Part 13 (1/2)

'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 d.a.m.n,' 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 cl.u.s.ter 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.

'Left here and left again at the dower house. Go as far as you can but park short of the gates.'

They reached what seemed to be a hamlet but there were no lights, no people and no moon. As they got out the cold hit them and Guillam smelt a cricket field and woodsmoke and Christmas all at once; he thought he had never been anywhere so quiet or so cold or so remote. A church tower rose ahead of them, a white fence ran to one side, and up on the slope stood what he took to be the rectory, a low rambling house, part thatched; he could make out the fringe of gable against the sky. Fawn was waiting for them; he came to the car as they parked, and climbed silently into the back.

'Ricki's been that much better today, sir,' he reported. He had evidently done a lot of reporting to Smiley in the last few days. He was a steady, soft-spoken boy with a great will to please, but the rest of the Brixton pack seemed to be afraid of him, Guillam didn't know why. 'Not so nervy, more relaxed I'd say. Did his pools this morning, loves the pools Ricki does, this afternoon we dug up fir trees for Miss Ailsa, so's she could drive them into market. This evening we had a nice game of cards and early bed.'

'Has he been out alone?' asked Smiley.

'No, sir.'

'Has he used the telephone?'

'Gracious no, sir, not while I'm around, and I'm sure not while Miss Ailsa was either.'

Their breath had misted the windows of the car, but Smiley would not have the engine on so there was no heater and no de-mister.

'Has he mentioned his daughter Danny?'

'Over the weekend he did a lot. Now he's sort of cooled off about them. I think he's shut them out of his mind in view of the emotional side.'

'He hasn't talked about seeing them again?'

'No, sir.'

'Nothing about arrangements for meeting when all this is over?'

'No, sir.'

'Or bringing them to England?'

'No, sir.'

'Nor about providing them with doc.u.ments?'

'No, sir.'

Guillam chimed in irritably: 'So what has he talked about, for heaven's sake?'

'The Russian lady, sir. Irina. He likes to read her diary. He says when the mole's caught, he's going to make Centre swap him for Irina. Then we'll get her a nice place, sir, like Miss Ailsa's but up in Scotland where it's nicer. He says he'll see me right, too. Give me a big job in the Circus. He's been encouraging me to learn another language to increase my scope.'

There was no telling, from the flat voice behind them in the dark, what Fawn made of this advice.

'Where is he now?'

'In bed, sir.'

'Close the doors quietly.'

Ailsa Brimley was waiting in the front porch for them: a grey-haired lady of sixty with a firm, intelligent face. She was old Circus, Smiley said, one of Lord Lansbury's coding ladies from the war, now in retirement but still formidable. She wore a trim brown suit. She shook Guillam by the hand and said 'How do you do', bolted the door and when he looked again she had gone. Smiley led the way upstairs. Fawn should wait on the lower landing in case he was needed.

'It's Smiley,' he said, knocking on Tarr's door. 'I want a chat with you.'

Tarr opened the door fast. He must have heard them coming, he must have been waiting just the other side. He opened it with his left hand, holding the gun in his right, and he was looking past Smiley down the corridor.

'It's only Guillam,' said Smiley.

'That's what I mean,' said Tarr. 'Babies can bite.'

They stepped inside. He wore slacks and some sort of cheap Malay wrap. Spelling cards lay spread over the floor and in the air hung a smell of curry which he had cooked for himself on a ring.

'I'm sorry to be pestering you,' said Smiley with an air of sincere commiseration. 'But I must ask you again what you did with those two Swiss escape pa.s.sports you took with you to Hong Kong.'

'Why?' said Tarr at last.

The jauntiness was all gone. He had a prison pallor, he had lost weight and as he sat on the bed with the gun on the pillow beside him, his eyes sought them out nervously, each in turn, trusting nothing.