A murder of quality

the long version

George Smiley was doing a favour for an old friend, Ailsa Brimley who edited a small religious newspaper. She had received a letter from a woman reader saying she wasn't mad and that her husband was trying to kill her. Stella Rode was the writer of the letter and was the wife of an assistant master at Carne School in Dorset. By the time the letter had arrived Stella was dead. George Smiley goes to the school to listen, ask questions and to think. He intends to uncover, layer upon layer, the complexities, skeletons and hatreds that comprised this little English institution.