‘Lock us in please,’ Lacon called, and they heard the snap of the key. ‘You know Smiley, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I think I do,’ said the figure as he began the long walk towards them out of the far gloom. ‘I think he once gave me a job, didn’t you, Mr Smiley?’
His voice was as soft as a southerner’s drawl but there was no mistaking the colonial accent. ‘Tarr, sir. Ricki Tarr from Penang.’
A fragment of firelight illuminated one side of the stark smile and made a hollow of one eye. ‘The lawyer’s boy, remember? Come on, Mr Smiley, you changed my first nappies.’
And then absurdly they were all four standing and Guillam and Lacon looked on like godparents while Tarr shook Smiley’s hand once, then again, then once more for the photographs.
‘How are you, Mr Smiley? It’s real nice to see you, sir.’
Relinquishing Smiley’s hand at last he swung away in the direction of his appointed chair, while Smiley thought: Yes, with Ricki Tarr it could have happened. With Tarr, anything could have happened. My God, he thought; two hours ago I was telling myself I would take refuge in the past. He felt thirsty and supposed it was fear.
Ten? Twelve years ago? It was not his night for understanding time. Among Smiley’s jobs in those days was the vetting of recruits: no one was taken on without his nod, no one trained without his signature on the schedule. The cold war was running high, scalphunters were in demand, the Circus’s residencies abroad had been ordered by Haydon to look out for likely material. Steve Mackelvore from Djakarta came up with Tarr. Mackelvore was an old pro with cover as a shipping agent and he had found Tarr angry drunk, kicking round the docks looking for a girl called Rose who had walked out on him.
According to Tarr’s story he was mixed up with a bunch of Belgians running guns between the islands and up-coast. He disliked Belgians and he was bored with gunrunning and he was angry because they’d stolen Rose. Mackelvore reckoned he would respond to discipline and was young enough to train for the type of mailfist operation that the scalphunters undertook from behind the walls of their glum Brixton schoolhouse. After the usual searches Tarr was forwarded to Singapore for a second look, then to the Nursery at Sarratt for a third. At that point Smiley came into the act as moderator at a succession of interviews, some hostile. Sarratt Nursery was the training compound, but it had space for other uses.
Tarr’s father was an Australian solicitor living in Penang, it seemed. The mother was a small-time actress from Bradford who came East with a British drama group before the war. The father, Smiley recalled, had an evangelical streak and preached in local gospel halls. The mother had a small criminal record in England but Tarr’s father either didn’t know or didn’t care. When the war came the couple evacuated to Singapore for the sake of their young son. A few months later Singapore fell and Ricki Tarr began his education in Changi jail under Japanese supervision. In Changi the father preached God’s charity to everyone in sight, and if the Japs hadn’t persecuted him his fellow prisoners would have done the job for them. With Liberation the three of them went back to Penang. Ricki tried to read for the law but more often broke it and the father turned some rough preachers loose on him to beat the sin out of his soul. Tarr flew the coop to Borneo. At eighteen he was a fully paid-up gunrunner playing all seven ends against the middle around the Indonesian islands, and that was how Mackelvore stumbled on him.
By the time he had graduated from the Nursery, the Malayan emergency had broken. Tarr was played back into gunrunning. Almost the first people he bumped into were his old Belgian friends. They were too busy supplying guns to the Communists to bother where he had been and they were shorthanded. Tarr ran a few shipments for them in order to blow their contacts, then one night got them drunk, shot four of them including Rose and set fire to their boat. He hung around Malaya and did a couple more jobs before being called back to Brixton and refitted for special operations in Kenya – or, in less sophisticated language, hunting Mau Mau for bounty.