title: The Constant Gardener: A Novel
author: John le Carre
description: British diplomat Justin Quayle, complacent raiser of freesias and doting husband of the stunning, much younger Tessa, has tended his own garden in Nairobi too long. Tessa is Justin's opposite, a fiery reformer, "that rarest thing, a lawyer who believes in justice," whose campaigns have earned her a nickname: "the Princess Diana of the African poor." But now Tessa has turned up naked, raped, and dead on a mysterious visit to remote Lake Turkana in Kenya. Her traveling companion (and lover?), the handsome Congolese-Belgian doctor Arnold Bluhm, has vanished. So has Quayle's complacency.
zlib_text: 
  
  
  # The Constant Gardener
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The Constant Gardener
  
  
  THE CONSTANT GARDENER
  
  
  JOHN LE CARRE
  
  
  For Yvette Pierpaoli who lived and died giving a damn
  
  
  
  
  
  Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
  
  
  Or what's 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 else's, and sounding stroppy: “Woodrow here,”
  his own perfectly decent name, but without the softening of his nickname
  Sandy, and snapped out as if he h