John le Carre: Our kind of traitor

Another silence followed – so long that Luke was reduced to asking Hector whether he was still there, for which he received a snappish 'where the fuck d'you think I am?'

'Well at least Billy Boy's aboard for you,' Luke suggested, by way of offering comfort that he didn't share.

'A total turnaround, thank God,' Hector replied devoutly. 'Don't know where I'd be without him.'

Luke didn't know either.

*

Billy Boy Matlock, Hector's ally suddenly? Hector's convert to the cause? His newfound comrade-in-arms? A total turnaround? Billy?

Or Billy Boy buying himself a little reinsurance on the side? Not that Billy Boy was bad, not bad like wicked, not bad like Aubrey Longrigg, Luke had never thought that of him – not your devious mastermind, your double or triple agent, sidling between conflicting powers. That wasn't Billy at all. He was too obvious for that.

So when precisely might this great conversion have occurred, and why? Luke marvelled. Or might it be that Billy Boy had already covered his back elsewhere, and was now ready to offer Hector his ample front, thereby becoming privy to the most closely guarded secrets in Hector's treasure chest?

What, for instance, had been in Billy's head that Sunday afternoon when he walked out of the Bloomsbury safe house, smarting from his humiliating put-down? Love of Hector? Or serious concerns for his own position in the future scheme of things?

What great City eminence might Billy Boy, in the days of painful rumination following that meeting, have invited to lunch – famously parsimonious though he might be – and sworn to secrecy, knowing that in the great eminence's book a secret is what he tells one person at a time? Knowing also that he has gained himself a friend should events take a tricky turn?

And of the many ripples that might fan out from this one little pebble tossed into the City's murky waters, who knew which of them might lap against the super-sharp ear of that distinguished City insider and rising parliamentarian, Aubrey Longrigg?

Or Bunny Popham?

Or Giles de Salis, ringmaster of the media circus?

And of all the other sharp-eared Longriggs, Pophams and de Salises waiting to jump on the Arena roundabout the minute it begins to turn?

Except that, according to Hector, the roundabout hasn't begun to turn. So why jump?

Luke wished very much that he had someone to share his thoughts with, but as usual there was nobody. Perry and Gail were outside the circle. Yvonne was off-air. And Ollie was – well, Ollie was the best back-door man in the business, but no Einstein when it came to the cut and thrust of high-stakes intrigue.

*

While Gail and Perry were performing sterling work as proxy parents, troupe leaders, Monopoly players and tour guides to the children, Ollie and Luke had been counting off the warning signs, and either dismissing them or adding them to Luke's ever-growing worry list.

In the course of one morning, Ollie had observed the same couple pass the house twice on the north side, then twice on the south-west side. Once the woman wore a yellow headscarf and a green Loden coat, once a floppy sunhat and slacks. But the same boots and socks, and carrying the same alpine walking stick. The man wore shorts the first time and baggy leopard-spot pants the second, but the same peaked blue cap and the same way of walking with his hands at his sides, barely moving them with his stride.

And Ollie had taught observation at training school, so it was hard to gainsay him.

Ollie had also been keeping a wary eye on Wengen railway station in the wake of Gail's and Natasha's encounter with Swiss authority at Interlaken Ost. According to a servant of the railway with whom Ollie had had a quiet beer in the Eiger Bar, the police presence in Wengen, normally restricted to resolving the odd punch-up, or conducting a half-hearted quest for drug pushers, had been increased over the past few days. Hotel registers had been checked out, and the photograph of a broad-faced, balding man with a beard had been surreptitiously shown to ticket clerks at the train and cable-car stations.

'I don't suppose Dima ever grew a beard at all, did he, back in the days when he was opening his first money laundromat in Brighton Beach?' he inquired of Luke during a quiet walk in the garden.

Both a beard and a moustache, Luke conceded grimly. They were part of the new identity he assumed in order to get himself to the States. Didn't shave them off till five years ago.

And – call it coincidence, but Ollie didn't – while he was at the railway news-stand, picking up the International Herald Tribune and the local press, he had spotted the same suspicious pair that he had seen casing the house. They were sitting in the waiting room and staring at the wall. Two hours and several trains going in both directions later, they were still there. Ollie could offer no explanation for their behaviour except cock-up: the relief surveillance team had missed the train, so the two were waiting while their superiors made up their minds what to do with them, or – taking into account their chosen position overlooking platform 1 – waiting to see who got off trains arriving from Lauterbrunnen.

'Plus the nice lady at the cheese shop asked me how many people I thought I was feeding, which I didn't like, but she may have been referring to my somewhat oversized tummy,' he ended, as if to lighten Luke's load, but humour wasn't coming easily to either of them.

Luke was also fretting about the fact that the household included four children of school age. Swiss schools were running, so why weren't our children at school? The medical nurse had asked him the same question when he went to the village surgery to have his hand checked. His lame reply to the effect that the International Schools were having a half-term had sounded implausible even to himself.

*

So far, Luke had insisted on confining Dima indoors, and Dima out of indebtedness had grudgingly submitted. In the afterglow of the scuffle on the staircase of the Bellevue Palace, Luke at first could do no wrong in Dima's eyes. But as the days crawled by and Luke had to find one excuse after another for the apparatchiks in London, Dima's mood turned to one of resistance, then revolt. Tiring of Luke, he put his case to Perry with characteristic bluntness:

'If I wanna take Tamara a walk, I gonna take her,' he growled. 'I see a beautiful mountain, I wanna show her. This isn't fucking Kolyma. You tell this to Dick, hear me, Professor?'

For the shallow climb up the concrete path to the benches that overlooked the valley, Tamara decided she needed a wheelchair. Ollie was sent off to find one. With her hennaed hair, splurged lipstick and dark glasses, she resembled some necromancer's artefact, and Dima in his boiler suit and woollen ski cap was no prettier. But in a community inured to every kind of human aberration, they made some sort of ideal elderly couple as Dima pushed Tamara slowly up the hill behind the house to show her the Staubbach Falls and Lauterbrunnen Valley in all their glory.

And if Natasha accompanied them, which she sometimes did, it was no longer as the hated love-child sired by Dima and inflicted on Tamara after she was ejected half-mad from prison, but as their loving and obedient daughter, whether natural or adopted was no longer relevant. But mostly, Natasha read her books or sought out her father when he was alone, blandishing him, stroking his bald head and kissing it as if he were her child.

Perry and Gail too were integral parts of this newly constituted family that was forming: with Gail forever thinking up new activities for the girls, introducing them to the cows in the meadows, marching them off to watch Hobelkase being planed in the cheese shop, or looking for deer and squirrels in the woods; while Perry played the boys' admired team leader and lightning-rod for their surplus energy. Only when Gail proposed an early-morning four at tennis with the boys did Perry uncharacteristically demur. After the match from hell in Paris, he confessed, he needed time to recover.