Part 4

The fourth part completes the Hamburg strand and, for the first time, brings the London and Paris ends of the story into the same frame. The address Kretzschmar gave Smiley takes him to a water camp on the Baltic coast near Lubeck, a small fishing community where Otto Leipzig lives on a boat, and where Smiley arrives too late: Leipzig has been tortured and killed, and the boat's cabin has been torn apart by whoever came looking for what he had.

The searchers went through the boat thoroughly and did not find what they wanted, a detail Smiley notices at the bloodied sink. What they missed, he finds: the torn half of a postcard, hidden underwater in an old gym-shoe on a fishing line, a recognition sign from which the second proof can be obtained. He returns through Lubeck, leaves the hire car in the station car park and disposes of the keys, and takes a taxi to Kretzschmar's house, where he matches his half of the postcard to the other. Kretzschmar, who has been holding what Leipzig left with him, hands over the tapes: Kirov's confession and the fruits of Leipzig's blackmail.

In Paris, Smiley brings in Peter Guillam, his former lieutenant and now the head of the British intelligence section at the embassy, to put Ostrakova somewhere safe before Karla's people can reach her. Back in London, Saul Enderby, the new head of the Circus, appears for the first time, and the young woman held under the name Alexandra is billed for the first time as well, though no source consulted describes what she does in this part beyond being present in it.

The part's sequence of discovery is its best. A plot that has been running on talk for two hours turns on one object recovered from under water, the torn postcard in the shoe, and the moment is the finest piece of pure dead-drop work in the serial. The other thing this hour does is introduce the two figures who will run the endgame, Guillam and Enderby, and with them the institution comes back into a story that has been, until now, a private enquiry. Michael Byrne's arrival as Guillam is the significant recasting: he plays a station head rather than a lieutenant, a colleague with his own service to protect, which changes his relationship with Smiley from the 1979 serial.

The weakness is structural. Leipzig is dead before Smiley reaches him, so the audience is denied the confrontation the previous part promised, and the hour has to do its work with a body, a wrecked cabin and a club owner at a table. It contains no scene partner of any weight for its lead until Guillam and Enderby arrive late. What it gains instead is place. This is the most fully realised location work in the serial, and the only hour in which Smiley operates abroad alone, without the Circus's cover or any of his old people, always one move behind the people he is trying to catch.