The Night Manager (15 page)

"Damn you, Jack Linden," Pete Pengelly announces suddenly, flushed with drink, while they sit there in the respectful silence that always follows one of Ruth Trethewey's insights.

"If you walked in here tonight I'd buy you a bloody beer, boy, and shake you by the bloody hand same as I did that night."

And next day Jack Linden will be forgotten, perhaps for weeks. His amazing sea voyage is forgotten, so is the mystery of the two men in a Rover car who were said to have called on him at the Lanyon the night before he flitted--and several times before that, according to one or two who ought to have known.

Yet the press cuttings are still pinned to the Snug wall, the blue crags of Lanyon valley still weep and smoulder in the poor weather that seems always to hang over them, the gorse and daffodils still flourish side by side on the banks of the Lanyon River, which is no wider these days than a fit man's stride. The darkened lane twists beside it on its way to the stubby cottage that was Jack Linden's home. The fishermen still steer a healthy berth round Lanyon Head, where brown rocks lurk like crocodiles at low water and the currents can suck you under on the quietest days, so that every year some fool cowboy from up-country, with a girlfriend and a rubber dinghy, diving for bits of wreck, dives his last or has to be lugged to safety by a rescue helicopter from Culdrose.

There were bodies enough in Lanyon Bay, they say in the village, long before Jack Linden added his bearded Australian to the score.

And Jonathan?

Jack Linden was as much a mystery to himself as to the village.

A dirty drizzle was falling as he kicked open the front door of the cottage and dumped his saddlebags on the bare boards. He had ridden three hundred and thirty miles in five hours. Yet as he tramped from one desolate bare room to another in his motorcycling boots and gazed out of the smashed windows at the apocalyptic landscape, he smiled to himself like a man who has found the palace of his dreams. I'm on my way, he thought. To complete myself, he thought, remembering the oath he had sworn in Herr Meister's fine-wine cellar. To discover the missing parts of my life. To get it right with Sophie.

His training in London belonged to another room in his mind: the memory games, the camera games, the communications games, the ceaseless drip of Burr's methodical instruction.

Be this, never be that, be your natural self but more so. Their planning fascinated Jonathan. He enjoyed their ingenuity and the paths of contrary reasoning.

"We'll reckon on Linden lasting the first round," Burr had said through Rooke's pipe smoke, as the three men sat together in the Spartan training house in Lisson Grove. "After that we'll find you someone else to be. You still up for this?"

Oh, he was up for this! With his rekindled sense of duty, he had cheerfully participated in his impending destruction, adding touches of his own that he considered more faithful to the original.

"Hang on a sec, Leonard. I'm on the run and the police are looking for me, okay? You say make a dash for France. But I'm an Ireland man. I'd never trust a border while I'm hot."

And they heeded him, and pencilled in a hellish extra week of lying low, and were impressed, and said as much behind his back.

"Keep him on a tight lead," Rooke advised Burr in his role as custodian of Jonathan's army persona. "No pampering. No extra rations. No unnecessary visits to the front line to buck him up. If he can't take it, the sooner we find out the better."

But Jonathan could take it. He had always taken it. Deprival was his element. He longed for a woman, a woman he had yet to meet, someone with a mission like his own, not a frivolous equestrienne with a rich patron: a woman with Sophie's gravitas and heart, and Sophie's undivided sexuality. Rounding a corner on his cliff walks, he would let his face light up with a smile of delighted recognition at the notion that this unmet paragon of female virtue would be waiting for him: Oh, hullo, Jonathan, it's you. Yet too often, when he examined her features more closely, she bore an uncomfortable similarity to Jed: Jed's wayward, perfect body, Jed's puckish smile.

The first time Marilyn Trethewey came to visit Jonathan was to deliver a case of mineral water that was too big to go on his motorbike. She was finely moulded like her mother, with a strict set jaw and jet-black hair the colour of Sophie's, and ruddy Cornish cheeks and strong high breasts, for she could not have been a day more than twenty. Spotting her striding behind her pram down the village street, always alone, or standing apart at the till in her mother's shop, Jonathan had wondered whether she was even seeing him, or merely resting her gaze on him while she saw something different in her mind.

She insisted on carrying the case of bottles to the front door, and when he made to take it from her, she shrugged him off.

So he stood on his own doorstep while she went into the house and set the box on the kitchen table, then took a long stare round the living room before coming back outside.

"Dig yourself in," Burr had advised. "Buy a greenhouse, plant a garden, form life-long friendships. We need to know you had to tear yourself away. If you can find a girl to leave dangling, so much the better. In a perfect world you'd make her pregnant."

"Thanks very much."

Burr caught his tone and gave him a swift sideways glance. "What's the matter, then? Taken a vow of celibacy, have we? That Sophie really got to you, didn't she?"

A couple of days later Marilyn came again, this time without anything to deliver. And instead of her habitual jeans and scruffy top, she had got herself up in a skirt and jacket, as if she had a date with her solicitor. She rang the bell, and as soon as he opened the door she said, "You gon' leave me be, then, right?" So he took a step back and let her past him, and she placed herself at the centre of the room as if testing his reliability.

And he saw that the lace cuffs of her blouse were shaking, and he knew that it had cost her a lot to get this far.

"You like it here, then, do you?" she asked him in her challenging way. "All by your own?" She had her mother's quick eye and untutored shrewdness.

"It's meat and drink to me," said Jonathan, taking refuge in his hotelier's voice.

"What d'you do, then? You can't watch telly all day. You haven't got none."

"Read. Walk. Do a bit of business here and there." So now go, he thought, smiling tensely at her, eyebrows raised.

"You paint, then, do you?" she said, examining his watercolours set out on the table before the seaward window.

"I try."

"I can paint." She was picking through the brushes, testing them for springiness and shape. "I was good at painting. Won prizes, didn't I?"

"Why don't you paint now. then?" Jonathan asked.

He had meant it as a question, but to his alarm she took it as an invitation. Having emptied out the water jar in the sink, she refilled it and sat down at his table, selected a fresh sheet of cartridge paper and, having tucked her hair behind her ears, lost herself to everything except her work. And with her long back turned to him, and her black hair hanging down it, and the sunlight from the window blazing on the top of her head, she was Sophie, his accusing angel, come to visit him.

He watched her for a while, waiting hopefully for the association to fade, but it didn't, so he went outside and dug in the garden until dusk. He returned to find her wiping down the table just as she had done at school. Then she propped her unfinished painting against the wall, and instead of sea or sky or cliff, it snowed a dark-haired, laughing girl--Sophie as a child, for instance, Sophie long before she married her perfect English gentleman for his passport.

"Come again tomorrow, then?" she asked in her clipped, aggressive way.

"Of course. If you wish. Why not?" said the hotelier, making a mental note to be in Falmouth. "If I have to be out, I'll leave the door open."

And when he returned from Falmouth he found the painting of the girl completed, and a note telling him gruffly that it was for him. After that she came most afternoons, and when she had finished her painting she sat herself opposite him in the armchair across the fire and read his copy of The Guardian.

"World's in a damn good mess, then, in't it, Jack?" she announced, rattling the paper. And he heard her laugh, which was what the village was beginning to hear too. "It's a bloody pigsty, Jack Linden. You take my word for it."

"Oh, I do," he assured her, careful not to return her smile for too long. "I absolutely do, Marilyn."

But he began urgently to wish her gone. Her vulnerability scared him. So did his sense of distance from her. Not in a thousand years, he assured Sophie in his mind. I swear.

Only occasionally, in the early mornings, for he woke most often with the dawn, did Jonathan's operational resolve threaten to collapse, and for a black hour he became the plaything of a past that reached much further back than Sophie's betrayal. He remembered the prickle of uniform against his child's skin and the khaki collar sawing at his neck. He saw himself sleeping at attention in the iron cot of his barrack room, waiting for reveille and the first falsetto orders of the day: Don't stand like a bloody butler, Pine, get your shoulders back, boy! Right back! More! He relived his fear of everything: of the mockery when he failed and the envy when he won; of the parade ground and the games field and the boxing ring; of being caught when he stole things for his comfort--a penknife, a photograph of someone's parents; of his fear of failure, which meant failing to ingratiate himself; of being late or early, too clean, not clean enough, too loud, too quiet, too subservient, too cheeky. He remembered learning to be brave as an alternative to cowardice.

He remembered the day he struck back, and the day he struck first, as he taught himself to lead from weakness into strength.

He remembered his early women, no different from his later ones, each a bigger disillusionment than the last as he struggled to elevate them to the divine status of the woman he had never had.

Of Roper he thought constantly--he had only to fish him from the pockets of his memory to feel a surge of purpose and direction. He could not listen to the radio or read a newspaper without detecting Roper's hidden hand in every conflict. If he read of a massacre of women and children in East Timor, it was Roper's guns that had committed the outrage. If a car bomb exploded in Beirut, Roper had supplied it, and probably the car as well: Been there. Seen the movie, thanks.

After Roper, it was Roper's people who became the object of his fascinated indignation. He thought of Major Corkoran alias Corky alias Corks, in his grimy muffler and disgraceful suede boots: Corky the signer. Corky who could get five hundred years in jail anytime Burr chose.

He thought of Frisky and Tabby and the misty company of retainers--of Sandy Lord Langbourne, with his gold hair bound at the nape; of Dr. Apostoll on his risers, whose daughter had killed herself for a Cartier watch; of MacArthur and Danby, the grey-suited executive twins from the nearly respectable side of the operation--until collectively the Roper household became a kind of monstrous First Family for him, with Jed his First Lady in the Tower.

"How much does she know about his business?" Jonathan asked Burr once.

Burr shrugged. "The Roper doesn't boast and doesn't tell. Nobody knows more than he needs to. Not with our Dicky."

An upper-class waif, thought Jonathan. A convent-school education. A faith rejected. A locked-up childhood like mine.

Jonathan's only confidant was Harlow, but between operational confidants there are limits to what either can confide. "Harlow is a walk-on." Rooke warned, during a night visit to the Lanyon. "He's only there for you to kill. He doesn't know the target, and he doesn't need to. Keep it that way."

Nevertheless, for this stage of the journey the murderer and his mark were allies, and Jonathan strove to make a bond with him.

"You a married man, Jumbo?"

They were sitting at the scrubbed pine table in Jonathan's kitchen after returning from their planned appearance at the Snug. Jumbo shook his head regretfully and took a pull of beer. He was an embarrassed soul, as big men often are, an actor or a grounded opera singer with a huge barrel chest. His black beard, Jonathan suspected, had been grown expressly for the part and would be gratefully removed as soon as the show ended. Was Jumbo a genuine Australian? It didn't matter. He was an expatriate everywhere.

"I shall expect a lavish funeral, Mr. Linden," said Jumbo gravely. "Black horses, a sparkling carriage and a nine-year-old catamite in a top hat. Your health."

"And yours too, Jumbo."

Having drained his sixth can, Jumbo slapped on his blue denim cap and lumbered to the door. Jonathan watched his crippled Land-Rover hobble up the winding lane.

"Who on earth was that?" said Marilyn, arriving with a pair of fresh mackerel.

"Oh, he's just my business partner," said Jonathan.

"Looked more like bloody Godzilla on a dark night to me."

She wanted to fry the fish, but he showed her how to bake it in foil, with fresh dill and seasoning. Once, as a dare, she tied his apron round him, and he felt her strong black hair brush against his cheek and waited for the smell of vanilla.

Stay away from me. I betray. I kill. Go home.

One afternoon Jonathan and Jumbo took the plane from Plymouth to Jersey and in the little port of St. Helier made a show of inspecting a twenty-five-foot yacht that was moored on the far side of the harbour. Their journey, like their joint appearance at the Snug, was intended for display. In the evening. Jumbo flew back alone.

The yacht they inspected was called Ariadne, and according to her log she had arrived from Roscoff two weeks earlier, sailed by a Frenchman named Lebray. Before Roscoff she was in Biarritz and, before that, open seas. Jonathan spent two days fitting her out, provisioning her and preparing the chartwork.

On the third day he took her to sea to get the feel of her and boxed the compass for himself while he was about it, for at sea as on land he trusted no one's work but his own. At first light on the fourth day he set sail. The area forecast was good, and for fifteen hours he cruised nicely at four knots, reaching for Falmouth on a southwesterly. But by evening the wind had turned blustery and by midnight it had freshened to a six or seven, throwing a big ground swell that had the Ariadne pitching.