The Night Manager (14 page)

"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."