How he strode the cliff path in the early mornings like a man who couldn’t sleep; so that Pete Hosken and his brother out at sea, lifting their lobster pots off Lanyon Head at dawn, would glimpse him on the clifftop, striding out like a trooper, most often with a pack on his shoulders: and what the hell would he put in a pack at that hour of the day? Drugs, I suppose. Well, they must have been. We know that too.
And how he worked the cliff meadows, up and down with his pick, till you’d think he was punishing the earth that bore him: that fellow could have made an honest living as a workman any day. Vegetables he was tilling, so he said, but didn’t never stay long enough to eat them.
And cooked all his own food, said Dora Harris; gourmet by the smell of it, because when the southwesterly was mild enough he could make her mouth water from half a mile off, same with Pete and his brother out to sea.
And how he was sweet on Marilyn Trethewey, or more likely she was sweet on him—well, Linden, he was sweet on everybody, to a point, but Marilyn hadn’t smiled for three winters, not till Jack Linden gave her reason.
And how he fetched old Bessie Jago’s groceries for her twice a week on his motorbike from Mrs. Trethewey’s—Bessie living on the corner to Lanyon Lane—arranging everything tidy on her shelves, not dumping the tins and packets on the table for her to sort out afterwards. And chattered to her all about his cottage, how he was slurrying his roof with cement and fitting new sashes to his windows and laying a new path to his front door.
But that was all he talked about, not a word about himself at all, where he’d lived or what he’d lived off, so that it was quite by accident they learned he had an interest in a boat business in Falmouth, a firm called Sea Pony, specialists in chartering and leasing sailing yachts. But not very highly regarded at all, said Pete Pengelly, more a hangout for water cowboys and druggies from up-country. Pete spotted him sitting in their front office one day when he took his van up to fetch a reconditioned outboard from Sparrows boatyard next door: Linden was sat at a table, said Pete, talking to a big, fat, sweating, bearded bugger with curly hair and a gold chain round his neck, who seemed to run the place. So that when Pete got to Sparrow’s he asked old Jason Sparrow outright: What’s up with Sea Pony next door, then, Jason? Looks like they’ve been taken over by the Mafia.
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 lump 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 were 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 hisself 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 checkered stream of puzzled reminiscence: at home as they sit dog-tired from the plow 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?”
“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 i
n 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 smolder 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 motor-cycling boots and gazed out of the smashed windows at the apoca-lyptic 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 penciled 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 sensuality. 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.
The first time Marilyn Trethewey came to visit Jonathan was to deliver a case of mineral water that was too big to go on his motorbike. She was finely molded like her mother, with a strict set jaw and jet-black hair the color of Sophie’s, and ruddy Cornish cheeks and strong high breasts, for she could not have been a day more than twenty. Spotting her striding behind her pram down the village street, always alone, or standing apart at the till in her mother’s shop, Jonathan had wondered whether she was even seeing him, or merely resting her gaze on him while she saw something different in her mind.
She insisted on carrying the case of bottles to the front door, and when he made to take it from her, she shrugged him off. So he stood on his own doorstep while she went into the house and set the box on the kitchen table, then took a long stare round the living room before coming back outside.
“Dig yourself in,” Burr had advised. “Buy a greenhouse, plant a garden, form lifelong friendships. We need to know you had to tear yourself away. If you can find a girl to leave dangling, so much the better. In a perfect world you’d make her pregnant.”
“Thanks very much.”
Burr caught his tone and gave him a swift sideways glance. “What’s the matter, then? Taken a vow of celibacy, have we? That Sophie really got to you, didn’t she?”
A couple of days later Marilyn came again, this time without anything to deliver. And instead of her habitual jeans and scruffy top, she had got herself up in a skirt and jacket, as if she had a date with her solicitor. She rang the bell, and as soon as he opened the door she said, “You gon’ leave me be, then, right?” So he took a step back and let her past him, and she placed herself at the center of the room as if testing his reliability. And he saw that the lace cuffs of her blouse were shaking, and he knew that it had cost her a lot to get this far.
“You like it here, then, do you?” she asked him in her challenging way. “All by your own?” She had her mother’s quick eye and untutored shrewdness.
“It’s meat and drink to me,” said Jonathan, taking refuge in his hotelier’s voice.
“What d’you do, then? You can’t watch telly all day. You haven’t got none.”
“Read. Walk. Do a bit of business here and there.” So now go, he thought, smiling tensely at her, eyebrows raised.
“You paint, then, do you?” she said, examining his watercolors set out on the table before the seaward window.
“I try.”
“I can paint.” She was picking through the brushes, testing them for springiness and shape. “I was good at painting. Won prizes, didn’t I?”
“Why don’t you paint now, then?” Jonathan asked.
He had meant it as a question, but to his alarm she took it as an invitation. Having emptied out the water jar in the sink, she refilled it and sat down at his table, selected a fresh sheet of cartridge paper and, having tucked her hair behind her ears, lost herself to everything except her work. And with her long back turned to him, and her black hair hanging down it, and the sunlight from the window blazing on the top of her head, she was Sophie, his accusing angel, come to visit him.
He watched her for a while, waiting hopefully for the association to fade, but it didn’t, so he went outside and dug in the garden until dusk. He returned to find her wiping down the table just as she had done at school. Then she propped her unfinished painting against the wall, and instead of sea or sky or cliff, it showed a dark-haired, laughing girl—Sophie as a child, for instance, Sophie long before she married her perfect English gentleman for his passport.
“Come again tomorrow, then?” she asked in her clipped, aggressive way.
“Of course. If you wish. Why not?” said the hotelier, making a mental note to be in Falmouth. “If I have to be out, I’ll leave the door open.”
And when he returned from Falmouth he found the painting of the girl completed, and a note telling him gruffly that it was for him. After that she came most afternoons, and when she had finished her painting she sat herself opposite him in the armchair across the fire and read his copy of The Guardian.
“World’s in a damn good mess, then, isn’t it, Jack?” she announced, rattling the paper. And he heard her laugh, whi
ch was what the village was beginning to hear too. “It’s a bloody pigsty, Jack Linden. You take my word for it.”
“Oh, I do,” he assured her, careful not to return her smile for too long. “I absolutely do, Marilyn.”
But he began urgently to wish her gone. Her vulnerability scared him. So did his sense of distance from her. Not in a thousand years, he assured Sophie in his mind, I swear.
Only occasionally, in the early mornings, for he woke most often with the dawn, did Jonathan’s operational resolve threaten to collapse, and for a black hour he became the plaything of a past that reached much further back than Sophie’s betrayal. He remembered the prickle of uniform against his child’s skin and the khaki collar sawing at his neck. He saw himself sleeping at attention in the iron cot of his barrack room, waiting for reveille and the first falsetto orders of the day. Don’t stand like a bloody butler, Pine, get your shoulders back, boy! Right back! More! He relived his fear of everything: of the mockery when he failed and the envy when he won; of the parade ground and the games field and the boxing ring; of being caught when he stole things for his comfort—a penknife, a photograph of someone’s parents; of his fear of failure, which meant failing to ingratiate himself, of being late or early, too clean, not clean enough, too loud, too quiet, too subservient, too cheeky. He remembered learning to be brave as an alternative to cowardice. He remembered the day he struck back, and the day he struck first, as he taught himself to lead from weakness into strength. He remembered his early women, no different from his later ones, each a bigger disillusionment than the last as he struggled to elevate them to the divine status of the woman he had never had.
Of Roper he thought constantly—he had only to fish him from the pockets of his memory to feel a surge of purpose and direction. He could not listen to the radio or read a newspaper without detecting Roper’s hidden hand in every conflict. If he read of a massacre of women and children in East Timor, it was Roper’s guns that had committed the outrage. If a car bomb exploded in Beirut, Roper had supplied it, and probably the car as well: Been there. Seen the movie, thanks.
The Night Manager Page 12
