‘Lord save us, that Dolphin does talk,’ he said carelessly.
‘Very able officer. Nearest thing to indispensable we have around here. Extremely competent, you can take my word for it,’ said Lauder. Looking closely at his watch before he signed the chit, he led Guillam back to the lifts. Toby Esterhase was at the barrier, talking to the unfriendly young janitor.
‘You are going back to Brixton, Peter?’ His tone was casual, his expression as usual impenetrable.
‘Why?’
‘I have a car outside actually. I thought maybe I could run you. We have some business out that way.’
Run you: Tiny Toby spoke no known language perfectly, but he spoke them all. In Switzerland Guillam had heard his French and it had a German accent; his German had a Slav accent and his English was full of stray flaws and stops and false vowel sounds.
‘It’s all right, Tobe, I think I’ll just go home. Night.’
‘Straight home? I would run you, that’s all.’
‘Thanks, I’ve got shopping to do. All those bloody godchildren.’
‘Sure,’ said Toby as if he hadn’t any, and stuck in his little granite jaw in disappointment.
What the hell does he want? Guillam thought again. Tiny Toby and Big Roy both: why were they giving me the eye? Was it something they were reading or something they ate?
Out in the street he sauntered down the Charing Cross Road peering at the windows of the bookshops while his other mind checked both sides of the pavement. It had turned much colder, a wind was getting up and there was a promise to people’s faces as they bustled by. He felt elated. Till now he had been living too much in the past, he decided. Time to get my eye in again. In Zwemmers he examined a coffee-table book called Musical Instruments Down the Ages and remembered that Camilla had a late lesson with Doctor Sand, her flute teacher. He walked back as far as Foyles, glancing down the bus queues as he went. Think of it as abroad, Smiley had said. Remembering the duty room and Roy Bland’s fishy stare, Guillam had no difficulty. And Bill too: was Haydon party to their same suspicion? No. Bill was his own category, Guillam decided, unable to resist a surge of loyalty to Haydon. Bill would share nothing that was not his own in the first place. Set beside Bill, those other two were pygmies.
In Soho he hailed a cab and asked for Waterloo Station. At Waterloo from a reeking phone box he telephoned a number in Mitcham, Surrey, and spoke to Inspector Mendel, formerly of Special Branch, known to both Guillam and Smiley from other lives. When Mendel came on the line he asked for Jenny and heard Mendel tell him tersely that no Jenny lived there. He apologised and rang off. He dialled the time and feigned a pleasant conversation with the automatic announcer because there was an old lady outside waiting for him to finish. By now he should be there, he thought. He rang off and dialled a second number in Mitcham, this time a callbox at the end of Mendel’s avenue.
‘This is Will,’ said Guillam.
‘And this is Arthur,’ said Mendel cheerfully. ‘How’s Will?’ He was a quirkish, loping tracker of a man, sharp-faced and sharp-eyed, and Guillam had a very precise picture of him just then, leaning over his policeman’s notebook with his pencil poised.
‘I want to give you the headlines now in case I go under a bus.’
‘That’s right, Will,’ said Mendel consolingly. ‘Can’t be too careful.’
He gave his message slowly, using the scholastic cover they had agreed on as a last protection against random interception: exams, students, stolen papers. Each time he paused he heard nothing but a faint scratching. He imagined Mendel writing slowly and legibly and not speaking till he had it all down.
‘I got those happy snaps from the chemist by the by,’ said Mendel finally, when he had checked it all back. ‘Come out a treat. Not a miss among them.’
‘Thanks. I’m glad.’
But Mendel had already rung off.
I’ll say one thing for moles, thought Guillam: it’s a long dark tunnel all the way. As he held open the door for the old lady he noticed the telephone receiver lying on its cradle, how the sweat crawled over it in drips. He considered his message to Mendel, he thought again of Roy Bland and Toby Esterhase staring at him through the doorway, he wondered quite urgently where Smiley was, and whether he was taking care. He returned to Eaton Place needing Camilla badly, and a little afraid of his reasons. Was it really age that was against him suddenly? Somehow, for the first time in his life, he had sinned against his own notions of nobility. He had a sense of dirtiness, even of self-disgust.