"Thank you, Sandy. Sorry to have kept you waiting."
He swung round, shoving the curtain away from him. Justin was looming in the doorway, looking as flustered as Woodrow felt and clutching a long, orange, sausage-shaped leather Gladstone bag, fully laden and very scuffed, with brass screws, brass corners and brass padlocks either end.
"All set then, old man? Debt of honor discharged?" Woodrow asked, taken aback but, as a good diplomat, recovering his charm immediately. "Jolly good. That's the way then. And you've got everything you came for, all that?"
"I believe so. Yes. To a point."
"You sound unsure."
"Really? I don't mean to. It was her father's," he explained, making a gesture with the bag.
"Looks more like an abortionist's," said Woodrow, to be chummy.
He offered a hand to help him, but Justin preferred to carry his booty for himself. Woodrow climbed into the van, Justin climbed after him, to sit with one hand curled over its old leather carrying handles. The taunts of journalists came at them through the thin walls:
"Do you reckon Bluhm topped her, Mr. Quayle?"
"Hey, Justin, my proprietor is offering mega-megabucks."
From the direction of the house, above the ringing of the telephone, Woodrow thought he heard a baby crying, and realized it was Mustafa.
CHAPTER THREE
Press coverage of Tessa's murder was at first not half as dire as Woodrow and his High Commissioner had feared. Arseholes who are expert at making something out of nothing, Coleridge cautiously observed, appeared equally capable of making nothing out of something. To begin with, that was what they did. "Bush Killers Slay British Envoy's Wife" ran the first reports, and this robust approach, written upward for the broadsheets and downward for the tabloids, served a discerning public well. The increasing hazards to aid workers around the globe were dwelled upon, there were stinging editorials on the failure of the United Nations to protect its own and the ever-rising cost of humanitarians brave enough to stand up and be counted. There was high talk of lawless tribesmen seeking whom they might devour, ritual killings, witchcraft and the gruesome trade in human skins. Much was made of the presence of roving gangs of illegal immigrants from Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia. But nothing at all of the irrefutable fact that Tessa and Bluhm, in full view of staff and guests, had shared a cabin on the night before her death. Bluhm was "a Belgian aid official" — right — "a United Nations medical consultant" — wrong — "an expert in tropical diseases" — wrong — and was feared abducted by the murderers, to be held for ransom or killed.
The bond between the experienced Dr. Arnold Bluhm and his beautiful young protege was commitment, it was humanitarian. And that was all it was. Noah made it only to the first editions, then died a second death. Black blood, as every Fleet Street schoolboy knows, is not news, but a decapitation is worth a mention. The searchlight was remorselessly on Tessa, the Society Girl Turned Oxbridge Lawyer, the Princess Diana of the African Poor, the Mother Teresa of the Nairobi Slums and the FO Angel Who Gave a Damn. An editorial in the Guardian made much of the fact that the Millennium's New Woman Diplomat [sic] should have met her death at Leakey's cradle of mankind, and drew from this the disquieting moral that, though racial attitudes may change, we cannot plumb the wells of savagery that are to be found at the heart of every man's darkness. The piece lost some of its impact when a subeditor unfamiliar with the African continent set Tessa's murder on the shores of Lake Tanganyika rather than Turkana.
There were photographs of her galore. Cheerful baby Tessa in the arms of her father the judge in the days when His Honor was a humble barrister struggling along on half a million a year. Ten-year-old Tessa in plaits and jodhpurs at her rich girl's private school, docile pony in background. (though her mother was an Italian contessa, it was noted approvingly, the parents had wisely settled for a British education.) Teenaged Golden Girl Tessa in bikini, her uncut throat artfully highlighted by the photographic editor's airbrush. Tessa in saucily pitched mortarboard, academic gown and miniskirt. Tessa in the ludicrous garb of a British barrister, following in her father's footsteps. Tessa on her wedding day, and Old Etonian Justin already smiling his older Etonian's smile.
Toward Justin, the press showed an unusual restraint, partly because they wished nothing to tarnish the shining image of their instant heroine, partly because there was precious little to say about him. Justin was "one of the FO'S loyal middle-rankers" — read "pen pusher" — a long-term bachelor "born into the diplomatic tradition" who before his marriage had flown the flag in some of the world's least favored hot spots, among them Aden and Beirut. Colleagues spoke kindly of his coolness in crisis. In Nairobi he had headed a "hightech international forum" on aid. Nobody used the word "backwater." Rather comically, there turned out to be a dearth of photographs of him either before or after his wedding. A "family snap" showed a clouded, inward-looking youth who with hindsight seemed marked down for early widowhood. It was abstracted, Justin confessed under pressure from his hostess, from a group picture of the Eton rugby team.
"I didn't know you were a rugger man, Justin! How very plucky of you," cried Gloria, whose self-appointed task each morning after breakfast was to take him his letters of commiseration and newspaper cuttings sent up by the High Commission.
"It wasn't plucky at all," he retorted in one of those flashes of spirit that Gloria so relished. "I was press-ganged into it by a thug of a housemaster who thought we weren't men till we'd been kicked to pieces. The school had no business releasing that photograph." And cooling down: "I'm most grateful, Gloria."
As he was for everything, she reported to Elena: for his drinks and meals and for his prison cell; for their turns together in the garden and their little seminars on bedding plants — he was particularly complimentary about the alyssum, white and purple, that she had finally persuaded to spread underneath the bombax tree — for her help in handling details of the approaching funeral, including going with Jackson to inspect the grave site and funeral home, since Justin by edict of London was to remain gated till the hue and cry died down. A faxed Foreign Office letter to this effect, addressed to Justin at the High Commission and signed "Alison Landsbury, Head of Personnel," had produced an almost violent effect on Gloria. She could not afterward remember an occasion when she so nearly lost control of herself.
"Justin, you are being outrageously misused. "Surrender the keys to your house until the appropriate steps have been taken by the authorities," my Aunt Fanny! Which authorities? Kenyan authorities? Or those flatfeet from Scotland Yard who still haven't even bothered to call on you?"
"But Gloria, I have already been to my house," Justin insisted, in an effort to soothe her. "Why fight a battle that is won? Will the cemetery have us?"
"At two-thirty. We are to be at Lee's Funeral Parlor at two. A notice goes to the newspapers tomorrow."
"And she's next to Garth" — Garth his dead son, so named after Tessa's father the judge.
"As near as we can be, dear. Under the same jacaranda tree. With a little African boy."
"You're very kind," he told her for the umpteenth time and, without further word, removed himself to the lower ground and his Gladstone bag.
The bag was his comforter. Twice now Gloria had glimpsed him through the bars of the garden window, seated motionless on his bed, head in hands and the bag at his feet, staring down at it. Her secret conviction — shared with Elena — was that it contained Bluhm's love letters. He had rescued them from prying eyes — no thanks to Sandy — and he was waiting till he was strong enough to decide whether to read them or burn them. Elena agreed, though she thought Tessa a stupid little tart to have kept them. "Read 'em and sling 'em is my motto, darling." Noticing Justin's reluctance to stray from his room for fear of leaving the bag unguarded, Gloria suggested he put it in the wine store, which, having an iron grille for a door, added to the prisonlike grimness of the lower ground.