John le Carre - Our kind of traitor

'Chairman designate of the new parliamentary subcommittee on banking ethics.'

'And not completely out of touch with our Service either, I suppose?' Hector suggested.

'I suppose not,' Luke agrees, though why on earth Hector should have regarded him as an authority at that moment was hard to tell.

*

Perhaps it's only right that we spies, even our retired ones, do not take naturally to being photographed, Luke reflected. Perhaps we nurture a secret fear that the Great Wall between our outer and inner selves will be pierced by the camera's lens.

Certainly Aubrey Longrigg MP gave that impression. Even caught unawares in poor light by an inferior video camera hand-held fifty metres away across the water, Longrigg seemed to be hugging whatever shadow the fairy-lit deck of the Princess Tatiana afforded.

Not, it must be said, that the poor chap was naturally photogenic, Luke conceded, once more thanking his lucky stars that their paths had never crossed. Aubrey Longrigg was balding, mean and beaky, as became a man famous for his intolerance of lesser minds than his own. Under the Adriatic sun, his unappetizing features have turned a flaming pink, and the rimless spectacles do little to alter the impression of a fifty-year-old bank clerk – unless, like Luke, you have heard tales of the restless ambition that drives him, the unforgiving intellect that had made the fourth floor a swirling hothouse of innovative ideas and feuding barons, and of his improbable attraction to a certain kind of woman – the kind presumably that gets a kick out of being intellectually belittled – of whom the latest example was standing beside him in the person of: The Lady Janice (Jay) Longrigg, society hostess and fundraiser, followed by Yvonne's shortlist of the many charities that had reason to be thankful to Lady Longrigg.

She wears a stylish, off-the-shoulder evening dress. Her groomed raven hair is held in place by a diamante grip. She has a gracious smile and the royal, forward-leaning totter that only Englishwomen of a certain birth and class acquire. And she looks, to Luke's unsparing eye, ineffably stupid. At her side hover her two pre-pubescent daughters in party frocks.

'She's his new one, right?' Matlock the unabashed Labour supporter suddenly sang out, with improbable vigour, as the screen went blank at Hector's touch, and the overhead light came on. 'The one he married when he decided to fast-lane himself into politics without doing any of the dirty work. Some Labourite Aubrey Longrigg is, I will say! Old or new!'

*

Why was Matlock so jovial again? – and this time for real? The last thing Luke had expected of him was outright laughter, which in Matlock was at the best of times a rare commodity. Yet his big, tweedy torso was heaving with silent mirth. Was it because Longrigg and Matlock had for years been famously at daggers drawn? That to enjoy the favour of the one had been to attract the hostility of the other? That Longrigg had come to be known as the Chief's brain, and Matlock, unkindly, as his brawn? That with Longrigg's departure, office wits had likened their feud to a decade-long bullfight in which the bull had put in la puntilla?

'Yes, well, always a high-flyer, Aubrey was,' he was remarking, like a man remembering the dead. 'Quite the financial wizard too, as I recall. Not in your league, Hector, I'm pleased to say, but getting up there. Operational funds were never a problem, that's for sure, not while Aubrey was at the helm. I mean, how did he ever come to be on that boat to begin with?' – asked the same Matlock who only minutes ago had asserted that a man couldn't be condemned for being on someone's boat. 'Plus consorting with a former secret source after departing the Service, which the rule book has some very firm things to say about, particularly if said source is a slippery customer like – whatever he calls himself these days.'

'Emilio dell Oro,' Hector put in helpfully. 'One to remember, actually, Billy.'

'You'd think he'd know better, Aubrey would, after what we taught him, consorting with Emilio dell Oro, then. You'd think a man of Aubrey's somewhat serpentine skills would be more circumspect in his choice of friend. How come he happened to be there? Perhaps he had a good reason. We shouldn't prejudge him.'

'One of those happy strokes of luck, Billy,' Hector explained. 'Aubrey and his newest wife and her daughters were enjoying a camping holiday up in the hills above the Adriatic Coast. A London banking chum of Aubrey's called him up, name unknown, told him the Tatiana was anchored near by and there was a party going on, so hurry on down and join the fun.'

'Under canvas? Aubrey? Tell me another.'

'Roughing it in a campsite. The populist life of New Labour Aubrey, man of the people.'

'Do you go on camping holidays, Luke?'

'Yes, but Eloise hates British campsites. She's French,' he replied, sounding idiotic to himself.

'And when you go on your camping holidays, Luke – taking care, as you do, to avoid British campsites – do you as a rule take your dinner jacket with you?'

'No.'

'And Eloise, does she take her diamonds with her?'

'She hasn't got any, actually.'

Matlock thought about this. 'I suppose you bumped into Aubrey quite a lot, did you, Hector, while you were cutting your lucrative swathe in the City, and others of us went on doing our duty? Had the odd jar together now and then, did you, you and Aubrey? The way City folk do?'

Hector gave a dismissive shrug. 'Bumped into each other now and then. Haven't got a lot of time for naked ambition, to be honest. Bores me.'

At which Luke, to whom dissembling these days did not come quite as easily as it used to, had to restrain himself from grasping the arms of his chair.

*

Bumped into each other? Dear Heaven, they had fought each other to a standstill – and then gone on fighting. Of all the vulture capitalists, asset-strippers, dawn-raiders and carpet-buggers that ever stepped – according to Hector – Aubrey Longrigg was the most two-faced, devious, backsliding, dishonest and well-connected.

It was Aubrey Longrigg lurking in the wings who had led the assault on Hector's family grain firm. It was Longrigg who, through a dubious but cleverly assembled network of cut-outs, had cajoled Her Majesty's Revenue amp; Customs into storming Hector's warehouses at dead of night, slashing open hundreds of sacks, smashing down doors and terrifying the night shift.

It was Longrigg's insidious network of Whitehall contacts that had unleashed Health amp; Safety, the Inland Revenue, the Fire Department and the Immigration Service to harass and intimidate the family employees, ransack their desks, seize their account books and challenge their tax returns.

But Aubrey Longrigg was not mere enemy in Hector's eyes – that would have been too easy altogether – he was an archetype; a classic symptom of the canker that was devouring not just the City, but our most precious institutions of government.

Hector was at war not with Longrigg personally. Probably he was speaking the truth when he told Matlock that Longrigg bored him, for it was an essential pillar of his thesis that the men and women he was pursuing were by definition bores: mediocre, banal, insensitive, lacklustre, to be distinguished from other bores only by their covert support for one another, and their insatiable greed.

*

Hector's commentary has become perfunctory. Like a magician who doesn't want you to look too closely at any one card, he is shuffling swiftly through the pack of international rogues that Yvonne has put together for him.

Glimpse a tubby, imperious, very small man loading up his plate from the buffet:

'Known in German circles as Karl der Kleine,' Hector says dismissively. 'Half a Wittelsbach – which half eludes me. Bavarian, pitch-black Catholic as they say down there; close ties with the Vatican. Closer still with the Kremlin. Indirectly elected member of the Bundestag – and non-executive director of a clutch of Russian oil companies, big chum of Emilio dell Oro's. Skied with him last year in St Moritz, took his Spanish boyfriend along. The Saudis love him. Next lovely.'