The Night Manager

One's Linden, the other's Harlow, Jason told Pete. Linden's from up-country, and Harlow, he's the big fat bearded bugger, Australian. The two of them bought the place for cash, said Jason, and haven't done a damn thing by it except smoke cigarettes and sail pleasure yachts up and down the estuary. Linden, he's some sailor, Jason conceded. But that Harlow, the fat one, he doesn't know his arse from his rudder. Mostly they quarrel, said Jason. Or Harlow does. Yells like a bloody bull. The other one, Linden, he just smiles. There's partners for you, said Jason with contempt.

So that was the first they heard of Harlow. Linden & Harlow, partners and enemies.

A week later, at lunchtime in the Snug, the same Harlow became flesh, and a bigger Jump of it you never saw, eighteen stone, twenty. In he walked with Jack Linden and sat down right there in the pine corner next to the darts board where William Charles sits. Filled the whole damn bench, he did, and ate three pasties. And there the two of them stayed till afternoon closing time, heads together over a map, murmuring like a pair of bloody pirates. Well, we know why. They were plotting it.

And now turn your back and Jumbo Harlow dead. And Jack Linden vanished and not a bloody goodbye for anyone.

* * *

Vanished so fast that most of them only ever got to grips with him in their memories. Vanished so thoroughly that if they hadn't had the press cuttings pinned to the Snug wall they might have believed he never passed their way at all; that the Lanyon valley was never cordoned off with orange tape guarded by two dirty-minded young coppers from Camborne; that the plainclothes detectives never trampled over the village from milking time till dusk ― "three cars' worth of the buggers," says Pete Pengelly; that the journalists never poured down from Plymouth, even London, women some of them and others who might as well have been, bombarding everyone with their stupid questions, from Ruth Trethewey right down to Slow-and-Lucky, who's a penny short of a pound and walks his Alsatian dog all day, the dog as daft as Lucky is, but more teeth: what did he wear, then, Mr. Luck? what did he talk about? did he never act violent with you at all?

"First day of it, we didn't hardly know the bloody difference between coppers and reporters," Pete likes to recall, to the laughter of the Snug. "We was calling the reporters sir and telling the coppers to bugger off. Second day, we was telling the whole lot of 'em to bugger off."

"He never bloody did it, boy," growls shrunken William Charles from his place beside the darts board. "They never proved nothing. You don't find no corpse, you got no bloody murderer. That's the law."

"They found the blood, though, William," says Pete Pengelly's younger brother, Jacob, who got three A-levels.

"Bugger blood," says William Charles. "Drop of blood didn't never prove nothing. Some bugger up-country cuts his-self shaving, police jumps up and calls Jack Linden a murderer. Bugger 'em."

"Why'd he run away, then? Why'd he flit off in the middle of the night if he never killed nobody?"

"Bugger 'em," William Charles repeats, like a beautiful Amen.

And why'd he leave poor Marilyn looking like a snake bit her, staring up the road all day in case his motorbike come back? She wouldn't tell the police no nonsense. Told them she'd never heard of him, and bugger it! Well, she would.

On it flows, back and forth, a chequered stream of puzzled reminiscence: at home as they sit dog-tired from the plough before their flickering television sets, on fogged-out evenings in the Snug as they sip their third beers and gaze at the plank floor. Dusk falls, the mist rolls in and sticks to the sash windows like steam, there's not a breath. The day's wind stops dead, the crows go quiet. On one short stroll to the pub you smell warm milk from the dairy, paraffin stoves, coal fires, pipe smoke, silage and seaweed from the Lanyon. A helicopter is plodding out to Scilly. A tanker is lowing in the sea fog. The church tower's chimes bang in your ear like a boxing gong. Everything is single, everything a separate smell or sound or piece of remembering. A footstep in the lane snaps like a broken neck.

"Tell you one thing, boy," Pete Pengelly pipes up as if butting in on a lively argument, though nobody has spoken a word about anything for minutes. "Jack Linden must have had some damn good reason. Jack, he had a reason for everything he ever done. You tell me if he didn't."

"He was some man in a boat too," concedes young Jacob, who like his brother fishes small boats out of Porthgwarra. "He come out with we one Saturday, didn't he, Pete? Never spoke a bloody word. Said he'd take a fish home. I offered to clean it for him, didn't I? Oh, I'll do it, he says. Lifted the fish straight off the bloody bone. Skin, head, tail, flesh. Cleaned it better than a seal."

"How 'bout sailing, then? Channel Islands to Falmouth single-handed in half a bloody gale?"