Free Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré Page A

potholes.’
    ‘Carting our presents,’ Gail blurted from the wings. ‘You with your cricket set, me with the gift-wrapped presents for the kids in the fanciest bag I could find, which isn’t saying a lot.’
    Is anybody listening out there? she wondered. Not to me. Perry is the horse’s mouth. I’m its arse.
    ‘The house as we approached it from the back was a pile of old bones,’ he continued. ‘We’d been warned not to expect a palace, we knew the house was up for demolition. But we hadn’t expected a wreck.’ The outward-bound Oxford don had turned field reporter: ‘There was a tumbledown brick building with barred windows, I deduced the old slave quarters. There was a high perimeter whitewashed wall, about twelve foot high and capped with razor wire, which was new and vile. There were white security lights stuck up on pylons round it like a football stadium, blazing down on whoever passed. We’d seen the glow from the balcony of our cabin. Fairy lights rigged between them, presumably in preparation for the night’s birthday festivities. Security cameras, but pointed away from us because we were the wrong side of them. I assume that was the intention. A shining new aerial dish, twenty foot high, directed northish, as far as I could read it on our way back. Pointed at Miami. Or Houston perhaps. Anyone’s guess.’ He thought about this. ‘Well, not yours, obviously. You people are supposed to know that stuff.’
    Is this a challenge or a joke? It’s neither. It’s Perry showing them how brilliant he is at doing their job, in case they haven’t noticed. It’s Perry the climber of north-facing overhangs, telling them he never forgets a route. It’s the Perry who can’t resist a challenge provided the odds are stacked against him.
    ‘Then downhill again through more forest to a bit of grass meadow with the headland sticking up at the end of it. In reality, the house hasn’t got a back. Or it’s all back, take your choice. It’s a pseudo-Elizabethan hotchpotch of a bungalow built out of clapboard and asbestos, facing three ways. Grey stucco walls. Poky leaded windows. Plywood pretending to be half-timber and a rear porch with a lantern dangling in it. Are you with me, Gail?’
    Would I be here if I wasn’t? ‘You’re doing fine,’ she said. Which wasn’t quite what he’d asked.
    ‘Add-on bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and offices with frontdoors on them, suggesting that the place had been some sort of commune or settlement at one time. So I mean, overall a shambles. It wasn’t Dima’s fault. We knew that, thanks to Mark. The Dimas had never lived there till now. Never touched it apart from a crash job on the security. The idea didn’t bother us. To the contrary. It had a much-needed touch of reality about it.’
    The ever-inquisitive Dr Yvonne is peering up from her medical notes. ‘But were there no chimneys after all that, Perry?’
    ‘Two attached to the remnants of a sugar mill on the western edge of the peninsula, the third at the edge of the woods. I thought I put that in our document as well.’
    Our bloody document? How many times have you said that now? Our document that you wrote and I haven’t been allowed to see, but they have? It’s your bloody document! It’s their bloody document! Her cheeks were scorching, and she hoped he’d noticed.
    ‘Then as we started down towards the house, about twenty metres from it, I suppose, Dima slowed us down,’ Perry was saying, his voice gathering intensity. ‘With his hands. Slow down .’
    ‘And would it be here also that he put his finger to his lips in a gesture of complicity?’ Yvonne asked, popping her head up at him while she wrote.
    ‘ Yes it was! ’ Gail leaped in. ‘ Exactly here. Huge complicity. First slow down, then shut up. We assumed the finger to the lips was all part of surprising the children, so we played along with it. Ambrose had said they’d been packed off to the crab races, so it seemed a bit odd they were