Smiley's People (6 page)

The steamer had stopped. They were on the other bank. Seizing his basket, the boy leapt ashore and, almost running, ducked between the bustling shoppers from one side-street to another without knowing where they led.

All through the drive back, while the steering-wheel hammered his arms and the engine played its pounding scale in his ears, the boy saw that face before him in the wet road, wondering as the hours passed whether it was something he had merely imagined in the emotion of the hand-over. Most likely the real contact was someone completely different, he thought, trying to soothe himself. One of those fat ladies in the green felt hats—even the conductor. I was overstrung, he told himself. At a crucial moment, an unknown man turned round and looked at me and I hung an entire history on him, even imagining he was my dying father.

By the time he reached Dover, he almost believed he had put the man out of his mind. He had dumped the cursed oranges in a litter-bin; the yellow envelope lay snug in the pouch of his tunic, one sharp corner pricking his skin, and that was all that mattered. So he had formed theories about his secret accomplice? Forget them. And even if, by sheer coincidence, he was right and it
was
that hollowed, glaring face
—then
what? All the less reason to go blabbing about it to the General, whose concern with security the boy likened to the unchallengeable passion of a seer. The thought of Stella became an aching need to him. His desire sharpened with every noisy mile. It was early morning still. He imagined waking her with his caresses; he saw her sleepy smile slowly turn to passion.

 

The summons came to Smiley that same night, and it is a curious fact, since he had an overall impression of not sleeping at all well during this late period of his life, that the phone had to ring a long time beside the bed before he answered it. He had come home straight from the library, then dined poorly at an Italian restaurant in Kings Road, taking the
Voyages of Olearius
with him for protection. He had returned to his house in Bywater Street and resumed work on his monograph with the devotion of a man who had nothing else to do. After a couple of hours he had opened a bottle of red Burgundy and drunk half of it, listening to a poor play on the radio. Then dozed, wrestling with troubled dreams. Yet the moment he heard Lacon’s voice, he had the feeling of being hauled from a warm and treasured place, where he wished to remain undisturbed for ever. Also, though in fact he was moving swiftly, he had the sensation of taking a long time to dress; and he wondered whether that was what old men did when they heard about a death.

“K
new him personally at all, did you, sir?” the Detective Chief Superintendent of Police asked respectfully in a voice kept deliberately low. “Or perhaps I shouldn’t enquire.”

The two men had been together for fifteen minutes but this was the Superintendent’s first question. For a while Smiley did not seem to hear it, but his silence was not offensive, he had the gift of quiet. Besides, there is a companionship about two men contemplating a corpse. It was an hour before dawn on Hampstead Heath, a dripping, misty, no-man’s hour, neither warm nor cold, with a heaven tinted orange by the London glow, and the trees glistening like oilskins. They stood side by side in an avenue of beeches and the Superintendent was taller by a head: a young giant of a man, prematurely grizzled, a little pompous perhaps, but with a giant’s gentleness that made him naturally befriending. Smiley was clasping his pudgy hands over his belly like a mayor at a cenotaph, and had eyes for nothing but the plastic-covered body lying at his feet in the beam of the Superintendent’s torch. The walk this far had evidently winded him, for he puffed a little as he stared. From the darkness round them, police receivers crackled in the night air. There were no other lights at all; the Superintendent had ordered them extinguished.

“He was just somebody I worked with,” Smiley explained after a long delay.

“So I was given to understand, sir,” the Superintendent said.

He waited hopefully but nothing more came. “Don’t even speak to him,” the Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Crime and Ops) had said to him. “You never saw him and it was two other blokes. Just show him what he wants and drop him down a hole. Fast.” Till now, the Detective Chief Superintendent had done exactly that. He had moved, in his own estimation, with the speed of light. The photographer had photographed, the doctor had certified life extinct, the pathologist had inspected the body
in situ
as a prelude to conducting his autopsy—all with an expedition quite contrary to the proper pace of things, merely in order to clear the way for the visiting
irregular,
as the Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Crime and Ops) had liked to call him. The irregular had arrived—with about as much ceremony as a meter-reader, the Superintendent noted—and the Superintendent had led him over the course at a canter. They had looked at footprints, they had tracked the old man’s route till here. The Superintendent had made a reconstruction of the crime, as well as he was able in the circumstances, and the Superintendent was an able man. Now they were in the dip, at the point where the avenue turned, where the rolling mist was thickest. In the torchbeam the dead body was the centre-piece of everything. It lay face downward and spread-eagled, as if it had been crucified to the gravel, and the plastic sheet emphasized its lifelessness. It was the body of an old man, but broad-shouldered still, a body that had battled and endured. The white hair was cut to stubble. One strong, veined hand still grasped a sturdy walking-stick. He wore a black overcoat and rubber overshoes. A black beret lay on the ground beside him, and the gravel at his head was black with blood. Some loose change lay about, and a pocket handkerchief, and a small penknife that looked more like a keepsake than a tool. Most likely they had started to search him and given up, sir, the Superintendent had said. Most likely they were disturbed, Mr. Smiley, sir; and Smiley had wondered what it must be like to touch a warm body you had just shot.

“If I might possibly take a look at his face, Superintendent,” Smiley said.

This time it was the Superintendent who caused the delay. “Ah, now are you sure about that, sir?” He sounded slightly embarrassed. “There’ll be better ways of identifying him than
that,
you know.”

“Yes. Yes, I am sure,” said Smiley earnestly, as if he really had given the matter great thought.

The Superintendent called softly to the trees, where his men stood among their blacked-out cars like a next generation waiting for its turn.

“You there. Hall. Sergeant Pike. Come here at the double and turn him over.”

Fast,
the Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Crime and Ops) had said.

Two men slipped forward from the shadows. The elder wore a black beard. Their surgical gloves of elbow length shone ghostly grey. They wore blue overalls and thigh-length rubber boots. Squatting, the bearded man cautiously untucked the plastic sheet while the younger constable laid a hand on the dead man’s shoulder as if to wake him up.

“You’ll have to try harder than that, lad,” the Superintendent warned in an altogether crisper tone.

The boy pulled, the bearded sergeant helped him, and the body reluctantly rolled over, one arm stiffly waving, the other still clutching the stick.

“Oh, Christ,” said the constable. “Oh, bloody hell!”—and clapped a hand over his mouth. The sergeant grabbed his elbow and shoved him away. They heard the sound of retching.

“I don’t hold with politics,” the Superintendent confided to Smiley inconsequentially, staring downward still. “I don’t hold with politics and I don’t hold with politicians either. Licensed lunatics most of them, in my view. That’s why I joined the Force, to be honest.” The sinewy mist curled strangely in the steady beam of his torch. “You don’t happen to know what did it, do you, sir? I haven’t seen a wound like that in fifteen years.”

“I’m afraid ballistics is not my province,” Smiley replied after another pause for thought.

“No, I don’t expect it would be, would it? Seen enough, sir?”

Smiley apparently had not.

“Most people expect to be shot in the chest really, don’t they, sir?” the Superintendent remarked brightly. He had learned that small talk sometimes eased the atmosphere on such occasions. “Your neat round bullet that drills a tasteful hole. That’s what most people expect. Victim falls gently to his knees to the tune of celestial choirs. It’s the telly that does it, I suppose. Whereas your real bullet these days can take off an arm or a leg, so my friends in brown tell me.” His voice took on a more practical tone. “Did he have a moustache at all, sir? My sergeant fancied a trace of white whisker on the upper jaw.”

“A military one,” said Smiley after a long gap, and with his thumb and forefinger absently described the shape upon his own lip while his gaze remained locked upon the old man’s body. “I wonder, Superintendent, whether I might just examine the contents of his pockets, possibly?”

“Sergeant Pike.”

“Sir!”

“Put that sheet back and tell Mr. Murgotroyd to have his pockets ready for me in the van, will you, what they’ve left of them. At the double,” the Superintendent added, as a matter of routine.

“Sir!”

“And come here.” The Superintendent had taken the sergeant softly by the upper arm. “You tell that young Constable Hall that I can’t stop him sicking up but I won’t have his irreverent language.” For the Superintendent on his home territory was a devoutly Christian man and did not care who knew it. “This way, Mr. Smiley, sir,” he added, recovering his gentler tone.

As they moved higher up the avenue, the chatter of the radios faded, and they heard instead the angry wheeling of rooks and the growl of the city. The Superintendent marched briskly, keeping to the left of the roped-off area. Smiley hurried after him. A windowless van was parked between the trees, its back doors open, and a dim light burning inside. Entering, they sat on hard benches. Mr. Murgotroyd had grey hair and wore a grey suit. He crouched before them with a plastic sack like a transparent pillowcase. The sack had a knot at the throat, which he untied. Inside, smaller packages floated. As Mr. Murgotroyd lifted them out, the Superintendent read the labels by his torch before handing them to Smiley to consider.

“One scuffed leather coin purse Continental appearance. Half inside his pocket, half out, left-side jacket. You saw the coins by his body—seventy-two pence. That’s all the money on him. Carry a wallet at all, did he, sir?”

“I don’t know.”

“Our guess is they helped themselves to the wallet, started on the purse, then ran. One bunch keys domestic and various, right-hand trousers. . . .”He ran on but Smiley’s scrutiny did not relax. Some people
act
a memory, the Superintendent thought, noticing his concentration, others
have
one. In the Superintendent’s book, memory was the better half of intelligence, he prized it highest of all mental accomplishments; and Smiley, he knew, possessed it. “One Paddington Borough Library Card in the name of V. Miller, one box Swan Vesta matches partly used, overcoat left. One Aliens’ Registration Card, number as reported, also in the name of Vladimir Miller. One bottle tablets, overcoat left. What would the tablets be for, sir, any views on that at all? Name of Sustac, whatever that is, to be taken two or three times a day?”

“Heart,” said Smiley.

“And one receipt for the sum of thirteen pounds from the Straight and Steady Minicab Service of Islington, North.”

“May I look?” said Smiley, and the Superintendent held it out so that Smiley could read the date and the driver’s signature, J. Lamb, in a copy-book hand wildly underlined.

The next bag contained a stick of school chalk, yellow and miraculously unbroken. The narrow end was smeared brown as if by a single stroke, but the thick end was unused.

“There’s yellow chalk powder on his left hand too,” Mr. Murgotroyd said, speaking for the first time. His complexion was like grey stone. His voice too was grey, and mournful as an undertaker’s. “We did
wonder
whether he might be in the teaching line, actually,” Mr. Murgotroyd added, but Smiley, either by design or oversight, did not answer Mr. Murgotroyd’s implicit question, and the Superintendent did not pursue it.

And a second cotton handkerchief, proffered this time by Mr. Murgotroyd, part blooded, part clean, and carefully ironed into a sharp triangle for the top pocket.

“On his way to a party, we wondered,” Mr. Murgotroyd said, this time with no hope at all.

“Crime and Ops on the air, sir,” a voice called from the front of the van.

Without a word the Superintendent vanished into the darkness, leaving Smiley to the depressed gaze of Mr. Murgotroyd.

“You a specialist of some sort, sir?” Mr. Murgotroyd asked after a long sad scrutiny of his guest.

“No. No, I’m afraid not,” said Smiley.

“Home Office, sir?”

“Alas, not Home Office either,” said Smiley with a benign shake of his head, which somehow made him party to Mr. Murgotroyd’s bewilderment.

“My superiors are a little worried about the press, Mr. Smiley,” the Superintendent said, poking his head into the van again. “Seems they’re heading this way, sir.”

Smiley clambered quickly out. The two men stood face to face in the avenue.

“You’ve been very kind,” Smiley said. “Thank you.”

“Privilege,” said the Superintendent.

“You don’t happen to remember which pocket the
chalk
was in, do you?” Smiley asked.

“Overcoat left,” the Superintendent replied in some surprise.

“And the searching of him—could you tell me again how you see
that
exactly?”

“They hadn’t time or didn’t care to turn him over. Knelt by him, fished for his wallet, pulled at his purse. Scattered a few objects as they did so. By then they’d had enough.”

“Thank you,” said Smiley again.