A Murder of Quality

by John le Carré

  Fielding made an impatient movement with his hand. ‘How do you know it wasn’t Rode?’

  ‘The people who are like that – there really are some, Fielding – do you know their secret? They can’t feel anything inside them, no pleasure or pain, no love or hate; they’re ashamed and frightened that they can’t feel. And their shame, this shame, Fielding, drives them to extravagance and colour; they must make themselves feel that cold water, and without that they’re nothing. The world sees them as showmen, fantasists, liars, as sensualists perhaps, not for what they are: the living dead.’

  ‘How do you know? How do you know it wasn’t Rode?’ Fielding cried with anger in his voice, and Smiley replied: ‘I’ll tell you.’

  ‘If Rode murdered his wife, he had planned to do so long ago. The plastic cape, the boots, the weapon, the intricate timing, the use of Perkins to carry the case to your house – these are evidence of long premeditation. Of course one could ask: if that’s so, why did he bother with Perkins at all – why didn’t he keep the case with him all the time? But never mind. Let’s see how he does it. He walks home with his wife after dinner, having deliberately forgotten the writing-case. Having left Stella at home, he returns to your house to collect it. It was a risky business, incidentally, leaving that case behind. Quite apart from the fact that one would expect him to have locked it, his wife might have noticed he hadn’t got it as they left – or you might have noticed, or Miss Truebody – but luckily no one did. He collects the case, hurries back, kills her, fabricating the clues which mislead the police. He thrusts the cape, boots and gloves into the refugees’ parcel, ties it up and prepares to make good his escape. He is alarmed by Mad Janie, perhaps, but reaches the lane and re-enters the house as Stanley Rode. Five minutes later he is with the D’Arcys. From then on for the next forty-eight hours he is under constant supervision. Perhaps you didn’t know this, Fielding, but the police found the murder weapon four miles down the road in a ditch. They found it within ten hours of the murder being discovered, long before Rode had a chance to throw it there.

  ‘This is the point, though, Fielding. This is what they can’t get over. I suppose it would be possible to make a phoney murder weapon. Rode could have taken hairs from Stella’s comb, stuck them with human blood to a length of coaxial cable and planted the thing in a ditch before he committed the murder. But the only blood he could use was his own – which belongs to a different blood group. The blood on the weapon they found belonged to Stella’s blood group. He didn’t do it. There’s a rather more concrete piece of evidence, to do with the parcel. Rigby had a word with Miss Truebody yesterday. It seems she telephoned Stella Rode on the morning of the day she was murdered. Telephoned at your request, Fielding, to say a boy would be bringing some old clothes up to North Fields on Thursday morning – would she be sure to keep the parcel open till then? … What did Stella threaten to do, Fielding? Write an anonymous letter to your next school?’

  Then Smiley put his hand on Fielding’s arm and said: ‘Go now, in God’s name go now. There’s very little time, for Adrian’s sake go now,’ and Ailsa Brimley whispered something he could not hear.

  Fielding seemed not to hear. His great head was thrown back, his eyes half closed, his wine glass still held between his thick fingers.

  And the front-door bell rang out, like the scream of a woman in an empty house.

  Smiley never knew what made the noise, whether it was Fielding’s hands on the table as he stood up, or his chair, falling backwards. Perhaps it was not a noise at all, but simply the shock of violent movement when it was least expected; the sight of Fielding, who a moment before had sat lethargic in his chair, springing forward across the room. Then Rigby was holding him, had taken Fielding’s right arm and done something to it so that Fielding cried out in pain and fear, swinging round to face them under the compulsion of Rigby’s grip. Then Rigby was saying the words, and Fielding’s terrified gaze fell upon Smiley.

  ‘Stop him, stop him, Smiley, for God’s sake! They’ll hang me.’ And he shouted the last two words again and again: ‘Hang me, hang me,’ until the detectives came in from the street, and shoved him without ceremony into a waiting car.

  Smiley watched the car go. It didn’t hurry, just picked its way down the wet street and disappeared. He remained there long after it had gone, looking towards the end of the road, so that passers-by stared oddly at him, or tried to follow his gaze. But there was nothing to see. Only the half-lit street, and the shadows moving along it.

  Afterword

  The origins of most of my books are by now a mystery to me, even if they were not at the time, but A Murder of Quality is clearly set in my memory. It was my second book and I wrote it in the flush of the modest success enjoyed by my first, Call for the Dead. I began it in 1961 when I arrived in Bonn ahead of my family to take up a junior post at the British Embassy, and by the time it appeared I had The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in my sights.

  I still had a notion in those days of writing a thriller a year and adding a much-needed few hundred pounds to my Foreign Service salary. Or so I told myself, even if my ambitions were secretly larger. I wrote A Murder of Quality first in the gloomy pension in Bad Godesberg where junior British diplomats were stabled while they awaited accommodation, then in the tiny house in the Gringstrasse where we lived with our two children and our au pair. In consequence, I wrote the book lying down, on beds, in notebooks, in the few snatched hours that were left to me by family and diplomatic life.

  My sources were extremely present to me, as they will be to the reader. I hated English boarding schools. I found them monstrous and still do, probably because I began my boarding-school career at the age of five, at a place called St Martin’s, Northwood, and did not end it till I was sixteen, when I flatly refused to return to Westcott House, Sherborne, on the solid grounds that I would take no more of such institutions.

  Yet as life would have it, eight years later I was banged up once again, this time at Eton as a junior Modern Languages master.

  Eton was not Sherborne at all. Sherborne in my day had been rustic, colonialist, chauvinist, militarist, religious, patriotic and repressive. Boys beat other boys, housemasters beat boys, and even the Headmaster turned his hand to beating boys when the crime was held to be sufficiently heinous or school discipline was thought to be slipping. I don’t know whether masters beat masters but, in any case, I loathed them, and I loathed their grotesque allegiances most of all. To this day, I can find no forgiveness for their terrible abuse of the charges entrusted to them.

  Only adults had nervous breakdowns in those days, so the methods of survival for boys who refused to join the system were animal cunning, ‘internal immigration’ as the Germans call it, or simply getting the hell out. I practised the first two then opted for the third and took myself to Switzerland.

  But Eton was an English social class of its own. A graduate of Eton is an Etonian first and a citizen second. He enjoys, during his schooling, more personal access to the staff than in any other school I am aware of, and an extremely high standard of teaching. Certainly the system had its barbarisms, but it awarded more privacy, more sovereignty to its pupils, more self-esteem – some would say arrogance – than I had imagined possible. As a young schoolmaster, I had the sensation of embarking on a second, vicarious education of my own, reacting sometimes against it, sometimes for it, but never calmly, never with any sense of integration or acceptance. Probably, since I had not yet begun to write, I had not realised quite how much of an outsider I was anyway, constantly repelled by the institutions that drew me.

  So the components are there for you to dissect as you will: an outrage at my Sherborne schooling, a fascination with the mores of the Etonian class, an attraction to it all, a revulsion from it, a bestiary of frightening adults drawn from the timid chambers of my institutional and largely parentless childhood; and a spiritual brutality towards young minds that in this far-from-perfect story takes the form of bloody violence.

  As
to poor Stella Rode and her nonconformism, they came from even further back, from the days when my brother and I spent our Sundays in the chapels and tabernacles of coastal Dorset, listening to the counsel of a far humbler God than He who guided the untroubled conscience of the British ruling classes.

  Rereading the book now, I find a flawed thriller redeemed by ferocious and quite funny social comment. Most of all I recognise the dankness of those old stone walls that formed the limits of my childhood and left me for the rest of my life with an urge to fight off whatever threatened to enclose me.

  John le Carrè

  December 1989

  It was gently suggested to me by the editors of Penguin Modern Classics that a new edition might benefit from a new Afterword. As I write, our British government is headed by an Old Etonian, David Cameron, just as in my days of teaching at Eton half a century ago, it was headed by another Old Etonian, Anthony Eden. Eden’s luckless Cabinet, as I recall, contained at various times some eleven fellow Old Etonians. David Cameron’s Cabinet is not as blessed in this respect as Eden’s was, but London’s Mayor is widely regarded as his principal competitor for the top job, and he of course is an Old Etonian, so we may all breathe safely.

  I don’t have the figures before me, but the preponderance of today’s Coalition Government Ministers who have been privately educated and attended Oxford and Cambridge is a fading national joke: fading only because, for as long as our two-tier educational system lasts, what else has the British public come to expect? Only a tiny proportion of our population can afford the £20,000-odd a year, after tax, that a public-school education these days demands. Only the charitable status of public schools – in other words, a fat subsidy courtesy of the British taxpayer – enables them to survive. Parents whose greatest ambition is to educate their children privately must scrape and save – all but the very richest – to achieve their goal. Let us then also pity those who are only rich enough to consign themselves to penury. The rest – that vast majority of British humanity for whom the cost of private schooling is hopelessly out of reach – must make the best of whatever the State can offer: a benefice that varies so wildly from one catchment area to another that families are reduced to uprooting and relocating themselves, simply to obtain a halfway decent education for their children or – not unknown – fudging their postcodes.

  Meanwhile, our ever-more centrist politicians, all singing from the same political hymn sheet, see no votes in urging the abolition of an educational system so manifestly unjust that it could have been designed to sow social discord, perpetuate class distinctions from the earliest years of life, and make a mockery of that trumpeted principle so dear to every politician’s heart: equality of opportunity for all.

  Among our European partners and competitors we must surely be unique in providing an educational gravy train that enables a self-selected few to arrive at the top of the social ladder without the smallest notion of how the other ninety-odd per cent live, work, skimp and strive. In my youth, there was at least the leavening of compulsory National Service, where for a couple of years we public-school boys were obliged to rub along with people we would not otherwise have entertained in the woodshed. The best emerged chastened and enlightened. The worst stayed as they were.

  That the so-called level playing field will never be level goes without saying. You can’t level family background, family literacy, and family stability. The children of articulate and achieving parents are pretty sure to get a head start over their less fortunate peers, at least to begin with. But in a single education system there is a shaking down and, however qualified, an essential sense of social fairness. And as each generation forms its own new elite, that elite is drawn from a common pool. In all of Europe, we Brits alone nourish our crippling social distinctions from kindergarten to the grave.

  In the United States, on the other hand, that class-ridden bastion of social equality, rich parents in rich cities are doing today what prospective Eton parents were doing fifty years ago: scurrying to get their children on to the entry lists of exclusive pre-schools, schools and colleges as soon as they are born, and preferably as soon as they’re conceived. All men are born free: just not for long.

  Was it ever so in England? Nearly it wasn’t. In 1945, when I was fourteen years old, one Canon Ross Wallace, former Indian Civil Servant, horseman, flogger and reigning Headmaster of Sherborne School, addressed his flock. I was one of the shivering lambs. The newly elected Labour Government of Clement Attlee, he announced with a choke in his thunderous voice, was about to abolish our public-school system. Many of those advocating this appalling step were themselves former public schoolboys, and accordingly traitors to their class. And we all knew how traitors should be dealt with in those days. He spoke as if the world was about to end. We boys should gird ourselves and wait bravely for the worst. We were the last of the Romans. The barbarians were at our gates.

  Well, there they are still, those barbarians, waiting. And the gates, with a few cosmetic variations, are as firmly locked as ever. Did I send my own sons to public school? Yes, of course I did, so I’m a traitor too, to my principles if not to my class. And for the oldest and weakest of excuses: you don’t experiment with your own kids, you do what’s best for them at the time, and so on. And if I need another excuse, which I do, I was in the Foreign Service when I made the choice, and since the taxpayer was footing a large chunk of the bill, it wasn’t all that hard.

  But this at least I can say in my defence: if at any time the public-school system had been swept away – by which I mean integrated unreservedly into the State system – then I would have tossed my hat in the air for my children, my purse, my country, and even for those poor, struggling nearly-rich who are prepared to bankrupt themselves to get their kids into British society’s Club Class.

  John le Carrè,

  October 2010.

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  First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz Ltd 1962

  Published in Penguin Classics 2011

  Copyright © le Carrè Productions, 1961, 1989, 2011

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

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  ISBN: 978-0-14-196745-5

 

 

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