The Night Manager

Hester Goodhew telephoned him from Kentish Town to say that her husband would be staying home for a few days: winter was never his best time, she said. After her, Goodhew himself came on the line, sounding like a hostage who has been rehearsed in his lines. "You've still got your budget till the end Of the year, Leonard. Nobody can take that away from you." Then, rather horribly, his voice cracked. "That poor boy. What will they do to him? I think of him all the time."

So did Burr, but he had work to do.

* * *

The interviewing room at the Ministry of Defence is white and sparse and prison lit and prison scrubbed. It is a brick-lined box with a blacked-out window and an electric radiator that stinks of burned dust whenever it is switched on. The absence of graffiti is alarming. Waiting, you wonder whether the last messages are painted out after the occupant is executed. Burr arrived late by design. When he entered, Palfrey attempted to look at him disdainfully over the top of his trembling newspaper, and smirked.

"Well, I did come" he said truculently. And stood. And made a show of folding up his paper.

Burr closed and carefully locked the door behind him, set down his briefcase, hung his coat on the hook and slapped Palfrey very hard across the side of the face. But dispassionately, reluctantly almost. As he might have hit an epileptic to ward off a fit, or his own child to calm him in a crisis.

Palfrey sat down again with a plop, on the same bench where he had been sitting earlier. He held his hand to the offended cheek.

"Animal," he whispered.

To a point, Palfrey was right, except that Burr's wildness was under iron control. Burr had the real black mood on him, and not his closest friends, not his wife, had seen him with the real black mood. Burr himself had seen it seldom. He didn't sit, but crouched fat-arsed and chapel-style at Palfrey's side, so that their heads could stay nice and close together. And to help Palfrey listen, he grabbed the poor fellow's drink-stained tie at the knot in both hands while he spoke, and it made a rather fearful noose.

"I've been very, very kind to you, Harry Palfrey, up till now," he began, in a mainstream speech that benefited from not having been prepared. "I've not queered your pitch. I've not peached. I've looked on indulgently while you gumshoed back and forth across the river, into bed with Goodhew, selling him out to Darker, playing all the ends against the middle, just the way you always did. Still promising divorce to every girl you meet, are you? Of course you are! Then hurrying home to renew your marriage vows to your wife? Of course you are! Harry Palfrey and his Saturday night conscience!" Burr tightened the hangman's knot of Palfrey's tie against the poor man's Adam's apple. " 'Oh, the things I have to do for England, Mildred!' " he protested, playing Palfrey's part. " 'The cost to my integrity, Mildred! If you but knew the tenth of it, you'd not sleep for the rest of your life ― except with me, of course. I need you, Mildred. I need your warmth, your consolation. Mildred, I love you!... Just don't tell my wife; she wouldn't understand.' " A painful lunge of the knot. "You still peddling that crap, Harry? Back and forth across the border, six times a bloody day? Ratting, re-ratting, re-re-ratting, till your furry little head's sticking out of your puzzled little arse? Of course you are!"

But it was not easy for Palfrey to give a rational response to these questions, because of Burr's unyielding, double handed, closing grip on his silk tie. It was a grey tie, silvery, which made the stains more prominent. Perhaps it had served Palfrey for one of his many marriages. It seemed incapable of breaking.