The Night Manager

"Australian bugger got no more'n what he deserved," says a voice from the corner. "He was more rough than ever Jack was by a mile. You see his hands, then, Pete? Dear God, they was big as marrows."

It takes Ruth Trethewey to lend the philosophical touch, though Ruth will never talk about the Marilyn side and shuts anybody up who tries it in her company. "Every man has his personal devil waiting for him somewhere," declares Ruth, who since her husband's death will occasionally flout the male domination of the Snug. "There's no man here tonight who hasn't got murder in his heart if the wrong person tempts him to it. You can be Prince Charles, I don't care. Jack Linden was too polite for his health. Everything he'd got locked up in him come out all at once."

"Damn you, Jack Linden," Pete Pengelly announces suddenly, flushed with drink, while they sit there in the respectful silence that always follows one of Ruth Trethewey's insights.

"If you walked in here tonight I'd buy you a bloody beer, boy, and shake you by the bloody hand same as I did that night."

And next day Jack Linden will be forgotten, perhaps for weeks. His amazing sea voyage is forgotten, so is the mystery of the two men in a Rover car who were said to have called on him at the Lanyon the night before he flitted ― and several times before that, according to one or two who ought to have known.

Yet the press cuttings are still pinned to the Snug wall, the blue crags of Lanyon valley still weep and smoulder in the poor weather that seems always to hang over them, the gorse and daffodils still flourish side by side on the banks of the Lanyon River, which is no wider these days than a fit man's stride. The darkened lane twists beside it on its way to the stubby cottage that was Jack Linden's home. The fishermen still steer a healthy berth round Lanyon Head, where brown rocks lurk like crocodiles at low water and the currents can suck you under on the quietest days, so that every year some fool cowboy from up-country, with a girlfriend and a rubber dinghy, diving for bits of wreck, dives his last or has to be lugged to safety by a rescue helicopter from Culdrose.

There were bodies enough in Lanyon Bay, they say in the village, long before Jack Linden added his bearded Australian to the score.

* * *

And Jonathan?

Jack Linden was as much a mystery to himself as to the village.

A dirty drizzle was falling as he kicked open the front door of the cottage and dumped his saddlebags on the bare boards. He had ridden three hundred and thirty miles in five hours. Yet as he tramped from one desolate bare room to another in his motorcycling boots and gazed out of the smashed windows at the apocalyptic landscape, he smiled to himself like a man who has found the palace of his dreams. I'm on my way, he thought. To complete myself, he thought, remembering the oath he had sworn in Herr Meister's fine-wine cellar. To discover the missing parts of my life. To get it right with Sophie.

His training in London belonged to another room in his mind: the memory games, the camera games, the communications games, the ceaseless drip of Burr's methodical instruction, be this, never be that, be your natural self but more so. Their planning fascinated Jonathan. He enjoyed their ingenuity and the paths of contrary reasoning.

"We'll reckon on Linden lasting the first round," Burr had said through Rooke's pipe smoke, as the three men sat together in the Spartan training house in Lisson Grove. "After that we'll find you someone else to be. You still up for this?"

Oh, he was up for this! With his rekindled sense of duty, he had cheerfully participated in his impending destruction, adding touches of his own that he considered more faithful to the original.

"Hang on a sec, Leonard. I'm on the run and the police are looking for me, okay? You say make a dash for France. But I'm an Ireland man. I'd never trust a border while I'm hot."

And they heeded him, and pencilled in a hellish extra week of lying low, and were impressed, and said as much behind his back.

"Keep him on a tight lead," Rooke advised Burr in his role as custodian of Jonathan's army persona. "No pampering. No extra rations. No unnecessary visits to the front line to buck him up. If he can't take it, the sooner we find out the better."

But Jonathan could take it. He had always taken it. Deprival was his element. He longed for a woman, a woman he had yet to meet, someone with a mission like his own, not a frivolous equestrienne with a rich patron: a woman with Sophie's gravitas and heart, and Sophie's undivided sexuality. Rounding a corner on his cliff walks, he would let his face light up with a smile of delighted recognition at the notion that this unmet paragon of female virtue would be waiting for him: Oh, hullo, Jonathan, it's you. Yet too often, when he examined her features more closely, she bore an uncomfortable similarity to Jed: Jed's wayward, perfect body, Jed's puckish smile.

* * *