The Night Manager

He was ten miles out of Newbury and forty miles out of London, but he was in the depths of rural England. He climbed a hill and entered an avenue of bare beech trees. The fields to either side were freshly ploughed. He smelled silage and remembered winter teas before the hob in his mother's kitchen in Yorkshire. We are honourable people, he thought, remembering Goodhew. Honourable English people with self-irony and a sense of decency, people with a street spirit and a good heart. What the hell's gone wrong with us?

A broken bus shelter reminded him of the tin hut in Louisiana where he had met Apostoll, betrayed by Harry Palfrey to Darker, and by Darker to the Cousins, and by the Cousins to God knew whom. Strelski would have brought a pistol, he thought. Flynn would have waded ahead of us, cradling his machine gun in his arms. We would be gun people, feeling safer for our guns.

But guns aren't the answer, he thought. Guns are a bluff. I'm a bluff. I'm unlicensed and unloaded, an empty threat. But I'm all I've got to wave at Sir Anthony Bloody Joyston Bradshaw.

He thought of Rooke and Palfrey sitting silently together in Rooke's office and the telephone between them. For the first time he almost smiled.

He spotted a signpost, turned left into an unpaved drive and was assailed by the false conviction that he had been here before. It's the conscious meeting the unconscious, he had read in some smart magazine: between them they give you the sense of déjà vu. He didn't believe that junk. Its language moved him to near violence, and he was feeling near violent now, just at the thought of it.

He stopped the car.

He was feeling too violent altogether. He waited for the feeling to subside. Christ almighty, what am I becoming? I could have strangled Palfrey. He lowered his window, put back his head and drank the country air. He closed his eyes and became Jonathan. Jonathan in agony, with his head back, unable to utter. Jonathan crucified, nearly dead and loved by Roper's woman.

A pair of stone gateposts loomed before him, but no notice saying Lanyon Rose. Burr stopped the car, took up the telephone, dialled Geoffrey Darker's direct line at the River House and heard Rooke's voice say "Hullo."

"Just checking," said Burr, and dialled the number of Darker's house in Chelsea. He heard Rooke again, grunted and rang off.

He dialled Darker's number in the country, with the same result. The intervention warrant was in operation.

Burr drove through the gates and entered a formal park run wild. Deer stared stupidly at him over the broken railing. The drive was thick with weeds. A grimy sign read JOYSTON BRADSHAW ASSOCIATES, BIRMINGHAM, With the BIRMINGHAM crossed out. Below it somebody had daubed the misspelled word Enquiries and an arrow. Burr passed a small lake. On the far side of it, the outlines of a great house appeared against the restless sky. Broken greenhouses and neglected stables clustered behind it in the dark. Some of the stables had once been offices. External iron staircases and gangways led to rows of padlocked doors. Of the main house, only the porch and two ground-floor windows were lit. He switched off the engine and took Goodhew's black briefcase from the passenger seat. He slammed the car shut and mounted the steps. An iron fist protruded from the stonework. He pulled it, then pushed it, but it didn't move. He grasped the door knocker and hammered on the door. The echoes were drowned in a tumult of howling dogs and a man's gravel voice lifted roughly against them:

"Whisper, shut up! Get down, damn you! All right, Veronica, I'll take it. That you, Burr?"

"Yes."

"You alone?"

"Yes."

The clatter of a chain being slipped from its runner. The turning of a heavy lock.

"Stay where you are. Let 'em smell you," the voice ordered.

The door opened; two great mastiffs snuffled at Burr's shoes, dribbled on his trouser legs and licked his hands. He stepped into a vast dark hallway reeking of damp and wood ash. Pale rectangles marked the places where pictures had once hung. A single light bulb burned in the chandelier. By its glow, Burr recognised the dissolute features of Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw. He wore a frayed smoking jacket and a town shirt with no collar.

The woman, Veronica, stood apart from him in an arched doorway, grey-haired and indeterminately aged. A wife? A nanny? A mistress? A mother? Burr had no idea. Beside her stood a small girl. She was about nine and wore a navy blue dressing gown with gold embroidery on the collar. Her bedroom slippers had gold rabbits on the toes. With her long fair hair brushed down her back, she looked like a child of the French aristocracy on her way to the scaffold.

"Hullo," Burr said to her. "I'm Leonard."

"Off to bed, Ginny," Bradshaw said. "Veronica, take her to bed. Got some important business to discuss, darling, mustn't be disturbed. About money, you see. Come on. Give us a kiss."