Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré

The duty logbooks were on the top shelf in bound volumes with the dates pasted on the spines. They looked like family account books. He took down the volume for April and studied the list of names on the inside cover, wondering whether anyone could see him from the dupe-room across the courtyard, and if they could, would they care? He began working through the entries, searching for the night of the tenth and eleventh when the signals traffic between London Station and Tarr was supposed to have taken place. Hong Kong was nine hours ahead, Smiley had pointed out: Tarr’s telegram and London’s first answer had both happened out of hours.

From the corridor came a sudden swell of voices and for a second he even fancied he could pick out Alleline’s growling border brogue lifted in humourless banter, but fancies were two a penny just now. He had a cover story and a part of him believed it already. If he was caught, the whole of him would believe it and if the Sarratt inquisitors sweated him he had a fallback, he never travelled without one. All the same he was terrified. The voices died, and the ghost of Percy Alleline with them. Sweat was running over his ribs. A girl tripped past humming a tune from Hair. If Bill hears you he’ll murder you, he thought, if there’s one thing that sends Bill spare, it’s humming. ‘What are you doing here, you pariah?’

Then to his fleeting amusement he actually heard Bill’s infuriated roar, echoing from God knows what distance: ‘Stop that moaning. Who is the fool?’

Move. Once you stop you never start again: there is a special stage-fright that can make you dry up and walk away, that burns your fingers when you touch the goods and turns your stomach to water. Move. He put back the April volume and drew four others at random, February, June, September and October. He flicked through them fast, looking for comparisons, returned them to the shelf and dropped into a crouch. He wished to God the dust would settle. Why didn’t someone complain? Always the same when a lot of people use one place: no one’s responsible, no one gives a hoot. He was looking for the night janitors’ attendance lists. He found them on the bottom shelf, jammed in with the teabags and the condensed milk: sheafs of them in envelope-type folders. The janitors filled them in and brought them to you twice in your twelve hours’ tour of duty: at midnight and again at six a.m. You vouched for their correctness – God knows how, since the night staff were scattered all over the building – signed them off, kept the third copy and chucked it in the cupboard, no one knew why. That was the procedure before the Flood, and it seemed to be the procedure now.

Dust and teabags on one shelf, he thought. How long since anyone made tea?

Once again he fixed his sights on April 10th/11th. His shirt was clinging to his ribs. What’s happened to me? Christ, I’m over the hill. He turned forward and back, forward again, twice, three times, then closed the cupboard on the lot. He waited, listened, took a last worried look at the dust then stepped boldly across the corridor, back to the safety of the men’s room. On the way the clatter hit him: coding machines, the ringing of the telephones, a girl’s voice calling ‘Where’s that damn float, I had it in my hand,’ and that mysterious piping again, but no longer like Camilla’s in the small hours. Next time I’ll get her to do the job, he thought savagely; without compromise, face to face, the way life should be.

In the men’s room he found Spike Kaspar and Nick de Silsky standing at the hand basins and murmuring at each other into the mirror: legmen for Haydon’s Soviet networks, they’d been around for years, known simply as the Russians. Seeing Guillam they at once stopped talking.

‘Hullo, you two. Christ you really are inseparable.’

They were blond and squat and they looked more like Russians than the real ones. He waited till they’d gone, rinsed the dust off his fingers then drifted back to Lauder Strickland’s room.

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