Free Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré

where Mr Dima himself would be waiting for them.
    She did her Ambrose voice again:
    ‘“Man, they got fairy lights up in that garden, they got a steel band,a marquee, they got a shipment of the tenderest Kobe beef ever came out of a cow. I don’t know what they haven’t got up there. And Mr Dima, he has it all fixed and prepared down to a fine pin. He has packed off my Elspeth and that whole knockabout family of his to a major crab-racing event over the other side of St John’s, just so’s we can smuggle you in by the back door, and that’s how secret you folks are tonight!”’
    If they had been looking for adventure, the Nature Path alone would have provided it. They must have been the first people to use it for simply years. A couple of times Perry actually had to beat a passage through the undergrowth:
    ‘Which of course he loved. Actually, he should have been a peasant, shouldn’t you? Then we came out in this long green tunnel with Dima standing at the end of it looking like a happy Minotaur. If there is such a thing.’
    Perry’s bony index finger jerked upward in admonition:
    ‘Which was our first sighting of Dima alone ,’ he warned gravely. ‘No bodyguards, no family. No children. No one to watch over us. Or none visible. We were a three, standing at the edge of a wood. I think we were both very much aware of that. The sudden exclusivity.’
    But whatever significance Perry attached to this remark was lost in the insistent rush of Gail’s narrative:
    ‘He hugged us, Yvonne! Really hugged us. First Perry, then shoved him aside, then me, then Perry again. Not sexy hugs. Great big family hugs. As if he hadn’t seen us for ages. Or wasn’t going to see us again.’
    ‘Or else he was desperate,’ Perry suggested, on the same earnest, reflective note. ‘A bit of that got through to me. Maybe not to you. What we meant to him at that moment. How important we were.’
    ‘He really loved us,’ Gail swept on determinedly. ‘He stood there, declaring his love. Tamara loved us too, he was positive. She just found it difficult to say because she was a bit crazy since her problem. No explanation of what the problem might have been, and who were we to ask? Natasha loved us, but she doesn’t say anything to anyone these days, she just reads books. The whole family loved the Englishfor our humanity and fair play. Except he didn’t say humanity , what did he say?’
    ‘Heart.’
    ‘We’re standing there at the end of the tunnel, having this great hug-fest, and he’s orating all this stuff about our hearts. I mean, how much love can you profess to somebody you’ve only ever exchanged six words with?’
    ‘Perry?’ Luke prompted.
    ‘I thought he was heroic ,’ Perry replied, his long hand now flying to his brow to form a classic gesture of worry. ‘I just didn’t know why. Didn’t I put that in our document somewhere? Heroic? I thought he was’ – with a shrug dismissing his own feelings as valueless – ‘I thought dignity under fire . I just didn’t know who was firing at him. Or why. I didn’t know anything, except –’
    ‘You were on the rock face with him,’ Gail suggested, not unkindly.
    ‘Yes. I was. And he was in a bad place. He needed us.’
    ‘ You ,’ she corrected him.
    ‘All right. Me. That’s all I’m trying to say.’
    ‘Then you tell it.’
    *
    ‘He walked us out of the tunnel, round to what we realized was going to be the back of the house,’ Perry began, and then broke off. ‘I take it that you do want an exact description of the place?’ he demanded sternly of Yvonne.
    ‘We do indeed, Perry,’ Yvonne replied, equally efficiently. ‘Every last dreary detail, please, if you don’t mind.’ And went back to her meticulous note-taking.
    ‘From where we’d emerged from the woods, there’s an old bit of service track covered in some sort of red cinder, probably made by the original builders as an access road. We had to pick our way uphill over the