She looked at him for a long time. He had never seen in any face such hopeless misery. He remembered how she had said to him before: ‘The children of my grief are dead.’ He understood that now, and heard it in her voice when at last she spoke: ‘Why, isn’t it obvious? The night he murdered Samuel. ‘That’s the great joke, Mr Smiley. At the very moment when Samuel could have done so much for them – not just a piece here and a piece there, but all the time – so many music cases – at that moment their own fear destroyed them, turned them into animals and made them kill what they had made. ‘Samuel
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