The Night Manager (16 page)

But his vows were in vain. The soldier in him was already polishing his boots for the long march toward the worst man in the world.

It was during these final days of Jonathan's tenure of the cottage that Pete Pengelly and his brother. Jacob, made the mistake of going lamping at the Lanyon.

Pete tells the story cautiously, and with visitors present he won't tell it at all, for there's confession to it and a certain rueful pride. Lamping for rabbits in those parts has been a hallowed sport for fifty years and more. With two motorcycle batteries in a small box strapped against your hip, an old car spotlamp with a close beam, and a bunch of spare six-volt bulbs, you can mesmerise a whole convocation of rabbits for long enough to pick them off in salvos. No law and no battalions of strident ladies in brown berets and ankle socks have succeeded in putting a stop to it, and the Lanyon has been a favoured hunting ground for generations--or was, until four of them went up there one night with guns and lamps, led by Pete Pengelly and his younger brother, Jacob.

They parked at Lanyon Rose, then picked their way along the riverbed. Pete swears to this day they were quiet as rabbits themselves and hadn't used the lamps but found their way by full moon, which was why they'd chosen that night. But when they came out on the cliff, careful to keep below the horizon, there stood Jack Linden not half a dozen paces uphill from them, his bare hands lifted from his sides. Kenny Thomas afterwards kept on about his hands, so pale and prominent in the moonlight, but that was the effect of the occasion. The knowing recall that Jack Linden never had big hands. Pete prefers to talk about Linden's face, which was set, he says, like a chunk of bloody blue elvan rock against the sky. You'd have broken your fist on it. There is no dispute about what took place after that.

"Excuse me, but where do you gentlemen think you're going, if I may ask?" says Linden with his customary respectfulness but no smile.

"Lamping," says Pete.

"Nobody's lamping here, I'm afraid, Pete," says Linden, who had only set eyes on Pete Pengelly a couple of times but seemed never to forget a name. "I own these fields, you know that. I don't farm them, but I do own them, and I let them be. That's what I expect other people to do as well. So I'm afraid lamping is out."

"It is, is it, Mr. Linden?" Pete Pengelly says.

"Yes, it is, Mr. Pengelly. I won't have sitting game shot on my land. It's not fair play. So why don't you all please empty your guns and go back to the car and go home and no hard feelings?"

At which Pete says, "To hell with you, boy," and the other three gather to Pete's side so that they are all four bunched and looking up at Linden, four guns against one fellow with the moon behind him. They had come straight on from the Snug, all of them, and were the better for a beer or two.

"Get out of our bloody way, Mr. Linden," says Pete. Then he makes the mistake of fidgeting his gun under his arm. Not pointing it at Linden: he swore he would never have done that, and those who know Pete believe him. And the gun was broken: Pete would never in his life have walked with a closed and loaded gun at night, he says. Nevertheless, as he fidgeted the gun, making it clear that he meant business, it is possible he snapped the breach shut by mistake; he will grant you that. Pete does not claim to have a precise and accurate memory of everything that happened, because the world by then was turning on its head around him, the moon was in the sea, his arse was on the other side of his face, and his feet were the other side of his arse, and the first useful information Pete could put together was that Linden was standing over him emptying the cartridges from his gun. And since it is true that big men fall harder than small men, Pete had fallen very hard indeed, and the impact of the blow, wherever it had hit him, had robbed him not only of his breath but of his will to get up.

The ethics of violence required that it was now the turn of the others, and there were still three of them. The two Thomas brothers had always been quick with their fists, and young Jacob played wing forward for the Pirates and was broad as a bus. And Jacob was all set to go in after his brother. It was Pete, lying in the bracken, who ordered him off.

"Don't touch him, boy. Don't you ever bloody go near him. He's a bloody witch, Go back to the car, all of us," he said, climbing slowly to his feet.

"Empty your guns first, please," says Linden.

On Pete Pengelly's nod the three men emptied the cartridges from their guns. Then all four trooped back to the car.

"I'd have bloody killed him!" Jacob protested as soon as they had driven off. "I'd have broke the bugger's legs for him, Pete, after what he done to you!"

"No, you wouldn't, my handsome," Pete replied. "But he'd have broke yours for sure."

And Pete Pengelly, they say in the village, changed his manners from that night on, though perhaps they are a little hasty to link cause with effect. Come September month, Pete married a sensible farmer's daughter from St. Just. Which is why he is able to look back on the episode with distance and tell about the night Jack Linden damn near did for him the way he did for that fat Aussie.

"I'll tell you one thing, boy. If Jack did do him in, he made some neat job of it, that's for sure."

But there's a better ending to it than that, even if Pete sometimes keeps it to himself like a thing too precious to share. The night before Jack Linden disappeared, he walked into the Snug and laid a bandaged hand on Pete Pengelly's shoulder and bought him a bloody beer, man. They talked for ten minutes, then Jack Linden went on home. "He was puttin' it right with himself," Pete insists proudly. "You bloody listen to me, boy. Jack Linden was setting his bloody house straight after he done his business with the Aussie."

Except that his name wasn't Jack Linden by then, which was something they couldn't properly get used to, and perhaps they never will. A couple of days after his disappearance, Linden-of-the-Lanyon-with-an-i-and-an-e turned out to be Jonathan Pine of Zürich, wanted by the Swiss police on suspicion of embezzlement at a fashionable hotel where he had been a trusted employee. "Sailing Hotelier on the Run," the Cornishman sang, over a photograph of Pine alias Linden. "Police seek Falmouth boat trader in case of missing Australian. 'We are treating this as a drug-related murder enquiry,' says CID chief. The man should be easily identified by his bandaged hand.' "

But Pine was not a man they knew.

Yes, bandaged. And wounded. Wound and bandage were both integral features of Burr's plan.

Jack Linden's hand, the same as he had laid on Pete Pengelly's shoulder. A lot of people, not just Pete Pengelly, had seen that hand bandaged, and the police, at Burr's instigation, made a fair fuss of who they all were, which hand it was, and when. And when they'd got the who and the when and the which, then, being police, they wanted the why. Which is to say. they wrote down the conflicting versions that Jack had given for having his right hand done up in a big gauze bandage, professional, and the fingertips tied together like asparagus. And with Burr's help, the police made sure these found their way into the press.

"Trying to fit a new pane of glass at my cottage," Jack Linden told Mrs. Trethewey on the Thursday as he paid her out his cash wrong-handed for the last time.

"Teach me to help out a friend," Jack had remarked to old William Charles when the two of them chanced to meet at Penhaligon's garage, Jack for petrol for the bike, William Charles for passing the time. "Asked me to pop by and help him mend his window. And now look." Then shoved his bandaged hand at William Charles like a sick dog with his paw, because Jack could make a joke of anything.

But it was Pete Pengelly who got them hot and bothered. "Of course it was in his bloody woodshed, boy!" he told the detective sergeant. "Trimming a pane of bloody glass, he was, up at the Lanyon in his woodshed, and the cutter slipped, blood all over the place. He put a bandage on it, bound it tight and drove himself one-handed to hospital on his bike, blood running up his sleeve all the way to Truro, told me! You don't make that up, boy. You bloody do it."

But when the police dutifully inspected the Lanyon woodshed, they found no glass, no cutter and no blood.

Murderers lie, Burr had explained to Jonathan. Too consistent is too dangerous. If you don't err, you won't be criminal.

The Roper checks, Burr had explained. Even when he's not suspicious, he checks. So we give you these little murderer's lies, to make the untrue murder true.

And a nice scar speaks volumes.

And at some point in these last few days, Jonathan broke all the rules and, without Burr's consent or knowledge, visited his former wife, Isabelle, in search of atonement.

I'll be passing through, he lied, telephoning her from a PenIance call box. Let's have lunch somewhere quiet. Riding his motorbike to Bath, wearing only the left glove because of his bandaged hand, he rehearsed his lines to her until they became a heroic song in his mind: You'll read things about me in the papers, but they won't be true, Isabelle. I'm sorry about the bad times, Isabelle, but there were good times too. Then he wished her luck, imagining she would do the same for him.

In a men's lavatory he changed into his suit and became a hotelier again. He hadn't seen her for five years, and he barely recognised her when she strode in twenty minutes late and blamed the bloody traffic. The long brown hair she used to brush down her naked back before they went to bed was cut to a practical brevity. She wore chunky clothes to hide her shape and carried a zip bag with a cellular telephone. And he remembered how, by the end, the telephone had been the only thing she could talk to.

"Christ," she said. "You look prosperous. Don't worry, I'll switch it off."

She's become a blurter, he thought, and remembered that her new husband was something in the local hunt.

"Well, stone the crows," she shouted. "Corporal Pine. After all these years. What on earth have you done to your hand?"

"Dropped a boat on it," he said, which apparently was sufficient explanation. He asked her how business was. In his suit it seemed the right sort of question to ask. He had heard she had gone into interior design.

"Bloody awful," she replied heartily. "What's Jonathan up to, anyway? Oh my Lord," she said, when he told her. "You're in the leisure industries too. We're doomed, darling. You're not building them, are you?"

"No, no. Brokering. Ferrying. We've got off to quite a decent start."

"Who's we, darling?"

"An Australian chum."

"Male?"

"Male and eighteen stone."

"What are you doing for sex? I always thought you might be queer. You're not, though, are you?"

It was a charge she had made often in her day, but she seemed to have forgotten this.

"Good Lord no," Jonathan replied with a laugh. "How's Miles?"

"Worthy. Very sweet. Banking and good works. He's got to pay off my overdraft next month, so I'm being nice to him."

She ordered a warm duck salad and Badoit and lit a cigarette.

"Why did you give up hoteling?" she asked, blowing smoke in his face. "Bored?"