Justin stared at Pellegrin in unfeigned astonishment, but Pellegrin was too busy with his fish to notice. "But what about the forensic evidence?" he heard himself ask, from some frozen planet. "The green safari truck? The beer bottles and cigarette ends? The two men who were spotted in Marsabit? What about — I don't know — ThreeBees, all the things the British police were asking me about?"
Pellegrin was smiling the first of his two smiles before Justin had finished speaking. "Fresh evidence, old boy. Conclusive, I'm afraid." He popped another piece of roll. "Coppers have found his clothes. Bluhm's. Buried at the lakeside. Not his safari jacket. He left that in the jeep as a blind. Shirt, trousers, underpants, socks, sneakers. Know what they found in the pocket of the trousers? Car keys. From the jeep. The ones he'd locked the jeep door with. Gives a new meaning to what the Yanks call closure these days. Very common thing with your crime of passion, I'm told. You kill somebody, lock the door behind you, lock up your mind. Thing never happened. Memory erased. Classic."
Distracted by Justin's incredulous expression, Pellegrin paused, then spoke in a voice of conclusion.
"I'm an Oswald man, Justin. Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy. Nobody helped him do it. Arnold Bluhm lost his rag and killed Tessa. The driver objected so Bluhm took a swing at him too. Then he chucked his head into the bushes for the jackals. Basta. There comes a moment, after all the wanking and fantasizing, when we're reduced to accepting the obvious. Sticky toffee pudding? Apple crumble?" He signaled to the waiter for coffee. "Mind if I give you one quiet word of warning between old friends?"
"Please do."
"You're on sick leave. You're in hell. But you're old Office, you know the rules and you're still an Africa man. And you're on my watch." And lest Justin might think this was some kind of romantic definition of his status: "Plenty of plums out there for a chap who's got himself sorted. Plenty of places I wouldn't be seen dead in. And if you're harboring so-called confidential information that you shouldn't have — in your head or anywhere else — it belongs to us, not you. Rougher world these days than the one we grew up in. Lot of mean chaps around with everything to go for and a lot to lose. Makes for bad manners."
As we have learned to our cost, thought Justin from far inside his glass capsule. He rose weightlessly from the table and was surprised to see his own image in a great number of mirrors at the same time. He saw himself from all angles, at all ages of his life. Justin the lost child in big houses, friend of cooks and gardeners. Justin the schoolboy rugby star, Justin the professional bachelor, burying his loneliness in numbers. Justin the Foreign Office white hope and nohoper, photographed with his friend the dracaena palm. Justin the newly widowed father of his dead and only son.
"You've been very kind, Bernard. Thank you."
Thank you for the master class in sophistry, he meant, if he meant anything. Thank you for proposing a film of my wife's murder and riding roughshod over every last sensitivity I had left. Thank you for her eighteen-page Armageddon scenario and her secret rendezvous with Woodrow, and other tantalizing additions to my awakening recollection. And thank you for the quiet word of warning, delivered with the glint of steel in your eye. Because when I look closely, I see the same glint in mine.
"You've gone pale," Pellegrin said accusingly. "Something wrong, old boy?"
"I'm fine. All the better for seeing you, Bernard."
"Get some sleep. You're running on empty. And we must do that weekend. Bring a chum. Someone who can play a bit."
"Arnold Bluhm never hurt a living soul," Justin said, carefully and clearly, as Pellegrin helped him into his raincoat and gave him back his bag. But whether he said this aloud, or to the thousand voices screaming in his head, he could not be absolutely sure.
CHAPTER TEN
It was the house he hated in his memory whenever he was away from it: big and shaggy and overbearingly parental, number four of a leafy Chelsea backwater, with a front garden that stayed as wild as it wanted, however much Justin pampered it when he had a bit of home leave. And the remains of Tessa's tree-house stuck like a rotting life raft in the dead oak that she wouldn't let him cut down. And broken balloons of ancient vintage, and shreds of kite harpooned on the dead tree's wiry branches. And a rusted iron gate that, when he shoved it against a slough of rotting leaves, sent the neighbor's wall eyed tomcat slinking into the undergrowth. And a pair of ill-tempered cherry trees that he supposed he should worry about because they had peach-curl.
It was the house he had dreaded all day long, and all last week while he was serving out his time in the lower ground, and all through his pounding westward walk through the lonely half dark of a London winter's afternoon, while his mind puzzled its way through the labyrinth of monstrosities in his head, and the Gladstone bag bumped against his leg. It was the house that held the parts of her he had never shared and now he never would.
A keen wind was rattling the awnings of the greengrocer's across the road, sending leaves and late shoppers scurrying along the pavement. But Justin, despite his lightweight suit, had too much inside him to be conscious of the cold. The tiled steps to the front door clanged as he stomped up them. Reaching the top he swung round and took a long stare back, he wasn't sure for what. A dosser lay bundled beneath the NatWest cash machine. An illegally parked man and woman sat arguing in their car. A thin man in a trilby hat and raincoat was leaning into his cell phone. In a civilized country you can never tell. The fan window over the front door was lit from inside. Not wishing to surprise anybody he pressed the bell and heard its familiar rusty sound, like a ship's klaxon, honking on the first-floor landing. Who's home? he wondered, waiting for a footstep. Aziz the Moroccan painter and his boyfriend Raoul. Petronilla, the Nigerian girl in search of God, and her fifty-year-old Guatemalan priest. Tall, chain-smoking Gazon, the cadaverous French doctor, who had worked with Arnold in Algeria and had Arnold's same regretful smile, and Arnold's way of halting in mid-sentence and half closing his eyes in painful memory, and waiting for his head to clear itself of heaven knew what nightmares before taking up the thread again.
Hearing no call or thump of feet, he turned the key and stepped into the hall, expecting smells of African cooking, the din of reggae over the radio and raucous coffee chatter from the kitchen.
"Hullo there!" he called. "It's Justin. Me."
No answering yell, no surge of music, no kitchen smells or voices. No sounds at all, beyond the shuffle of traffic from the street outside and the echo of his own voice climbing up the stairwell. All he saw instead was Tessa's head, cut at the neck from a newspaper and backed on cardboard, staring at him from a parade of jam jars filled with flowers. And amid the jam jars, a folded sheet of cartridge paper torn, he guessed, from Aziz's drawing book, with handwritten messages of sorrow, love and farewell from Tessa's vanished tenants: Justin, we didn't feel we could stay, dated last Monday.
He refolded the paper and replaced it among the jars. He stood to attention, eyes dead ahead as he blinked away his tears. Leaving the Gladstone on the hall floor, he made his way to the kitchen, using the wall to steady himself. He pulled open the fridge. Empty except for one forgotten bottle of prescription medicine, a woman's name on the label, unfamiliar. Annie somebody. Must be one of Gazon's. He groped his way down the corridor to the dining room and put on the lights.
Her father's hideous pseudo-Tudor dining room. Six scrolled and crested chairs for fellow megalomaniacs to either side of it. An embroidered carver head and tail for the royal couple. Daddy knew it was terribly ugly but he loved it, so I do too, she was telling him. Well, I don't, he was thinking, but God forbid I say so. In their first months together Tessa had talked of nothing but her father and mother, till under Justin's artful guidance she set to work exorcising their ghosts by filling the house with people of her own age, the crazier the merrier: Etonian Trotskyists, drunken Polish prelates and oriental mystics, plus half the freeloaders of the known world. But once she discovered Africa, her aim steadied, and number four became instead a haven for introverted aid workers and activists of every dubious shade. Still scanning the room, Justin's eye settled disapprovingly on a crescent of soot that lay around the marble fireplace, coating the firedogs and fender. Jackdaws, he thought. And let his eye continue drifting round the room until once more it settled on the soot. Then let his mind settle on it too. And stay settled while he argued with himself. Or with Tessa, which was much the same.