"Make yourselves at home," said Woodrow, as if they hadn't.
"Kovacs — believed Hungarian — woman-young. Raven-black hair, long legs-he'll be giving us her vital statistics next — first name unknown, researcher."
"You'd remember her all right," said Rob.
"I'm afraid I don't."
"Emrich. Medical doctor, research scientist, first qualified in Petersburg, took a German degree at Leipzig, did research work in Gdansk. Female. No description available. Name to you?"
"I've never heard of such a person in my life. Nobody of that description, nobody of that name, nobody of that origin or qualification."
"Blimey. You really haven't heard of her, have you?"
"And our old friend Lorbeer," Lesley came in apologetically. "First name unknown, origins unknown, probably half Dutch or Boer, qualifications also a mystery. We're quoting from Bluhm's notes, that's the problem, so we're at his mercy, as you might say. He's got the three names ringed together like a flow chart, with itsy-bitsy descriptions inside each balloon. Lorbeer and the two women doctors. Lorbeer, Emrich, Kovacs. Quite a mouthful. We'd have brought you a copy but we're a bit queasy about using copiers at the moment. You know what the local police are like. And copy shops — well, we wouldn't trust them to copy the Lord's Prayer, frankly, would we, Rob?"
"Use ours," said Woodrow too quickly.
A ruminative silence followed, which to Woodrow was like a deafness where no cars went by, and no birds sang, and nobody walked down the corridor outside his door. It was broken by Lesley doggedly describing Lorbeer as the man they would most like to question.
"Lorbeer's a floater. He's believed to be in the pharmaceutical business. He's believed to have been in and out of Nairobi a few times in the last year but the Kenyans can't trace him, surprisingly. He's believed to have visited Tessa's ward in the Uhuru Hospital when she was confined there. Bullish, that's another description we've had. I thought that was the Stock Exchange. And you're sure you've never come across a reddish-haired medical Lorbeer of bullish appearance at all, may be a doctor? Anywhere in your travels?"
"Never heard of the man. Or anyone like him."
"We're getting that quite a lot, actually," Rob commented from the wings.
"Tessa knew him. So did Bluhm," said Lesley.
"That doesn't mean I knew him."
"So what's the white plague when it's at home?" Rob asked.
"I've absolutely no idea."
They left as they had left before: on an ever-growing question mark.
* * *
As soon as he was safely clear of them, Woodrow picked up the internal phone to Coleridge and, to his relief, heard his voice.
"Got a minute?"
"I suppose so."
He found him sitting at his desk, one splayed hand to his brow. He was wearing yellow braces with horses on them. His expression was wary and belligerent.
"I need to be assured that we have London's backing in this," Woodrow began, without sitting down.
"We being who exactly?"
"You and I."
"And by London, you mean Pellegrin, I take it."
"Why? Has anything changed?"
"Not to my knowledge."
"Is it going to?"
"Not to my knowledge."
"Well, does Pellegrin have backing? Put it that way."
"Oh, Bernard always has backing."
"So do we go on with this, or don't we?"
"Go on lying, you mean? Of course we do."
"Then why can't we agree on — on what we say?"
"Good point. I don't know. If I were a God man, I'd sneak off and pray. But it's not as fucking easy as that. The girl's dead. That's one part of it. And we're alive. That's another part."
"So have you told them the truth?"
"No, no, good Lord no. Memory like a sieve, me. Terribly sorry."
"Are you going to tell them the truth?"
"Them? No, no. Never. Shits."
"Then why can't we agree our stories?"
"That's it. Why not? Why not indeed. You've put your finger on it, Sandy. What's stopping us?"
* * *
"It's about your visit to the Uhuru Hospital, sir," Lesley began crisply.
"I thought we'd rather done that one in our last session."
"Your other visit. Your second one. A bit later. More a follow — up."
"Follow-up? Follow-up of what?"
"A promise you made to her, apparently."
"What are you talking about? I don't understand you."
But Rob understood her perfectly, and said so. "Sounded pretty good English to me, sir. Did you have a second meeting with Tessa at the hospital? Like four weeks after she'd been discharged, for instance? Like meet her in the anteroom to the postnatal clinic where she had an appointment? Because that's what it says you did in Arnold's notes, and he hasn't been wrong so far, not from what us ignorant folk can understand of them."
Arnold, Woodrow recorded. Not Bluhm anymore.
The soldier's son was debating with himself, and he was doing so with the glacial calculation that in crisis was his muse, while in his memory he was following the scene in the crowded hospital as if it had happened to someone else. Tessa is carrying a tapestry bag with cane handles. It is the first time he has seen it, but from now on and for the rest of her short life it is part of the tough image that she had formed of herself while she was lying in hospital with her dead baby in the morgue and a dying woman in the bed opposite her and the dying woman's baby at her breast. It goes with the less makeup and the shorter hair and the glower that is not so very different from the disbelieving stare that Lesley was bestowing on him this minute, while she waited for his edited version of the event. The light, as everywhere in the hospital, is fickle. Huge shafts of sunlight bisect the half dark of the interior. Small birds glide among the rafters. Tessa is standing with her back against a curved wall, next to an ill — smelling coffee shop with orange chairs. There is a crowd milling in and out of the sunbeams but he sees her immediately. She is holding the tapestry bag in both hands across her lower belly and standing the way tarts used to stand in doorways when he was young and scared. The wall is in shadow because the sunbeams don't reach the edges of the room and perhaps that's why Tessa has chosen this particular spot.
"You said you would listen to me when I was stronger," she reminds him in a low, harsh voice he scarcely recognizes.
It is the first time they have spoken since his visit to the ward. He sees her lips, so fragile without the discipline of lipstick. He sees the passion in her gray eyes, and it scares him as all passion scares him, his own included.
"The meeting you are referring to was not social," he told Rob, avoiding Lesley's unrelenting gaze. "It was professional. Tessa claimed to have stumbled on some documents which, if genuine, were politically sensitive. She asked me to meet her at the clinic so that she could hand them over."
"Stumbled how?" asked Rob.
"She had outside connections. That's all I know. Friends in the aid agencies."
"Such as Bluhm?"
"Among others. It was not the first time she had approached the High Commission with stories of high scandal, I should add. She made quite a habit of it."
"By High Commission, you mean you?"
"If you mean me in my capacity as Head of Chancery, yes."