Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré

The drawing room door was ajar. Softly he pushed it further open.

‘Peter?’ he said.

Through the gap he saw by the light of the street two suede shoes, lazily folded, protruding from one end of the sofa.

‘I’d leave that coat on if I were you, George, old boy,’ said an amiable voice. ‘We’ve got a long way to go.’

Five minutes later, dressed in a vast brown travelling coat, a gift from Ann and the only one he had that was dry, George Smiley was sitting crossly in the passenger seat of Peter Guillam’s extremely draughty sports car, which he had parked in an adjoining square. Their destination was Ascot, a place famous for women and horses. And less famous perhaps as the residence of Mr Oliver Lacon of the Cabinet Office, a senior adviser to various mixed committees and a watch-dog of intelligence affairs. Or, as Guillam had it less reverentially, Whitehall’s head prefect.

While at Thursgood’s school, wakefully in bed, Bill Roach was contemplating the latest wonders which had befallen him in the course of his daily vigil over Jim’s welfare. Yesterday Jim had amazed Latzy. Thursday he had stolen Miss Aaronson’s mail. Miss Aaronson taught violin and scripture, Roach courted her for her tenderness. Latzy the assistant gardener was a DP, said Matron, and DPs spoke no English, or very little. DP meant Different Person, said Matron, or anyway foreign from the war. But yesterday Jim had spoken to Latzy, seeking his assistance with the car club, and he had spoken to him in DP, or whatever DPs speak, and Latzy had grown a foot taller on the spot.

The matter of Miss Aaronson’s mail was more complex. There were two envelopes on the staffroom sideboard Thursday morning after chapel when Roach called for his form’s exercise books, one addressed to Jim and one to Miss Aaronson. Jim’s was typewritten. Miss Aaronson’s was handwritten, in a hand not unlike Jim’s own. The staffroom, while Roach made these observations, was empty. He helped himself to the exercise books and was quietly taking his leave when Jim walked in by the other door, red and blowing from his early walk.

‘On your way, Jumbo, bell’s gone,’ stooping over the sideboard.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Foxy weather, eh Jumbo?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘On your way, then.’

At the door, Roach looked round. Jim was standing again, leaning back to open the morning’s Daily Telegraph. The sideboard was empty. Both envelopes had gone.

Had Jim written to Miss Aaronson and changed his mind? Proposing marriage, perhaps? Another thought came to Bill Roach. Recently, Jim had acquired an old typewriter, a wrecked Remington which he had put right with his own hands. Had he typed his own letter on it? Was he so lonely that he wrote himself letters, and stole other people’s as well? Roach fell asleep.

CHAPTER FOUR

Guillam drove languidly but fast. Smells of autumn filled the car, a full moon was shining, strands of mist hung over open fields and the cold was irresistible. Smiley wondered how old Guillam was and guessed forty, but in that light he could have been an undergraduate sculling on the river; he moved the gear lever with a long flowing movement as if he were passing it through water. In any case, Smiley reflected irritably, the car was far too young for Guillam. They had raced through Runnymede and begun the run up Egham Hill. They had been driving for twenty minutes and Smiley had asked a dozen questions and received no answer worth a penny, and now a nagging fear was waking in him which he refused to name.

‘I’m surprised they didn’t throw you out with the rest of us,’ he said, not very pleasantly, as he hauled the skirts of his coat more tightly round him. ‘You had all the qualifications: good at your work, loyal, discreet.’

‘They put me in charge of scalphunters.’

‘Oh my Lord,’ said Smiley with a shudder, and, pulling up his collar round his ample chins, he abandoned himself to that memory in place of others more disturbing: Brixton, and the grim flint schoolhouse that served the scalphunters as their headquarters. The scalphunters’ official name was Travel. They had been formed by Control on Bill Haydon’s suggestion in the pioneer days of the cold war, when murder and kidnapping and crash blackmail were common currency, and their first commandant was Haydon’s nominee. They were a small outfit, about a dozen men, and they were there to handle the hit-and-run jobs that were too dirty or too risky for the residents abroad. Good intelligence work, Control had always preached, was gradual and rested on a kind of gentleness. The scalphunters were the exception to his own rule. They weren’t gradual and they weren’t gentle either, thus reflecting Haydon’s temperament rather than Control’s. And they worked solo, which was why they were stabled out of sight behind a flint wall with broken glass and barbed wire on the top.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *