Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré

‘Stupid bloody cabaret,’ Bill remarked, waving vaguely at the mothers. ‘Percy’s getting more insufferable every day.’

‘He does seem to,’ said Guillam heartily.

‘How’s Smiley these days? Seen much of him? You used to be quite a chum of his, didn’t you?’

Guillam’s world, which was showing signs till then of steadying to a sensible pace, plunged violently. ‘Afraid not,’ he said, ‘he’s out of bounds.’

‘Don’t tell me you take any notice of that nonsense,’ Bill snorted. They had reached the stairs. Haydon went ahead.

‘How about you?’ Guillam called. ‘Have you seen much of him?’

‘And Ann’s flown the coop,’ said Bill, ignoring the question. ‘Pushed off with a sailor boy or a waiter or something.’ The door to his room was wide open, the desk was heaped with secret files. ‘Is that right?’

‘I didn’t know,’ said Guillam. ‘Poor old George.’

‘Coffee?’

‘I think I’ll get back, thanks.’

‘For tea with Brother Tarr?’

‘That’s right. At Fortnum’s. So long.’

In Archives Section, Alwyn was back from lunch. ‘Bag’s all gone, sir,’ he said gaily. ‘Should be over in Brixton by now.’

‘Oh damn,’ said Guillam, firing his last shot. ‘There was something in it I needed.’

A sickening notion had struck him: it seemed so neat and so horribly obvious that he could only wonder why it had come to him so late. Sand was Camilla’s husband. She was living a double life. Now whole vistas of deceit opened before him. His friends, his loves, even the Circus itself, joined and re-formed in endless patterns of intrigue. A line of Mendel’s came back to him, dropped two nights ago as they drank beer in some glum suburban pub: ‘Cheer up, Peter, old son. Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double.’

Tarr, he thought. That bastard Ricki Tarr.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The bedroom was long and low, once a maid’s room, built into the attic. Guillam was standing at the door; Tarr sat on the bed motionless, his head tilted back against the sloped ceiling, hands to either side of him, fingers wide. There was a dormer window above him and from where Guillam stood he could see long reaches of black Suffolk countryside, and a line of black trees traced against the sky. The wallpaper was brown with large red flowers. The one light hung from a black oak truss, lighting their two faces in strange geometric patterns, and when either of them moved, Tarr on the bed or Smiley on the wooden kitchen chair, they seemed by their movement to take the light with them a distance before it resettled.

Left to himself Guillam would have been very rough with Tarr, he had no doubt of it. His nerves were all over the place and on the drive down he had touched ninety before Smiley sharply told him to go steady. Left to himself he would have been tempted to beat the daylights out of Tarr and if necessary he would have brought Fawn in to lend a hand; driving, he had a very clear picture of opening the front door of wherever Tarr lived and hitting him in the face several times, with love from Camilla and her ex-husband, the distinguished doctor of the flute. And perhaps in the shared tension of the journey Smiley had received the same picture telepathically for the little he said was clearly directed to talking Guillam down. ‘Tarr has not lied to us, Peter. Not in any material way. He has simply done what agents do the world over: he has failed to tell us the whole story. On the other hand he has been rather clever.’ Far from sharing Guillam’s bewilderment, he seemed curiously confident, even complacent, to the extent of allowing himself a sententious aphorism from Steed Asprey on the arts of double cross; something about not looking for perfection, but for advantage, which again had Guillam thinking about Camilla. ‘Karla has admitted us to the inner circle,’ Smiley announced, and Guillam made a bad joke about changing at Charing Cross. After that Smiley contented himself with giving directions and watching the wing mirror.

They had met at Crystal Palace, a van pickup with Mendel driving. They drove to Barnsbury, straight into a car body repair shop at the end of a cobbled alley full of children. There they were received with discreet rapture by an old German and his son, who had stripped the plates off the van almost before they got out of it and led them to a souped-up Vauxhall ready to drive out of the far end of the workshop. Mendel stayed behind with the Testify file which Guillam had brought from Brixton in his night-bag; Smiley said, ‘Find the A12.’ There was very little traffic but short of Colchester they hit a cluster of lorries and Guillam suddenly lost patience. Smiley had to order him to pull in. Once they met an old man driving at twenty in the fast lane. As they overtook him on the inside he veered wildly towards them, drunk or ill, or just terrified. And once with no warning they hit a fog wall, it seemed to fall on them from above. Guillam drove clean through it, afraid to brake because of black ice. Past Colchester they took small lanes. On the signposts were names like Little Horkseley, Wormingford and Bures Green, then the signposts stopped and Guillam had a feeling of being nowhere at all.