The "darling" was technically addressed to Woodrow, but it might as well have been meant for Justin, for as she blurted it she dissolved into uncontrollable tears, the last of a long and tearful day. Sobbing wretchedly, she grasped Justin against her, punching his back and rolling her cheek against him and whispering, "Oh don't go, oh please, oh Justin," and other less decipherable exhortations before bravely thrusting herself free of him, elbowing her husband out of the light and charging up the stairs to her bedroom and slamming the door.
"Bit overwrought," Woodrow explained, grinning.
"We all are," said Justin, accepting Woodrow's hand and shaking it. "Thank you again, Sandy."
"We'll be in touch."
"Indeed."
"And you're quite sure you don't want a reception party the other end? They're all busting to do their stuff."
"Quite sure, thank you. Tessa's lawyers are preparing for my arrival."
And the next minute Justin was walking down the steps to the red car, with Mustafa one side of him with the Gladstone bag, and Livingstone carrying his gray suitcase on the other.
"I have left envelopes for you all with Mr. Woodrow," Justin told Mustafa as they drove. "And this is to be handed privately to Ghita Pearson. And you know I mean privately."
"We know you will always be a good man, Mzee," said Mustafa prophetically, consigning the envelope to the recesses of his cotton jacket. But there was no forgiveness in his voice for leaving Africa.
* * *
The airport, despite its recent facelift, was in chaos. Travel-weary groups of scalded tourists made long lines, harangued tour guides and frantically bundled huge rucksacks into X-ray machines. Check-in clerks puzzled over every ticket and murmured interminably into telephones. Incomprehensible loudspeaker announcements spread panic while porters and policemen looked idly on. But Woodrow had arranged everything. Justin had barely emerged from the car before a male British Airways representative spirited him to a small office safe from public gaze.
"I'd like my friends to come with me, please," Justin said.
"No problem."
With Livingstone and Mustafa hovering behind him, he was handed a boarding pass in the name of Mr. Alfred Brown. He looked on passively while his gray suitcase was similarly labeled.
"And I shall take this one into the cabin with me," he announced, as an edict.
The representative, a blond New Zealand boy, affected to weigh the Gladstone in his hand and let out an exaggerated grunt of exertion. "Family silver, is it, sir?"
"My host's," said Justin, duly entering into the joke, but there was enough in his face to suggest that the issue was not negotiable.
"If you can carry it, sir, so can we," said the blond representative, passing the bag back to him. "Have a nice flight, Mr. Brown. We'll be taking you through the arrivals side, if it's all the same to you."
"You're very kind."
Turning to say his last good-byes, Justin seized Livingstone's enormous fists in a double handshake. But for Mustafa the moment was too much. Silently as ever, he had slipped away. The Gladstone firmly in his grasp, Justin entered the arrivals hall in the wake of his guide, to find himself staring at a giant buxom woman of no definable race grinning down at him from the wall. She was twenty feet tall and five feet across her widest point and she was the only commercial advertisement in the entire hall. She was dressed in nurse's uniform and had three golden bees on each shoulder. Three more were prominently displayed on the breast pocket of her white tunic, and she was offering a tray of pharmaceutical delicacies to a vaguely multiracial family of happy children and their parents. The tray held something for each of them: bottles of gold-brown medicine that looked more like whisky for the dad, chocolate-coated pills just right for munching by the kiddies, and for the mum beauty products decorated with naked goddesses reaching for the sun. Blazoned across the top and bottom of the poster, violent puce lettering proclaimed the joyous message to all mankind:
ThreeBees
BUZZY FOR THE HEALTH OF AFRICA!
The poster held him.
Exactly as it had held Tessa.
Staring rigidly up at it, Justin is listening to her joyous protestations at his right side. Dizzy from travel, laden with last — minute hand luggage, the two of them have minutes earlier arrived here from London for the first time. Neither has set foot on the African continent before. Kenya — all Africa — awaits them. But it is this poster that commands Tessa's excited interest.
"Justin, look! You're not looking."
"What is it? Of course I am."
"They've hijacked our bloody bees! Somebody thinks he's Napoleon! It's absolutely brazen. It's an outrage. You must do something!"
And so it was. An outrage. A hilarious one. Napoleon's three bees, symbols of his glory, treasured emblems of Tessa's beloved island of Elba where the great man had whittled away his first exile, had been shamelessly deported to Kenya and sold into commercial slavery. Pondering the same poster now, Justin could only marvel at the obscenity of life's coincidence.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Perched stiffly in his upgraded seat at the front of the plane, the Gladstone bag above him in the overhead locker, Justin Quayle stared past his reflection into the blackness of space. He was free. Not pardoned, not reconciled, not comforted, not resolved. Not free of the nightmares that told him she was dead, and waking to discover they were true. Not free of the survivor's guilt. Not free of fretting about Arnold. But free at last to mourn in his own way. Free of his dreadful cell. Of the jailers he had learned to detest. Of circling his room like a convict, driven half crazy by the dazzlement of his mind and the squalor of his confinement. Free of the silence of his own voice, of sitting on the edge of his bed asking why? on and on. Free of the shameful moments when he was so low and tired and drained that he almost succeeded in convincing himself that he didn't give a damn, the marriage had been a madness anyway and was over, so be thankful. And if grief, as he had read somewhere, was a species of idleness, then free of the idleness that thought of nothing but its grief.
Free also of his interrogation by the police, when a Justin he didn't recognize strode to the center of the stage and, in a series of immaculately sculpted sentences, laid his burden at the feet of his bemused interrogators — or as much of it as a puzzled instinct told him it was prudent to reveal. They began by accusing him of murder.
"There's a scenario hanging over us here, Justin," Lesley explains apologetically, "and we have to put it to you straightaway, so that you're aware of it, although we know it's hurtful. It's called a love triangle, and you're the jealous husband and you've organized a contract killing while your wife and her lover are as far away from you as possible, which is always good for the alibi. You had them both killed, which was what you wanted for your vengeance. You had Arnold Bluhm's body taken out of the jeep and lost so that we'd think Arnold Bluhm was the killer and not you. Lake Turkana's full of crocodiles, so losing Arnold wouldn't be a problem. Plus there's a nice inheritance coming your way by all accounts, which doubles up the motive."
They are watching him, he is well aware, for signs of guilt or innocence or outrage or despair — for signs of something anyway — and watching him in vain, because, unlike Woodrow, Justin at first does absolutely nothing. He sits groomed and pensive and remote on Woodrow's reproduction carving chair, his fingertips set to the table as if he has just played a chord of music and is listening to it fade away. Lesley is accusing him of murder, yet all she gets is a small frown linking him to his inner world.