Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré

‘Nothing.’ She had almost forgotten it. ‘I heard once he had a run round the park with Ann, that’s all. Isn’t he a cousin of hers or something? I always thought you’d have been so good together, you and Bill, if it could have worked. You’d have brought back the old spirit. Instead of that Scottish twerp. Bill rebuilding Camelot’ – her fairy-tale smile again – ‘and George-‘

‘George picking up the bits,’ said Smiley, vamping for her, and they laughed, Smiley falsely.

‘Give me a kiss, George. Give Connie a kiss.’

She showed him through the kitchen garden, the route her lodgers used, she said he would prefer it to the view of the filthy new bungalows the Harrison pigs had flung up in the next door garden. A thin rain was falling, the few stars glowed big and pale in the mist; on the road lorries rumbled northward through the night. Clasping him Connie grew suddenly frightened.

‘You’re very naughty, George. Do you hear? Look at me. Don’t look that way, it’s all neon lights and Sodom. Kiss me. All over the world beastly people are making our time into nothing, why do you help them? Why?’

‘I’m not helping them, Connie.’

”Course you are. Look at me. It was a good time, do you hear? A real time. Englishmen could be proud then. Let them be proud now.’

‘That’s not quite up to me, Connie.’

She was pulling his face on to her own, so he kissed her full on the lips.

‘Poor loves.’ She was breathing heavily, not perhaps from any one emotion but from a whole mess of them, washed around in her like mixed drinks. ‘Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away. Bye-bye world. You’re the last, George, you and Bill. And filthy Percy a bit.’ He had known it would end like this; but not quite so awfully. He had had the same story from her every Christmas at the little drinking parties that went on in corners round the Circus. ‘You don’t know Millponds, do you?’ she was asking.

‘What’s Millponds?’

‘My brother’s place. Beautiful Palladian house, lovely grounds, near Newbury. One day a road came. Crash. Bang. Motorway. Took all the grounds away. I grew up there, you see. They haven’t sold Sarratt, have they? I was afraid they might.’

‘I’m sure they haven’t.’

He longed to be free of her but she was clutching him more fiercely, he could feel her heart thumping against him.

‘If it’s bad, don’t come back. Promise? I’m an old leopard and I’m too old to change my spots. I want to remember you all as you were. Lovely, lovely boys.’

He did not like to leave her there in the dark, swaying under the trees, so he walked her halfway back to the house, neither of them talking. As he went down the road he heard her humming again, so loud it was like a scream. But it was nothing to the mayhem inside him just then, the currents of alarm and anger and disgust at this blind night walk with God knew what bodies at the end.

He caught a stopping train to Slough where Mendel was waiting for him with a hired car. As they drove slowly towards the orange glow of the city, he listened to the sum of Peter Guillam’s researches. The duty officers’ ledger contained no record of the night of the tenth and eleventh of April, said Mendel. The pages had been excised with a razor blade. The janitors’ returns for the same night were also missing, as were the signals’ returns.

‘Peter thinks it was done recently. There’s a note scribbled on the next page saying “All enquiries to Head of London Station”. It’s in Esterhase’s handwriting and dated Friday.’

‘Last Friday?’ said Smiley, turning so fast that his seat belt let out a whine of complaint. ‘That’s the day Tarr arrived in England.’

‘It’s all according to Peter,’ Mendel replied stolidly.

And finally, that concerning Lapin alias Ivlov, and Cultural Attaché Aleksey Aleksandrovich Polyakov, both of the Soviet Embassy in London, Toby Esterhase’s lamplighter reports carried no adverse trace whatever. Both had been investigated, both were graded Persil: the cleanest category available. Lapin had been posted back to Moscow a year ago.

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 *