Justin. Leave your house at seven-thirty tonight. Bring a briefcase stuffed with newspaper. Walk to the Cineflex theater in the King's Road. Buy a ticket for screen two and watch the film till nine o'clock. Leave with your briefcase by the side (western) exit. Look for a parked blue minibus close to the exit. You will recognize the driver. Burn this.
No signature.
He examined the envelope, sniffed it, sniffed the card, smelled nothing, didn't know what he was expecting to smell. He took the card and envelope to the kitchen, set a match to them and, in the best traditions of the Foreign Service security course, put them in the sink to burn. When they had burned, he broke the ash and coaxed the fragments into the disposal unit, which he ran for longer than necessary. He started back up the stairs, two at a time till he reached the top of the house. It was not haste that drove him but determination: Don't think, act. A locked attic door faced him. He held a key ready. His expression was resolute but apprehensive. He was a desperate man steeling himself for the leap. He flung back the door and strode into the tiny hall. It led to a run of attic rooms set amid jackdawinfested chimney pots and secret bits of flat roof for growing potted plants and making love. He barged forward, eyes wrinkled into slits to resist the glare of memory. Not an object, picture, chair or corner but Tessa owned it, dwelled in it, spoke from it. Her father's pompous desk, made over to him on her wedding day, stood in its familiar alcove. He threw back the top. What did I tell you? Pillaged. He yanked open her clothes cupboard and saw her winter coats and frocks, torn from their hangers and left to die with their pockets inside out. Honestly, darling, you could have hung them up. You know perfectly well that I did, and someone pulled them down. Delving beneath them he unearthed Tessa's old music case, the nearest he could get to a briefcase.
"Let's do this together," he told her, aloud now.
About to leave, he paused to spy on her through the open bedroom door. She had come out of the bathroom and was standing naked in front of the mirror, head to one side as she combed out her wet hair. One bare foot was turned ballet-style toward him, which was what it always seemed to do when she was naked. One hand was lifted to her head. Watching her, he felt the same inexpressible estrangement from her that he had felt when she was alive. You're too perfect, too young, he told her. I should have left you in the wild. Bullshit, she replied sweetly, and he felt much better.
Descending to the ground-floor kitchen he found a heap of old copies of the Kenyan Standard, Africa Confidential, the Spectator and Private Eye. He stuffed them into her music case, returned to the hall, took a last look at her makeshift shrine and the Gladstone. I'm leaving it where they can find it in case they're not satisfied with their work this morning at the Office, he explained to her, and stepped into the freezing dark. The walk to the cinema took him ten minutes. Screen two was three-quarters empty. He paid no attention to the film. Twice he had to slink to the men's lavatory, music case in hand, to consult his wristwatch unobserved. At five to nine he left by the western exit to find himself in a bitterly cold side street. A parked blue minibus stared at him, and he had an absurd moment of imagining it was the green safari truck from Marsabit. Its headlights winked. An angular figure in a seaman's cap lounged in the driver's seat.
"Back door," Rob ordered.
Justin walked to the rear of the bus and saw the door already open, and Lesley's arm outstretched to receive the music case. Landing on a wooden seat in pitch blackness, he was in Muthaiga again, on the slatted bench of the Volkswagen van, with Livingstone at the wheel and Woodrow sitting opposite him giving orders.
"We're following you, Justin," Lesley explained. Her voice in the darkness was urgent, yet mysteriously despondent. It was as if she too had suffered a great loss. "The surveillance team followed you to the cinema and we're part of it. Now we're covering the side exit in case you come out that way. There's always a possibility that the quarry gets bored and leaves early. You just did. In five minutes, that's what we'll report to mission control. Which way are you heading?"
"East."
"So you'll hail a cab and go east. We'll report the number of your cab. We won't follow you because you'd recognize us. There's a second surveillance car waiting for you at the front of the cinema and a spare lying up in the King's Road for contingencies. If you decide to walk or take a tube, they'll drop a couple of pedestrians behind you. If you catch a bus, they'll be grateful because there's nothing easier than getting stuck behind a London bus. If you go into a phone box and make a call, they'll listen to it. They have a Home Office warrant and it works wherever you happen to phone from."
"Why?" Justin asked.
His eyes were growing accustomed to the light. Rob had draped his long body over the back of the driver's seat, making himself part of the conversation. His manner was as abject as Lesley's but more hostile.
"Because you crapped on us," he said.
Lesley was dragging newspaper out of Tessa's music case and stuffing it into a plastic carrier bag. A wad of large envelopes lay at her feet, perhaps a dozen. She began loading them into the music case.
"I don't understand," Justin said.
"Well, try," Rob advised. "We're under sealed orders, right? We tell Mr. Gridley what you do. Someone up there says why you do it, but not to us. We're the help."
"Who searched my house?"
"In Nairobi or Chelsea?" Rob countered sardonically.
"Chelsea."
"Not ours to inquire. The team was stood down for four hours while whoever did it did it. That's all we know. Gridley put one uniformed copper on the doorstep in case anyone tried to wander in off the street. If they did, his job was to tell them that our officers were investigating a burglary of the premises, so bugger off. If he was a copper at all, which I doubt," Rob added, snapping his mouth shut.
"Rob and me are off the case," Lesley said. "Gridley would assign us to traffic duties in the Orkney Islands if he could, except he daren't."
"We're off everything," Rob put in. "We're unpersons. Thanks to you."
"He wants us where he can see us," Lesley said.
"Inside the tent, pissing out," said Rob.
"He's sent two new officers to Nairobi to help and advise the local police in the search for Bluhm and that's all," said Lesley. "No looking under stones, no deviations. Period."
"No Marsabit Two, no more grief about dying nigger women and phantom doctors," Rob said. "Gridley's own lovely words. And our replacements aren't allowed to talk to us in case they catch our disease. They're a couple of nobrains with a year to go, same as Gridley."
"It's a top security situation and you're part of it," Lesley said, closing the clasp on the music case but hugging it to her lap. "What part is anybody's guess. Gridley wants your life story. Who you meet, where, who comes to your house, who you phone, what you eat, who with. Every day. You're a material player in a top secret operation is all we're allowed to know. We're to do what we're told and mind our own business."
"We'd not been back in the Yard ten minutes before he was yelling for all notebooks, tapes and exhibits on his desk now," said Rob. "So we gave them to him. The original set, complete and uncut. After we'd made copies, naturally."
"The glorious House of ThreeBees is never to be mentioned again and that's an order," Lesley said. "Not their products, their operations or their staff. Nothing's allowed to rock the boat. Amen."
"What boat?"
"Lots of boats," Rob cut in. "Take your pick. Curtiss is untouchable. He's halfway to brokering a bumper British arms deal with the Somalis. The embargo's a nuisance but he's found ways of getting round it. He's front-runner in the race to provide a stateof-the-art East African telecom system using British high tech."