John le Carré - The Constant Gardener

The premier spy novelist of his time. Perhaps of all time

Time

One of those writers who will be read a century from now

Robert Harris

The great master of the spy story the constant flow of emotion lifts him not only above all modern suspense novelists, but above most novelists now practising

Financial Times

The master

Henning Mankell, Daily Telegraph

Our greatest living master of espionage fiction Le Carr is one of our great writers of moral ambiguity, a tireless explorer of that darkly contradictory no-mans land

Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times

Le Carr is not just todays gold standard, but the best there ever was

The Huffington Post

No other contemporary novelist has more durably enjoyed the twin badges of being both well-read and well-regarded

Scott Turow

Le Carr is one of the best novelists of any kind we have

Vanity Fair

He can communicate emotion, from sweating fear to despairing love, with terse and compassionate conviction. Above all, he can tell a tale

Susan Hill, Sunday Times

A masterly understanding of moral complexity the signature clarity of his prose is matched only by the distinctive murkiness of what it describes

Guardian

Brilliant, morally outraged works that mine rich veins of post-Cold War venality

Seattle Times

The worlds greatest fictional spymaster

Newsweek

John le Carr was born in 1931 and attended the universities of Bern and Oxford. He taught at Eton and served briefly in British Intelligence during the Cold War. For the last fifty years he has lived by his pen. He divides his time between London and Cornwall.

John le Carr

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THE CONSTANT GARDENER

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

India | New Zealand | South Africa

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published by Hodder & Stoughton 2001

Published in Penguin Books 2018

Copyright David Cornwell, 2001

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover illustration by Matt Taylor

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works: Clinical Trials: A Practical Approach by Stuart J. Pocock. 1984 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Reproduced with permission. Drug Firm Put Patients at Risk in Hospital Trials by Paul Nuki, David Leppard, Gareth Walsh and Guy Dennis from The Sunday Times, London Times Newspapers Ltd, 14 May 2000.

ISBN: 978-0-241-32234-5

For Yvette Pierpaoli
who lived and died giving a damn

Ah, but a mans reach should exceed his grasp.
Or whats a heaven for?

Andrea del Sarto by Robert Browning

The news hit the British High Commission in Nairobi at nine-thirty on a Monday morning. Sandy Woodrow took it like a bullet, jaw rigid, chest out, smack through his divided English heart. He was standing. That much he afterwards remembered. He was standing and the internal phone was piping. He was reaching for something, he heard the piping so he checked himself in order to stretch down and fish the receiver off the desk and say, Woodrow. Or maybe, Woodrow here. And he certainly barked his name a bit, he had that memory for sure: of his voice sounding like someone elses, and sounding stroppy: Woodrow here, his own perfectly decent name, but without the softening of his nickname Sandy, and snapped out as if he hated it, because the High Commissioners usual prayer meeting was slated to start in thirty minutes prompt, with Woodrow, as Head of Chancery, playing in-house moderator to a bunch of special-interest prima donnas, each of whom wanted sole possession of the High Commissioners heart and mind.

In short, just another bloody Monday in late January, the hottest time in the Nairobi year, a time of dust and water shortages and brown grass and sore eyes and heat ripping off the city pavements; and the jacarandas, like everybody else, waiting for the long rains.

Exactly why he was standing was a question he never resolved. By rights he should have been crouched behind his desk, fingering his keyboard, anxiously reviewing guidance material from London and incomings from neighbouring African Missions. Instead of which he was standing in front of his desk and performing some unidentified vital act such as straightening the photograph of his wife Gloria and two small sons, perhaps, taken last summer while the family was on home leave. The High Commission stood on a slope, and its continuing subsidence was enough to tilt pictures out of true after a weekend on their own.

Or perhaps he had been squirting mosquito spray at some Kenyan insect from which even diplomats are not immune. There had been a plague of Nairobi eye a few months back, flies that when squidged and rubbed accidentally on the skin could give you boils and blisters, and even send you blind. He had been spraying, he heard his phone ring, he put the can down on his desk and grabbed the receiver: also possible, because somewhere in his later memory there was a colour-slide of a red tin of insecticide sitting in the outtray on his desk. So, Woodrow here, and the telephone jammed to his ear.

Oh, Sandy, its Mike Mildren. Good morning. You alone by any chance?

Shiny, overweight, twenty-four-year-old Mildren, High Commissioners private secretary, Essex accent, fresh out from England on his first overseas posting and known to the junior staff, predictably, as Mildred.

Yes, Woodrow conceded, he was alone. Why?

Somethings come up, Im afraid, Sandy. I wondered if I might pop down a moment actually.

Cant it wait till after the meeting?

Well, I dont think it can really no, it cant, Mildren replied, gathering conviction as he spoke. Its Tessa Quayle, Sandy.

A different Woodrow now, hackles up, nerves extended. Tessa. What about her? he said. His tone deliberately incurious, his mind racing in all directions. Oh Tessa. Oh Christ. What have you done now?

The Nairobi police say shes been killed, Mildren said, as if he said it every day.

Utter nonsense, Woodrow snapped back before he had given himself time to think. Dont be ridiculous. Where? When?

At Lake Turkana. The eastern shore. This weekend. Theyre being diplomatic about the details. In her car. An unfortunate accident, according to them, he added apologetically. I had a sense that they were trying to spare our feelings.

Whose car? Woodrow demanded wildly fighting now, rejecting the whole mad concept who, how, where and his other thoughts and senses forced down, down, down, and all his secret memories of her furiously edited out, to be replaced by the baked moonscape of Turkana as he recalled it from a field trip six months ago in the unimpeachable company of the military attach. Stay where you are, Im coming up. And dont talk to anyone else, dyou hear?

Moving by numbers now, Woodrow replaced the receiver, walked round his desk, picked up his jacket from the back of his chair and pulled it on, sleeve by sleeve. He would not customarily have put on a jacket to go upstairs. Jackets were not mandatory for Monday meetings, let alone for going to the private office for a chat with chubby Mildren. But the professional in Woodrow was telling him he was facing a long journey. Nevertheless on his way upstairs he managed by a sturdy effort of self-will to revert to his first principles whenever a crisis appeared on his horizon, and assure himself, just as he had assured Mildren, that it was a lot of utter nonsense. In support of which, he summoned up the sensational case of a young Englishwoman who had been hacked to pieces in the African bush ten years ago. Its a sick hoax, of course it is. A replay in somebodys deranged imagination. Some wildcat African policeman stuck out in the desert, half loco on