A Murder of Quality AND Call for the Dead

by John le Carré

  “I didn’t believe old Mr Glaston at first. He said she was bad, but I didn’t believe it. They lived up on the hill then, Gorse Hill, only a step from the Tabernacle; Stella and her father. They never seemed to keep servants for long, so she did most of the work. I used to call in Sunday mornings sometimes after church. Stella looked after her father, cooked for him and everything, and I always wondered how I’d ever have the nerve to ask Mr Glaston for her. The Glastons were big people in Branxome. I was teaching at Grammar School in those days. They let me teach part-time while I read for my degree, and I made up my mind that if I passed the exam. I’d ask her to marry me.

  “The Sunday after the results came out I went round to the house after morning service. Mr Glaston opened the door himself. He took me straight into the study. You could see half the potteries in Poole from the window, and the sea beyond. He sat me down and he said: ‘I know what you’re here for, Stanley. You want to marry Stella. But you don’t know her,’ he said, ‘you don’t know her.’ ‘I’ve been visiting two years, Mr Glaston,’ I said, ‘and I think I know my mind.’ Then he started talking about her. I never thought to hear a human being talk like that of his own child. He said she was bad—bad in her heart. That she was full of malice. That was why no servants would stay at the Hill. He told me how she’d lead people on, all kind and warm, till they’d told her everything, then she’d hurt them, saying wicked, wicked things, half true, half lies. He told me a lot more besides, and I didn’t believe it, not a word. I think I lost my head; I called him a jealous old man who didn’t want to lose his housekeeper, a lying, jealous old man who wanted his child to wait on him till he died. I said it was him who was bad, not Stella, and I shouted at him liar, liar. He didn’t seem to hear, just shook his head, and I ran out into the hall and called Stella. She’d been in the kitchen, I think, and she came to me and put her arms round me and kissed me.

  “We were married a month later, and the old man gave her away. He shook my hand at the wedding and called me a fine man, and I thought what an old hypocrite he was. He gave us money—to me, not her—two thousand pounds. I thought perhaps he was trying to make up for the dreadful things he’d said, and later I wrote to him and said I forgave him. He never answered and I didn’t see him often after that.

  “For a year or more we were happy enough at Branxome. She was just what I thought she’d be, neat and simple. She liked to go for walks and kiss at the stiles; she liked to be a bit grand sometimes, going to the Dolphin for dinner all dressed up. It meant a lot to me then, I don’t mind admitting, going to the right places with Mr Glaston’s daughter. He was Rotary and on the Council and quite a figure in Branxome. She used to tease me about it—in front of other people too, which got me a bit. I remember one time we went to the Dolphin, one of the waiters there was a bloke called Johnnie Raglan. We’d been to school together. Johnnie was a bit of a tear-about and hadn’t done anything much since he’d left school except run after girls and get into trouble. Stella knew him, I don’t know how, and she waved to him as soon as we’d sat down. Johnnie came over and Stella made him bring another chair and sit with us. The Manager looked daggers, but he didn’t dare to do anything because she was Samuel Glaston’s daughter. Johnnie stayed there all the meal and Stella talked to him about school and what I was like. Johnnie was pleased as punch and got cheeky, saying I’d been a swat and a good boy and all the rest, and how Johnnie had knocked me about—lies most of it, and she egged him on. I went for her afterwards and said I didn’t pay good money at the Dolphin to hear Johnnie Raglan tell a lot of tall stories, and she turned on me fast like a cat. It was her money, she said, and Johnnie was as good as me any day. Then she was sorry and kissed me and I pretended to forgive her.”

  Sweat was forming on his face; he was talking fast, the words tripping over each other. It was like a man recalling a nightmare, as if the memory were still there, the fear only half gone. He paused and looked sharply at Smiley as if expecting him to speak, but Smiley seemed to be looking past him, his face impassive, its soft contours grown hard.

  “Then we went to Carne. I’d just started reading The Times and I saw the advert. They wanted a science tutor and I applied. Mr D’Arcy interviewed me and I got the job. It wasn’t till we got to Carne that I knew that what her father had said was true. She hadn’t been very keen on Chapel before, but as soon as she got here she went in for it in a big way. She knew it would look wrong, that it would hurt me. Branxome’s a fine big church, you see; there was nothing funny about going to Branxome Tabernacle. But at Carne it was different; Carne Tabernacle’s a little out-of-the-way place with a tin roof. She wanted to be different, to spite the school and me, by playing the humble one. I wouldn’t have minded if she’d been sincere, but she wasn’t, Mr Cardew knew that. He got to know Stella, Mr Cardew did. I think her father told him; anyway, Mr Cardew was up North before, and he knew the family well. For all I know he wrote to Mr Glaston, or went and saw him or something.

  “She began there well enough. The townspeople were all pleased enough to see her—a wife from the School coming to the Tabernacle, that had never happened before. Then she took to running the appeal for the refugees—to collecting clothes and all that. Miss D’Arcy was running it for the school, Mr D’Arcy’s sister, and Stella wanted to beat her at her own game—to get more from the Chapel people than Miss D’Arcy got from the School. But I knew what she was doing, and so did Mr Cardew, and so did the townspeople in the end. She listened. Every drop of gossip and dirt, she hoarded it away. She’d come home of an evening sometimes—Wednesdays and Fridays she did her Chapel work—and she’d throw off her coat and laugh till I thought she’d gone mad.

  “‘I’ve got them! I’ve got them all,’ she’d say, ‘I know all their little secrets and I’ve got them in the hollow of my hand, Stan.’ That’s what she’d say. And those that realised grew to be frightened of her. They all gossiped, Heaven knows, but not to profit from it, not like Stella. Stella was cunning; anything decent, anything good, she’d drag it down and spoil it. There were a dozen she’d got the measure of. There was Mulligan the furniture man; he’s got a daughter with a kid near Leamington. Somehow she found out the girl wasn’t married—they’d sent her to an aunt to have her baby and begin again up there. She rang up Mulligan once, something to do with a bill for moving Simon Snow’s furniture, and she said ‘Greetings from Leamington Spa, Mr Mulligan. We need a little co-operation.’ She told me that—she came home laughing her head off and told me. But they got her in the end, didn’t they? They got their own back!”

  Smiley nodded slowly, his eyes now turned fully upon Rode.

  “Yes,” he said at last, “they got their own back.”

  “They thought Mad Janie did it, but I didn’t. Janie’d as soon have killed her own sister as Stella. They were as close as moon and stars, that’s what Stella said. They’d talk together for hours in the evenings when I was out late on Societies or Extra Tuition. Stella cooked food for her, gave her clothes and money. It gave her a feeling of power to help a creature like Janie, and have her fawning round. Not because she was kind, but because she was cruel.

  “She’d brought a little dog with her from Branxome, a mongrel. One day a few months ago I came home and found it lying in the garage whimpering, terrified. It was limping and had blood on its back. She’d beaten it. She must have gone mad. I knew she’d beaten it before, but never like that; never. Then something happened— I shouted at her and she laughed and then I hit her. Not hard, but hard enough. In the face. I gave her twenty-four hours to have the dog destroyed or I’d tell the police. She screamed at me—it was her dog and she’d damn well do what she liked with it—but next day she put on her little black hat and took the dog to the vet. I suppose she told him some tale. She could spin a good tale about anything, Stella could. She kind of stepped into a part and played it right through. Like the tale she told the Hungarians. Miss D’Arcy had some refugees to stay from London once and Stella told them such a tale they ran
away and had to be taken back to London. Miss D’Arcy paid for their fares and everything, even had the welfare officer down to see them and try and put things right. I don’t think Miss D’Arcy ever knew who’d got at them, but I did—Stella told me. She laughed, always that same laugh: ‘There’s your fine lady, Stan. Look at her charity now.’

  “After the dog, she took to pretending I was violent, cringing away whenever I came near, holding her arm up as though I was going to hit her again. She even made out I was plotting to murder her: she went and told Mr Cardew I was. She didn’t believe it herself; she’d laugh about it sometimes. She said to me: ‘It’s no good killing me now, Stan; they’ll all know who’s done it.’ But other times she’d whine and stroke me, begging me not to kill her. ‘You’ll kill me in the long nights!’ She’d scream it out—it was the words that got her, the long nights, she liked the sound of them the way an actor does, and she’d build a whole story round them. ‘Oh, Stan,’ she’d say, ‘keep me safe in the long nights.’ You know how it is when you never meant to do anything anyway, and someone goes on begging you not to do it? You think you might do it after all, you begin to consider the possibility.”

  Miss Brimley drew in her breath rather quickly. Smiley stood up and walked over to Rode.

  “Why don’t we go back to my house for some food?” he said. “We can talk this over quietly. Among friends.”

  They took a taxi to Bywater Street. Rode sat beside Ailsa Brimley, more relaxed now, and Smiley, opposite him on a drop-seat, watched him and wondered. And it occurred to him that the most important thing about Rode was that he had no friends. Smiley was reminded of Büchner’s fairy tale of the child left alone in an empty world who, finding no one to talk to, went to the moon because it smiled at him, but the moon was made of rotten wood. And when the sun and moon and stars had all turned to nothing, he tried to go back to the earth, but it had gone.

  Perhaps because Smiley was tired, or perhaps because he was getting a little old, he felt a movement of sudden compassion towards Rode, such as children feel for the poor and parents for their children. Rode had tried so hard—he had used Carne’s language, bought the right clothes, and thought as best he could the right thoughts, yet remained hopelessly apart, hopelessly alone.

  He lit the gas-fire in the drawing-room while Ailsa Brimley went to the delicatessen in the King’s Road for soup and eggs. He poured out whisky and soda and gave one to Rode, who drank it in short sips, without speaking.

  “I had to tell somebody,” he said at last. “I thought you’d be a good person. I didn’t want you to print that article, though. Too many knew, you see.”

  “How many really knew?”

  “Only those she’d gone for, I think. I suppose about a dozen townspeople. And Mr Cardew, of course. She was terribly cunning, you see. She didn’t often pass on gossip. She knew to a hair how far she could go. Those who knew were the ones she’d got on the hook. Oh, and D’Arcy, Felix D’Arcy, he knew. She had something special there, something she never told me about. There were nights when she’d put on her shawl and slip out, all excited as if she was going to a party. Quite late sometimes, eleven or twelve. I’d never ask her where she was going because it only bucked her, but sometimes she’d nod at me all cunning and say, ‘You don’t know, Stan, but D’Arcy does. D’Arcy knows and he can’t tell,’ and then she’d laugh again and try and look mysterious, and off she’d go.”

  Smiley was silent for a long time, watching Rode and thinking. Then he asked suddenly: “What was Stella’s blood group, do you know?”

  “Mine’s B. I know that. I was a donor at Branxome. Hers was different.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She had a test before we were married. She used to suffer from anaemia. I remember hers being different, that’s all. Probably A. I can’t remember for sure. Why?”

  “Where were you registered as a donor?”

  “North Poole Transfusion Centre.”

  “Will they know you there still? Are you still recorded there?”

  “I suppose so.”

  The front door bell rang. It was Ailsa Brimley, back from her shopping.

  Ailsa installed herself in the kitchen, while Rode and Smiley sat in the warm comfort of the drawing-room.

  “Tell me something else,” said Smiley, “about the night of the murder. Why did you leave the writing-case behind? Was it absent-mindedness?”

  “No, not really. I was on Chapel duty that night, so Stella and I arrived separately at Fielding’s house. She got there before I did and I think Fielding gave the case to her—right at the start of the evening so that it wouldn’t get forgotten. He said something about it later that evening. She’d put the case beside her coat in the hall. It was only a little thing about eighteen inches by twelve. I could have sworn she was carrying it as we stood in the hall saying good-bye, but I must have been mistaken. It wasn’t till we got to the house that she asked me what I’d done with it.”

  “She asked you what you’d done with it?”

  “Yes. Then she threw a temper and said I expected her to remember everything. I didn’t particularly want to go back, I could have rung Fielding and arranged to collect it first thing next morning, but Stella wouldn’t hear of it. She made me go. I didn’t like to tell the police all this stuff about us quarrelling, it didn’t seem right.”

  Smiley nodded. “When you got back to Fielding’s you rang the bell?”

  “Yes. There’s the front door, then a glass door inside, a sort of french window to keep out draughts. The front door was still open, and the light was on in the hall. I rang the bell and collected the case from Fielding.”

  They had finished supper when the telephone rang.

  “Rigby here, Mr Smiley. I’ve got the laboratory results. They’re rather puzzling.”

  “The exam. paper first: it doesn’t tally?”

  “No, it doesn’t. The boffins here say all the figures and writing were done with the same ballpoint pen. They can’t be sure about the diagrams but they say the legend on all the diagrams corresponds to the rest of the script on the sheet.”

  “All done by the boy after all in fact?”

  “Yes. I brought up some other samples of his handwriting for comparison. They match the exam. paper right the way through. Fielding couldn’t have tinkered with it.”

  “Good. And the clothing? Nothing there either?”

  “Traces of blood, that’s all. No prints on the plastic.”

  “What was her blood group, by the way?”

  “Group A.”

  Smiley sat down on the edge of the bed. Pressing the receiver to his ear, he began talking quietly. Ten minutes later he was walking slowly downstairs. He had come to the end of the chase, and was already sickened by the kill.

  It was nearly an hour before Rigby arrived.

  20

  THE DROSS OF THE RIVER

  Albert Bridge was as preposterous as ever; bony steel, rising to Wagnerian pinnacles, against the patient London sky; the Thames crawling beneath it with resignation, edging its filth into the wharves of Battersea, then sliding towards the mist down river.

  The mist was thick. Smiley watched the driftwood, as it touched it, turning first to white dust, then seeming to lift, dissolve and vanish.

  This was how it would end, on a foul morning like this when they dragged the murderer whimpering from his cell and put the hempen rope round his neck. Would Smiley have the courage to recall this two months from now, as the dawn broke outside his window and the clock rang out the time? When they broke a man’s neck on the scaffold and put him away like the dross of the river?

  He made his way along Beaumont Street towards the King’s Road. The milkman chugged past him in his electric van. He would breakfast out this morning, then take a cab to Curzon Street and order the wine for dinner. He would choose something good. Fielding would like that.

  Fielding closed his eyes and drank, his left hand held lightly across his chest.

  �
�Divine,” he said, “divine!” And Ailsa Brimley, opposite him, smiled gently.

  “How are you going to spend your retirement, Mr Fielding?” she asked. “Drinking Frankenwein?”

  His glass still held before his lips, he looked into the candles. The silver was good, better than his own. He wondered why they were only dining three. “In peace,” he replied at last. “I have recently made a discovery.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That I have been playing to an empty house. But now I’m comforted to think that no one remembers how I forgot my words or missed an entry. So many of us wait patiently for our audience to die. At Carne no one will remember for more than a Half or two what a mess I’ve made of life. I was too vain to realise that until recently.” He put the glass down in front of him and smiled suddenly at Ailsa Brimley. “That is the peace I mean. Not to exist in anyone’s mind, but my own; to be a secular monk, safe and forgotten.”

  Smiley gave him more wine: “Miss Brimley knew your brother Adrian well in the war. We were all in the same department,” he said. “She was Adrian’s secretary for a while. Weren’t you, Brim?”

  “It’s depressing how the bad live on,” Fielding declared. “Rather embarrassing. For the bad, I mean.” He gave a little gastronomic sigh. “The moment of truth in a good meal! Übergangsperiode between entremets and dessert,” and they all laughed, and then were silent. Smiley put down his glass, and said:

  “The story you told me on Thursday, when I came and saw you …”

  “Well?” Fielding was irritated.

  “About cheating for Tim Perkins … how you took the paper from the case and altered it …”

  “Yes?”

  “It isn’t true.” He might have been talking about the weather. “They’ve examined it and it isn’t true. The writing was all one person’s … the boy’s. If anyone cheated, it must have been the boy.”

  There was a long silence. Fielding shrugged.