Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré

‘This has none.’

‘Does it give the identity of Merlin?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. The Minister would not want to know, and Alleline would not want to tell him.’

‘What does wider exploitation mean?’

‘I refuse to be interrogated, George. You’re not family any more, you know. By rights I should have you specially cleared as it is.’

‘Witchcraft-cleared?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do we have a list of people who have been cleared in that way?’

It was in the policy file, Lacon retorted, and all but slammed the door on him before coming back, to the slow chant of ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ introduced by an Australian disc-jockey. ‘The Minister-‘ He began again. ‘He doesn’t like devious explanations. He has a saying: he’ll only believe what can be written on a postcard. He’s very impatient to be given something he can get his hands on.’

Smiley said: ‘You won’t forget Prideaux, will you? Just anything you have on him at all; even scraps are better than nothing.’

With that Smiley left Lacon to glare a while, then make a second exit: ‘You’re not going fey are you, George? You realise that Prideaux had most likely never even heard of Witchcraft before he was shot? I really do fail to see why you can’t stick with the primary problem instead of rootling around in…’ But by this time he had talked himself out of the room.

Smiley turned to the last of the batch: ‘Operation Witchcraft, correspondence with Department’. Department being one of Whitehall’s many euphemisms for the Circus. This volume was conducted in the form of official minutes between the Minister on the one side, and on the other – recognisable at once by his laborious schoolboy hand – Percy Alleline, at that time still consigned to the bottom rungs of Control’s ladder of beings.

A very dull monument, Smiley reflected, surveying these much-handled files, to such a long and cruel war.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It was this long and cruel war which in its main battles Smiley now relived as he embarked upon his reading. The files contained only the thinnest record of it; his memory contained far more. Its protagonists were Alleline and Control, its origins misty. Bill Haydon, a keen if saddened follower of those events, maintained that the two men learned to hate each other at Cambridge during Control’s brief spell as a don and Alleline’s as an undergraduate. According to Bill, Alleline was Control’s pupil and a bad one, and Control taunted him, which he certainly might have.

The story was grotesque enough for Control to play it up: ‘Percy and I are blood brothers I hear. We romped together in punts, imagine!’ He never said whether it was true.

To half-legends of that sort Smiley could add a few hard facts from his knowledge of the two men’s early lives. While Control was no man’s child, Percy Alleline was a lowland Scot and a son of the Manse; his father was a Presbyterian hammer and if Percy did not have his faith, he had surely inherited the faculty of bullish persuasion. He missed the war by a year or two and joined the Circus from a City company. At Cambridge he had been a bit of a politician (somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan, said Haydon who was himself, Lord knows, no milk and water Liberal) and a bit of an athlete. He was recruited by a figure of no account called Maston who for a short time contrived to build himself a corner in counter intelligence. Maston saw a great future in Alleline and, having peddled his name furiously, fell from grace. Finding Alleline an embarrassment, Circus personnel packed him off to South America where he did two full tours under consular cover without returning to England.

Even Control admitted that Percy did extremely well there, Smiley recalled. The Argentinians, liking his tennis and the way he rode, took him for a gentleman – Control speaking – and assumed he was stupid, which Percy never quite was. By the time he handed over to his successor he had put together a string of agents along both seaboards and was spreading his wings northward as well. After home leave and a couple of weeks’ briefing he was moved to India where his agents seemed to regard him as the reincarnation of the British Raj. He preached loyalty to them, paid them next to nothing and when it suited him sold them down the river. From India he went to Cairo.