Seeing Guillam standing at her desk, the archivist smiled. Quite often, when Brixton was dead, Guillam would spend a day here searching through old cases for one that could stand retiring. She was Sal, a plump, sporting girl who ran a youth club in Chiswick and was a judo black belt.
‘Break any good necks this weekend?’ he asked, helping himself to a bunch of green requisition slips.
Sal handed him the notes she kept for him in her steel cupboard.
‘Couple. How about you?’
‘Visiting aunts in Shropshire, thank you.’
‘Some aunts,’ said Sal.
Still at her desk he filled in slips for the next two references on his list. He watched her stamp them, tear off the flimsies, and post them through a slot on her desk.
‘D corridor,’ she murmured, handing back the top copies. ‘The two-eights are halfway on your right, the three-ones are next alcove down.’
Pushing open the far door, he entered the main hall. At the centre an old lift like a miner’s cage carried files into the body of the Circus. Two bleary juniors were feeding it, a third stood by to operate the winch. Guillam moved slowly along the shelves reading the fluorescent number cards.
‘Lacon swears he holds no file on Testify at all,’ Smiley had explained in his usual worried way. ‘He has a few resettlement papers on Prideaux and nothing else.’ And in the same lugubrious tone: ‘So I’m afraid we’ll have to find a way of getting hold of whatever there is in Circus Registry.’
For ‘getting hold’, in Smiley’s dictionary, read ‘steal’.
One girl stood on a ladder. Oscar Allitson the collator was filling a laundry basket with wrangler files, Astrid the maintenance man was mending a radiator. The shelves were wooden, deep as bunks and divided into pigeon-holes by panels of ply. He already knew that the Testify reference was four-four eight-two E, which meant alcove forty-four, where he now stood. E stood for extinct and was used for dead operations only. Guillam counted to the eighth pigeon-hole from the left. Testify should be second from the left but there was no way of making certain because the spines were unmarked. His reconnaissance complete, he drew the two files he had requested, leaving the green slips in the steel brackets provided for them.
‘There won’t be much, I’m sure,’ Smiley had said, as if thinner files were easier. ‘But there ought to be something, if only for appearances.’ That was another thing about him that Guillam didn’t like just then: he spoke as if you followed his reasoning, as if you were inside his mind all the time.
Sitting down he pretended to read but passed the time thinking of Camilla. What was he supposed to make of her? Early this morning as she lay in his arms she told him she had once been married. Sometimes she spoke like that: as if she’d lived about twenty lives. It was a mistake, so they packed it in.
‘What went wrong?’
‘Nothing. We weren’t right for each other.’
Guillam didn’t believe her.
‘Did you get a divorce?’
‘I expect so.’
‘Don’t be damn silly, you must know whether you’re divorced or not!’
His parents handled it, she said; he was foreign.
‘Does he send you money?’
‘Why should he? He doesn’t owe me anything.’
Then the flute again, in the spare room, long questioning notes in the half light while Guillam made coffee. Is she a fake or an angel? He’d half a mind to pass her name across the records. She had a lesson with Sand in an hour.
Armed with a green slip with a four-three reference, he returned the two files to their places and positioned himself at the alcove next to Testify.
‘Dry run uneventful,’ he thought.
The girl was still up her ladder. Allitson had vanished but the laundry basket was still there. The radiator had already exhausted Astrid and he was sitting beside it reading the Sun. The green slip read four-three four-three and he found the file at once because he had already marked it down. It had a pink jacket like Testify. Like Testify it was reasonably thumbed. He fitted the green slip into the bracket. He moved back across the aisle, again checked Allitson and the girls, then reached for the Testify file and replaced it very fast with the file he had in his hand.