Smiley’s People by John le Carré

Weighing the problem, Smiley probably fell asleep. The telephone was on Ann’s little desk, and it must have rung three or four times before he was aware of it.

‘Yes, Oliver?’ said Smiley cautiously.

‘Ah, George. I tried you earlier. You got back all right, I trust?’

‘Where from?’ asked Smiley.

Lacon preferred not to answer this question. ‘I felt I owed you a call, George. We parted on a sour note. I was brusque. Too much on my plate. I apologize. How are things? You are done? Finished?’

In the background Smiley heard Lacon’s daughters squabbling about how much rent was payable on a hotel in Park Lane. He’s got them for the weekend, thought Smiley.

‘I’ve had the Home Office on the line again, George,’ Lacon went on in a lower voice, not bothering to wait for his reply. ‘They’ve had the pathologist’s report and the body may be released. An early cremation is recommended. I thought perhaps if I gave you the name of the firm that is handling things, you might care to pass it on to those concerned. Unattributably, of course. You saw the press release? What did you think of it? I thought it was apt. I thought it caught the tone exactly.’

‘I’ll get a pencil,’ Smiley said and fumbled in the drawer once more until he found a pear-shaped plastic object with a leather thong which Ann sometimes wore around her neck. With difficulty he prised it open, and wrote to Lacon’s dictation : the firm, the address, the firm again, followed yet again by the address.

‘Got it? Want me to repeat it? Or should you read it back to me, make assurance double sure?’

‘I think I have it, thank you,’ Smiley said. Somewhat belatedly, it dawned on him that Lacon was drunk.

‘Now, George, we have a date, don’t forget. A seminar on marriage with no holds barred. I have cast you as my elder statesman here. There’s a very decent steak-house downstairs and I shall treat you to a slap-up dinner while you give me of your wisdom. Have you a diary there? Let’s pencil something in.’

With dismal foreboding Smiley agreed a date. After a lifetime of inventing cover stories for every occasion, he still found it impossible to talk his way out of a dinner invitation.

‘And you found nothing?’ Lacon asked, on a more cautious note. ‘No snags, hitches, loose ends. It was a storm in a teacup, was it, as we suspected?’

A lot of answers crossed Smiley’s mind, but he saw no use to any of them.

‘What about the phone bill?’ Smiley asked.

‘Phone bill? What phone bill? Ah, you mean his. Pay it and send me the receipt. No problem. Better still, slip it in the post to Strickland.’

‘I already sent it to you,’ said Smiley patiently. ‘I asked you for a breakdown of traceable calls.’

‘I’ll get on to them at once,’ Lacon replied blandly. ‘Nothing else?’

‘No. No, I don’t think so. Nothing.’

‘Get some sleep. You sound all in.’

‘Good night,’ said Smiley.

With Ann’s magnifying glass in his plump fist once more, Smiley went back to his examination. The floor of the pit was carpeted, apparencty in white; the quilted sofas were formed in a horseshoe following the line of the drapes that comprised the rear perimeter. There was an upholstered door in the background and the clothes the two men had discarded – jackets, neckties, trousers – were hanging from it with hospital neatness. There was an ashtray on the table and Smiley set to work trying to read the writing round the edge. After much manipulation of the glass he came up with what the lapsed philologist in him described as the asterisk (or putative) form of the letters ‘A-C-H-T’, but whether as a word in their own right meaning ‘eight’ or ‘attention’ as well as certain other more remote concepts – or as four letters from a larger word, he could not tell. Nor did he at this stage exert himself to find out, preferring simply to store the intelligence in the back of his mind until some other part of the puzzle forced it into play.

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