The Night Manager

Gradually, nevertheless, an archive was assembled. First thing in the morning a policeman's daughter called Pearl would trundle in a metal trolley with the purloined records patched and bandaged like casualties of war, and Burr's little team of dedicated assistants would resume its work. Last thing at night she trundled them back to their cell. The trolley had a wonky wheel, and you could hear it whistling down the linoleum corridor. They called it Roper's tumbril.

* * *

But even in the midst of these exertions, Burr never took his mind's eye off Jonathan. "Don't let him risk his hand now, Reggie," he urged Quayle over the secure telephone while he champed and waited for what Goodhew sarcastically referred to as his master's official, final maybe. "He's not to go stealing any more faxes or listening at keyholes, Reggie. He's to tread water and act natural. Is he still angry with us over Cairo? I'll not flirt with him till I know I can have him. I've been that road before." And to Rooke, "I'm telling no one, Rob. He's Mr. Brown for the lot of them. Darker and his friend Ogilvey have taught me a lesson I'll not ignore."

As a further desperate precaution, Burr opened a decoy file for Jonathan, gave it a fictitious name, fronted it with the particulars of a fictitious agent, and surrounded it with a conspicuous secrecy, which he hoped would draw the eye of any predator. Paranoia? Rooke suggested. Burr swore it was no more than a sensible precaution. He knew too well the lengths that Darker would go to in order to do down a rival ― even one as humble as Burr's tin-pot outfit.

Meanwhile in his neat script Burr added note after note to Jonathan's fast-expanding dossier, which he kept in an unfiled folder in the dreariest corner of the registry. Through intermediaries, Rooke drew the army papers on Jonathan's father. The son was barely six years old when Sergeant Peter Pine won his posthumous Military Medal in Aden for "outstanding courage in the face of the enemy." A press cutting showed a ghostly child displaying it on the breast of his blue mackintosh outside the palace gates. A weeping aunt escorted him. His mother was not well enough to attend. A year later she too was dead.

"Those are usually the chaps who love the army best," Rooke commented in his simple way. "Can't think why he gave it up."

By the age of thirty-three, Peter Pine had fought the Mau Mau in Kenya, chased Grivas across Cyprus and battled with guerrillas in Malaya and northern Greece. Nobody had a bad word to say of him.

"A sergeant and a gentleman," Burr the anti-colonialist told Goodhew wryly.

Returning to the son, Burr pored over reports of Jonathan's progress through army foster homes, civilian orphanages and the Duke of York's Military School in Dover. Their inconsistency quickly incensed him. Timid, ran one; plucky, another; a solitary, a grand mixer, an inward boy, an outgoing one, a natural leader, lacks charisma, back and forth like a pendulum.

And once, very involved with foreign languages, as if this were a morbid symptom of something better left alone. But it was the word unreconciled that got Burr's goat.

"Who the hell ever decreed," he demanded indignantly, "that a sixteen-year-old boy of no fixed abode, who's never had a chance to know parental love, should be reconciled?"

Rooke took his pipe from his mouth and frowned, which was about as near as he came to indulging in an abstract argument.

"What does cabby mean?" Burr demanded from deep in his reading.

"Streetwise, among other things. Pushy."

Burr was at once offended. "Jonathan's not streetwise. He's not wise at all. He's putty. What's a roulement?"

"A five-month tour," Rooke replied patiently.

Burr had come upon Jonathan's record in Ireland, where, after a succession of special training courses, for which he had volunteered, he had been assigned to close observation duties in the bandit country of South Armagh.

"What was Operation Night Owl?"

"I haven't the foggiest idea."

"Come on, Rob. You're the soldier in the family."

Rooke rang the Ministry of Defence, to be told the Night Owl papers were too highly classified to be released to an unchartered agency.

"Unchartered?" Rooke exploded, blushing darker than his moustache. "What the devil do they think we are? Some Whitehall bucket shop? Good Lord!"

But Burr was too preoccupied to relish Rooke's rare outburst.

He had fixed upon the image of the pale boy wearing his father's medal for the convenience of photographers. Burr was by now moulding Jonathan in his mind. Jonathan was their man, he was sure of it. No cautious words from Rooke could soften his conviction.

"When God finished putting together Dicky Roper," he told Rooke earnestly over a Friday evening curry, "He took a deep breath and shuddered a bit, then He ran up our Jonathan to restore the ecological balance."

* * *