‘Purcell. Molly Purcell.’
‘That’s the one. Her story was at least straightforward. Prague radio was promising an emergency bulletin in half an hour’s time. That was a quarter of an hour ago. The bulletin would concern an act of gross provocation by a Western power, an infringement of Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty, and an outrage against freedom-loving people of all nations. Apart from that,’ said Sam drily, ‘it was going to be laughs all the way. I rang Bywater Street of course, then I made a signal to Berlin telling them to find you and fly you back by yesterday. I gave Mellows the main phone numbers and sent him off to find an outside line and get hold of whoever was around of the top brass. Percy was in Scotland for the weekend and out to dinner. His cook gave Mellows a number, he rang it, spoke to his host Percy had just left.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Smiley interrupted. ‘Rang Bywater Street, what for?’ He was holding his upper lip between his finger and thumb, pulling it out like a deformity, while he stared into the middle distance.
‘In case you’d come back early from Berlin,’ said Sam.
‘And had I?’
‘No.’
‘So who did you speak to?’
‘Ann.’
Smiley said: ‘Ann’s away just now. Could you remind me how it went, that conversation?’
‘I asked for you and she said you were in Berlin.’
‘And that was all?’
‘It was a crisis, George,’ Sam said in a warning tone.
‘So?’
‘I asked her whether by any chance she knew where Bill Haydon was. It was urgent. I gathered he was on leave but might be around. Somebody once told me they were cousins.’ He added: ‘Besides, he’s a friend of the family, I understood.’
‘Yes. He is. What did she say?’
‘Gave me a shirty “no” and rang off. Sorry about that, George. War’s war.’
‘How did she sound?’ Smiley asked after letting the aphorism lie between them for some while.
‘I told you: shirty.’
Roy was at Leeds University talent-spotting, said Sam, and not available.
Between calls, Sam was getting the whole book thrown at him. He might as well have invaded Cuba: ‘The military were yelling about Czech tank movements along the Austrian border, the wranglers couldn’t hear themselves think for the radio traffic round Brno, and as for the Foreign Office, the resident clerk was having the vapours and yellow fever all in one. First Lacon then the Minister were baying at the doors and at half past twelve we had the promised Czech news bulletin, twenty minutes late but none the worse for that. A British spy named Jim Ellis, travelling on false Czech papers and assisted by Czech counter-revolutionaries, had attempted to kidnap an unnamed Czech general in the forest near Brno, and smuggle him over the Austrian border. Ellis had been shot but they didn’t say killed, other arrests were imminent. I looked Ellis up in the workname index and found Jim Prideaux. And I thought, just as Control must have thought: If Jim is shot and has Czech papers, how the hell do they know his workname, and how do they know he’s British? Then Bill Haydon arrived, white as a sheet. Picked up the story on the tickertape at his club. He turned straight round and came to the Circus.’
‘At what time was that exactly?’ Smiley asked, with a vague frown. ‘It must have been rather late.’
Sam looked as if he wished he could make it easier. ‘One fifteen,’ he said.
‘Which is late, isn’t it, for reading club tickertapes?’
‘Not my world, old boy.’
‘Bill’s the Savile, isn’t he?’
‘Don’t know,’ said Sam doggedly. He drank some coffee. ‘He was a treat to watch, that’s all I can tell you. I used to think of him as an erratic sort of devil. Not that night, believe me. All right, he was shaken. Who wouldn’t be? He arrived knowing there’d been a God-awful shooting party and that was about all. But when I told him that it was Jim who’d been shot, he looked at me like a madman. Thought he was going to go for me. “Shot. Shot how? Shot dead?” I shoved the bulletins into his hand and he tore through them one by one-‘