The Night Manager

But they were reckoning without Sophie. They didn't know about his Secret Sharer. Sophie who had been there ahead of him. And was there now, smiling at him over her coffee, please, Egyptian. Forgiving him. Amusing him: seducing him a little, urging him to live by daylight. When they beat his face ― a prolonged and careful beating, but a devastating one ― he wryly compared faces with her, and for a distraction he told her all about the Irish boy and the Heckler. But nothing maudlin; she was utterly against it; they never went in for self-pity or lost their sense of humour. You killer this woman? she teased him, lifting her plucked dark eyebrows and laughing her mannish laugh. No, he hadn't killered her. They had put that discussion behind them long ago. She had listened to his account of his dealings with Ogilvey, she had heard him out, now smiling, now frowning in distaste. "I think you did your duty, Mr. Pine," she declared when he had finished. "Unfortunately there are many kinds of loyalty, and we cannot serve them all at once. Like my husband, you believed you were a patriot. Next time you will make a better choice. Perhaps we shall make it together." When Tabby and Frisky worked on his body ― mostly by chaining him in attitudes that produced prolonged and excruciating pain ― Sophie reminded him how her body had been broken too: in her case, clubbed until it was destroyed. And when he was deep down and half asleep and wondering how he would make it back to the top of the crevasse, he regaled her with accounts of difficult climbs he had made in the Oberland ― a north face of the Jungfrau that had gone seriously wrong; bivouacking in a hundred-mile-an-hour wind. And Sophie, if she was bored, never showed it. She listened with her great brown eyes steadfastly upon him, loving and encouraging him: I am sure, that you will never again give yourself away so cheaply, Mr. Pine

, she had told him. Our good manners can sometimes disguise our courage from us. Have you something to read on the plane back to Cairo? I think I shall read. It will help me to remember that I am myself. And then, to his surprise, he was back in the little flat in Luxor, watching her pack up her overnight bag, one object at a time and very deliberately, as if she were selecting companions for a much longer journey than the trip to Cairo.

And of course it was Sophie who had encouraged him to keep his silence. Had she herself not died without betraying him?

When they had pulled off the adhesive and removed the chamois bung, it was on Sophie's advice that he asked to speak to Roper personally.

"That's the way, then, Tommy," said Tabby, out of breath from his exertions. "You have a natter with the Chief. Then we can all have a nice beer together like the old days."

And Roper in his own good time strolled down to see him, dressed in his cruise gear ― including the white buckskin shoes with crepe soles that Jonathan had noticed in his dressing room at Crystal ― and sat on the chair across the room from him. And it passed through Jonathan's mind that this was now the second time that Roper had seen him with his face in a mess, and that Roper's expression on both occasions had been identical: the same wrinkling of the nose, the same critical assessment of the damage and of Jonathan's chances of survival. He wondered how Roper would have looked at Sophie if he had been around while they were beating her to death.

"All right, Pine?" he asked pleasantly. "No complaints? They looking after you all right?"

"Beds are a bit lumpy."

Roper laughed good-humouredly. "Can't have everything, I suppose. Jed misses you."

"Then send her to me."

"Not her scene, I'm afraid. Convent girl. Likes a sheltered life."

So Jonathan explained to Roper that during his initial conversations with Langbourne, Corkoran and others, the suggestion had repeatedly been aired that Jed was in some way involved in Jonathan's activities. And he wished to say categorically that whatever he had done, he had done it alone, unaided at any point by Jed. And that far too much had been made of a couple of social visits to Woody's House that had taken place when Jed was being bored to death by Caroline Langbourne and Jonathan was lonely. After that, he regretted he could not answer any further questions. Roper, normally so swift to take a point, seemed for a while stuck for words.

"Your people kidnapped my boy," he said at last. "You lied your way into my house, stole my woman. You tried to screw up my deal. Hell do I care whether you talk or not? You're dead."