No answer.
‘I want you to take the weekend off. Would that raise eyebrows at the Circus?’ Enthusiastically, Esterhase shook his head. ‘I’m sure you’d prefer to be out of it anyway, wouldn’t you?’ Esterhase nodded. ‘Say you’re having girl trouble or whatever sort of trouble you’re in these days. You’ll be spending the night here, possibly two. Fawn will look after you, there’s food in the kitchen. What about your wife?’
While Guillam and Smiley looked on, Esterhase dialled the Circus and asked for Phil Porteous. He said his lines perfectly: a little self-pity, a little conspiracy, a little joke. Some girl who was passionate about him up north, Phil, and threatening wild things if he didn’t go and hold her hand.
‘Don’t tell me, I know it happens to you every day, Phil. Hey, how’s that gorgeous new secretary of yours? And listen, Phil, if Mara phones from home, tell her Toby’s on a big job, okay? Blowing up the Kremlin, back on Monday. Make it nice and heavy, huh? Cheers, Phil.’
He rang off and dialled a number in north London. ‘Mrs M., hullo, this is your favourite boyfriend, recognise the voice? Good. Listen, I’m sending you a visitor tonight, an old, old friend, you’ll be surprised. She hates me,’ he explained to them, his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘He wants to check the wiring,’ he went on. ‘Look it all over, make sure it’s working okay, no bad leaks, all right?’
‘If he’s any trouble,’ Guillam said to Fawn with real venom as they left, ‘bind him hand and foot.’
In the stairwell, Smiley lightly touched his arm. ‘Peter, I want you to watch my back. Will you do that for me? Give me a couple of minutes, then pick me up on the corner of Marloes Road, heading north. Stick to the west pavement.’
Guillam waited, then stepped into the street. A thin drizzle lay on the air, which had an eerie warmness like a thaw. Where lights shone, the moisture shifted in fine clouds, but in shadow he neither saw nor felt it: simply, a mist blurred his vision, making him half-close his eyes. He completed one round of the gardens then entered a pretty mews well south of the pick-up point. Reaching Marloes Road he crossed to the western pavement, bought an evening paper and began walking at a leisurely rate past villas set in deep gardens. He was counting off pedestrians, cyclists, cars, while out ahead of him, steadily plodding the far pavement, he picked out George Smiley, the very prototype of the homegoing Londoner. ‘Is it a team?’ Guillam had asked. Smiley could not be specific. ‘Short of Abingdon Villas, I’ll cross over,’ he said. ‘Look for a solo. But look!’
As Guillam watched, Smiley pulled up abruptly, as if he had just remembered something, stepped perilously into the road and scuttled between the angry traffic to disappear at once through the doors of an off-licence. As he did so, Guillam saw, or thought he saw, a tall crooked figure in a dark coat step out after him, but at that moment a bus drew up, screening both Smiley and his pursuer; and when it pulled away, it must have taken his pursuer with it, for the only survivor on that strip of pavement was an older man in a black plastic raincoat and cloth cap lolling at the bus-stop while he read his evening paper; and when Smiley emerged from the off-licence with his brown bag, he did not so much as lift his head from the sporting pages. For a short while longer, Guillam trailed Smiley through the smarter reaches of Victorian Kensington as he slipped from one quiet square to another, sauntered into a mews and out again by the same route. Only once, when Guillam forgot Smiley and out of instinct turned upon his own tracks, did he have a suspicion of a third figure walking with them: a fanged shadow thrown against the broadloom brickwork of an empty street, but when he started forward, it was gone.
The night had its own madness after that; events ran too quickly for him to fasten on them singly. Not till days afterwards did he realise that the figure, or the shadow of it, had struck a chord of familiarity in his memory. Even then, for some time, he could not place it. Then one early morning, waking abruptly, he had it clear in his mind: a barking, military voice, a gentleness of manner heavily concealed, a squash racquet jammed behind the safe of his room in Brixton, which brought tears to the eyes of his unemotional secretary.