The one dimension of the Julie Ward death and the subsequent quest for truth that has remained under-scrutinized by media reports and the three books on the matter is the official British involvement in her family's search for the truth and justice. The Kenyan police's attempts to frame the death as accidental overwhelmingly focused both media and public attention on the Kenyan state actors and their attempt to conceal the truth. By implication, Britain was, for years, assumed to naturally support the quest for the truth in the matter. Britain's quiet and non-sensational involvement in the case reinforced this assumption, enabling it to go unexamined. Yet, on hindsight, there were several instances when the conduct of the British High Commission in Nairobi and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London invited more questions than were asked at the time.

In this chapter, I invert this focus on the Kenyan state institutions, by examining the nature of official British involvement in the search for the truth behind Julie Ward's death. Through a reading of John Ward's The Animals are Innocent, John le Carré's The Constant Gardener, and news articles drawn from Kenyan and British print media, the chapter reflects on the configurations of the official British interventions in the case. In his investigations, as documented in The Animals are Innocent, John Ward perceived British institutions and officials as honest, professional and committed to justice, in sharp contrast with Kenyan officialdom's unprofessionalism and lack of integrity. In this chapter, I hope to illustrate that these assumptions, though founded on his experiences with Kenyan and British officialdom in the course of his investigations, blinded Ward to the subterranean fault lines of competing interests in the official British involvement in the quest for his daughter's killers. By reading Ward's account of the quest for his daughter's killers alongside a fictional account of a similar quest in le Carré's novel The Constant Gardener, and the subsequent revelation of British complicity in the cover-up of the truth behind Julie Ward's death, I hope to illustrate that, contrary to Ward's belief, and indeed, popular wisdom about British moral integrity and commitment to justice as opposed to the failings of the Kenyan officialdom, there were underlying fault lines that suggest continuities and complicities between Kenya and Britain in the cover-up. These fault lines unmasked the contradictions embedded in Ward's assumptions about Kenya and Britain.