‘How old did you say he was, sir?’ the Superintendent asked.
‘I didn’t, but he owned to sixty-nine.’
‘Plus your recent heart attack, I gather. Now, sir. First he stops. In sharp order. Don’t ask my why, perhaps he was spoken to. My guess is he heard something. Behind him. Notice the way the pace shortens, notice the position of the feet as he makes the half-turn, looks over his shoulder or whatever? Anyway he turns and that’s why I say “behind him”. And whatever he saw or didn’t see – or heard or didn’t hear – he decides to run. Off he goes, look!’ the Superintendent urged, with the sudden enthusiasm of the sportsman. ‘Wider stride, heels not hardly on the ground at all. A new print entirely, and going for all he’s worth. You can even see where he shoved himself off with his stick for the extra purchase.’
Peering now by daylight, Smiley no longer with any certainty could see, but he had seen last night – and in his memory saw again this morning – the sudden desperate gashes of the ferrule thrust downward, then thrust at an angle.
‘Trouble was,’ the Superintendent commented quietly, resuming his courtroom style, ‘whatever killed him was out in front, wasn’t it? Not behind him at all.’
It was both, thought Smiley now, with the advantage of the intervening hours. They drove him, he thought, trying without success to recall the Sarratt jargon for this particular technique. They knew his route, and they drove him. The frightener behind the target drives him forward, the finger man loiters ahead undetected till the target blunders into him. For it was a truth known also to Moscow Centre murder teams that even the oldest hands will spend hours worrying about their backs, their flanks, the cars that pass and the cars that don’t, the streets they cross and the houses that they enter. Yet still fail, when the moment is upon them, to recognize the danger that greets them face to face.
‘Still running,’ the Superintendent said, moving steadily nearer the body down the hill. ‘Notice how his pace gets a little longer because of the steeper gradient now? Erratic too, see that? Feet flying all over the shop. Running for dear life. Literally. And the walking stick still in his right hand. See him veering now, moving towards the verge? Lost his bearings, I wouldn’t wonder. Here we go. Explain that if you can !’
The torchbeam rested on a patch of footprints close together, five or six of them, all in a very small space at the edge of the grass between two high trees.
‘Stopped again,’ the Superintendent announced. ‘Not so much a total stop perhaps, more your stutter. Don’t ask me why. Maybe he just wrong-footed himself. Maybe he was worried to find himself so close to the trees. Maybe his heart got him – if you tell me it was dicky. Then off he goes again same as before.’
‘With the stick in his left hand,’ Smiley had said quietly.
‘Why? That’s what I ask myself, sir, but perhaps you people know the answer. Why? Did he hear something again? Remember something? Why – when you’re running for your life – why pause, do a duck-shuffie, change hands and then run on again? Straight into the arms of whoever shot him? Unless of course whatever was behind him overtook him there, came round through the trees perhaps, made an arc as it were? Any explanation from your side of the street, Mr Smiley?’
And with that question still ringing in Smiley’s ears they had arrived at last at the body, floating like an embryo under its plastic film.
But Smiley, on this morning after, stopped short of the dip. Instead, by placing his sodden shoes as best he could upon each spot exactly, he set about trying to imitate the movements the old man might have made. And since Smiley did all this in slow motion, and with every appearance of concentration, under the eye of two trousered ladies walking their Alsatians, he was taken for an adherent of the new fad in Chinese martial exercises, and accounted mad accordingly.