"Thanks, Gloria, there's really no need," he cut in with surprising firmness.
Deprived of her tender moment, Gloria struggled to recover a tone of practicality. "Yes, well, you'll come up whenever you want, won't you, dear? Dinner at eight, theoretically. Drinkies before if you feel like it. Just do whatever you wish. Or nothing. Heaven knows when Sandy will be back." After which she went gratefully upstairs to her bedroom, showered and changed and did her face, then looked in on the boys at their prep. Quelled by the presence of death, they were working diligently, or pretending to.
"Does he look terrifically sad?" asked Harry, the younger one.
"You'll meet him tomorrow. Just be very polite and serious with him. Mathilda's making you hamburgers. You'll eat them in the playroom, not the kitchen, understood?" A postscript popped out of her before she had even thought about it: "He's a very courageous fine man, and you're to treat him with great respect."
Descending to the drawing room she was surprised to find Justin ahead of her. He accepted a hefty whisky and soda, she poured herself a glass of white wine and sat in an armchair, actually Sandy's, but she wasn't thinking of Sandy. For minutes — she'd no idea how many in real time — neither of them spoke, but the silence was a bond that Gloria felt more keenly the longer it went on. Justin sipped his whisky, and she was relieved to note that he had not caught Sandy's thoroughly irritating new habit of closing his eyes and pouting as if the whisky had been given him to test. Glass in hand, he moved himself to the French window, looking out into the floodlit garden — twenty 150-watt bulbs hooked up to the house generator, and the blaze of them burning one half of his face.
"Maybe that's what everyone thinks," he remarked suddenly, resuming a conversation they had not had.
"What is, dear?" Gloria asked, not certain she was being addressed, but asking anyway because he clearly needed to talk to someone.
"That you were loved for being someone you weren't. That you're a sort of fraud. A love thief."
Gloria had no idea whether this was something everyone thought, but she had no doubts at all that they shouldn't. "Of course you're not a fraud, Justin," she said stoutly. "You're one of the most genuine people I know, you always were. Tessa adored you and so she should have done. She was a very lucky young girl indeed." As for love thief, she thought-well, no prizes for guessing who did the love thieving in that duo!
Justin did not respond to this glib assurance, or not that she could see, and for a spell all she heard was the chain reaction of barking dogs — one started, then all the others did, up and down Muthaiga's golden mile.
"You were always good to her, Justin, you know you were. You mustn't go castigating yourself for crimes you didn't commit. A lot of people do that when they lose someone, and they're not being fair on themselves. We can't go round treating people as if they were going to drop dead any minute, or we'd never get anywhere. Well, would we? You were loyal to her. Always," she asserted, thereby incidentally implying that the same could not be said for Tessa. And the implication was not lost on him, she was sure of it: he was on the brink of talking about that wretched Arnold Bluhm when to her vexation she heard the clunk of her husband's latchkey in the door and knew the spell was broken.
"Justin, you poor chap, how's it going?" Woodrow cried, pouring himself an unusually modest glass of wine before crashing onto the sofa. "No more news, I'm afraid. Good or bad. No clues, no suspects, not as yet. No trace of Arnold. The Belgians are supplying a helicopter, London's coming up with a second. Money, money, curse of us all. Still, he's a Belgian citizen, so why not? How very pretty you're looking, sweet. What's for dins?"
He's been drinking, Gloria thought in disgust. He pretends to work late and he sits there in his office drinking while I make the boys do their homework. She heard a movement from the window and saw to her dismay that Justin had braced himself to take his leave — scared off, no doubt, by her husband's elephantine flat-footedness.
"No food?" Woodrow protested. "Got to keep your strength up, you know, old boy."
"You are very kind but I fear I have no appetite. Gloria, thank you again. Sandy, goodnight."
"And the Pellegrin sends strong supporting messages from London. Whole Foreign Office struck down with grief, he says. Didn't want to intrude personally."
"Bernard was always very tactful."
She watched the door close, she heard his footsteps descend the concrete staircase, she saw his empty glass resting on the bamboo table beside the French window, and for a frightening moment she was convinced she would never see him again.
Woodrow bolted his dinner clumsily, not tasting it as usual. Gloria, who like Justin had no appetite, watched him. Juma their houseboy, tiptoeing restlessly between them, watched him too.
"How we faring?" Woodrow murmured with a conspiratorial slur, keeping his voice down and pointing at the floor to warn her to do the same.
"Been fine," she said, playing his game. "Considering." What are you doing down there? she wondered. Are you lying on your bed, flailing yourself in the darkness? Or are you staring through your bars into the garden, talking to her ghost?
"Anything of any significance come out?" Woodrow was asking, stumbling a bit on the word "significance" but still contriving to keep their conversation allusive on account of Juma.
"Like what?"
"About our lover boy," he said and, leering shamefully, jabbed a thumb at her begonias and mouthed "bloom," at which Juma hurried off to get a jug of water.
For hours Gloria lay awake beside her snoring husband until, fancying she heard a sound from downstairs, she crept to the landing and peered out of the window. The power cut was over. An orange glow from the city lifted to the stars. But no Tessa lurked in the lighted garden, and no Justin either. She returned to bed to find Harry diagonally asleep with his thumb in his mouth and one arm across his father's chest.
* * *
The family rose early as usual, but Justin was ahead of them, dressed in his crushed suit and hovering. He looked flushed, she thought, a little overbusy, too much color under the brown eyes. The boys shook his hand, gravely as instructed, and Justin meticulously returned their greetings.
"Oh Sandy, yes, good morning," he said as soon as Woodrow appeared. "I wondered whether we might have a quick word."
The two men withdrew to the sun lounge.
"It's about my house," Justin began, as soon as they were alone.
"House here or house in London, old boy?" Woodrow countered in a fatuous effort to be cheerful. And Gloria, listening to every word through the serving hatch to the kitchen, could have brained him.
"Here in Nairobi. Her private papers, lawyers' letters. Her family-trust material. Documents that are precious to both of us. I can't leave her personal correspondence sitting there for the Kenyan police to plunder at will."
"So what's the solution, old boy?"
"I'd like to go there. At once."
So firm! Gloria rhapsodized. So forceful, in spite of everything!
"My dear chap, that's impossible. The hacks would eat you alive."
"I don't believe that's true, actually. They can try and take my photograph, I suppose. They can shout at me. If I don't reply to them, that's about as far as they can go. Catch them while they're shaving."
Gloria knew her husband's prevarications inside out. In a minute he'll call Bernard Pellegrin in London. That's what he always does when he needs to bypass Porter Coleridge and get the answer he wants to hear.
"Look here, tell you what, old boy. Why not write me a list of what you want and I'll pass it to Mustafa somehow and have him bring the stuff here?"