A Murder of Quality AND Call for the Dead

by John le Carré

  “Well, of course, if they were on to something really big they might.”

  “Meaning if they had a highly placed resident agent in play?”

  “Yes, roughly.”

  “And assuming they had such an agent, a Maclean or Fuchs, it is conceivable that they would establish a station here under trade cover with no operational function except to hold the agent’s hand?”

  “Yes, it’s conceivable. But it’s a tall order, George. What you’re suggesting is that the agent is run from abroad, serviced by courier and the courier is serviced by the Mission, which is also the agent’s personal guardian angel. He’d have to be some agent.”

  “I’m not suggesting quite that—but near enough. And I accept that the system demands a high-grade agent. Don’t forget we only have Blondie’s word for it that he came from abroad.”

  Mendel chipped in: “This agent—would he be in touch with the Mission direct?”

  “Good Lord, no,” said Guillam. “He’d probably have an emergency procedure for getting in touch with them—a telephone code or something of the sort.”

  “How does that work?” asked Mendel.

  “Varies. Might be on the wrong number system. You dial the number from a call box and ask to speak to George Brown. You’re told George Brown doesn’t live there so you apologize and ring off. The time and the rendezvous are prearranged—the emergency signal is contained in the name you ask for. Someone will be there.”

  “What else would the Mission do?” asked Smiley.

  “Hard to say. Pay him probably. Arrange a collecting place for reports. The controller would make all those arrangements for the agent, of course, and tell him his part of it by courier. They work on the Soviet principle a good deal, as I told you—even the smallest details are arranged by control. The people in the field are allowed very little independence.”

  There was another silence. Smiley looked at Guillam and then at Mendel, then blinked and said:

  “Blondie didn’t come to Scarr in January and February, did he?”

  “No,” said Mendel; “this was the first year.”

  “Fennan always went skiing in January and February. This was the first time in four years he’d missed.”

  “I wonder,” said Smiley, “whether I ought to go and see Maston again.”

  Guillam stretched luxuriously and smiled: “You can always try. He’ll be thrilled to hear you’ve been brained. I’ve a sneaking feeling he’ll think Battersea’s on the coast, but not to worry. Tell him you were attacked while wandering about in someone’s private yard— he’ll understand. Tell him about your assailant, too, George. You’ve never seen him, mind, and you don’t know his name, but he’s a courier of the East German Intelligence Service. Maston will back you up; he always does. Specially when he’s got to report to the Minister.”

  Smiley looked at Guillam and said nothing.

  “After your bang on the head, too,” Guillam added; “he’ understand.”

  “But, Peter—”

  “I know, George, I know.”

  “Well, let me tell you another thing. Blondie collected his car on the first Tuesday of each month.”

  “So?”

  “Those were the nights Elsa Fennan went to the Weybridge Rep. Fennan worked late on Tuesdays, she said.”

  Guillam got up. “Let me dig about, George. Cheerio, Mendel, I’ll probably give you a ring tonight. I don’t see what we can do now, anyway, but it would be nice to know, wouldn’t it?” He reached the door. “Incidentally, where are Fennan’s possessions—wallet, diary and so forth? Stuff they found on the body?”

  “Probably still at the Station,” said Mendel; “until after the inquest.”

  Guillam stood looking at Smiley for a moment, wondering what to say.

  “Anything you want, George?”

  “No thanks—oh, there is one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Could you get the CID off my back? They’ve visited me three times now and of course they’ve got nowhere locally. Could you make this an Intelligence matter for the time being? Be mysterious and soothing?”

  “Yes, I should think so.”

  “I know it’s difficult, Peter, because I’m not—”

  “Oh, another thing just to cheer you up. I had that comparison made between Fennan’s suicide note and the anonymous letter. They were done by different people on the same machine. Different pressures and spacing but identical typeface. So long, old dear. Tuck into the grapes.”

  Guillam closed the door behind him. They heard his footsteps echoing crisply down the bare corridor.

  Mendel rolled himself a cigarette.

  “Lord,” said Smiley; “does nothing frighten you? Haven’t you seen the Sister here?”

  Mendel grinned and shook his head.

  “You can only die once,” he said, putting the cigarette between his thin lips. Smiley watched him light it. He produced his lighter, took the hood off it and rotated the wheel with his stained thumb, swiftly cupping both hands around it and nursing the flame towards the cigarette. There might have been a hurricane blowing.

  “Well, you’re the crime expert,” said Smiley. “How are we doing?”

  “Messy,” said Mendel. “Untidy.”

  “Why?”

  “Loose ends everywhere. No police work. Nothing checked. Like algebra.”

  “What’s algebra got to do with it?”

  “You’ve got to prove what can be proved, first. Find the constants. Did she really go to the theatre? Was she alone? Did the neighbours hear her come back? If so, what time? Was Fennan really late Tuesdays? Did his Missus go to the theatre regularly every fortnight like she said?”

  “And the 8.30 call. Can you tidy that for me?”

  “You’ve got that call on the brain, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. Of all the loose ends, that’s the loosest. I brood over it, you know, and there just isn’t any sense in it. I’ve been through his train timetable. He was a punctual man—often got to the FO before anyone else, unlocked his own cupboard. He would have caught the 8.54, the 9.08, or at worst the 9.14. The 8.54 got him in at 9.38—he liked to be at his office by a quarter to ten. He couldn’t possibly want to be woken at 8.30.”

  “Perhaps he just liked bells,” said Mendel, getting up.

  “And the letters,” Smiley continued. “Different typists but the same machine. Discounting the murderer two people had access to that machine: Fennan and his wife. If we accept that Fennan typed the suicide note—and he certainly signed it—we must accept that it was Elsa who typed the denunciation. Why did she do that?”

  Smiley was tired out, relieved that Mendel was going.

  “Off to tidy up. Find the constants.”

  “You’ll need money,” said Smiley, and offered him some from the wallet beside his bed. Mendel took it without ceremony, and left.

  Smiley lay back. His head was throbbing madly, burning hot. He thought of calling the nurse and cowardice prevented him. Gradually the throbbing eased. He heard from outside the ringing of an ambulance bell as it turned off Prince of Wales Drive into the hospital yard. “Perhaps he just liked bells,” he muttered, and fell asleep.

  He was woken by the sound of argument in the corridor—he heard the Sister’s voice raised in protest; he heard footsteps and Mendel’s voice, urgent in contradiction. The door opened suddenly and someone put the light on. He blinked and sat up, glancing at his watch. It was a quarter to six. Mendel was talking to him, almost shouting. What was he trying to say? Something about Battersea Bridge … the river police … missing since yesterday … He was wide awake. Adam Scarr was dead.

  10

  THE VIRGIN’S STORY

  Mendel drove very well, with a kind of schoolma’amish pedantry that Smiley would have found comic. The Weybridge road was packed with traffic as usual. Mendel hated motorists. Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage. He didn’t care who it was—he’d seen bishops in purple d
oing seventy in a built-up area, frightening pedestrians out of their wits. He liked Smiley’s car. He liked the fussy way it had been maintained, the sensible extras, wing mirrors and reversing light. It was a decent little car.

  He liked people who looked after things, who finished what they began. He liked thoroughness and precision. No skimping. Like this murderer. What had Scarr said? “Young, mind, but cool. Cool as charity.” He knew that look, and Scarr had known it too … the look of complete negation that reposes in the eyes of a young killer. Not the look of a wild beast, not the grinning savagery of a maniac, but the look born of supreme efficiency, tried and proven. It was a stage beyond the experience of war. The witnessing of death in war brings a sophistication of its own; but beyond that, far beyond, is the conviction of supremacy in the heart of the professional killer. Yes, Mendel had seen it before: the one that stood apart from the gang, pale eyed, expressionless, the one the girls went after, spoke of without smiling. Yes, he was a cool one all right.

  Scarr’s death had frightened Mendel. He made Smiley promise not to go back to Bywater Street when he was released from hospital. With any luck they’d think he was dead, anyway. Scarr’s death proved one thing, of course: the murderer was still in England, still anxious to tidy up. “When I get up,” Smiley had said last night, “we must get him out of his hole again. Put out bits of cheese.” Mendel knew who the cheese would be: Smiley. Of course if they were right about the motive there would be other cheese too: Fennan’s wife. In fact, Mendel thought grimly, it doesn’t say much for her that she hasn’t been murdered. He felt ashamed of himself and turned his mind to other things. Such as Smiley again.

  Odd little beggar, Smiley was. Reminded Mendel of a fat boy he’d played football with at school. Couldn’t run, couldn’t kick, blind as a bat but played like hell, never satisfied till he’d got himself torn to bits. Used to box, too. Came in wide open swinging his arms about: got himself half killed before the referee stopped it. Clever bloke, too.

  Mendel stopped at a roadside café for a cup of tea and a bun, then drove into Weybridge. The Repertory Theatre was in a one-way street leading off the High Street where parking was impossible. Finally he left the car at the railway station and walked back into the town.

  The front doors of the theatre were locked. Mendel walked round to the side of the building under a brick archway. A green door was propped open. It had push bars on the inside and the words “stage door” scribbled in chalk. There was no bell; a faint smell of coffee issued from the dark green corridor within. Mendel stepped through the doorway and walked down the corridor, at the end of which he found a stone staircase with a metal handrail leading upwards to another green door. The smell of coffee was stronger, and he heard the sound of voices.

  “Oh rot, darling, frankly. If the culture vultures of blissful Surrey want Barrie three months running let them have it, say I. It’s either Barrie or A Cuckoo in the Nest for the third year running and for me Barrie gets it by a short head”—this from a middle-aged female voice.

  A querulous male replied: “Well, Ludo can always do Peter Pan, can’t you, Ludo?”

  “Bitchie, bitchie,” said a third voice, also male, and Mendel opened the door.

  He was standing in the wings of the stage. On his left was a piece of thick hardboard with about a dozen switches mounted on a wooden panel. An absurd rococo chair in gilt and embroidery stood beneath it for the prompter and factotum.

  In the middle of the stage two men and a woman sat on barrels smoking and drinking coffee. The décor represented the deck of a ship. A mast with rigging and rope ladders occupied the centre of the stage, and a large cardboard cannon pointed disconsolately towards a backcloth of sea and sky.

  The conversation stopped abruptly as Mendel appeared on the stage. Someone murmured: “My dear, the ghost at the feast,” and they all looked at him and giggled.

  The woman spoke first: “Are you looking for someone, dear?”

  “Sorry to butt in. Wanted to talk about becoming a subscriber to the theatre. Join the club.”

  “Why yes, of course. How nice,” she said, getting up and walking over to him. “How very nice.” She took his left hand in both of her own and squeezed it, stepping back at the same time and extending her arms to their full length. It was her chatelaine gesture—Lady Macbeth receives Duncan. She put her head on one side and smiled girlishly, retained his hand and led him across the stage to the opposite wing. A door led into a tiny office littered with old programmes and posters, greasepaint, false hair and tawdry pieces of nautical costume.

  “Have you seen our panto this year? Treasure Island. Such a gratifying success. And so much more social content, don’t you think, than those vulgar nursery tales?”

  Mendel said: “Yes, wasn’t it,” without the least idea of what she was talking about, when his eye caught a pile of bills rather neatly assembled and held together by a bulldog clip. The top one was made out to Mrs Ludo Oriel and was four months overdue.

  She was looking at him shrewdly through her glasses. She was small and dark, with lines on her neck and a great deal of make-up. The lines under her eyes had been levelled off with greasepaint but the effect had not lasted. She was wearing slacks and a chunky pullover liberally splashed with distemper. She smoked incessantly. Her mouth was very long, and she held her cigarette in the middle of it in a direct line beneath her nose, her lips formed an exaggerated convex curve, distorting the lower half of her face and giving her an ill-tempered and impatient look. Mendel thought she would probably be difficult and clever. It was a relief to think she couldn’t pay her bills.

  “You do want to join the club, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  She suddenly flew into a rage: “If you’re another bloody tradesman you can get out. I’ve said I’ll pay and I will, just don’t pester me. If you let people think I’m finished I will be and you’ll be the losers, not me.”

  “I’m not a creditor, Mrs Oriel. I’ve come to offer you money.”

  She was waiting.

  “I’m a divorce agent. Rich client. Like to ask you a few questions. We’re prepared to pay for your time.”

  “Christ,” she said with relief. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” They both laughed. Mendel put five pounds on top of the bills, counting them down.

  “Now,” said Mendel; “how do you keep your club subscription list? What are the benefits of joining?”

  “Well, we have watery coffee on stage every morning at eleven sharp. Members of the club can mix with the cast during the break between rehearsals from 11.00 to 11.45. They pay for whatever they have, of course, but entry is strictly limited to club members.”

  “Quite.”

  “That’s probably the part that interests you. We seem to get nothing but pansies and nymphos in the morning.”

  “It may be. What else goes on?”

  “We put on a different show each fortnight. Members can reserve seats for a particular day of each run—the second Wednesday of each run, and so on. We always begin a run on the first and third Mondays of the month. The show begins at 7.30 and we hold the club reservations until 7.20. The girl at the box office has the seating plan and strikes off each seat as it’s sold. Club reservations are marked in red and aren’t sold off till last.”

  “I see. So if one of your members doesn’t take his usual seat, it will be marked off on the seating plan.”

  “Only if it’s sold.”

  “Of course.”

  “We’re not often full after the first week. We’re trying to do a show a week, you see, but it’s not easy to get the—er—facilities. There isn’t the support for two-week runs really.”

  “No, no, quite. Do you keep old seating plans?”

  “Sometimes, for the accounts.”

  “How about Tuesday the third of January?”

  She opened a cupboard and took out a sheaf of printed seating plans. “This is the second fortnight of our pantomime, of course. Tradition.”
r />   “Quite,” said Mendel.

  “Now who is it you’re so interested in?” asked Mrs Oriel, picking up a ledger from the desk.

  “Small blonde party, aged about forty-two or three. Name of Fennan, Elsa Fennan.”

  Mrs Oriel opened her ledger. Mendel quite shamelessly looked over her shoulder. The names of club members were entered neatly in the left-hand column. A red tick on the extreme left of the page indicated that the member had paid his subscription. On the right-hand side of the page were notes of standing reservations made for the year. There were about eighty members.

  “Name doesn’t ring a bell. Where does she sit?”

  “No idea.”

  “Oh, yes, here we are. Merridale Lane, Walliston. Merridale!—I ask you. Let’s look. A rear stall at the end of a row. Very odd choice, don’t you think? Seat number R2. But God knows whether she took it on the third of January. I shouldn’t think we’ve got the plan any more, though I’ve never thrown anything away in my life. Things just evaporate, don’t they?” She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, wondering whether she’d earned her five pounds. “Tell you what, we’ll ask the Virgin.” She got up and walked to the door; “Fennan … Fennan …” she said. “Half a sec, that does ring a bell. I wonder why. Well, I’m damned—of course—the music case.” She opened the door. “Where’s the Virgin?” she said, talking to someone on the stage.

  “God knows.”

  “Helpful pig,” said Mrs Oriel, and closed the door again. She turned to Mendel: “The Virgin’s our white hope. English rose, local solicitor’s stage-struck daughter, all lisle stockings and get-me-if-you-can. We loathe her. She gets a part occasionally because her father pays tuition fees. She does seating in the evenings sometimes when there’s a rush—she and Mrs Torr, the cleaner, who does cloaks. When things are quiet, Mrs Torr does the whole thing and the Virgin mopes about in the wings hoping the female lead will drop dead.” She paused. “I’m damned sure I remember ‘Fennan.’ Damned sure I do. I wonder where that cow is.” She disappeared for a couple of minutes and returned with a tall and rather pretty girl with fuzzy blonde hair and pink cheeks—good at tennis and swimming.