Smiley's People by John le Carré

dawn on Hampstead Heath, a dripping, misty, no-man’s hour, neither warm nor cold, with a heaven tinted orange by the London glow, and the trees glistening like oilskins. They stood side by side in an avenue of beeches and the Superintendent was taller by a head: a young giant of a man, prematurely grizzled, a little pompous perhaps, but with a giant’s gentleness that made him naturally befriending. Smiley was clasping his pudgy hands over his belly like a mayor at a cenotaph, and had eyes for nothing but the plastic-covered body lying at his feet in the beam of the Superintendent’s torch. The walk this far had evidently winded him, for he puffed a little as he stared. From the darkness round them, police receivers crackled in the night air. There were no other lights at all; the Superintendent had ordered them extinguished.
    “He was just somebody I worked with,” Smiley explained after a long delay.
    “So I was given to understand, sir,” the Superintendent said.
    He waited hopefully but nothing more came. “Don’t even speak to him,” the Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Crime and Ops) had said to him. “You never saw him and it was two other blokes. Just show him what he wants and drop him down a hole. Fast.” Till now, the Detective Chief Superintendent had done exactly that. He had moved, in his own estimation, with the speed of light. The photographer had photographed, the doctor had certified life extinct, the pathologist had inspected the body in situ as a prelude to conducting his autopsy—all with an expedition quite contrary to the proper pace of things, merely in order to clear the way for the visiting irregular, as the Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Crime and Ops) had liked to call him. The irregular had arrived—with about as much ceremony as a meter-reader, the Superintendent noted—and the Superintendent had led him over the course at a canter. They had looked at footprints, they had tracked the old man’s route till here. The Superintendent had made a reconstruction of the crime, as well as he was able in the circumstances, and the Superintendent was an able man. Now they were in the dip, at the point where the avenue turned, where the rolling mist was thickest. In the torchbeam the dead body was the centre-piece of everything. It lay face downward and spread-eagled, as if it had been crucified to the gravel, and the plastic sheet emphasized its lifelessness. It was the body of an old man, but broad-shouldered still, a body that had battled and endured. The white hair was cut to stubble. One strong, veined hand still grasped a sturdy walking-stick. He wore a black overcoat and rubber overshoes. A black beret lay on the ground beside him, and the gravel at his head was black with blood. Some loose change lay about, and a pocket handkerchief, and a small penknife that looked more like a keepsake than a tool. Most likely they had started to search him and given up, sir, the Superintendent had said. Most likely they were disturbed, Mr. Smiley, sir; and Smiley had wondered what it must be like to touch a warm body you had just shot.
    “If I might possibly take a look at his face, Superintendent,” Smiley said.
    This time it was the Superintendent who caused the delay. “Ah, now are you sure about that, sir?” He sounded slightly embarrassed. “There’ll be better ways of identifying him than that, you know.”
    “Yes. Yes, I am sure,” said Smiley earnestly, as if he really had given the matter great thought.
    The Superintendent called softly to the trees, where his men stood among their blacked-out cars like a next generation waiting for its turn.
    “You there. Hall. Sergeant Pike. Come here at the double and turn him over.”
    Fast, the Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Crime and Ops) had said.
    Two men slipped forward from the shadows. The elder wore a black beard. Their surgical gloves of elbow length shone ghostly grey. They wore blue overalls and thigh-length rubber boots. Squatting,