‘Hullo, Bill,’ said Guillam.
Leaving his door still open – a breach of housekeeper regulations – Haydon fell in ahead of them, still without a word. He was dressed with his customary dottiness. The leather patches of his jacket were stitched on like diamonds, not squares, which from behind gave him a harlequin look. His spectacles were jammed into his lank grey forelock like goggles. For a moment they followed him uncertainly, till without warning he suddenly turned himself round, all of him at once like a statue being slowly swivelled on its plinth, and fixed his gaze on Guillam. Then grinned, so that his crescent eyebrows went straight up like a clown’s, and his face became handsome and absurdly young.
‘What the hell are you doing here, you pariah?’ he enquired pleasantly.
Taking the question seriously Lauder started to explain about the Frenchman and the dirty money.
‘Well, mind you lock up the spoons,’ said Bill, talking straight through him. ‘Those bloody scalphunters will steal the gold out of your teeth. Lock up the girls too,’ he added as an afterthought, his eyes still on Guillam, ‘if they’ll let you. Since when did scalphunters wash their own money? That’s our job.’
‘Lauder’s doing the washing. We’re just spending the stuff.’
‘Papers to me,’ Haydon said to Strickland, with sudden curtness. ‘I’m not crossing any more bloody wires.’
‘They’re already routed to you,’ said Guillam. ‘They’re probably in your in-tray now.’
A last nod sent them on ahead, so that Guillam felt Haydon’s pale blue gaze boring into his back all the way to the next dark turning.
‘Fantastic fellow,’ Lauder declared, as if Guillam had never met him. ‘London Station could not be in better hands. Incredible ability. Incredible record. Brilliant.’
Whereas you, thought Guillam savagely, are brilliant by association. With Bill, with the coffee-machine, with banks. His meditations were interrupted by Roy Bland’s caustic Cockney voice, issuing from a doorway ahead of them.
‘Hey Lauder, hold on a minute: have you seen Bloody Bill anywhere? He’s wanted urgently.’
Followed at once by Toby Esterhase’s faithful mid-European echo from the same direction: ‘Immediately, Lauder, actually, we have put out an alert for him.’
They had entered the last cramped corridor. Lauder was perhaps three paces on and was already composing his answer to this question as Guillam arrived at the open doorway and looked in. Bland was sprawled massively at his desk. He had thrown off his jacket and was clutching a paper. Arcs of sweat ringed his armpits. Tiny Toby Esterhase was stooped over him like a headwaiter, a stiff-backed miniature ambassador with silvery hair and a crisp unfriendly jaw, and he had stretched out one hand towards the paper as if to recommend a speciality. They had evidently been reading the same document when Bland caught sight of Lauder Strickland passing.
‘Indeed I have seen Bill Haydon,’ said Lauder, who had a trick of rephrasing questions to make them sound more seemly. ‘I suspect Bill is on his way to you this moment. He’s a way back there down the corridor; we were having a brief word about a couple of things.’
Bland’s gaze moved slowly to Guillam and settled there; its chilly appraisal was uncomfortably reminiscent of Haydon’s. ‘Hullo, Pete,’ he said. At this Tiny Toby straightened up and turned his eyes also directly towards Guillam: brown and quiet like a pointer’s.
‘Hi,’ said Guillam, ‘what’s the joke?’
Their greeting was not merely frosty, it was downright hostile. Guillam had lived cheek by jowl with Toby Esterhase for three months on a very dodgy operation in Switzerland and Toby had never smiled once, so his stare came as no surprise. But Roy Bland was one of Smiley’s discoveries, a warm-hearted impulsive fellow for that world, red-haired and burly, an intellectual primitive whose idea of a good evening was talking Wittgenstein in the pubs round Kentish Town. He’d spent ten years as a Party hack, plodding the academic circuit in Eastern Europe, and now like Guillam he was grounded, which was even something of a bond. His usual style was a big grin, a slap on the shoulder and a blast of last night’s beer; but not today.