"He screams at them is all he does. It's pathetic, frankly. KVH don't want his money. They want his business, which is what we all knew, but he didn't. I don't know where the shock waves will end, do I?"
"I'm sorry to hear that, Doug. I'd always thought of you and Kenny as hand in glove."
"Me too, sir. It's taken a lot to bring me to this point, I'll confess. It's not like me to be two-faced, is it?"
A bunch of ostracized male gazelles had come to the roadside to watch them pass.
"What do you want, Doug?" Donohue asked.
"I was wondering whether there was informal work available, sir. Anyone you'd like visited or kept an eye on. Any special documents you needed." Donohue waited, unimpressed. "Plus I've got this friend. From the Ireland days. Lives in Harare, which wouldn't be my cup of tea."
"What about him?"
"He was approached, wasn't he? He's a freelance."
"Approached to do what?"
"Certain European people who were friends of friends of his approached him. Offering him megabucks to pacify a white woman and her black boyfriend up Turkana way. Like by yesterday. Leave tonight, we've got a car waiting."
Donohue pulled onto the verge and again stopped the car. "Date?" he asked.
"Two days before Tessa Quayle was killed."
"Did he take the contract?"
"Of course not, sir."
"Why not?"
"He's not the sort. He won't touch women, for one thing. He's done Rwanda, he's done Congo. He'll never touch another woman."
"So what did he do?"
"He advised them to speak to certain people he knew who weren't so particular."
"Such as who?"
"He's not saying, Mr. Donohue. And if he was, I wouldn't let him tell me. There are some things that are too dangerous to know."
"Not a lot on offer then, is there?"
"Well, he is prepared to talk the wider parameters, if you know what I mean."
"I don't. I buy names, dates and places. Retail. Cash in a bag. No parameters."
"I think what he's really talking about, sir, if you cut away the fancy language is: would you like to buy what happened to Dr. Bluhm, including map references? Only being by way of a writer, he's written an account of the events in Turkana as they affected the doctor, based on what his friends told him. For your eyes only, assuming the price is right."
Another group of night migrants had assembled round the car, led by an old man in a lady's broad-brimmed hat with a bow on it.
"Sounds crap to me," said Donohue.
"I don't think it's crap, sir. I think it's the real McCoy. I know it is."
A chill passed over Donohue. Know? he wondered. Know how? Or is your friend from Ireland days a cipher for Doug Crick?
"Where is it? This account he's written."
"It's to hand, sir. I'll put it that way."
"I'll be at the pool bar of the Serena Hotel tomorrow at midday for twenty minutes."
"He's looking at fifty K's, Mr. Donohue."
"I'll tell you what he's looking at when I've seen it."
Donohue drove for an hour, swerving between craters, slowing down for very little. A jackal scurried through his headlights, bound for the game park. A group of women from a local flower farm hailed a lift from him, but for once he didn't stop. Even passing his own house he refused to slow down, but headed directly for the High Commission. The lake salmon would have to keep until tomorrow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
"Sandy Woodrow," Gloria announced with playful severity, standing arms akimbo before him in her new fluffy dressing gown, "it's jolly well time you showed the flag."
She had risen early and brushed out her hair by the time he had shaved. She had packed the boys off to school with the driver, then cooked him bacon and eggs, which he wasn't allowed, but once in a while a girl's allowed to spoil her man. She was mimicking the school prefect in herself, using her head girl voice, though none of this was yet apparent to her husband, who was plowing his way as usual through a heap of Nairobi newspapers.
"Flag goes back up on Monday, dear," Woodrow replied distractedly, masticating bacon. "Mildred's been on to Protocol Department. Tessa's been half-masted longer than a prince of the blood."
"I'm not talking about that flag, silly," said Gloria, removing the newspapers from his reach and setting them prettily on a side table beneath her watercolors. "Are you sitting comfortably? So listen. I'm talking about throwing an absolutely bumper party to cheer us all up, you included. It's time, Sandy. It really is. It's time we all said to each other, "Right. Been there. Done that. Dreadfully sorry. But life has to go on." Tessa would feel exactly the same. Vital question, darling. What's the inside story? When are the Porters coming back?" The Porters like the Sandys and the Elenas, which is how we talk about people when we're being cozy.
Woodrow transferred a square of egg to his fried bread. "Mr. and Mrs. Porter Coleridge are taking an extended period of home leave while they settle their daughter Rosie into school," he intoned, quoting an imaginary spokesman. "Inside story, outside story, only story there is."
But a story that, despite his seeming ease, exercised Woodrow considerably. What the hell was Coleridge up to? Why this radio silence? All right, he was on home leave. Good luck to him. But Heads of Mission on home leave have telephones and e-mails and addresses. They get withdrawal symptoms, phone their number twos and private secretaries on the flimsiest excuse, wanting to know about their servants, gardens, dogs and how's the old place ticking over without me? And they get huffy when it's suggested to them that the old place ticks over rather better when they're not in it. But from Coleridge, ever since his abrupt departure, not a dicky bird. And if Woodrow called London with the professed aim of bouncing a few innocent questions off him — and quite incidentally to pump him about his aims and dreams — he was met by one blank wall after another. Coleridge was "doing a stint at Cabinet Office," said a neophyte in Africa Department. He was "attending a ministerial working party," said a satrap in the permanent undersecretary's department.
And Bernard Pellegrin, when Woodrow finally reached him from the digital phone on Coleridge's desk, was as airy as the rest of them. "One of those Personnel cock-ups," he explained vaguely. "PM wants a briefing so the Secretary of State has to have one, so they all want one. Everyone wants a bit of Africa. What's new?"
"But is Porter coming back here or not, Bernard? I mean this is very unsettling. For all of us."
"I'd be the last to know, old boy." Slight pause. "You alone?"
"Yes."
"That little shit Mildred hasn't got her ear to the keyhole?"
Woodrow glanced at the closed door to the anteroom and lowered his voice. "No."
"Remember that thick bit o' paper you sent me not so long ago? Twenty-odd pages — woman author?"
Woodrow's stomach lurched. Anti-listening devices might be safe against outsiders, but are they safe against us?
"What about it?"
"My view is — best scenario would be-solve everything — it never arrived. Lost in the mails. That play?"
"You're talking about your end, Bernard. I can't speak for your end. If you didn't receive it, that's your business. But I sent it to you. That's all I know."
"Suppose you didn't send it, old boy. Suppose none of it happened. Never written, never sent? Would that be viable your end?" The voice absolutely at ease with itself.
"No. It's impossible. Not at all viable, Bernard."
"Why not?" Interested, but not the smallest degree perturbed.
"I sent it to you by bag. It was listed. Personal for you. Inventoried. The Queen's Messengers signed for it. I told — " he was going to say "Scotland Yard" but changed his mind in time — "I told the people who came out here about it. I had to. They'd already got the background by the time they spoke to me." His fear made him angry. "I told you I'd told them! I warned you, actually! Bernard, is something unraveling? You're making me a bit jumpy, actually. I'd rather understood from you that the whole thing had been laid peacefully to rest."