'One scuffed leather coin case Continental appearance. Half inside his pocket, half out, left-side jacket. You saw the coins by his body - seventy-two pence. That's all the money on him. Carry a wallet at all. did he, sir?'
'I don't know.'
'Our guess is they helped themselves to the wallet, started on the purse, then ran. One bunch keys domestic and various, right-hand trousers...' He ran on but Smiley's scrutiny did not relax. Some people act a memory, the Superintendent thought, noticing his concentration, others have one, In the Superintendent's book, memory was the better half of intelligence, he prized it highest of all mental accomplishments; and Smiley, he knew, possessed it. 'One Paddington Borough Library Card in the name of V. Miller, one box Swan Vesta matches partly used, overcoat left. One Aliens' Registration Card, number as reported, also in the name of Vladimir Miller. One bottle tablets, overcoat left. What would the tablets be for, sir, any views on that at all? Name of Sustac, whatever that is, to be taken two to three times a day?'
'Heart,' said Smiley.
'And one receipt for the sum of thirteen pounds from the Straight and Steady Minicab Service of Islington, North.'
'May I look?' said Smiley, and the Superintendent held it out so that Smiley could read the date and the driver's signature, J. Lamb, in a copy-book hand wildly underlined.
The next bag contained a stick of school chalk, yellow and miraculously unbroken. The narrow end was smeared brown as if by a single stroke, but the thick end was unused.
'There's yellow chalk powder on his left hand too,' Mr Murgotroyd said, speaking for the first time. His complexion was like grey stone. His voice too was grey, and mournful as an undertaker's. 'We did wonder whether he might be in the teaching line, actually,' Mr Murgotroyd added, but Smiley, either by design or oversight, did not answer Mr Murgotroyd's implicit question, and the Superintendent did not pursue it.
And a second cotton handkerchief, proffered this time by Mr Murgotroyd, part bloodied, part clean, and carefully ironed into a sharp triangle for the top pocket.
'On his way to a party, we wondered,' Mr Murgotroyd said, this time with no hope at all.
'Crime and Ops on the air, sir,' a voice called from the front of the van.
Without a word the Superintendent vanished into the darkness, leaving Smiley to the depressed gaze of Mr Murgotroyd.
'You a specialist of some sort, sir?' Mr Murgotroyd asked after a long sad scrutiny of his guest.
'No. No, I'm afraid not,' said Smiley.
'Home Office, sir?'
'Alas, not Home Office either,' said Smiley with a benign shake of his head, which somehow made him party to Mr Murgotroyd's bewilderment.
'My superiors are a little worried about the press, Mr Smiley,' the Superintendent said, poking his head into the van again. 'Seems they're heading this way, sir.'
Smiley clambered quickly out. The two men stood face to face in the avenue.
'You've been very kind,' Smiley said. 'Thank you.'
'Privilege,' said the Superintendent.
'You don't happen to remember which pocket the chalk was in, do you?' Smiley asked.
'Overcoat left,' the Superintendent replied in some surprise.
'And the searching of him - could you tell me again how you see that exactly?'
'They hadn't time or didn't care to turn him over. Knelt by him, fished for his wallet, pulled at his purse. Scattered a few objects as they did so. By then they'd had enough.'
'Thank you,' said Smiley again.
And a moment later, with more ease than his portly figure might have suggested him capable of, he had vanished among the trees. But not before the Superintendent had shone the torch full upon his face, a thing he hadn't done till now for reasons of discretion. And taken an intense professional look at the legendary features, if only to tell his grandchildren in his old age : how George Smiley, sometime Chief of the Secret Service, by then retired, had one night come out of the woodwork to peer at some dead foreigner of his who had died in highly nasty circumstances.
Not one face at all actually, the Superintendent reflected. Not when it was lit by the torch like that indirectly from below. More your whole range of faces. More your patchwork of different ages, people and endeavours. Even - thought the Superintendent - of different faiths.
'The best I ever met,' old Mendel, the Superintendent's one-time superior, had told him over a friendly pint not long ago. Mendel was retired now, like Smiley. But Mendel knew what he was talking about and didn't like Funnies any better than the Superintendent did - interfering la-di-da amateurs most of them, and devious with it. But not Smiley. Smiley was different, Mendel had said. Smiley was the best - simply the best case man Mendel had ever met - and old Mendel knew what he was talking about.
An abbey, the Superintendent decided. That's what he was, an abbey. He would work that into his sermon the next time his turn came around. An abbey, made up of all sorts of conflicting ages and styles and convictions. The Superintendent liked that metaphor the more he dwelt on it. He would try it out on his wife when he got home : man as God's architecture, my dear, moulded by the hand of ages, infinite in his striving and diversity... But at this point the Superintendent laid a restraining hand upon his own rhetorical imagination. Maybe not, after all, he thought. Maybe we're flying a mite too high for the course, my friend.
There was another thing about that face the Superintendent wouldn't easily forget either. Later, he talked to old Mendel about it, as he talked to him later about lots of things. The moisture. He'd taken it for dew at first - yet if it was dew why was the Superintendent's own face bone dry? It wasn't dew and it wasn't grief either, if his hunch was right. It was a thing that happened to the Superintendent himself occasionally and happened to the lads too, even the hardest; it crept up on them and the Superintendent watched for it like a hawk. Usually in kids' cases, where the pointlessness suddenly got through to you your child batterings, your criminal assaults, your infant rapes. You didn't break down or beat your chest or any of those histrionics. No. You just happened to put your hand to your face and find it damp and you wondered what the hell Christ bothered to die for, if He ever died at all.
And when you had that mood on you, the Superintendent told himself with a slight shiver, the best thing you could do was give yourself a couple of days off and take the wife to Margate, or before you knew where you were you found yourself getting a little too rough with people for your own good health.
'Sergeant!' the Superintendent yelled.
The bearded figure loomed before him.
'Switch the lights on and get it back to normal,' the Superintendent ordered. 'And ask Inspector Hallowes to slip up here and oblige. At the double.'
FOUR
They had unchained the door to him, they had questioned him even before they took his coae tersely and intently. Were there any compromising materials on the body, George? Any that would link him with us? My God, you've been a time! They had shown him where to wash, forgetting that he knew already. They had sat him in an armchair and there Smiley remained, humble and discarded, while Oliver Lacon, Whitehall's Head Prefect to the intelligence services, prowled the threadbare carpet like a man made restless by his conscience, and Lauder Strickland said it all again in fifteen different ways to fifteen different people, over the old upright telephone in the far comer of the room - 'Then get me back to police liaison, woman, at once' - either bullying or fawning, depending on rank and clout. The Superintendent was a life ago, but in time ten minutes. The flat smelt of old nappies and stale cigarettes and was on the top floor of a scrolled Edwardian apartment house not two hundred yards from Hampstead Heath. In Smiley's mind, visions of Vladimir's burst face mingled with these pale faces of the living, yet death was not a shock to him just now, but merely an affirmation that his own existence too was dwindling; that he was living against the odds. He sat without expectation. He sat like an old man at a country railway station, watching the express go by. But watching all the same. And remembering old journeys.