A Legacy of Spies characters

Appears from the start

The narrator: a retired Circus officer, half Breton and half Scottish, who spent his career in the field and in Smiley's service and now lives on his mother's farm in Brittany with his companion Catherine and her daughter. Old, careful with money and content to be forgotten, he is summoned to London by a letter from a Service he no longer recognises, and finds that the past he helped to bury has been dug up.

Appears from the start

Guillam's chief now: the head of the Circus in his time, and the man who devised and ran the operations now under investigation. He has long since disappeared from public life, and nobody at the modern Service will say where he is.

Appears from the start

The Frenchwoman who farms Guillam's land in Brittany and shares his house, direct, unsentimental and incurious about his past, with a daughter who does not speak.

First appears in chapter 2

The Service's lawyer, courteous, quick and entirely modern, who conducts the interviews. His concern is not with what was right but with what can be defended in front of a parliamentary committee and a court, and with making sure the Service of today is not held responsible for the Service of fifty years ago.

First appears in chapter 2

The Service's in-house historian and researcher, who has read the surviving files more thoroughly than anyone alive and has noticed exactly which documents are missing. Sharp, hostile and impatient with the old men's evasions, she conducts much of the questioning.

First appears in chapter 3

A Circus officer of the fifties and sixties, hard, solitary and a heavy drinker, who ran the Berlin station and its agents into East Germany. He is spoken of in the files and by everyone who knew him as the best field man of his generation, and he has been dead for decades.

First appears in chapter 3

A young London librarian and communist party member who became attached to Leamas, and who died with him at the Berlin Wall. She had no part in the intelligence world beyond the use that was made of her.

First appears in chapter 3

Leamas's son by a marriage that failed, brought up in Germany and grown into a hard, damaged and unscrupulous man with convictions behind him. He wants money and he wants somebody punished, and he is prepared to threaten in order to get both.

First appears in chapter 4

The operations chief of the East German service, feared and detested by his own colleagues, a physically cold and violent man with an unsavoury war record. During the period under investigation he was also the Circus's most productive source, recruited in London after an operation went wrong and protected at enormous cost.

First appears in chapter 4

The Circus's code name for Doris Gamp, an East German woman married to a Stasi officer, who volunteered her services to the West out of anger and conviction rather than money. Devout, headstrong and physically brave, she photographed documents from inside the service that employed her husband and became for a time the Circus's best window into it. She has a young son she is obliged to leave behind.

First appears in chapter 5

The head of the Circus during the period under investigation, secretive, ill and manipulative, who conceived the operations at the centre of the enquiry and never told any one participant more than a fraction of the whole. He died shortly after they ended.

First appears in chapter 8

Liz Gold's daughter, brought up by relatives and told very little about her mother's death. She is educated, temperate and genuinely in search of the truth rather than damages, which makes her harder to deal with than her fellow claimant.

First appears in chapter 9

A Scottish Circus veteran who kept the service's safe houses and their secrets for decades, still alive, still discreet, and still loyal to the men she worked for. What she remembers about a particular house in the country is not what the files record.