing one suitcase on each workbench he drew out his two most treasured bundles and laid them on the counting table, careful to choose the very center lest in grief or madness they took it into their heads to hurl themselves over the edge. Cautiously he began undressing the first bundle, layer by layer — her cotton housecoat, her angora cardigan, the one she had worn the day before she left for Lokichoggio, her silk blouse, still with her scent around the neck — until he held the unveiled prize in his hands: one sleek gray box twelve inches by ten with the logo of its Japanese maker blazoned on the lid. Unscathed by days and nights of hellish solitude and travel. From the second bundle, he extracted the accessories. When he had done this, he gingerly transported the whole assembly piece by piece to an old pine desk at the other end of the room.

"Later," he promised her aloud. "Patience, woman."

Breathing more easily, he took a radio alarm clock from his hand luggage and fiddled with it until he had the local wavelength for the BBC World Service. All through his journey he had kept abreast of the fruitless search for Arnold. Setting the alarm to the next hourly bulletin he turned his attention to the uneven heaps of letters, files, press cuttings, printouts and bundles of official-looking papers of the sort that, in another life, had been his refuge from reality. But not tonight, not by any stretch. These papers offered no refuge from anything, whether they were Lesley's police files, Ham's record of Tessa's imperious demands of him, or her own carefully ordered wads of letters, essays, newspaper cuttings, pharmaceutical and medical texts, messages to herself from the notice board in her workroom, or her fevered jottings in the hospital, retrieved by Rob and Lesley from their hiding place in Arnold Bluhm's apartment. The radio had switched itself on. Justin lifted his head and listened. Of the missing Arnold Bluhm, doctor of medicine, suspected killer of British envoy's wife Tessa Quayle, the announcer had once again nothing to say. His devotions over, Justin delved among Tessa's papers until he found the object he had determined to keep beside him throughout his explorations. She had brought it with her from the hospital — the only thing of Wanza's that they left behind

. She had retrieved it from an unemptied waste bin next to Wanza's abandoned bed. For days and nights after her return, it had stood like an accusing sentinel on her workroom desk: one small cardboard box, red and black, five inches by three, empty. From there it had made its way to the center drawer, where Justin had found it during his overhasty search of her possessions. Not forgotten, not rejected. But relegated, flattened, shoved aside while she gave herself to more immediate matters. The name Dypraxa printed in a band on all four sides, the leaflet showing indications and contra-indications inside the box. And three jokey little gold bees in arrow formation on the lid. Opening it, restoring it to its status as a box, Justin placed it at the center of an empty shelf on the wall directly before him. Kenny K thinks he's Napoleon with his ThreeBees, she had whispered to him in her fever. And their sting is fatal, did you know that? No, darling, I didn't know, go back to sleep.

* * *

To read.

To travel.

To slow down his head.

To accelerate his wits.

To charge and yet stand still, to be as patient as a saint, and impulsive as a child.