The Night Manager

SEVEN

Jonathan arrived at Mrs. Trethewey's post office store on a bleak Friday, calling himself Linden, a name he had picked out of the air when Burr invited him to suggest one. He had never met a Linden in his life, unless he was unconsciously recalling something on his German mother's side, a song or poem she had recited to him on her seemingly eternal deathbed.

The day had been sullen and damp, an evening that began at breakfast. The village lay a few miles from Land's End. The blackthorn on Mrs. Trethewey's granite hedge was hunchbacked from the southwesterly gales. The bumper stickers in the church car park told strangers to go home.

There is larceny to returning covertly to your own country after you have abandoned it. There is larceny to using a brand-new alias and being a new version of yourself. You wonder whose clothes you have stolen, what shadow you are casting, whether you have been here before as someone else. There is a sense of occasion about your first day in the part after six years as your undefined self in exile. Some of this freshness may have shown in Jonathan's face, for Mrs. Trethewey has always afterwards maintained that she observed a cockiness about him, what she called a twinkle. And Mrs. Trethewey is not given to romancing. She is a clever woman, tall and stately, not country to look at at all. Sometimes she says things that make you wonder what she might have been if she'd had the education they get these days, or a husband with more under his hat than poor old Tom, who dropped dead of a stroke in Penzance last Christmastime after a touch too much charity at the Masonic Hall.

"Jack Linden, he was sharp now," she will say in her didactic Cornish way. "His eyes was nice enough when you first looked at them; merry, I dare say. But they was all over you and not the way you're thinking, Marilyn. They saw you far and close at the same time. You'd think he'd stole something before he ever come in the shop. Well, he had. We know that now. Same as we know a lot else we'd sooner not."

It was twenty past five and ten minutes to closing, and she was running up her totals on the electronic till before watching Neighbours on TV with Marilyn, her daughter, who was upstairs minding her little girl. She heard his big motorbike ― "one of them real growlers." She saw him bump it onto its stand and take off his helmet and smooth down his nice hair though it didn't need it, more a way of relaxing himself, she guessed. And she believed she saw him smile. An emmet, she thought, and a cheerful one at that. In West Cornwall emmet means foreigner, and a foreigner is anyone who comes from east of the river Tamar.

But this one could have been an emmet from the moon. She'd a good mind to turn the notice round on the door, she says, but his looks stopped her. Also his shoes, which were the same as her Tom's used to be, polished like conkers and wiped carefully on the mat as he came in, not what you expected from a motorcyclist at all.

So she went on with her totals while he drifted round the shelves without bothering to take a basket, which is men all over whether they're Paul Newman or plain as mud: come in for a packet of razor blades, end up with their arms full, anything but take a basket. And very quiet on his feet, soundless almost, him being so light. You don't think of motorbike people being quiet as a rule.

"You from up-country then, are you, my dove?" she asked him.

"Oh, well, yes, I'm afraid I am."

"There's no need to be afraid, my darling. There's plenty of nice people come from up-country, and there's plenty down here I wish would go up-country." No answer. Too busy with the biscuits. And his hands, she noticed, now he'd pulled his gloves off: groomed to a turn. She always liked well-kept hands. "What part are you from, then? Somewhere nice, I hope."

"Well, nowhere, really," he confessed, pert as may be, taking down two packets of digestives and a plain crackers and reading the labels as if he'd never seen them.

"You can't be from Nowhere Really, my robin," Mrs, Trethewey retorted, following him along the racks with her eyes. "You may not be Cornish, but you can't be just air. Where you from, now?"

But where the villagers tended to come smartly to attention when Mrs. Trethewey put on her stern voice, Jonathan merely smiled. "I've been living abroad," he explained, as if humouring her. "I'm a case of the wanderer returned."

And his voice the same as his hands and shoes, she recounts: polished like glass.

"What part of abroad, then, my bird?" she demanded. "There's more than one abroad, even down here. We're not that primitive, though there's a lot may think we are, I daresay."

But she couldn't get past him, she says. He just stood there and smiled and helped himself to tea and tuna and oat cakes, calm as a juggler, and every time she asked a question he made her feel cheeky.

"Well, I'm the one who's taken the cottage at the Lanyon, you see," he said.

"That means you're barking mad, then, my darling," said Ruth Trethewey comfortably. "Nobody who wasn't mad would want to live out on the Lanyon, sitting in the middle of a rock all day."

And this farawayness in him, she says. Well, he was a sailor, of course, we know that now even if he put it to a bad use. This fixed grin he had while he studied the tinned fruits like he was learning them by heart. Elusive, that's what he was. Like soap in the bath. You thought you had him, then he'd slipped through your fingers. There was something about him, that's all she knows.

"Well, I suppose you have a name at least, if you've decided to join us." said Mrs. Trethewey in a kind of indignant despair. "Or did you leave that abroad when you come home?"

"Linden," he said, getting out his money. "Jack Linden. With an i and an e," he added helpfully. "Not to be confused with Lyndon with a y."

She remembers how carefully he loaded everything into his saddlebags, one for this side, one for that side, like trimming his boat. Then kick-started his bike, with his arm up to say goodbye. You're Linden of the Lanyon, she decided, as she watched him ride up to the crossroads and tilt neatly to the left. From Nowhere Really.

"I've had a Mr.-Linden-of-the-Lanyon-with-an-i-and-an-e in the shop," she told Marilyn when she went upstairs. "And he's got a motorbike bigger than a horse."

"Married, I suppose," said Marilyn, who had a baby girl but would never talk about the father.

And that was who Jonathan became, from his first day until the news broke: Linden of the Lanyon, another of those migrant English souls who seem almost by gravity to sink further and further westward down the peninsula, trying to escape their secrets and themselves.

The rest of the village's intelligence about him was gathered piecemeal by those near-supernatural methods that are the pride of any good network. How he was rich, which was to say he paid cash and paid it almost before it was owed ― in new fives and tens counted like playing cards onto the lid of Mrs. Trethewey's deep-freeze. Well, we know where he got that from, don't we? No wonder it was cash!

"Say when, please, Mrs. Trethewey," Jonathan would call as he went on dealing out the bank notes. Shocking really to think they weren't his. But money has no smell, they say.

"Now, that's not my job, Mr. Linden," Mrs. Trethewey would protest. "That's your job. I can take all you've got of those and more." In the country, jokes fare best by repetition.

How he spoke all the foreign languages in the world, leastways German. Because when Dora Harris at the Count House had a lady German hiker go poorly on her, Jack Linden got to hear about it somehow and rode down to the Count House and talked to her, with Mrs. Harris sitting on the bed for respectability. Then stayed till Dr. Maddern came, so he could translate the girl's symptoms to him, some of them very intimate, said Dora, but Jack Linden knew all the words. Dr. Maddern said he must have special knowledge to know words like that at all.

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 cliff top, 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 Sparrow's 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 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?"

"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.

* * *

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 moulded like her mother, with a strict set jaw and jet-black hair the colour 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 life-long 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 centre 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 watercolours 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 snowed 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, in't it, Jack?" she announced, rattling the paper. And he heard her laugh, which 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.

After Roper, it was Roper's people who became the object of his fascinated indignation. He thought of Major Corkoran alias Corky alias Corks, in his grimy muffler and disgraceful suede boots: Corky the signer. Corky who could get five hundred years in jail anytime Burr chose.

He thought of Frisky and Tabby and the misty company of retainers ― of Sandy Lord Langbourne, with his gold hair bound at the nape; of Dr. Apostoll on his risers, whose daughter had killed herself for a Cartier watch; of MacArthur and Danby, the grey-suited executive twins from the nearly respectable side of the operation ― until collectively the Roper household became a kind of monstrous First Family for him, with Jed his First Lady in the Tower.

"How much does she know about his business?" Jonathan asked Burr once.

Burr shrugged. "The Roper doesn't boast and doesn't tell. Nobody knows more than he needs to. Not with our Dicky."

An upper-class waif, thought Jonathan. A convent-school education. A faith rejected. A locked-up childhood like mine.

* * *

Jonathan's only confidant was Harlow, but between operational confidants there are limits to what either can confide. "Harlow is a walk-on." Rooke warned, during a night visit to the Lanyon. "He's only there for you to kill. He doesn't know the target, and he doesn't need to. Keep it that way."

Nevertheless, for this stage of the journey the murderer and his mark were allies, and Jonathan strove to make a bond with him.

"You a married man, Jumbo?"

They were sitting at the scrubbed pine table in Jonathan's kitchen after returning from their planned appearance at the Snug. Jumbo shook his head regretfully and took a pull of beer. He was an embarrassed soul, as big men often are, an actor or a grounded opera singer with a huge barrel chest. His black beard, Jonathan suspected, had been grown expressly for the part and would be gratefully removed as soon as the show ended. Was Jumbo a genuine Australian? It didn't matter. He was an expatriate everywhere.

"I shall expect a lavish funeral, Mr. Linden," said Jumbo gravely. "Black horses, a sparkling carriage and a nine-year-old catamite in a top hat. Your health."

"And yours too, Jumbo."

Having drained his sixth can, Jumbo slapped on his blue denim cap and lumbered to the door. Jonathan watched his crippled Land-Rover hobble up the winding lane.

"Who on earth was that?" said Marilyn, arriving with a pair of fresh mackerel.

"Oh, he's just my business partner," said Jonathan.

"Looked more like bloody Godzilla on a dark night to me."

She wanted to fry the fish, but he showed her how to bake it in foil, with fresh dill and seasoning. Once, as a dare, she tied his apron round him, and he felt her strong black hair brush against his cheek and waited for the smell of vanilla. Stay away from me. I betray. I kill. Go home.

* * *

One afternoon Jonathan and Jumbo took the plane from Plymouth to Jersey and in the little port of St. Helier made a show of inspecting a twenty-five-foot yacht that was moored on the far side of the harbour. Their journey, like their joint appearance at the Snug, was intended for display. In the evening. Jumbo flew back alone.

The yacht they inspected was called Ariadne, and according to her log she had arrived from Roscoff two weeks earlier, sailed by a Frenchman named Lebray. Before Roscoff she was in Biarritz and, before that, open seas. Jonathan spent two days fitting her out, provisioning her and preparing the chartwork.

On the third day he took her to sea to get the feel of her and boxed the compass for himself while he was about it, for at sea as on land he trusted no one's work but his own. At first light on the fourth day he set sail. The area forecast was good, and for fifteen hours he cruised nicely at four knots, reaching for Falmouth on a southwesterly. But by evening the wind had turned blustery and by midnight it had freshened to a six or seven, throwing a big ground swell that had the Ariadne pitching.

Jonathan reduced sail and ran before the weather for the safety of Plymouth. As he passed the Eddystone Lighthouse the wind veered westerly and fell, so he changed course to Falmouth once more and beat west, hugging the shore and short-tacking to avoid the heavy weather. By the time he reached harbour he had been sailing hard for two nights without sleep. Sometimes the sounds of the storm deafened him. Sometimes he heard no weather at all and wondered if he was dead.

The beam sea and the close-hauling had rolled him about like a boulder; his body creaked and his head rang hollow with the solitude of the sea. But throughout the journey he thought of nothing he afterwards remembered. Or nothing but his own survival, Sophie was right. He had a future.

"You been somewhere nice, then?" Marilyn asked him, staring at the fire. She had taken off her cardigan. She wore a sleeveless blouse, buttoned down the back.

"Just a trip upcountry."

He realised with dread that she had been waiting for him all day. Another painting stood on the chimney-piece, very like the first. She had brought him fruit, and freesias for the vase.

"Well, thank you," he said politely. "That's super of you. Thanks."

"You want me, then, Jack Linden?"

She had lifted her hands to the back of her neck and unfastened the top two buttons of her blouse. She took a step to him and smiled. She began weeping, and he didn't know what to do. He put his arm round her and led her to her van and left her there to weep till she was ready to drive home.

* * *

That night, an almost metaphysical sense of his uncleanliness descended over Jonathan. In his extreme solitude, he decided that the fake murder he was about to commit was an externalisation of the real murders he had already committed in Ireland and the murder he had committed against Sophie; and that the ordeal that awaited him was a mere foretaste of a lifetime of penance.

For the days that remained to him, a passionate fondness for the Lanyon took possession of his heart and he rejoiced in every fresh example of the cliff's perfection: the seabirds wherever they put themselves, always in the right place, the hawks lying on the wind, the setting sun melting into black cloud, the fleets of small boats clustered over the shoals below, while the gulls above made a shoal of their own. And when darkness came, there were the boats again, a tiny city in the middle of the sea. With each last hour, this urge to be assumed into the landscape ― hidden in it, buried in it ― became almost unbearable.

A storm got up. Lighting a candle in the kitchen, he stared past it into the swirling night, while the wind crackled in the window frames and made the slate roof chatter like an Uzi. In the early morning, when the storm dropped, he ventured outdoors to wander over last night's battlefield ― then, Lawrence-like, leapt helmetless onto his motorbike, drove up to one of the old hill forts and scanned the coastline till he made out some landmark that pointed to the Lanyon. That is my home. The cliff has accepted me. I will live here forever. I will be clean.

But his vows were in vain. The soldier in him was already polishing his boots for the long march toward the worst man in the world.

* * *

It was during these final days of Jonathan's tenure of the cottage that Pete Pengelly and his brother. Jacob, made the mistake of going lamping at the Lanyon.

Pete tells the story cautiously, and with visitors present he won't tell it at all, for there's confession to it and a certain rueful pride. Lamping for rabbits in those parts has been a hallowed sport for fifty years and more. With two motorcycle batteries in a small box strapped against your hip, an old car spotlamp with a close beam, and a bunch of spare six-volt bulbs, you can mesmerise a whole convocation of rabbits for long enough to pick them off in salvos. No law and no battalions of strident ladies in brown berets and ankle socks have succeeded in putting a stop to it, and the Lanyon has been a favoured hunting ground for generations ― or was, until four of them went up there one night with guns and lamps, led by Pete Pengelly and his younger brother, Jacob.

They parked at Lanyon Rose, then picked their way along the riverbed. Pete swears to this day they were quiet as rabbits themselves and hadn't used the lamps but found their way by full moon, which was why they'd chosen that night. But when they came out on the cliff, careful to keep below the horizon, there stood Jack Linden not half a dozen paces uphill from them, his bare hands lifted from his sides. Kenny Thomas afterwards kept on about his hands, so pale and prominent in the moonlight, but that was the effect of the occasion. The knowing recall that Jack Linden never had big hands. Pete prefers to talk about Linden's face, which was set, he says, like a chunk of bloody blue elvan rock against the sky. You'd have broken your fist on it. There is no dispute about what took place after that.

"Excuse me, but where do you gentlemen think you're going, if I may ask?" says Linden with his customary respectfulness but no smile.

"Lamping," says Pete.

"Nobody's lamping here, I'm afraid, Pete," says Linden, who had only set eyes on Pete Pengelly a couple of times but seemed never to forget a name. "I own these fields, you know that. I don't farm them, but I do own them, and I let them be. That's what I expect other people to do as well. So I'm afraid lamping is out."

"It is, is it, Mr. Linden?" Pete Pengelly says.

"Yes, it is, Mr. Pengelly. I won't have sitting game shot on my land. It's not fair play. So why don't you all please empty your guns and go back to the car and go home and no hard feelings?"

At which Pete says, "To hell with you, boy," and the other three gather to Pete's side so that they are all four bunched and looking up at Linden, four guns against one fellow with the moon behind him. They had come straight on from the Snug, all of them, and were the better for a beer or two.

"Get out of our bloody way, Mr. Linden," says Pete.

Then he makes the mistake of fidgeting his gun under his arm. Not pointing it at Linden: he swore he would never have done that, and those who know Pete believe him. And the gun was broken: Pete would never in his life have walked with a closed and loaded gun at night, he says. Nevertheless, as he fidgeted the gun, making it clear that he meant business, it is possible he snapped the breach shut by mistake; he will grant you that. Pete does not claim to have a precise and accurate memory of everything that happened, because the world by then was turning on its head around him, the moon was in the sea, his arse was on the other side of his face, and his feet were the other side of his arse, and the first useful information Pete could put together was that Linden was standing over him emptying the cartridges from his gun. And since it is true that big men fall harder than small men, Pete had fallen very hard indeed, and the impact of the blow, wherever it had hit him, had robbed him not only of his breath but of his will to get up.

The ethics of violence required that it was now the turn of the others, and there were still three of them. The two Thomas brothers had always been quick with their fists, and young Jacob played wing forward for the Pirates and was broad as a bus. And Jacob was all set to go in after his brother. It was Pete, lying in the bracken, who ordered him off.

"Don't touch him, boy. Don't you ever bloody go near him. He's a bloody witch, Go back to the car, all of us," he said, climbing slowly to his feet.

"Empty your guns first, please," says Linden.

On Pete Pengelly's nod the three men emptied the cartridges from their guns. Then all four trooped back to the car.

"I'd have bloody killed him!" Jacob protested as soon as they had driven off. "I'd have broke the bugger's legs for him, Pete, after what he done to you!"

"No, you wouldn't, my handsome," Pete replied. "But he'd have broke yours for sure."

And Pete Pengelly, they say in the village, changed his manners from that night on, though perhaps they are a little hasty to link cause with effect. Come September month, Pete married a sensible farmer's daughter from St. Just. Which is why he is able to look back on the episode with distance and tell about the night Jack Linden damn near did for him the way he did for that fat Aussie.

"I'll tell you one thing, boy. If Jack did do him in, he made some neat job of it, that's for sure."

But there's a better ending to it than that, even if Pete sometimes keeps it to himself like a thing too precious to share. The night before Jack Linden disappeared, he walked into the Snug and laid a bandaged hand on Pete Pengelly's shoulder and bought him a bloody beer, man. They talked for ten minutes, then Jack Linden went on home. "He was puttin' it right with himself," Pete insists proudly. "You bloody listen to me, boy. Jack Linden was setting his bloody house straight after he done his business with the Aussie."

Except that his name wasn't Jack Linden by then, which was something they couldn't properly get used to, and perhaps they never will. A couple of days after his disappearance, Linden-of-the-Lanyon-with-an-i-and-an-e turned out to be Jonathan Pine of Zürich, wanted by the Swiss police on suspicion of embezzlement at a fashionable hotel where he had been a trusted employee. "Sailing Hotelier on the Run," the Cornishman sang, over a photograph of Pine alias Linden. "Police seek Falmouth boat trader in case of missing Australian. 'We are treating this as a drug-related murder enquiry,' says CID chief. The man should be easily identified by his bandaged hand.' "

But Pine was not a man they knew.

* * *

Yes, bandaged. And wounded. Wound and bandage were both integral features of Burr's plan.

Jack Linden's hand, the same as he had laid on Pete Pengelly's shoulder. A lot of people, not just Pete Pengelly, had seen that hand bandaged, and the police, at Burr's instigation, made a fair fuss of who they all were, which hand it was, and when. And when they'd got the who and the when and the which, then, being police, they wanted the why. Which is to say. they wrote down the conflicting versions that Jack had given for having his right hand done up in a big gauze bandage, professional, and the fingertips tied together like asparagus. And with Burr's help, the police made sure these found their way into the press.

"Trying to fit a new pane of glass at my cottage," Jack Linden told Mrs. Trethewey on the Thursday as he paid her out his cash wrong-handed for the last time.

"Teach me to help out a friend," Jack had remarked to old William Charles when the two of them chanced to meet at Penhaligon's garage, Jack for petrol for the bike, William Charles for passing the time. "Asked me to pop by and help him mend his window. And now look." Then shoved his bandaged hand at William Charles like a sick dog with his paw, because Jack could make a joke of anything.

But it was Pete Pengelly who got them hot and bothered. "Of course it was in his bloody woodshed, boy!" he told the detective sergeant. "Trimming a pane of bloody glass, he was, up at the Lanyon in his woodshed, and the cutter slipped, blood all over the place. He put a bandage on it, bound it tight and drove himself one-handed to hospital on his bike, blood running up his sleeve all the way to Truro, told me! You don't make that up, boy. You bloody do it."

But when the police dutifully inspected the Lanyon woodshed, they found no glass, no cutter and no blood.

Murderers lie, Burr had explained to Jonathan. Too consistent is too dangerous. If you don't err, you won't be criminal.

The Roper checks, Burr had explained. Even when he's not suspicious, he checks. So we give you these little murderer's lies, to make the untrue murder true.

And a nice scar speaks volumes.

* * *

And at some point in these last few days, Jonathan broke all the rules and, without Burr's consent or knowledge, visited his former wife, Isabelle, in search of atonement.

I'll be passing through, he lied, telephoning her from a PenIance call box. Let's have lunch somewhere quiet. Riding his motorbike to Bath, wearing only the left glove because of his bandaged hand, he rehearsed his lines to her until they became a heroic song in his mind: You'll read things about me in the papers, but they won't be true, Isabelle. I'm sorry about the bad times, Isabelle, but there were good times too. Then he wished her luck, imagining she would do the same for him.

In a men's lavatory he changed into his suit and became a hotelier again. He hadn't seen her for five years, and he barely recognised her when she strode in twenty minutes late and blamed the bloody traffic. The long brown hair she used to brush down her naked back before they went to bed was cut to a practical brevity. She wore chunky clothes to hide her shape and carried a zip bag with a cellular telephone. And he remembered how, by the end, the telephone had been the only thing she could talk to.

"Christ," she said. "You look prosperous. Don't worry, I'll switch it off."

She's become a blurter, he thought, and remembered that her new husband was something in the local hunt.

"Well, stone the crows," she shouted. "Corporal Pine. After all these years. What on earth have you done to your hand?"

"Dropped a boat on it," he said, which apparently was sufficient explanation. He asked her how business was. In his suit it seemed the right sort of question to ask. He had heard she had gone into interior design.

"Bloody awful," she replied heartily. "What's Jonathan up to, anyway? Oh my Lord," she said, when he told her. "You're in the leisure industries too. We're doomed, darling. You're not building them, are you?"

"No, no. Brokering. Ferrying. We've got off to quite a decent start."

"Who's we, darling?"

"An Australian chum."

"Male?"

"Male and eighteen stone."

"What are you doing for sex? I always thought you might be queer. You're not, though, are you?"

It was a charge she had made often in her day, but she seemed to have forgotten this.

"Good Lord no," Jonathan replied with a laugh. "How's Miles?"

"Worthy. Very sweet. Banking and good works. He's got to pay off my overdraft next month, so I'm being nice to him."

She ordered a warm duck salad and Badoit and lit a cigarette.

"Why did you give up hoteling?" she asked, blowing smoke in his face. "Bored?"

"Just the lure of the new," he said.

We'll desert, the captain's untameable daughter had whispered as she spread her sublime body over his. If I have to eat one more army dinner I'll blow up this whole barracks single-handed. Fuck me, Jonathan. Make me a woman. Fuck me and take me somewhere I can breathe.

"How's the painting doing?" he asked, remembering how they had both worshiped her great talent, how he had abased himself in order to elevate it, cooked and carried and swept for her, believing she would paint the better for his self-denial.

She snorted. "My last exhibition was three years ago. Sold six out of thirty, all to Miles's rich friends. Probably needed someone like you to make a basket case out of me. Jesus, you led me a dance. What the hell did you want? I wanted to be van Gogh ― what did you want? Apart from being the army's answer to Rambo?"

You, he thought. I wanted you, but you weren't there. He could say none of it. He wished he could be worse-mannered.

Bad manners are freedom, she used to say. Fucking is bad manners. But there was no point to her argument anymore. He had come to ask forgiveness for the future, not the past.

"Anyway, why didn't you want me to tell Miles I was seeing you?" she asked accusingly.

Jonathan pulled the old false smile. "I didn't want us to upset him," he said.

For a magic moment he saw her as he had first possessed her in the days when she was the belle of his regimental depot: the crisp rebellious face tilted in desire, lips parted, the angry smoulder in her eyes. Come back, he shouted in his heart. Let's try again.

The young ghost vanished and the old one reappeared.

"Why on earth don't you pay in plastic?" she asked as he counted out the bank notes with his left hand. "Far easier to tell where the pennies are going, darling."

Burr was right, he thought. I'm a single man.