John le Carre: Our kind of traitor

Puzzled by his aggression, Gail shakes her head. It's true, Perry. Guilty as charged. I didn't know about mourning buttons and now I do, so you can get on with the story, can't you?

'And it didn't occur to you to alert the hotel, for instance, Perry?' Luke asks doggedly. '"There's a Russian with a family-size gun sitting up in the lifeguard's lookout"?'

'Many possibilities suggested themselves, Luke, and that was no doubt one of them,' Perry replies, his bout of aggression not yet run out. 'But what on earth was the hotel supposed to do? There was every indication that, if Dima didn't actually own the place, he had it in his pocket. Anyway, we had the children to consider: whether it was right to make a fuss in front of everyone. We decided it wasn't.'

'And the island's police authorities? You didn't think of them?' – Luke again.

'We had four more days. We didn't intend to spend them making dramatic statements to the police about goings-on they were probably up to their necks in anyway.'

'And that was a joint decision?'

'It was an executive decision. Mine. I wasn't about to march up to Gail and say, "Vanya's got a gun stuck in his belt, d'you think we should tell the police?" – least of all in front of the girls. Once we were alone and I'd got my bearings, I told her what I'd seen. We talked it through rationally, and that was the decision we came up with: no action.'

Overtaken by an involuntary rush of loving support, Gail backs him up with her Counsel's Opinion: 'Maybe Vanya had a perfectly good local permit to carry the gun. What did Perry know? Maybe Vanya didn't need a permit. Maybe the police had given him the gun in the first place. We weren't exactly up in Antiguan gun law, were we, Perry, either of us?'

She half expects Yvonne to raise a contrary point of law, but Yvonne's too busy consulting her copy of the offending document in its buff folder:

'Could I trouble the two of you for a description of this Uncle Vanya, please?' she asks in an aggression-free voice.

'Pockmarked,' says Gail promptly, again dazzled by how it was all there before her in her memory. Fifty-odd. Pumice-stone cheeks. A drinker's paunch. She thought she'd seen him drinking surreptitiously from a flask at the tennis, but couldn't be sure.

'Rings on each finger of his right hand,' says Perry when it's his turn. 'Seen collectively, a knuckleduster. Black, scarecrow hair, jutting out from the back of his hat, but I suspect he was bald on top and that was why he wore the tam-o'-shanter. Lot of blubber on him.'

And yes, Yvonne, that's him, they agree in a shared murmur, their heads touching and the electricity flying between them as they gaze at the full-plate photograph she has slipped under their noses. Yes, that's Vanya from Perm, second from left of four merry, overweight white men sitting in a nightclub surrounded by hookers and paper streamers and bottles of champagne on New Year's Eve 2008 in God-knows-where.

*

Gail needs the loo. Yvonne leads her up the narrow basement stairs to the mysteriously plush ground floor. Genial Ollie without his beret is stretched out in a winged armchair, deep in a newspaper. It's not your ordinary sort of paper, being printed in Cyrillic. Gail thinks she deciphers Novaya Gazeta but can't be certain and doesn't want to do him the favour of asking. Yvonne waits while Gail pees. The loo is fancy, with pretty hand towels, scented soap and hunting prints of Jorrocks on expensive wallpaper. They return downstairs. Perry remains stooped over his hands, but this time the palms are upward so he looks as though he's reading two fortunes at once.

'So, Gail,' says little Luke smartly. 'Your shout again, I think.'

Not a shout, actually, Luke. A fucking scream, one that's been banking up in me for some while now, as I think you may have noticed in the course of resting your eyes on me a little more frequently than the spies' Handbook of Inter-Gender Etiquette considers strictly necessary.

*

'I simply had no idea,' she begins, talking straight ahead of her, but favouring Yvonne over Luke. 'I just blundered in. I should have realized. I didn't.'

'You've absolutely nothing to reproach yourself with,' Perry retorts hotly from her side. 'Nobody told you, nobody gave you the slightest warning. If anyone was to blame, Dima's lot were.'

Gail is not to be consoled. She is a lawyer in a brick-lined wine cellar at dead of night, assembling the case against the accused, and the accused is herself. She is lying face down on a beach in Antigua under a sunshade in mid-afternoon with her top undone and two small girls squatting beside her and Perry is stretched out on her other side wearing his schoolboy shorts and a pair of his late father's National Health spectacles fitted with his own prescription sunglass lenses.

The girls have eaten their free ice creams and drunk their free fruit juice. Uncle Vanya from Perm is up his ladder with the family-sized pistol in his belt and Natasha – whose name is a challenge to Gail every time she approaches it; she has to gather herself together and make a clean jump of it like horse-riding at school – Natasha is lying the other end of the beach in splendid isolation. Elspeth meanwhile has withdrawn to a safe distance. Perhaps she knows what's about to happen. With the hindsight she is not allowed to indulge, Gail thinks so.

The shadows are back in the girls' faces, she notices. The professional in her fears they may share a bad secret. With the stuff she has to listen to in court most days of the week, that's what bothers her, that's what drives her curiosity: children who don't chatter and aren't naughty. Children who don't realize they're victims. Children who can't look you in the eye. Children who blame themselves for the things adults do to them.

'I ask questions for a living,' she protests. She is saying everything to Yvonne now. Luke is a blur and Perry is outside her frame, relegated there deliberately. 'I've done family courts, I've had children in the witness box. What we do in our work, we do out of our work. We're not two people. We're just us.'

In a gesture intended to ease her stress rather than his own, Perry cranes his body upwards and gives a swimmer's stretch of his long arms, but Gail's stress isn't eased.

'So the first thing I said to them was: tell me some more about Uncle Vanya. They'd been so cryptic about him I thought he might be a bad uncle. "Uncle Vanya plays the balalaika with us, we love him very much, and he's funny when he gets drunk." That's Irina speaking. She's decided to be more forthcoming than her big sister. But I'm thinking: a drunken uncle who plays music to them, what else does he play?'

'And the language spoken still English, we take it,' Yvonne asks, in her pursuit of every last detail. But gently now, woman to woman. 'We're not into basic French or anything?'

'English was virtually their first language. Internat American English with a slight Italian accent. So then I asked, is Vanya a real uncle or just an honorary one? Answer: Vanya is our mother's brother and he used to be married to Aunt Raisa who lives in Sochi with another husband nobody likes. We're doing family tree now, which is great by me. Tamara is Dima's wife, and she's very strict, and she prays a lot because she's holy and she is kind to have us. Kind? Have us how? And then I say – I'm being a really clever lawyer now, asking the tangential questions, not the in-your-face ones – is Dima kind to Tamara? Is Dima kind to his boys? Meaning: is Dima a bit too kind to you? And Katya says, yes, Dima is kind to Tamara because he is her husband and her sister's dead, and Dima is kind to Natasha because he's her father and her mother's dead, and to his sons because he's their father. Which opens the door to the question I really want to ask, and I put it to Katya because she's older: So who's your father, Katya? And Katya says, he's dead. And Irina joins in and says, so's our mother. They're both dead. I do a kind of "oh really?" and when they just look at me, I say, I'm very sad for you. How long have they been dead? I wasn't even sure I believed them. There was a bit of me that was still hoping they were pulling some gruesome children's trick. By now it's Irina doing the talking and Katya who's gone into a kind of trance. So have I, but that's beside the point. They died on Wednesday, Irina says. A lot of emphasis on the day. As if the day's to blame. Wednesday was when they died, whenever Wednesday was. So I say – it just gets worse and worse – you mean last Wednesday? And Irina says, yes, Wednesday a week ago, the 29th of April: very precisely, making sure I get it right. So Wednesday last week and something about a car smash, and I just sit there staring at them, and Irina takes my hand and pats it and Katya puts her head in my lap, and Perry who I've completely forgotten about wraps his arm round me, and I'm the only person crying.'