by Tom Stoppard
WREN: Look, I’m good for fifty if it helps. I’ll put it in under dog-handling. I suppose Hogbin must have handled the dog.
CHIEF: Let’s go halves. One-fifty each.
BLAIR:Excuse me, sir. Why can’t we use Purvis’s money? After all, he killed the dog.
CHIEF: Purvis’s money?
BLAIR:Highgate kept giving him odd sums for film and bus fares, which we made him accept to preserve his credibility, and which Highgate made him declare for the same reason. There must be several hundred pounds by now, lying in some account somewhere.
CHIEF: Excellent. Well thought, Blair. Would you care for a pipe?
BLAIR:No thank you, sir. I’ll stick to the old briar.
CHIEF: How is your pipe, Wren? Ready for another?
WREN: No thanks, it’s bubbling along very nicely.
CHIEF: Jolly good. Well, that’s that.
BLAIR:Actually it wasn’t about the dog. It was about the opium. And your. . . your private life generally. Purvis said it was all over Highgate. I’d like to know how it got there.
CHIEF: Purvis took it up there. I put it into his Highgate package a couple of months ago. He was coming up for retirement and I thought that if they thought they had something on me I might get a tickle as his replacement . . . Nothing doing so far. Perhaps it’s just as well. These double and triple bluffs can get to be a bit of a headache. It got to be a bit of a headache for Purvis.
WREN: How did it work?
(The CHIEF speaks, slowly, deliberately, reflectively. The pauses filled with the gentle bubbling of his pipe.)
CHIEF: Well, in the beginning the idea was that if they thought that we knew that they thought Purvis was their man . . . they would assume that the information we gave Purvis to give to them . . . would be information designed to mislead . . . so they would take that into account . . . and, thus, if we told Purvis to tell them that we were going to do something . . . they would draw the conclusion that we were not going to do it . . . but as we were on to that, we naturally were giving Purvis genuine information to give to them, knowing that they would be drawing the wrong conclusions from it . . . This is where it gets tricky . . . because if they kept drawing these wrong conclusions while the other thing kept happening . . . they would realize that we had got to Purvis first after all . . . So to keep Purvis in the game we would have to not do some of the things which Purvis told them we would be doing, even though our first reason for telling Purvis was that we did intend to do them . . . In other words . . . in order to keep fooling the Russians, we had to keep doing the opposite of what we really wanted to do . . . Now this is where it gets extremely tricky . . . Obviously we couldn’t keep doing the opposite of what we wished to do simply to keep Purvis in the game . . . so we frequently had to give Purvis the wrong information from which the Russians would draw the right conclusion, which enabled us to do what we wished to do, although the Russians, thanks to Purvis, knew we were going to do it . . . In other words, Purvis was acting, in effect, as a genuine Russian spy in order to maintain his usefulness as a bogus Russian spy . . . The only reason why this wasn’t entirely disastrous for us was that, of course, during the whole of this time, the Russians, believing us to believe that Purvis was in their confidence, had been giving Purvis information designed to mislead us . . . and in order to maintain Purvis’s credibility they have been forced to do some of the things which they told Purvis they would do, although their first reason for telling him was that they didn’t wish to do them.
(Pause.)
In other words, if Purvis’s mother had got kicked by a horse things would be more or less exactly as they are now.
(Pause.)
If I were Purvis I’d drown myself.
PURVIS: PS—Incidentally, Dr Seddon thinks that you ought to be in here yourself, but I’ll leave you to field that one.