My God, thought Smiley; you really do work round the clock. A twenty-four-hour cabaret, you are—“We Never Closed.” He walked out into the street.
3
ELSA FENNAN
Merridale Lane is one of those corners of Surrey where the inhabitants wage a relentless battle against the stigma of suburbia. Trees, fertilized and cajoled into being in every front garden, half obscure the poky “Character dwellings” which crouch behind them. The rusticity of the environment is enhanced by the wooden owls that keep guard over the names of houses, and by crumbling dwarfs indefatigably poised over goldfish ponds. The inhabitants of Merridale Lane do not paint their dwarfs, suspecting this to be a suburban vice, nor, for the same reason, do they varnish the owls; but wait patiently for the years to endow these treasures with an appearance of weathered antiquity, until one day even the beams on the garage may boast of beetle and woodworm.
The lane is not exactly a cul-de-sac although estate agents insist that it is; the further end from the Kingston by-pass dwindles nervously into a gravel path, which in turn degenerates into a sad little mud track across Merries Field—leading to another lane indistinguishable from Merridale. Until about 1920 this path had led to the parish church, but the church now stands on what is virtually a traffic island adjoining the London road, and the path which once led the faithful to worship provides a superfluous link between the inhabitants of Merridale Lane and Cadogan Road. The strip of open land called Merries Field has already achieved an eminence far beyond its own aspirations; it has driven a wedge deep into the District Council, between the developers and the preservers, and so effectively that on one occasion the entire machinery of local government in Walliston was brought to a standstill. A kind of natural compromise has now established itself: Merries Field is neither developed nor preserved by the three steel pylons, placed at regular intervals across it. At the centre is a cannibal hut with a thatched roof called “The War Memorial Shelter,” erected in 1951 in grateful memory to the fallen of two wars, as a haven for the weary and old. No one seems to have asked what business the weary and old would have in Merries Field, but the spiders have at least found a haven in the roof, and as a sittingout place for pylon-builders the hut was unusually comfortable.
Smiley arrived there on foot just after eight o’clock that morning, having parked his car at the police station, which was ten minutes’ walk away.
It was raining heavily, driving cold rain, so cold it felt hard upon the face.
Surrey police had no further interest in the case, but Sparrow had sent down independently a Special Branch officer to remain at the police station and act if necessary as liaison between Security and the police. There was no doubt about the manner of Fennan’s death. He had been shot through the temple at point blank range by a small French pistol manufactured in Lille in 1957. The pistol was found beneath the body. All the circumstances were consistent with suicide.
Number fifteen Merridale Lane was a low, Tudor-style house with the bedrooms built into the gables, and a half-timbered garage. It had an air of neglect, even disuse. It might have been occupied by artists, thought Smiley. Fennan didn’t seem to fit here. Fennan was Hampstead and au-pair foreign girls.
He unlatched the gate and walked slowly up the drive to the front door, trying vainly to discern some sign of life through the leaded windows. It was very cold. He rang the bell.
Elsa Fennan opened the door.
“They rang and asked me if I minded. I didn’t know what to say. Please come in.” A trace of a German accent.
She must have been older than Fennan. A slight, fierce woman in her fifties with hair cut very short and dyed to the colour of nicotine. Although frail, she conveyed an impression of endurance and courage, and the brown eyes that shone from her crooked little face were of an astonishing intensity. It was a worn face, racked and ravaged long ago, the face of a child grown old on starving and exhaustion, the eternal refugee face, the prison-camp face, thought Smiley.
She was holding out her hand to him—it was scrubbed and pink, bony to touch. He told her his name.
“You’re the man who interviewed my husband,” she said; “about loyalty.” She led him into the low, dark drawing-room. There was no fire. Smiley felt suddenly sick and cheap. Loyalty to whom, to what. She didn’t sound resentful. He was an oppressor, but she accepted oppression.
“I liked your husband very much. He would have been cleared.”
“Cleared? Cleared of what?”
“There was a prima facie case for investigation—an anonymous letter—I was given the job.” He paused and looked at her with real concern. “You have had a terrible loss, Mrs Fennan … you must be exhausted. You can’t have slept all night …”
She did not respond to his sympathy: “Thank you, but I can scarcely hope to sleep today. Sleep is not a luxury I enjoy.” She looked down wryly at her own tiny body; “My body and I must put up with one another twenty hours a day. We have lived longer than most people already.
“As for the terrible loss. Yes, I suppose so. But you know, Mr Smiley, for so long I owned nothing but a toothbrush, so I’m not really used to possession, even after eight years of marriage. Besides, I have the experience to suffer with discretion.”
She bobbed her head at him, indicating that he might sit, and with an oddly old-fashioned gesture she swept her skirt beneath her and sat opposite him. It was very cold in that room. Smiley wondered whether he ought to speak; he dared not look at her, but peered vaguely before him, trying desperately in his mind to penetrate the worn, travelled face of Elsa Fennan. It seemed a long time before she spoke again.
“You said you liked him. You didn’t give him that impression, apparently.”
“I haven’t seen your husband’s letter, but I have heard of its contents.” Smiley’s earnest, pouchy face was turned towards her now: “It simply doesn’t make sense. I as good as told him he was … that we would recommend that the matter be taken no further.”
She was motionless, waiting to hear. What could he say: “I’m sorry I killed your husband, Mrs Fennan, but I was only doing my duty. (Duty to whom for God’s sake?) He was in the Communist Party at Oxford twenty-four years ago; his recent promotion gave him access to highly secret information. Some busybody wrote us an anonymous letter and we had no option but to follow it up. The investigation induced a state of melancholia in your husband, and drove him to suicide.” He said nothing.
“It was a game,” she said suddenly, “a silly balancing trick of ideas; it had nothing to do with him or any real person. Why do you bother yourself with us? Go back to Whitehall and look for more spies on your drawing boards.” She paused, showing no sign of emotion beyond the burning of her dark eyes. “It’s an old illness you suffer from, Mr Smiley,” she continued, taking a cigarette from the box; “and I have seen many victims of it. The mind becomes separated from the body; it thinks without reality, rules a paper kingdom and devises without emotion the ruin of its paper victims. But sometimes the division between your world and ours is incomplete; the files grow heads and arms and legs, and that’s a terrible moment, isn’t it? The names have families as well as records, and human motives to explain the sad little dossiers and their make-believe sins. When that happens I am sorry for you.” She paused for a moment, then continued:
“It’s like the State and the People. The State is a dream too, a symbol of nothing at all, an emptiness, a mind without a body, a game played with clouds in the sky. But States make war, don’t they, and imprison people? To dream in doctrines—how tidy! My husband and I have both been tidied now, haven’t we?” She was looking at him steadily. Her accent was more noticeable now.
“You call yourself the State, Mr Smiley; you have no place among real people. You dropped a bomb from the sky: don’t come down here and look at the blood, or hear the scream.”
She had not raised her voice, she looked above him now, and beyond.
“You seem shocked. I should be weeping, I suppose, but I’v
e no more tears, Mr Smiley—I’m barren; the children of my grief are dead. Thank you for coming, Mr Smiley; you can go back, now— there’s nothing you can do here.”
He sat forward in his chair, his podgy hands nursing one another on his knees. He looked worried and sanctimonious, like a grocer reading the lesson. The skin of his face was white and glistened at the temples and on the upper lip. Only under his eyes was there any colour: mauve half-moons bisected by the heavy frame of his spectacles.
“Look, Mrs Fennan; that interview was almost a formality. I think your husband enjoyed it, I think it even made him happy to get it over.”
“How can you say that, how can you, now this …”
“But I tell you it’s true: why, we didn’t even hold the thing in a Government office—when I got there I found Fennan’s office was a sort of right of way between two other rooms, so we walked out into the park and finished up at a café—scarcely an inquisition, you see. I even told him not to worry—I told him that. I just don’t understand the letter—it doesn’t …”
“It’s not the letter, Mr Smiley, that I’m thinking of. It’s what he said to me.”
“How do you mean?”
“He was deeply upset by the interview, he told me so. When he came back on Monday night he was desperate, almost incoherent. He collapsed in a chair and I persuaded him to go to bed. I gave him a sedative which lasted him half the night. He was still talking about it the next morning. It occupied his whole mind until his death.”
The telephone was ringing upstairs. Smiley got up.
“Excuse me—that will be my office. Do you mind?”
“It’s in the front bedroom, directly above us.”
Smiley walked slowly upstairs in a state of complete bewilderment. What on earth should he say to Maston now?
He lifted the receiver, glancing mechanically at the number on the apparatus.
“Walliston 2944.”
“Exchange here. Good morning. Your eight-thirty call.” “Oh—Oh yes, thank you very much.”
He rang off, grateful for the temporary respite. He glanced briefly round the bedroom. It was the Fennans’ own bedroom, austere but comfortable. There were two armchairs in front of the gas fire. Smiley remembered now that Elsa Fennan had been bedridden for three years after the war. It was probably a survival from those years that they still sat in the bedroom in the evenings. The alcoves on either side of the fireplace were full of books. In the furthest corner, a typewriter on a desk. There was something intimate and touching about the arrangement, and perhaps for the first time Smiley was filled with an immediate sense of the tragedy of Fennan’s death. He returned to the drawing-room.
“It was for you. Your eight-thirty call from the exchange.”
He was aware of a pause and glanced incuriously towards her. But she had turned away from him and was standing looking out of the window, her slender back very straight and still, her stiff, short hair dark against the morning light.
Suddenly he stared at her. Something had occurred to him which he should have realized upstairs in the bedroom, something so improbable that for a moment his brain was unable to grasp it. Mechanically he went on talking; he must get out of there, get away from the telephone and Maston’s hysterical questions, get away from Elsa Fennan and her dark, restless house. Get away and think.
“I have intruded too much already, Mrs Fennan, and I must now take your advice and return to Whitehall.”
Again the cold, frail hand, the mumbled expressions of sympathy. He collected his coat from the hall and stepped out into the early sunlight. The winter sun had just appeared for a moment after the rain, and it repainted in pale, wet colours the trees and houses of Merridale Lane. The sky was still dark grey, and the world beneath it strangely luminous, giving back the sunlight it had stolen from nowhere.
He walked slowly down the gravel path, fearful of being called back.
He returned to the police station, full of disturbing thoughts. To begin with it was not Elsa Fennan who had asked the exchange for an eight-thirty call that morning.
4
COFFEE AT THE FOUNTAIN
The CID Superintendent at Walliston was a large, genial soul who measured professional competence in years of service and saw no fault in the habit. Sparrow’s Inspector Mendel on the other hand was a thin, weasel-faced gentleman who spoke very rapidly out of the corner of his mouth. Smiley secretly likened him to a gamekeeper—a man who knew his territory and disliked intruders.
“I have a message from your Department, sir. You’re to ring the Adviser at once.” The Superintendent indicated his telephone with an enormous hand and walked out through the open door of his office. Mendel remained. Smiley looked at him owlishly for a moment, guessing his man.
“Shut the door.” Mendel moved to the door and pulled it quietly to.
“I want to make an inquiry of the Walliston telephone exchange. Who’s the most likely contact?”
“Assistant Supervisor normally. Supervisor’s always in the clouds; Assistant Supervisor does the work.”
“Someone at 15 Merridale Lane asked to be called by the exchange at eight-thirty this morning. I want to know what time the request was made and who by. I want to know whether there’s a standing request for a morning call, and if so let’s have the details.”
“Know the number?”
“Walliston 2944. Subscriber Samuel Fennan, I should think.”
Mendel moved to the telephone and dialled 0. While he waited for a reply he said to Smiley: “You don’t want anyone to know about this, do you?”
“No one. Not even you. There’s probably nothing in it. If we start bleating about murder we’ll …”
Mendel was through to the exchange, asking for the Assistant Supervisor.
“Walliston CID here, Superintendent’s office. We have an inquiry … yes, of course … ring me back then … CID outside line, Walliston 2421.”
He replaced the receiver and waited for the exchange to ring him. “Sensible girl,” he muttered, without looking at Smiley. The telephone rang and he began speaking at once.
“We’re investigating a burglary in Merridale Lane. Number fifteen. Just possible they used number fifteen as an observation point for a job on the opposite house. Have you got any way of finding out whether calls were originated or received on Walliston 2944 in the last twenty-four hours?”
There was a pause. Mendel put his hand over the mouthpiece and turned to Smiley with a very slight grin. Smiley suddenly liked him a good deal.
“She’s asking the girls,” said Mendel; “and she’ll look at the dockets.” He turned back to the telephone and began jotting down figures on the Superintendent’s pad. He stiffened abruptly and leant forward on the desk.
“Oh yes.” His voice was casual, in contrast to his attitude; “I wonder when she asked for that?” Another pause … “19.55 hours … a man, eh? The girl’s sure of that, is she? … Oh, I see, oh, well, that fixes that. Thanks very much indeed all the same. Well, at least we know where we stand … not at all, you’ve been very helpful … just a theory, that’s all … have to think again, won’t we? Well, thanks very much. Very kind, keep it under your hat … Cheerio.” He rang off, tore the page from the pad, and put it in his pocket.
Smiley spoke quickly: “There’s a beastly café down the road. I need some breakfast. Come and have a cup of coffee.” The telephone was ringing; Smiley could almost feel Maston on the other end. Mendel looked at him for a moment and seemed to understand. They left it ringing and walked quickly out of the police station towards the High Street.
The Fountain Café (Proprietor Miss Gloria Adam) was all Tudor and horse brasses and local honey at sixpence more than anywhere else. Miss Adam herself dispensed the nastiest coffee south of Manchester and spoke of her customers as “My Friends.” Miss Adam did not do business with friends, but simply robbed them, which somehow added to the illusion of genteel amateurism which Miss Adam was so anxious to preserve. Her origin was obscure, but she o
ften spoke of her late father as “The Colonel.” It was rumoured among those of Miss Adam’s friends who had paid particularly dearly for their friendship that the colonelcy in question had been granted by the Salvation Army.
Mendel and Smiley sat at a corner table near the fire, waiting for their order. Mendel looked at Smiley oddly: “The girl remembers the call clearly; it came right at the end of her shift— five to eight last night. A request for an eight-thirty call this morning. It was made by Fennan himself—the girl is positive of that.”
“How?”
“Apparently this Fennan had rung the exchange on Christmas Day and the same girl was on duty. Wanted to wish them all a Happy Christmas. She was rather bucked. They had quite a chat. She’s sure it was the same voice yesterday, asking for the call. ‘Very cultured gentleman,’ she said.”
“But it doesn’t make sense. He wrote a suicide letter at ten-thirty. What happened between eight and ten-thirty?”
Mendel picked up a battered old briefcase. It had no lock— more like a music case, thought Smiley. He took from it a plain buff folder and handed it to Smiley. “Facsimile of the letter. Super said to give you a copy. They’re sending the original to the FO and another copy straight to Marlene Dietrich.”
“Who the devil’s she?”
“Sorry, sir. What we call your Adviser, sir. Pretty general in the Branch, sir. Very sorry, sir.”
How beautiful, thought Smiley, how absolutely beautiful. He opened the folder and looked at the facsimile. Mendel went on talking: “First suicide letter I’ve ever seen that was typed. First one I’ve seen with the time on it, for that matter. Signature looks OK, though. Checked it at the station against a receipt he once signed for lost property. Right as rain.”
The letter was typed, probably a portable. Like the anonymous denunciation; that was a portable too. This one was signed with Fennan’s neat, legible signature. Beneath the printed address at the head of the page was typed the date, and beneath that the time: 10.30 p.m.:
A Murder of Quality AND Call for the Dead Page 17
