Part 2

The second part is the investigation proper, and its method is to retrace a dead man's movements. Smiley works on the assumption that Vladimir was killed for something he was carrying, which is the one thing Lacon's brief does not allow for. The instruction is repeated: "Tidy him up, keep us out of it, and don't wander." The fact Smiley cannot get past is that Vladimir had two proofs and was bringing them with him, and the whole purpose of the brief is to bury the question of what they were.

He searches Vladimir's flat and finds nothing. What puzzles him is what the police did and did not find in the dead man's coat, which is effectively empty. The emptiness is the clue. Vladimir was a professional operating under Moscow Rules, the discipline of being able to dispose of everything he was carrying if he was followed, and the coat tells Smiley that his friend expected to be trailed and took precautions no ordinary street killing would explain.

Smiley walks the ground of Hampstead Heath himself, reading it. He finds the signs a dead drop leaves behind: a chalk mark, a drawing pin on a park pavilion, and the negative of a compromising photograph, two men with a woman, hidden in a half-empty packet of cigarettes in a tree. He develops the negative at his home in Chelsea in a near-wordless sequence, and recognises one of the two men as Otto Leipzig, the General's lieutenant. That recognition points him at the courier, and he goes to see Villem Craven and his wife Stella, who do not want the service their husband served coming back into the house. Their daughter Beckie is part of the household. In the emigre circle he talks to Mikhel, Vladimir's friend, former aide-de-camp and keeper of the Free Baltic Library, and to Mikhel's wife Elvira.

In Paris, Ostrakova is set upon in the street by two men and thrown in front of a car, and spends the aftermath in a hospital bed, writing again to London in fear for her life. By the end of the hour Smiley is certain that Vladimir was killed by Moscow Centre and not by a street criminal, has one of the two proofs in his hand, knows that the second has gone missing, and has twice been told to stop. He has not stopped.

The part belongs to Guinness in near-silence. Two long set pieces, the walk across the heath and the work in the darkroom, are carried with almost no dialogue, and they make the investigation itself the spectacle: a man reading a coat, a route, a piece of ground and a photograph, and asking ordinary questions of ordinary people. One critical account compares the developing sequence to Antonioni's Blow-Up, on the grounds that both turn an act of examination into the drama. It is an espionage episode whose climactic discovery is a piece of dead-drop tradecraft, a chalk mark, a drawing pin and a cigarette packet in a tree, rather than a confrontation.

The weakness is that the hour is almost entirely procedure, and the audience is ahead of Smiley on everything except the detail of the photograph. Little between the first scene and the last changes the shape of the story. What it does change is direction: this is the part that turns a burial job into a pursuit, and it fixes the serial's habit of letting the people the institution has stopped paying, the Cravens, Mikhel, the emigre circle, carry the emotional cost of its decisions. It is also the last hour before the cast opens up with Esterhase, Connie Sachs and the Hamburg club owner.