The Night Manager

Yet of all those present at the Fiddler's Club that night, only the leftover lawyer Harry Palfrey had any notion of the scope of Rex Goodhew's crusade. Palfrey was a degenerate. In every British organisation there is always one man who makes an art form of going to the devil, and in this one respect Hairy Palfrey was the River House's prize exhibit. Whatever he had done well in the first half of his life, Palfrey had systematically undone in the second ― whether it was his law practice, his marriage or the preservation of his pride, of which the last shameful tatters lingered in his apologetic grin. Why Darker kept him on, why anybody did, was no mystery at all: Palfrey was the failure who made everyone look successful by comparison.

Nothing was too humble for him, nothing too demeaning. If there was scandal, Palfrey was ever willing to be slaughtered. If murder was to be done, Palfrey was on hand with a bucket and cloth to mop up the blood and find you three eyewitnesses to say you were never there. And Palfrey, with the wisdom of the corrupt, knew Rex Goodhew's story as if it were his own ― which in a sense it was, since he had long ago made the same perceptions as Goodhew, even if he had never had the courage to draw the same conclusions.

The story was that after twenty-five years before the Whitehall mast, something inside Goodhew had discreetly snapped.

Perhaps it was the ending of the Cold War that had caused it.

Goodhew had the modesty not to know.

The story was that one Monday morning Goodhew woke as usual and decided with no premeditation that for far too long, in the misused name of freedom, he had been sacrificing scruple and principle to the great god expediency, and that the excuse for doing so was dead.

And that he was suffering from all the bad habits of the Cold War without their justification. He must mend his ways or perish in his soul. Because the threat outside the gates had gone. Decamped. Vanished.

But where to begin? A perilous bicycle ride supplied him with his answer. On the same rainy February morning, the eighteenth ― Rex Goodhew never forgot a date ― he was cycling from his home in Kentish Town to Whitehall as usual, weaving between the choked columns of commuter cars, when he experienced a silent epiphany. He would crop the secret octopus.

He would give away its powers to separate, smaller agencies and make each of them separately accountable. He would deconstruct, decentralise, humanise. And he would begin with the most corrupting influence of all: the unholy marriage between Pure Intelligence, Westminster and the covert weapons trade, presided over by Geoffrey Darker of the River House.

* * *

How did Harry Palfrey know all this? Goodhew had told him. Goodhew, out of his Christian decency, had invited Palfrey to Kentish Town at summer weekends to drink Pimm's in the garden and play silly cricket with the kids, well aware that, in his shabby, grinning way, Palfrey was near the dangerous edge. And after dinner, Goodhew had left Palfrey at the table with his wife so that he could pour out his soul to her, because there is nothing that dissolute men like better than confessing themselves to virtuous women.

And it was in the afterglow of one such luxurious unbaring that Harry Palfrey, with pathetic alacrity, volunteered to become Goodhew's informant on the backstairs machinations of certain wayward barons at the River House.

FIVE

Zürich huddled low beside the lake, shivering under a freezing grey cloud.

"My name's Leonard," Burr announced, hauling himself out of Quayle's office chair like someone about to intervene in a brawl. "I do crooks. Smoke? Here. Poison yourself."

He made the offer sound so much like a jovial conspiracy that Jonathan obeyed at once and ― though he smoked rarely and always regretted it afterwards ― took a cigarette. Burr drew a lighter from his pocket, cocked it and fired it at Jonathan's face.

"I expect you think we let you down, don't you?" he said, going for the point of most resistance. "You and Ogilvey had quite a how-d'you-do before you left Cairo, if I'm correct."

I thought you let her down, Jonathan almost replied. But his guard was up, so he gave his hotelier's smile and said, "Oh, nothing terminal, I'm sure."

Burr had thought carefully about this moment and decided on attack as his best defence. Never mind he harboured the worst suspicions of Ogilvey's part in the affair: this was no moment to suggest he was speaking for a divided house.