Free Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré Page B

still in the house. But we just assumed something had changed and they hadn’t gone after all. Or I did.’
    ‘Thank you, Gail.’
    For what, for Christ’s sake? For upstaging Perry? Don’t mention it, Yvonne, it’s a pleasure. She raced on:
    ‘Dima had us on tiptoe by now. Literally holding our breath. We didn’t doubt him – I think it’s a point to make. We were obeying him, which isn’t like either of us, but we were. He led us to a door, a house door, but a side one. It wasn’t locked, he just pushed it and went in ahead, then immediately swung round, with one hand upin the air and the other one to his lips like’ – like Daddy playing Boots in a Christmas pantomime, but sober , she was going to say, but didn’t – ‘well, and this really intense stare, urging silence on us. Right, Perry? Your turn.’
    ‘Then, when he knew he had us, he beckoned us to follow. I went first.’ Perry’s tone by contrast minimal in deliberate counterpoint to hers – his voice for when he’s truly excited and pretending he isn’t. ‘We crept into an empty hall. Well, hall ! It was about ten by twelve feet, with a cracked, west-facing window with diamond panes made out of masking tape and the evening sun pouring through them. Dima still had his finger to his lips. I stepped inside and he grabbed hold of my arm, the way he’d grabbed it on the court. Strength in a league of its own. I couldn’t have competed with it.’
    ‘Did you think you might have to compete with it?’ Luke inquired, with male sympathy.
    ‘I didn’t know what to think. I was worried about Gail and my concern was to get myself between them. For a few seconds, only.’
    ‘And long enough for you to realize it wasn’t a children’s game any more,’ Yvonne suggested.
    ‘Well, it was beginning to dawn,’ Perry confessed, and paused, his voice drowned out by the wail of a passing ambulance in the street above them. ‘You have to understand the amount of unexpected din inside the place,’ he insisted, as if the one sound had set off the other. ‘We were only in this tiny hall, but we could hear the wind bumping the whole rickety house around. And the light was – well, phantasmagoric , to use a word my students love. It was coming at us in layers through the west window. You had this powdery light from the low cloud rolling in from the sea, and then a layer of brilliant sunlight riding in over the top of it. And pitch-black shadows where it didn’t reach.’
    ‘And cold,’ Gail complained, hugging herself theatrically. ‘Like only empty houses are. And that chilly graveyard smell they have. But all I was thinking was: where are the girls? Why no sight or sound of them? Why no sound of anybody or anything except the wind? And if nobody’s around,who were we doing all this secrecy stuff for? Who were we fooling except ourselves? And Perry, you were thinking the same, weren’t you, you told me so afterwards.’
    *
    And behind Dima’s raised forefinger, a different face, Perry is saying. All the fun had gone out of it. Out of his eyes. It was humourless. Rigid. He really needed us to be afraid. To share his fear. And as we stand there bemused – and, yes, afraid – the spectral figure of Tamara materializes before us in a corner of the tiny hall where she’s been standing all along without us noticing, in the darkest recess on the other side of the shafts of sunlight. She’s wearing the same long black dress she wore at the tennis match, and wore again when she and Dima spied on them from the darkness of the people carrier, and she looks like her own ghost.
    Gail grabbed back the story:
    ‘The first thing I saw was her bishop’s cross. Then the rest of her, forming round it. She’d plaited and braided her hair for the birthday party and rouged her cheeks, and daubed lipstick round her mouth – I mean, really round it. She looked as mad as a bedbug. She didn’t have her finger to her lips. She didn’t need to. Her whole body was