The Night Manager

Burr was still sitting with his hands buried in his face, speaking through his splayed fingers. "What the hell does he want, Rob? One minute I'm to frustrate Geoffrey Darker and all his wicked works, the next he's ordering me to collaborate with Darker. What the bloody hell does he want?"

"He wants you to ring him back," said Rooke patiently.

"Darker is wicked. You know that, I know that. On a clear day, so does Rex Goodhew. So why do we have to ponce around pretending Darker's a realist?"

Burr rang Goodhew back nonetheless, which was only proper because, as Rooke constantly reminded him, Goodhew was the best and only champion he had.

In appearance Rooke and Burr could scarcely have been more different: Rooke the military parade horse in his nearly good suits, Burr as slovenly in his manner as his speech. There was a Celt in Burr somewhere, an artist and a rebel ― Goodhew said a gypsy. When he troubled to dress himself for an occasion, he only contrived to look more disreputable than when he wasn't bothering. Burr, as he would tell you himself, was the other kind of Yorkshireman. His forebears were not miners but handloom weavers, which meant they had owned their lives instead of being vassals in a corporate endeavour. The blackened sandstone village where Burr had grown to manhood was built onto a south-facing hillside, with each house looking at the sun and each attic window stretched to catch the most of it. In their solitary lofts, Burr's forefathers had woven all alone and all day long, while the womenfolk downstairs chattered and did the spinning. The men led lives of monotony in communion with the sky. And while their hands mechanically performed the daily drudgery, their minds took off in all sorts of startling directions. In that one small town, there are tales to fill a book about the poets, chess players and mathematicians whose brains grew to fruition in the long daylight of their attic eyries. And Burr, all the way to Oxford and beyond, was the inheritor of their collective thrift, their virtue and their mysticism.

So that it was somehow written in the stars, from the day Goodhew plucked Burr from the River House and gave him his own underfinanced, underwanted agency, that Burr should appoint Richard Onslow Roper as his personal Antichrist.

* * *

Oh, there had been others before Roper. In the dying years of the Cold War, before the new agency was a twinkle in Goodhew's eye, when Burr was already dreaming of the post-Thatcher Jerusalem and even his most honourable colleagues in Pure Intelligence were casting about for other people's enemies and jobs, there were few insiders who did not remember Burr's vendettas against such renowned illegals of the eighties as the grey-suited billionaire "scrap-metal dealer" Tyler, who flew standby, or the monosyllabic "accountant" Lorimer, who made all his calls from public pay phones, or the odious Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, gentleman and occasional satrap of Darker's so-called Procurement Studies Group, who ran a vast estate on the fringes of Newbury and rode to hounds with his butler mounted at his side, equipped with stirrup cup and foie gras sandwiches.

But Richard Onslow Roper, said the Burr-watchers, was the adversary Leonard had always dreamed of. Everything Leonard was looking for to appease his Fabian conscience, Dicky Roper possessed in trumps. In Roper's past there was neither striving nor disadvantage. Class, privilege, everything Burr loathed, had been handed to Roper on a salver. Burr even had a special voice for talking about him: "our Dicky," he would call him, with a shove of his Yorkshire accent; or, for variety, "the Roper."

"He's tempting God, is our Dicky. Everything God's got, the Roper's got to have two of, and it'll be the undoing of him."

Such obsession did not always make for balance. Embattled in his shoestring agency, Burr had a tendency to see conspiracy everywhere. A file had only to go missing, a permission be delayed, for him to scent the long arm of Darker's people.

"I tell you, Rob, if the Roper committed daylight armed robbery in full view of the Lord Chief Justice of England ― "

"The Chief Justice would lend him his jemmy," Rooke suggested.

"And Darker would have bought it for him. Come on. Lunch."

In their dingy offices in Victoria Street, the two men would prowl and brood till late into the evenings. The Roper's file ran to eleven volumes and half a dozen secret annexes, flagged and cross-referred. Put together, it documented his steady glide from the grey or semi-tolerated arms deal all the way to what Burr called dark black.

But the Roper had other files: at Defence, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the Bank of England, the Treasury, Overseas Development, the Inland Revenue. To obtain them without arousing curiosity in the circles where Darker might have allies required stealth and luck, and occasionally Rex Goodhew's devious connivance. Pretexts had to be invented, unwanted papers requested, in order to confuse the scent.