My decision to retire fully at the end of June this year after 6 years of free-range consultancy might have produced another blog like the one I did back when I decided to leave my safe public sector job. Then I read John Le Carre’s ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ on holiday, and the two things got all mixed up in my head. Here’s the result. 

‘Of course,’ Ferguson would say, ‘if Democratic Services Black Ops Division really did exist, I’d be forced to deny its existence.’

Then a pause of just the right length, for timing was one of his attributes, they said, before he said, ‘or have you neutralised by one of its operatives. It would be all the same to me.’

And the politician would laugh, if they had any sense of humour at all, and at that level of politics, all but the leading ones usually did.

For it was a good line, if an old one: like one of Ferguson’s suits, worn enough to look lived in, but still surprisingly sharp. Not unlike Ferguson himself, perhaps. But then Ferguson himself was long gone, over the wall, they said, into private consultancy work six years since.

‘There’s really nothing I can tell you, Councillor Smiley,’ said the new Head of Corporate, Partnership and Essential Services, in the process telling Smiley much more than they knew. ‘All these fantastical stories about inter-Service feuds date back to long before my time, I’m afraid.’

Smiley stared at a spot behind the man’s left ear, as if the Head were an optician and Smiley was on the receiving end of an eye test rather than a polite brush-off.

‘No inter-Service feuds then,’ Smiley repeated dully, but his eyes were on the man suddenly, parsing his very soul. The Head blanched, and fiddled with his earring as if signalling to someone in the Lidl car park, far below Fife House’s third floor.

‘Absolutely none,’ the man said, smiling benignly. ‘I mean, I’ve only been here two months – ‘ plausible deniability, Smiley thought unkindly – ‘but there are no indications of our falling out in any significant way with our colleagues in other Services. If there ever was, it was long, long ago. In the bad old days.’

And there it was. The Bad Old Days, the phrase Smiley had been expecting, used by every new-broom boss across the public sector, whether it was MI5 or Scotland’s third biggest local authority. We made mistakes in the past, new broom bosses always said, but we’ve held our hands up to them; without admitting that hands had only been held up when feet had been put to the fire. In the past there had been – insert current euphemism like ‘regrettable misunderstandings’ – but now we worked in close partnership with our key stakeholders, all hatchets buried, Awkward Squad members forcibly retired, and past regrettable misunderstandings forgiven and forgotten.

And, by the way, ‘departments’ had been rebranded as ‘services’ long ago. No one really knew why.

Well, Smiley might be 100 years old, and had only stood as councillor for the Strathmiglo Ward of Fife Council to get him out of that retirement home for disused fictional characters, but he knew eggs were generally ovoid objects. He would get to the truth, even if it meant he had to go to the Dogs.

Legal were only one floor below the Head of Corporate, Partnership and Essential Services,

their nominal boss, but Smiley knew better than to go straight there. Even if Democratic Services Black Ops weren’t tailing him at the office door, the particular big dog he was looking for preferred a different kennel.

Instead, he slipped down the back stairs and loitered at the foot of them until his constituent arrived as prearranged at the Fife House front desk and started raising Cain about his neighbour’s leylandii hedge blocking out his light. Taking advantage of the commotion, Smiley evaded the notice of the Front Desk operatives and slipped through the revolving doors without challenge. He hadn’t even signed out.

As he collected the unmarked Nissan Micra from the M & S Food car park, he allowed himself a pinched smile. It was a long time since he had been in the field, but he hadn’t lost all his tradecraft.

* * * *

They met in a disused office in County Buildings. Files – actual paper files – were piled to the ceiling, the mustiness of their smell testament to one of those internecine feuds the Head of CP & E said were a thing of the past. 17 years on, Petersen said, neither department had blinked, and the office no longer existed on any of the official floor plans. The files themselves were listed only as ‘hard copy back up to digitised assets.’

County Buildings, Cupar, occupied a similar half-life to the mouldering files in a locked room at its core. The 12 miles from Fife House might as well have been 122 for all the meaningful business that was transacted there. Its county town days of glory far behind it, it now hosted irrelevancies like North East Fife Planning Committee, as Smiley knew to his cost. Long hours debating kitchen extensions in St Andrews had only been lightened by the contributions of the man perched awkwardly on a pile of box folders across from him, pronouncements on planning law of such presbyterian purity that they had, on occasion, drawn spontaneous applause from the public gallery.

But Petersen was not in a forthcoming mood today.

‘I’m afraid I can’t help you, Councillor Smiley,’ he said. The solicitor was dressed in his trademark dark suit. Smiley had known more outrageously dressed undertakers. ‘Once Ferguson moved to Committee – ‘ Peterson pursed his lips as if the very departmental name itself gave him a sour taste – ‘I didn’t really have anything to do with him.’

Smiley knew that wasn’t entirely true, but he understood the man’s desire to distance himself from the old days, bad or not, and a maverick like Ferguson, once a Dog himself before he’d crossed to the dark side, or Committee Services as it was then known.

‘Perhaps not,’ he said agreeably. ‘But surely you must know who Ferguson was close to latterly. And who his enemies were.’

‘His enemies were the same as ours,’ Peterson said evenly. He looked round him. ‘It’s here in the files, if anyone actually read anything instead of getting AI to summarise it for them these days.’

‘And those enemies were … who, would you say? Councillors? Planners? Civil servants?’

Petersen snorted. ‘None of the above. Ask Melvo. He’ll know where the bodies are buried. I hear he’s in Berlin.’

‘Berlin? You mean he’s … ?’

Petersen nodded wearily, as if admitting Smiley had finally come up with a valid planning reason for refusal of a St Andrews kitchen extension. ‘You guessed it. He’s going to see Bob Mould live for the fiftieth time.’

Smiley read up on Melvo on the flight to Berlin. Now retired, he had been hand picked to head up an entirely new unit in Democratic Services. He had assembled a crack team of unimpeachable operatives, running elections and electoral registration. Some said he was the true genius behind CP & E. Others that he had turned a blind eye to Ferguson’s covert activity with his feared unit of hand picked operatives, known only as Committee. ‘Dispensing procedural advice at the point of a sword,’ was one of Ferguson’s other mordant quips.

Smiley caught Melvo necking a 0% Weissbier in one of the old haunts near the gig venue. ‘Sure, I still see Ferguson from time to time,’ he admitted. ‘No crime in that. Here’s his number. He’s on WhatsApp. Uses Facebook Messenger too, for that matter. Loose lips … ‘

‘And enemies?’ Smiley pressed the man for more information. It was getting late. Bob Mould had done four encores.

‘Same as all of us. But I’ll let Ferguson tell you.’

Smiley sighed, and signalled the barman for a beer of his own. A proper one, with alcohol in it. He could feel a headache coming on.

* * * *

Ferguson suggested they meet in a coffee shop in Morningside, which was either a very clever bit of tradecraft or a very stupid one: Smiley initially wasn’t sure which. He countered with Blackford Hill, and they compromised on a walk round Blackford Pond first, then a climb up the Hill’s steepest side.

They were to meet at the Leaf and Bean police box at 11.00, for a coffee to go. If either of them ordered a matcha tea, the alarm was triggered and both of them would walk away. No sane person in the Service drank matcha.

‘The advantage of the Pond,’ Ferguson said laconically, ‘is there’s just one path and it’s circular. Extra check to see we’re not being followed.’ Smiley saw now the former lawyer’s opening gambit had been a lure, to reel him in. Americanos in hand, they took the Pond anti-clockwise.

‘How’s North East Fife Planning Committee these days, Councillor Smiley?’ Ferguson asked, eyebrows raised. ‘Wasn’t it the Chinese described a committee as a creature with four back legs? Perhaps they’d sat through a session in County Buildings, back in the Tang Dynasty.’

Smiley grunted noncommittally. ‘Is it true you used to tell officers in agenda planning meetings you took bribes to put their reports at the end of the agenda?’

Ferguson laughed. ‘I think some of them actually believed me. If you’ve been going through the papers, you’ll see that Law and Admin – as everyone still called us – always put their reports well down the batting order. Councillors were blown by then, you see. Nobody sits through an hour of departmental show and tell without going cross-eyed. We could’ve asked for the Moon by the time they got to our stuff.’

Smiley concentrated on getting up the Hill before getting to the meat of the matter. The climb was steep for a 100 year old fictional character who had never been in the best of shape, and the path was muddy from the recent rain. Presently they reached a bench on the saddle of the Hill rather than its summit, and sat quietly for a moment. Ferguson, Smiley noted, was barely out of breath.

‘They tell me you’re retiring for good,’ Smiley said, gazing at the vista of Edinburgh before them.

‘I’ll be 64 in the autumn,’ Ferguson said. He studied the memorial plate on the bench, in remembrance of one Archibald MacTavish, well-beloved husband, father and grandfather, who had long stravaiged over Blackford Hill before his untimely demise at 97. ‘This consultancy caper was only meant to be a stop gap after I went over the wall. As it turned out, it went far better than I could’ve imagined.

‘Why stop now, then? Past catching up with you?’ Smiley knew plenty of retired spooks who’d kept their hand in, then suddenly disappeared off the radar, jumping at shadows.

‘The future hitting me full in the face, more like,’ Ferguson said. He had shifted in his seat now, studying the rear view of a jogger puffing uphill past them. ‘This old dog’s learnt a fair few new tricks over the past six years, George, but there comes a time when you start to lose your currency. Better to chip a catch to mid off and walk off with your bat held high than wait for your partner to run you out.’

‘Is that what happened at Fife House? Was there a mole in Democratic Services Black Ops? After all, there were plenty of enemies by then, weren’t there: councillors, the Chief Executive’s Unit, both Governments starving you of cash…’

‘I never saw you councillors as the enemy,’ Ferguson said, staring straight ahead now at the city view. ‘Misguided at times, certainly, but generally on the side of the angels. Apart from the wrong ‘uns, and I had a direct line to the Dogs to sniff them out, if I didn’t want to do the biting myself.

‘Government? The Civil Service couldn’t find their backsides with both hands half the time – still can’t, actually. They didn’t know enough about anything to be a decent oppo.

‘The Chief Exec, now. He was a character. Did you know he used to play bass in a band called The Scrotum Poles? His punk nom de guerre was Sid Gripple. (1) You couldn’t treat someone with a back story like that as a hostile.

‘Even Inhuman Resources weren’t always against us. Time to time they needed the Dogs to pull them out of a hole of their own making, so we were mostly on friendly terms.’

‘Who then? Who does that leave? And don’t give me that twaddle about inter-Service peace love and understanding … ‘

Ferguson seemed to consider the question as he took the top off his coffee and drank the dregs of it. He had clearly held on to it just to give him something to do with his hands between passages of dialogue.

‘You know,’ he said eventually, ‘when Internal Audit moved into our section of the open plan, I was pleased at first. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer, as the old mafia saying goes. And, by then, they were the only enemies we had.’

‘Really? Internal Audit?’ Smiley took off the top of his own coffee, but it was empty.

‘They used to be bean counters, auditors. Good for keeping accountants on the straight and narrow. Picking up on arithmetic; checking our lads were using the current version of the Guidance in the way they cooked the books. All boring as hell, of course, and only of interest to other accountants. Which is why they branched out into governance, risk management, all the really sexy stuff. But quis auditet auditores, as I used to say to their Chief.’

‘Governance? Really?’ A wave of tiredness swept over Smiley. He hadn’t slept well the night before: troubled dreams of Berlin, and Bob Mould doing Black Sabbath covers.

‘Governance. Really,’ Ferguson said. ‘Oh, there’s lots of mischief you can make out of little errors in Standing Orders, Schemes of Administration, even whether there are review periods … ‘ his voice seemed to blend into a one note drone, rather like Bob Mould’s guitar after the final encore, as Smiley’s drowsiness took hold. Through half shut eyes he noticed, all too late, the tell tale mark on the lid of his coffee cup.

‘ … all about process, and for them, documenting whether there is a process,’ Ferguson concluded, but his interrogator was already slumped across Mr MacTavish’s memorial bench.

‘Back to the retirement home for you, Councillor Smiley,’ he murmured. ‘Of course, there’ll have to be a by-election in Strathmiglo Ward.’ Ferguson took a different phone from his pocket and thumbed a message to the clean up squad, waiting in the Observatory Car Park. The female jogger, returned from her exertions, nodded as she went to join the others.

It was a long time since Ferguson had been in charge of Democratic Services Black Ops Division, but they still owed him one. (2)

This skit is dedicated to the late great Alastair McKie, who would have got all the in jokes.

(1) true story

(2) with apologies to my former colleagues. Names have been only slightly changed to make it obvious who they are.