The Trinity Six
Charles Cumming
FROM THE WINNER OF THE CWA IAN FLEMING STEEL DAGGER 2012 FOR BEST THRILLER OF THE YEAR. Perfect for fans of John le Carré, a gripping and suspenseful spy thriller from ‘the master of the modern spy thriller’ (Mail on Sunday)
Hard-up Russia expert Dr Sam Gaddis finally has a lead for the book that could solve all his career problems. But the story of a lifetime becomes an obsession that could kill him.
When his source is found dead, Gaddis is alone on the trail of the Cold War’s deadliest secret: the undiscovered sixth member of the infamous Cambridge spy ring.
Suddenly threatened at every step and caught between two beautiful women, both with access to crucial evidence, Sam cannot trust anyone.
To get his life back, he must chase shadows through Europe’s corridors of power. But the bigger the lie, the more ruthlessly the truth is kept buried…
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2011
Copyright © Charles Cumming 2011
Charles Cumming asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007337835
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2011 ISBN: 9780007337811
Version: 2018-02-28
Dedication
For my sister, Alex for her children, Lucy, Edward and Sophie and to the memory of Simon Pilkington (1938–2009)
Epigraph
You know, you should never catch a spy. Discover him and then control him, but never catch him. A spy causes far more trouble when he’s caught.
Harold Macmillan
Contents
Title Page (#u27eaafc6-3a8e-50b6-bf99-10b982dff77b)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements
A note on ‘The Cambridge Five’
An Excerpt from A Foreign Country
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
About the Author
By Charles Cumming
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1
‘The dead man was not a dead man. He was alive but he was not alive. That was the situation.’
Calvin Somers, the nurse, stopped at the edge of the towpath and looked behind him, back along the canal. He was a slight man, as stubborn and petulant as a child. Gaddis came to a halt beside him.
‘Keep talking,’ he said.
‘It was the winter of 1992, an ordinary Monday night in February.’ Somers took an apple from his coat pocket and bit into it, chewing over the memories. ‘The patient’s name was Edward Crane. It said he was seventy-six on his notes, but none of us knew what was true and what wasn’t. He looked mid-sixties to me.’ They started walking again, black boots pressing through the mud. ‘They’d obviously worked out it was best if they admitted him at night, when there were fewer people around, when the day staff had gone off shift.’
‘Who’s “they”?’ Gaddis asked.
‘The spooks.’ A mallard lifted off the canal, quick wings shedding water as he turned towards the sun. ‘Crane was brought in on a stretcher, unconscious, just after ten on the evening of the third. I was ready for him. I’m always ready. He bypassed A&E and was put straight into a private room off the ward. The chart said he had no next of kin and wasn’t to be resuscitated in the event of cardiac arrest. Nothing unusual about that. Far as anyone was concerned, this was just another old man suffering from late-stage pancreatic cancer. Hours to live, liver failure, toxic. At least, that was the story MI6 was paying us to pedal.’
Somers threw the half-eaten apple at a plastic bottle floating on the canal and missed by three feet.
‘Soon as I got Crane into the room, I hooked him up to some drips. Dextrose saline. A bag of Amikacin that was just fluid going nowhere. Even gave him a catheter. Everything had to look kosher just in case a member of staff stuck their head round the door who wasn’t supposed to.’
‘Did that happen? Did anybody see Crane?’
Somers scratched the side of his neck. ‘Nah. At about two in the morning, Meisner called for a priest. That was all part of the plan. Father Brook. He didn’t suspect a thing. Just came in, administered the last rites, went home. Soon after that, Henderson showed up and did his little speech.’
‘What little speech?’
Somers came to a halt. He didn’t make eye contact very often but did so now, assuming a patrician tone which Gaddis took to be an attempt at impersonating Henderson’s cut-glass accent.
‘“From this point onwards, Edward Crane is effectively dead. I would like to thank you all for your work thus far, but a great deal remains to be done.”’
A man pushing a rusty bicycle came towards them on the towpath, ticking past in the dusk.
‘We were all there,’ said Somers. ‘Waldemar, Meisner, Forman. Meisner was so nervous he looked as if he was going to throw up. Waldemar didn’t speak much English and still didn’t really understand what he’d got himself involved in. He was probably just thinking about the money. That’s what I was doing. Twenty grand in 1992 was a lot of cash to a twenty-eight-year-old nurse. You any idea what we got paid under the Tories?’
Gaddis didn’t respond. He didn’t want to have a conversation about under-funded nurses. He wanted to hear the end of the story.
‘Anyway, at some point Henderson took a checklist out of his coat pocket and ran through it. First, he turned to Meisner and asked him if he’d filled out the death certificate. Meisner said he had and produced a biro from behind his ear, as if that proved it. I was told to go back down to Crane’s room and wrap the body. “No need to clean him,” Henderson said. For some reason, Waldemar – we called him “Wally” – thought this was funny and we all just stood there watching him laugh. Then Henderson tells him to pull himself together and gives him instructions to have a trolley waiting, to take the old man down to the ambulance. I remember Henderson didn’t talk to Forman until the rest of us had gone. Don’t ask me what he’d agreed with her. Probably to tag a random corpse in the mortuary, some tramp from Praed Street with no ID, no history. How else could they have got away with it? They needed a second body.’
‘This is useful,’ Gaddis told him, because he felt that he needed to say something. ‘This is really useful.’
‘Well, you get what you pay for, don’t you, Professor?’ Somers produced a smug grin. ‘What was hard is that we had other patients to attend to. It was a normal Monday night. It wasn’t as if everything could just grind to a halt because MI6 were in the building. Meisner was the senior doctor, too, so he was always moving back and forth around the hospital. At one point I don’t think I saw him for about an hour and a half. Wally had jobs all over the place, me as well. Added to that, I had to try to keep the other nurses out of Crane’s room. Just in case they got nosey.’ The path narrowed beside a barge and the two men were obliged to walk in single file. ‘In the end, everything went like clockwork. Meisner got the certificate done, Crane was wrapped up with a small hole in the fabric he could breathe through, Wally took him down to the ambulance and the old man was gone by six a.m., out into his new life.’
‘His new life,’ Gaddis muttered. He looked up at the darkening sky and wondered, not for the first time, if he would ever set eyes on Edward Anthony Crane. ‘And that’s it?’
‘Almost.’ Somers wiped his nose in the failing light. ‘Eight days later I was going through The Times. Found an obituary for an “Edward Crane”. Wasn’t very long. Tucked down the right-hand side of the page under “Lives Remembered”, next to some French politician who’d fucked up during Suez. Crane was described as a “resourceful career diplomat”. Born in 1916, educated at Marlborough College, then Trinity, Cambridge. Postings to Moscow, Buenos Aires, Berlin. Never married, no offspring. Died at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, after “a long battle with cancer”.’
A light drizzle was beginning to fall. Gaddis passed a set of lock gates and moved in the direction of a pub. Somers pushed a hand through his hair.
‘So that’s what happened, Professor,’ he said. ‘Edward Crane was a dead man, but he was not a dead man. Edward Crane was alive but he was not alive. That was the situation.’
The pub was packed.
Gaddis went to the bar and ordered two pints of Stella Artois, a packet of peanuts and a double of Famous Grouse. Thanks to Somers, he was down to the loose change in his pockets and had to pay the barman with a debit card. Inside his jacket he found the torn scrap of paper on which he kept his passwords and pin numbers and punched in the digits while the landlord made a noise through his teeth. With Somers still in the Gents, Gaddis sank the whisky as a single shot then found a table at the back of the pub where he could watch groups of shivering smokers huddled outside and try to convince himself that he had made the right decision to quit.
‘Got you a Stella,’ he said when Somers came up to the table. For an instant it looked as though he wasn’t going to sit down, but Gaddis pushed the pint towards him and said: ‘Peanuts.’
It was just past six o’clock. West Hyde on a Tuesday night. Suits, secretaries, suburbia. A jukebox was crooning Andy Williams. Tacked up beside a dartboard in the far corner of the room was an orange poster emblazoned with the words:
CURRY NIGHT – WEDNESDAY. Gaddis took off his corduroy jacket and looped it over the arm of a neighbouring chair.
‘So what happened next?’
He knew that this was the part Somers liked, playing the pivotal role, playing Deep Throat. The nurse – the senior nurse, as he would doubtless have insisted – produced another of his smug grins and took a thirsty pull on the pint. Something about the warmth of the pub had restored his characteristic complacency; it was as if Somers had reprimanded himself for being too open beside the canal. After all, he was in possession of information that Gaddis wanted. The professor had paid three grand for it. It was gold dust to him.
‘What happened next?’
‘That’s right, Calvin. Next.’
Somers leaned back in his chair. ‘Not much.’ He seemed to regret this answer and rephrased it, searching for more impact. ‘I watched the ambulance turn past the Post Office, had a quick smoke and went back inside. Took the lift up to Crane’s room, cleared it out, threw away the bags and catheter and sent the medical notes down to Patient Records. You could probably check them if you want. Far as the hospital was concerned, a seventy-six-year-old cancer patient had come in suffering from liver failure and died during the night. The sort of thing that happened all the time. It was a new day, a new shift. Time to move on.’
‘And Crane?’
‘What about him?’
‘You never heard another word?’
Somers looked as if he had been asked an idiotic question. That was the trouble with intellectuals. So fucking stupid.
‘Why would I hear another word?’ He took a long draw on the pint and did something with his eyes which made Gaddis want to deck him. ‘Presumably he was given a new identity. Presumably he enjoyed another ten years of happy life and died peacefully in his bed. Who knows?’
Two smokers, one coming in, one going out, pushed past their table. Gaddis was obliged to move a leg out of the way.
‘And you never breathed a word about it? Nobody asked you any questions? Nobody apart from Charlotte has brought up this subject for over ten years?’
‘You could say that, yeah.’
Gaddis sensed a lie here, but knew there was no point pursuing it. Somers was the type who shut down once you caught them in a contradiction. He said: ‘And did Crane talk? What kind of man was he? What did he look like?’
Somers laughed. ‘You don’t do this very often, do you, Professor?’
It was true. Sam Gaddis didn’t often meet male nurses in pubs on the outskirts of London and try to extract information about seventy-six-year-old diplomats whose deaths had been faked by men who paid out twenty grand in return for a lifetime of silence. He was divorced and forty-three. He was a senior lecturer in Russian History at University College London. His normal beat was Pushkin, Stalin, Gorbachev. Nevertheless, that remark took him to the edge of his patience and he said: ‘And how often do you do it, Calvin?’ just so that Somers knew where he stood.
The reply did the trick. A little frown of panic appeared in the gap between Somers’s eyes which he tried, without success, to force away. The nurse sought refuge in some peanuts and got salt on his fingers as he wrestled with the packet.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘Crane didn’t speak at all. Before he was admitted, they’d given him a mild anaesthetic which had rendered him unconscious. He had grey hair, shaved to look like he’d undergone chemotherapy, but his skin was too healthy for a man supposedly in his condition. He probably weighed about seventy kilos, between five foot ten and six foot. I never saw his eyes, on account of the fact they were always closed. That good enough for you?’
Gaddis didn’t answer immediately. He didn’t need to. He let the silence speak for him. ‘And Henderson?’
‘What about him?’
‘What kind of man was he? What did he look like? All you’ve told me so far is that he wore a long black overcoat and sounded like somebody doing a bad impression of David Niven.’
Somers turned his head and stared at the far corner of the room.
‘Charlotte never told you?’
‘Told me what?’
Somers blinked rapidly and said: ‘Pass me that newspaper.’ There was a damp, discarded copy of The Times lying in a trickle of beer on the next-door table. A black girl listening to a pink iPod smiled her assent when Gaddis asked if he could take it. He straightened it out and handed the newspaper across the table.
‘You’ve heard of the Leighton Inquiry?’ Somers asked.
Leighton was a judicial inquiry into an aspect of government policy relating to the war in Afghanistan. Gaddis had heard of it. He had read the op-eds, caught the reports on Channel Four News.
‘Go on,’ he said.
Somers turned to page five. ‘You see this man?’
He flattened out the newspaper, spinning it through a hundred and eighty degrees. The nurse’s narrow, nail-bitten finger skewered a photograph of a man ducking into a government Rover on a busy London street. The man was in late middle-age and surrounded by a crush of reporters. Gaddis read the caption.
Sir John Brennan leaves Whitehall after giving evidence to the inquiry.
There was a smaller, formal Foreign Office portrait of Brennan set inside the main photograph. Gaddis looked up. Somers saw that he had made the connection.
‘Henderson is John Brennan? Are you sure?’
‘As sure as I’m sitting here looking at you.’ Somers drained his pint. ‘The man who paid me twenty grand sixteen years ago to cover everything up wasn’t just any old spook. The man who called himself Douglas Henderson in 1992 is now the head of MI6.’
Chapter 2
It was a long way from Daunt Books on Holland Park Avenue to that suburban September pub in West Hyde.
A month earlier, Gaddis had been launching his latest book – Tsars, a comparative study of Peter the Great and the current Russian president, Sergei Platov – at a bookshop in central London. His editor, the part-owner of a boutique publishing house which had paid the princely sum of £4750 for the book, hadn’t made it to the event. A lone diarist, on work experience at the Evening Standard, had poked her head around the door of the bookshop at six twenty-five, picked up a glass of room temperature Sauvignon Blanc and, having established that she had more chance of finding a story on the top deck of the number 16 bus, left after ten minutes. No celebrity historian, no literary editor, nor any representative of the BBC had replied to the invitations which the PR girl insisted had gone out – ‘first class’ – in the second week of July. A solitary notice in Saturday’s Independent had turned up one ashen-faced matriarch who had come ‘all the way from Hampstead because I so enjoyed your book on Bulgakov’, as well as a former student of Sam’s named Colin who claimed that he had spent the previous year ‘walking around Kazakhstan reading Herman Hesse’. The rest were staff – the manager of the shop, someone to operate the till – about a dozen colleagues and students from UCL, Sam’s next-door neighbour, Kath, who was highly-sexed and always opened the front door in her dressing-gown, and his close friend, the journalist Charlotte Berg.
Did Gaddis care that the new book would most probably disappear without trace? Yes and no. Though politically active, he was under no illusions that a single book could change attitudes to Sergei Platov. Tsars would be politely reviewed by the broadsheet press in London and dismissed in Moscow as Western propaganda. It had taken three years to write and would sell perhaps a thousand copies in hardback. Long ago, Gaddis had decided to write solely for the pleasure of writing: to expect greater rewards was to invite frustration. If the public enjoyed his books, he was happy; if they didn’t, so be it. They had better things to be spending their hard-earned cash on. He had no desire for fame, no innate interest in making money: what mattered to him was the quality of the work. And Tsars was a book that he was proud of. It amounted to a sustained attack on the Platov regime, an attack which he had tried to condense, as succinctly as possible, into a 750-word op-ed in the Guardian which had appeared three days earlier.
Thus far, that had been the extent of the book’s publicity campaign. Gaddis wasn’t particularly interested in cultivating a public image. Four years earlier, for example, he had published a biography of Trotsky which had been enthusiastically talked up on Radio 4. An enterprising young television producer had invited him to screen test for a series of programmes about ‘Great Revolutionary Figures’. Gaddis had declined. Why? Because he felt at the time that it would mean spending too long away from his baby daughter, Min, and abandoning his students at UCL. His friends and colleagues had thought it was a missed opportunity. What was the point of being a successful academic in twenty-first-century Britain if you didn’t want to appear on BBC4? Think of the tie-ins, they said. Think of the money. With his crooked good looks, Gaddis would have been a natural for television, but he valued his privacy too much and didn’t want to sideline the career he loved for what he described as ‘the dubious pleasure of seeing my mug on television’. There was stubbornness in the decision, certainly, but Dr Sam Gaddis thought of himself, first and foremost, as a teacher. He believed in the unarguable notion that if a young person is lucky enough to read the right books at the right time in the company of the right teacher, it will change their life for ever.
‘So what do we have with Sergei Platov?’ he began. The manager of Daunts was sure that no more of the thirty seats set out in the bookshop would be filled by curious passers-by and had asked Gaddis to begin. ‘Is he saint or sinner? Is Platov guilty of war crimes in Chechnya, of personally authorizing the murder of journalists critical of his regime, or is he a statesman who has restored the might of Mother Russia, thereby rescuing his country from decadence and corruption?’
The question, as far as Gaddis was concerned, was rhetorical. Platov was a stain on the Russian character, a borderline sociopath who had, in less than ten years, destroyed the possibility of a democratic Russia. A former KGB spy, he had green-lit the murder of Russian civilians on foreign soil, held Eastern European countries to ransom over the supply of gas, and encouraged the murder of journalists and human rights activists brave enough to criticize his regime. One such journalist – Katarina Tikhonov – had been a good friend of Gaddis’s. They had corresponded for over fifteen years and met whenever he visited Moscow. She had been shot in the elevator of her apartment building three years earlier. Not a single suspect had been arrested in connection with the murder, an anomaly which he had exposed in his new book.
He turned to his notes.
‘History tells us that Sergei Platov is a survivor, from a family of survivors.’
‘What do you mean?’ The Hampstead matriarch was sitting in the front row and already asking questions. Gaddis flattered her with a patient smile which had the useful simultaneous effect of making her feel embarrassed for interrupting.
‘What I mean is that his family survived the worst excesses that twentieth-century Russia could throw at them. Platov’s grandfather worked as a chef for Josef Stalin and lived to tell the tale. That in itself is a miracle. His father was one of only four soldiers from a unit of twenty-eight men who survived after they were betrayed to the Germans at Kingisepp in 1941. Sergei Spiridonovich Platov was pursued into the surrounding countryside and only avoided capture by breathing through a hollow reed while submerged in a pond. Sean Connery had the same trick in Dr No.’
Somebody laughed. Traffic hummed on Holland Park Avenue. Sam Gaddis was looking at a sea of nodding, attentive faces.
‘Do you know about the siege of Leningrad?’ he asked. He hadn’t meant to start on that, not tonight, but it was a subject on which he had lectured many times at UCL and the Daunt crowd would go for it. The manager, standing near the door, was bobbing his head in a way that looked enthusiastic.
‘It’s the winter of 1942. Minus twenty degrees at night. Three million people in a city surrounded by German troops, a million of them women and children.’ The matriarch gasped. ‘There is so little food that people are dying at the rate of five thousand a day. Leningrad’s entire supply of flour has been destroyed by German firebombs. The fires cause molten sugar to saturate the earth at the Badayev warehouses. People are so hungry that they are prepared to dig into the frozen ground to extract the sugar and sell it on the black market. The top three feet of soil sells for one hundred roubles a glass, the next three feet for fifty.’
A bell and a sudden burst of traffic. The door of the bookshop opened and a young woman stepped inside: shoulder-length black hair, knee-high leather boots over denim jeans, and the sort of figure that a forty-three-year-old, divorced academic who has drunk three glasses of Sauvignon Blanc notices and photographs with his eyes, even while giving a talk at his own book launch. The woman whispered something to the manager, briefly caught Sam’s eye, then settled in a seat at the back.
Gaddis wished that he had brought his props. At UCL, his annual lecture on the siege of Leningrad was a must-see sellout, one of the very few events that every student in the Russian history programme felt both obliged and enthused to attend. Gaddis always began by standing behind a table on which he had placed a third of a loaf of sliced white bread, a pound of minced beef, a bowl of bran flakes, a small cup of sunflower oil and three digestive biscuits.
‘This,’ he tells the packed auditorium, ‘is all that you get to eat for the next thirty days. This is all that an adult citizen of Leningrad could claim on their ration cards in the early years of World War II. Kind of puts the January detox in perspective, doesn’t it?’ The lecture takes place in the early weeks of the New Year, so the joke always whips up a satisfying gale of nervous laughter. ‘But enjoy it while you can.’ Confused looks in the front row. Plate by plate, bowl by bowl, Dr Gaddis now tips the food on to the floor until all that remains on the table in front of him are ten slices of stale white bread. ‘By the time the siege really starts to bite, bread is more or less the only form of sustenance you’re going to get, and its nutritional value is nil. The people of Leningrad don’t have access to Hovis or Mother’s Pride. This bread’ – he picks up a piece and tears it into tiny pieces, like a child feeding ducks – ‘is made mostly from sawdust, from sweepings on the floor. If you’re lucky enough to have a job in a factory, you get 250 grams of it every week. How much is 250 grams?’ Gaddis now picks up six slices of the bread and hands them to a student in the front row. ‘That’s about how much it is. But if you don’t work in a factory’ – three of the slices come back – ‘you get only 125 grams.’
‘And I warn you not to be young,’ he continues, channelling Neil Kinnock now, a politician from yesteryear whom most of his students are too young to remember. ‘I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to grow old in the Leningrad of 1942. Because if you do’ – at this point, he gets hold of the final three slices of bread, tossing them to the floor – ‘if you do, you’ll most likely starve to death.’ He lets that one settle in before delivering the coup de grâce. ‘And don’t be an academic, either. Don’t be an intellectual.’ Another gale of nervous laughter. ‘Comrade Stalin doesn’t like people like us. As far as he’s concerned, academics and intellectuals can starve to death.’
The beautiful woman in the knee-high boots was staring at him intently. At UCL, Gaddis usually picked out a volunteer at this stage and asked them to take off their shoes, which he then placed on a table at the front of the lecture hall. He liked to pull grass clippings and pieces of bark from the pockets of his jacket. Christ, if Health and Safety had allowed it, he’d have brought a dead rat and a dog in, as well. That, after all, was what the citizens of Leningrad survived on as the Germans tightened the noose: grasses and bark; leather shoes boiled down for sustenance; the flesh of vermin and dogs. Cannibalism was also rife. Children would disappear. Limbs would mysteriously be removed from corpses left to freeze in the street. The meat pies on sale in the markets of war-torn Leningrad could contain anything from horse flesh to human being.
But tonight he kept things simple. Tonight Dr Gaddis spoke about Platov’s aunt and first cousin surviving three years in a German concentration camp in the Baltics. He related how, on one occasion, Platov’s mother had passed out from hunger only to wake up while she was being taken to a cemetery by men who had assumed she was dead. Towards eight o’clock, he read a short extract from the new book about Platov’s early years in the KGB and, by eight fifteen, people were applauding and he was taking questions from the floor, trying to make the case that Russia was reverting to totalitarianism and all the time wondering how to persuade the girl in the knee-high boots to join his party for dinner.
In the end, he didn’t need to. As the launch was beginning to thin out, she approached him at the makeshift bar and held out her hand.
‘Holly Levette.’
‘Sam.’ Her hand was slim and warm and had rings all over it. She was about twenty-eight with huge blue eyes. ‘You were the one who was late.’
A smile of what looked like genuine embarrassment. Her right cheek had a little scar on the bone which he liked. ‘Sorry, I was held up on the Tube. I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.’
They moved away from the bar.
‘Not at all.’ He was trying to work out what she did for a living. Something in the arts, something creative. ‘Have we met before?’
‘No, no. I just read your article in the Guardian and knew that you were speaking tonight. I have something that I thought you might be interested in.’
They had found themselves in a small clearing in the Travel section. In his peripheral vision, Gaddis could sense somebody trying to catch his eye.
‘What kind of something?’
‘Well, my mother has just died.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
It didn’t look as though Holly Levette needed much comforting.
‘Her name was Katya Levette. Before her death she was working on a book about the history of the KGB. A lot of her information came from sources in British and Russian intelligence. I don’t want her papers to go to waste. All that hard work, all those interviews. I wondered whether you might like to have a look at her research, see if there’s any value in it?’
It could have been a trap, of course. A mischievous source in MI6 or the Russian FSB looking to use a mid-level British historian for purposes of propaganda. After all, why come all the way to the bookshop? Why not just phone him at UCL or send an email to his website? But the chances of a honey-trap were slim. If the spooks wanted a scandal, if they wanted headlines, they would have gone for Beevor or Sebag Montefiore, for Andrew or West. Besides, Gaddis would be able to tell in five minutes if the documents were genuine. He’d spent half his life in the museums of London, Moscow and St Petersburg. He was a citizen of the historical archive.
‘Sure, I could take a look at them. You’re kind to think of me. Where are the papers?’
‘At my flat in Chelsea.’
And suddenly the tone of the conversation shifted. Suddenly Holly Levette was looking at Dr Sam Gaddis in the way that mischievous female students sometimes look at attractive, fortysomething bachelor academics when they are up to no good. As if her flat in Chelsea promised more than just dust-gathering notebooks on the KGB.
‘Your flat in Chelsea,’ Sam repeated. He caught the smell of her perfume as he drank more wine. ‘I should probably take your number.’
She was smiling, enjoying the game, promising him something with those huge blue eyes. From the hip pocket of her slim jeans, Holly Levette produced a card which she pressed into his hand. ‘Why don’t you ring me when you’re not so busy?’ she suggested. ‘Why don’t you call and we can arrange for you to come and pick them up?’
‘It’s a good idea.’ Gaddis looked at the card. There was nothing on it except a name and a telephone number. ‘And you say your mother was researching the history of Soviet intelligence?’
‘The KGB, yes.’
A pause. There were so many questions to ask that he could say nothing; if he started, they would never stop. A male colleague from UCL materialized beside Gaddis and stared, with abandon, deep into Holly’s cleavage. Gaddis didn’t bother introducing them.
‘I should go,’ she said, touching his arm as she took a step backwards. ‘It was so lovely to meet you. Your talk was fantastic.’
He shook her hand again, the one with all the rings. ‘I’ll call you,’ he said. ‘And I’ll definitely take you up on that offer.’
‘What offer?’ asked the colleague.
‘Oh, the best kind,’ replied Holly Levette. ‘The best kind.’
Chapter 3
Two days later, on a rain-drenched Saturday morning in August, Gaddis rang the number on the card and arranged to go to Chelsea to pick up the boxes. Five minutes after walking through the door of her flat on Tite Street, he was in bed with Holly Levette. He did not leave until eight o’clock the following evening, the boot of his car sagging under the weight of the boxes, his head and body aching from the sweet carnal impact of a woman who remained, even after all that they had shared, something of a stranger to him, an enigma.
Her flat had been a bombsite, a deep litter field of newspapers, books, back issues of the New Yorker, half-finished glasses of wine and ashtrays overflowing with old joints and crushed cigarette packets. The kitchen had three days of washing up piled at the sink, the bedroom more rugs and more clothes strewn over more chairs than Gaddis had ever seen in his life. It reminded him of his own house which, in the years since Natasha had left him, had become a bachelor’s labyrinth of paperbacks, take-away menus and DVD box sets. He had a Belarussian cleaning lady, but she was near-arthritic and spent most her time chatting to him in the kitchen about life in post-Communist Minsk.
Holly’s search for the KGB material had taken them downstairs, to the basement of the apartment block, where Katya Levette had filled a storage cupboard to capacity with dozens of unmarked boxes. It had taken them both more than an hour to locate the files and to carry them outside to Gaddis’s car. Even then, Holly said that she could not be sure that he had taken everything with him.
‘But it’s a start, right?’ she said. ‘It’s something to be getting on with.’
‘Where did all this stuff come from?’ he asked.
The sheer volume of material in the basement suggested that Katya Levette had either been extremely well connected in the intelligence firmament or an inveterate hoarder of useless, second-hand information. Gaddis had Googled her, but most of the articles available under her name were either book reviews or hagiographic profiles of middle-ranking business figures in the UK and United States. At no point had she been a staff writer on any recognized publication.
‘Mum was friendly with a lot of Russian ex-pats in London,’ Holly explained. ‘Oligarchs, ex-KGB. You probably know most of them.’
‘Not socially.’
‘And she had a boyfriend once upon a time. Someone in MI6. I think a lot of the stuff may have come from him.’
‘You mean he leaked it?’
Holly nodded and looked away. She was concealing something, but Gaddis did not feel that he knew her well enough to push for more information. There had already been hints of a fraught relationship between mother and daughter; the truth would come out in good time.
He had driven home and put the boxes – fifteen of them – on the floor of Min’s bedroom, making a silent promise to get to them within a few days. And he would have called Holly again almost immediately had it not been for the grim surprise of Monday’s post.
* * *
There were two letters.
The first came in an ominous brown envelope marked HM
REVENUE & CUSTOMS / PRIVATE and was a demand for late payment of tax. A demand for £21,248, to be exact, which was about £21,248 more than Gaddis had in the bank. Failure to pay the sum in full by mid-October, the letter stated, would result in legal action. In the meantime, interest on the debt was accumulating at a rate of 6.5 per cent.
The second letter bore the unmistakable handwriting of his ex-wife, complete with a Spanish postmark and a stain in the left-hand corner which he put down to a wayward cup of café con leche.
The letter was typed.
Dear Sam
I’m sorry to have to write like this, rather than phone, but Sergio and Nick have advised me that it’s best to do these things on a formal basis.
Sergio was the lawyer. Nick was the Barcelona-based boyfriend. Gaddis wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about either of them.
The situation is that N and I are desperately short of money because of the restaurant and I need more help with the school fees. I know you’ve already been more than generous, but I can’t meet my half of the payments for this term or the next. Is there any possible way you could help? Min loves the school and is already incredibly good at Catalan and Spanish. The last thing either of us wants is to take her out and separate her from all the friends she’s made. The other school is miles away and awful, for all sorts of reasons that are too depressing to go into. (I’ve heard reports of bullying, of racism against an Indian child, even an accident in the playground that was covered up by staff.) You get the picture.
Will you write and let me know what you think? I’m sorry to have to ask you to help with this because we always agreed to go fifty/fifty. But I don’t see that I have any choice. The figure we’re talking about is in the region of €5000. When the restaurant starts turning a profit, I promise to pay you back.
I hope everything is OK in London/at UCL etc. Give my love to everybody –
Hasta luego
Natasha x
Sam Gaddis wasn’t the sort of man who panicked, but equally he wasn’t the sort of man who had twenty-five thousand quid lying around for random tax bills and school fees. He’d already taken out two separate £20,000 loans to pay off debts accumulated by his divorce; the monthly interest repayments alone amounted to £800, on top of a £190,000 mortgage.
He took the tube to UCL and arranged to meet his literary agent for lunch. It was the only solution. He would have to work his way out of the crisis. He would have to write.
They met, two days later, at a small, exorbitantly expensive restaurant on High Street Kensington where the only other clientele were bored Holland Park housewives with lovers half their age and an elderly Greek businessman who took almost an hour to eat a single bowl of risotto.
Robert Paterson, UK director of Dippel, Gordon and Kahla, Literary Agents since 1968, had more important clients than Dr Samuel Gaddis – soap stars, for example, who brought in 15 per cent commissions on six-figure autobiography deals – but none with whom he would rather have spent three hours in an overpriced London restaurant.
‘You mentioned that you had money worries?’ he said as they ordered a second bottle of wine. Paterson was three years off retirement and the sole surviving member of the generation which still believed in the dignity of the three-Martini lunch. ‘Tax?’
‘How did you know?’
‘Always is, this time of year.’ Paterson nodded knowingly as he rounded off a veal cutlet. ‘Most of my clients have less idea how to manage their finances than Champion the Wonder Horse. I get three telephone calls a week from some of them. “Where’s my foreign rights deal? Where’s the cash from the paperback?” I’m not a literary agent any more. I’m a personal financial adviser.’
Gaddis smiled a crooked smile. ‘And what financial advice would you give me?’
‘Depends how much you need.’
‘Twenty-one grand for Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue, payable last Tuesday. Four grand for Min’s school fees. Likely to rise to ten or twenty in the next couple of years unless Natasha’s boyfriend suddenly figures out that being the manager of a successful restaurant in Barcelona doesn’t involve spending three days a week working on his offpiste skiing in the Pyrenees. They’re chucking euros into the Mediterranean.’
‘And UCL can’t help?’
Gaddis thanked the waiter, who had poured more wine into his glass. ‘I’m forty-three. My salary won’t go much higher unless I get Chair. The mortgage alone is costing me a third of what I earn. Short of stealing first editions of Pride and Prejudice from the London Library, I’m not looking at raising the money any time soon.’
‘So you need a new deal?’ Paterson dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin.
‘I need a new deal, Bob.’
‘What did I get you last time?’
‘South of five grand.’
Paterson looked mildly embarrassed to have brokered such a meagre contract. He was a huge man, requiring a two-foot gap between his chair and the table. He folded his arms so that they were resting on the summit of his voluminous belly. A Buddha tailored by Savile Row.
‘So we’re talking what? Thirty thousand pounds as a signature advance?’
A small droplet of gravy had appeared at the edge of Paterson’s shirt. Gaddis nodded and his agent produced a stagey sigh.
‘Well, if you want that sort of money quickly, you’ll have to write a strictly commercial book, almost certainly within twelve months and probably under a pseudonym, so that you have the impact of a debut writer. That’s the only way I can get you a serious cheque in today’s market. A historical comparison between Sergei Platov and Peter the Great, God bless you, isn’t going to cut it. With the best will in the world, Sam, nobody really cares about journalists getting bumped off in Russia. Your average punter doesn’t have a clue who Peter the Great is. Does he play for Liverpool? Was he knocked out in the final of Britain’s Got Talent? Do you see the problem?’
Gaddis was nodding. He saw the problem. The trouble was, he had no aptitude for forging commercial bestsellers which he could write in twelve months. There were lectures he had given at UCL which had taken him more than a year to research and prepare. For an astonishing moment, during which Paterson was putting on a pair of half-moon spectacles and scanning the pudding menu, he reflected on the very real possibility that he would have to moonlight as a cab driver in order to raise the cash.
Then he remembered Holly Levette.
‘What about the KGB?’
‘What about it?’ Paterson looked up from the menu and did a comic double-take around the restaurant. ‘Are they here?’
Gaddis smiled at the joke. A small boy walked past the table and disappeared towards the downstairs bathroom. ‘What about a history of Soviet and Russian intelligence?’ he said. ‘Something with spies in it?’
‘As a series of novels?’
‘If you like.’
Paterson peered over the spectacles, a father suddenly sceptical of a wayward son. ‘I don’t really see you as a novelist, Sam,’ he said. ‘Fiction isn’t your thing. It would take you far too long to complete a manuscript. You should be thinking along the lines of a non-fiction title which can spin off into a TV series, a documentary with you in front of the camera. If you’re serious about making money, you need to start being serious about your image. No future in being a fusty old academic these days. Look at Schama. You have to multi-task. I’ve always said you’d be a natural for television.’
Gaddis hid a thought behind his glass of wine. Maybe it was time. Min was in Barcelona. He was completely broke. What did he have to lose by getting his face on television?
‘Go on, then. Give me the inside take.’
Paterson duly obliged. ‘Well, when it comes to books about Russia, Chechnya is a no-no. Nobody gives a monkey’s.’ He broke off to order ‘just a smidgen of tiramisu, just a smidgen’ from the waiter. ‘Ditto Yeltsin, ditto Gorbachev, ditto His Rampaging Egoness, the late lamented Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Done to death. You’ve written about Platov, Chernobyl is old hat, so – yes – you might as well stick to spies. But we’d need poisoned umbrellas, secret KGB plots to knock off Reagan or Thatcher, irrefutable evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lovechild of Rudolf Nureyev and Svetlana Stalin. I’m talking cover of the Daily Mail. I’m talking scoop.’
The Greek businessman had finally conceded defeat at the hands of his risotto. Gaddis was at once flattered and bemused that Paterson should consider him capable of unearthing a story on that scale. He was also concerned that Holly Levette’s boxes would contain nothing but second-hand, irrelevant dross from dubious sources in the Russian underworld. Right now, though, those boxes were all that he had to go on.
‘I’ll work on it,’ he said.
‘Good.’ Paterson observed the arrival of his tiramisu with a whistle of anticipation. ‘Now. Is there any way I can interest you in a coffee?’
Chapter 4
Eight hours later, Gaddis went for supper at the Hampstead house of Charlotte Berg. Berg had been his flatmate at Cambridge and his girlfriend – briefly – before he had been married. She was a former war correspondent who hid the scars of Bosnia, of Rwanda and the West Bank beneath a veneer of bonhomie and slightly fading glamour. Over roast chicken prepared by her husband, Paul, Charlotte began to share details of her latest piece, a freelance story to be sold to the Sunday Times which she claimed would be the biggest political scandal of the decade.
‘I’m sitting on a scoop,’ she said.
Gaddis reflected that it was the second time that day that he had heard the word.
‘What kind of scoop?’
‘Well, it wouldn’t be a scoop if I told you, would it?’
This was a game they played. Charlotte and Sam were rivals, in the way that close friends often keep a quiet, competitive eye on one another. The rivalry was professional, it was intellectual and it was almost never taken too seriously.
‘What do you remember about Melita Norwood?’ she asked. Sam looked over at Paul, who was concentratedly mopping up gravy with a hunk of French bread. Norwood was the so-called ‘Granny Spy’, exposed in 1999, who had passed British nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the 1940s and 50s.
‘I remember that she was swept under the carpet. Spied for Stalin, sped up his nuclear programme by about five years, but was allowed to die peacefully in her bed by a British government who didn’t want the negative publicity of trying an eighty-year-old woman for treason. Why?’
Charlotte pushed her plate to one side. She was a gestural, free-spirited woman of vast appetites: for cigarettes, for drink, for information. Paul was the only man she had ever been with who had been able to tolerate her many contradictions. ‘Fuck Melita Norwood,’ she said suddenly, grabbing Sam’s glass of wine by mistake and swallowing most of it.
‘If you say so.’
‘What about Roger Hollis?’ she asked quickly.
‘What about him?’
‘Do you think he was a traitor?’
Sir Roger Hollis was a grey area in the history of British intelligence. In 1981, the journalist Chapman Pincher had published a bestselling book, Their Trade is Treachery, in which it was alleged that Hollis, a former head of MI5, had been a KGB spy. Gaddis had read the book as a teenager. He remembered the bright red cover with the shadow of a sickle falling across it; his father asking to borrow it on a seaside holiday in Sussex.
‘To be honest, I haven’t thought about Hollis for a long time,’ he said. ‘Pincher’s allegations were never proved. Is that what you’re working on? Is that the scoop? Is there some kind of connection between Hollis and Norwood? She was associated with a KGB spy codenamed “HUNT” who was never identified. Was HUNT Hollis?’
Charlotte laughed. She was enjoying tapping into Gaddis’s reserves of expertise.
‘Fuck Hollis,’ she said, with the same abrasive glee with which she had dismissed Norwood. Gaddis was bemused.
‘Why do you keep saying that?’
‘Because they were small potatoes. Bit-part players. Minnows compared to what I’ve stumbled on.’
‘Which is …?’ Paul asked.
Charlotte finished off what must have been her ninth or tenth glass of wine. ‘What if I told you there was a sixth Cambridge spy who had never been unmasked? A contemporary of Burgess and Maclean, of Blunt, Philby and Cairncross, who is still alive today?’
At first, Gaddis couldn’t untangle precisely what Charlotte was telling him. He, too, had drunk at least a bottle of Côtes du Rhône. Hollis a Cambridge spy? Norwood a sixth member of the Ring of Five? Surely she wasn’t working on a crackpot theory like that? But he was a guest in her house, enjoying her hospitality, so he kept his doubts to himself.
‘I’d tell you that you were sitting on a fortune.’
‘This isn’t about money, Sam.’ There was no admonishment in Charlotte’s tone, just the bluntness for which she was renowned. ‘This is about history. I’m talking about a legendary KGB spy, codenamed ATTILA, who matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s. A man every bit as dangerous and as influential as Maclean and Philby. A mole at the heart of Britain’s political and intelligence infrastructure whose treason has been deliberately covered up by the British government for more than fifty years.’
‘Jesus.’ Gaddis tried to hide his scepticism. It surely wasn’t plausible that a sixth member of the Trinity ring had escaped detection. Every spook and academic and journalist with the slightest interest in the secret world had been hunting the sixth man for decades. Any Soviet defector, at any point after 1945, could have blown ATTILA’s cover at the drop of a hat. At the very least, Cairncross or Blunt would have given him up at the time of their exposure.
‘Where are you getting your information?’ he asked. ‘Why was there no mention of ATTILA in Mitrokhin?’
Vasili Mitrokhin was a major in the KGB who passed detailed accounts of Russian intelligence operations to MI6 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The documents were published in the UK in 1992.
‘Everybody thinks the entire history of Soviet espionage was contained in Mitrokhin.’ Charlotte lit a cigarette and looked utterly content. ‘But there was a ton of stuff he didn’t get his hands on. Including this.’
Paul put his knife and fork together. Charlotte’s husband was a tall, patient man, impassive to the point of diffidence. A successful City financier – hence the seven-figure, five-bedroom house in Hampstead – he loved Charlotte not least because she allowed him to blend into the background, to maintain the privacy he had worked so hard to protect. He was so inscrutable that Sam could never work out whether Paul viewed him as a threat to their marriage or as a valued friend. It was almost a surprise when he joined the fray, saying:
‘Come on, who’s your source?’
Charlotte leaned forward into an effectively conspiratorial cloud of cigarette smoke and looked at both men in turn. Her husband was the only person she could entirely trust with the information. Gaddis was a loyal friend, of course, a man of tact and discretion, but he also possessed a streak of mischievousness which made sharing a secret like this extremely risky.
‘Stays between these four walls, OK?’ she said, so that Gaddis was aware of what it meant to her. He felt a sudden thrust of envy, because she seemed so convinced of her prize.
‘Of course. Four walls. Won’t breathe a word.’
‘Can I tell Polly?’ Paul muttered, placing his hand on Charlotte’s back as he stood to clear the plates. Polly was their arthritic black Labrador and, in the absence of any children, their most cherished companion.
‘This is serious,’ she said. ‘I’m sworn to secrecy. But it’s so mind-boggling I can’t keep my mouth shut.’
Gaddis felt a historian’s excitement at the prospect of what Charlotte had uncovered. The sixth man. Was it really possible? It was like finding Lucan. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Let me start at the beginning.’ Charlotte filled another glass of wine. Paul caught Sam’s eye and frowned imperceptibly. She was a functioning alcoholic: a bottle of wine at lunch, two at dinner; gins at six; a couple of tumblers of Laphroaig last thing at night. None of it ever seemed to affect her behaviour beyond a certain decibel increase in the volume of her voice. But the booze was undoubtedly beating her: it was putting years on, adding weight, black-bagging her eyes. ‘About a month ago I received a letter from a man called Thomas Neame. He claims to be the confidant of a British diplomat who spent his entire career, from World War II to the mid-1980s, working as a spy for the KGB. I made some basic enquiries, discovered that Thomas was kosher, and went to meet him.’
‘Went where?’ Paul was oblivious to the comings-and-goings of his wife’s career. Often she would disappear for weeks on end, pursuing a story in Iraq, in California, in Moscow.
‘That’s secret number one,’ Charlotte replied. ‘I can’t tell even you where Thomas Neame lives.’
‘Trust is such a wonderful thing between husband and wife,’ Gaddis muttered. ‘How old is this guy?’
‘Ninety-one.’ Charlotte gulped more wine. Her skin had darkened under the low lights of the kitchen, her mouth now ruby red with lipstick and wine. ‘But ninety-one going on seventy-five. You wouldn’t fancy taking him on in an arm wrestle. Very tough and fit, sort of war generation Scot who can smoke forty a day and still pop to the top of Ben Nevis before breakfast.’
‘Unlike someone else I know,’ said Paul pointedly, looking at the cigarette in his wife’s hand. Charlotte’s years of reporting overseas had weakened, rather than strengthened, what had once been an iron constitution. Both Paul and Gaddis worried about this but could no more have curtailed her lifestyle than they could have biked to the moon.
‘And how does Neame know that his friend was a spy?’ Gaddis asked. ‘How come it hasn’t leaked out before?’
His phone rang before Charlotte had a chance to respond. Gaddis plucked it from the pocket of his jacket and looked at the display. It was a text from Holly Levette.
NIGHTCAP …?
He was possessed by two contradictory impulses: to polish off his wine as quickly as possible and to grab a taxi south to Tite Street; or to come clean to Charlotte about his quest for a headline-grabbing story of his own.
‘Do you know this woman?’ he said, holding up the phone, as if there was a photograph of Holly on the screen. ‘Holly Levette?’
‘Rings a bell.’
‘Mother’s name was Katya. She was working on a history of the KGB when—’
‘Katya Levette!’ Charlotte reacted with mock horror. She shook her head and said: ‘Commonly regarded as the world’s worst hack.’
‘How so?’
She waved a hand in front of her face. ‘Not worth going into. Our paths crossed once or twice. She was constantly telling me how wonderful I was, but clearly looking for a quid pro quo. I think her daughter sent me an email after she died, saying how much Katya had admired something I’d written about Chechnya. Then offered me a load of old junk from her research papers.’
‘A load of old junk,’ Gaddis repeated, with a thump of despair.
‘Well, not junk.’ Charlotte looked sheepish. ‘Actually, I palmed her off on you. Told her to give them to a proper historian.’
‘Gee thanks.’
‘And now she’s been in touch?’
Gaddis nodded. ‘She didn’t mention that I was getting them second-hand. She told me how much she’d admired my Guardian article about Sergei Platov.’
Paul smothered a laugh. ‘Flattery will get you everywhere.’
Gaddis poured himself a glass of wine. Skirting around the dirty weekend in Chelsea, he explained that Holly had come to Daunt Books and offered him the KGB material on a plate.
‘A beautiful girl turns up like that, willing to hand over several hundred documents about Soviet intelligence, you don’t exactly turn a blind eye. How was I to know Katya was a fruitcake?’
‘Oh, she’s beautiful, is she?’ Charlotte asked, animated by the opportunity to tease him. ‘You never said.’
‘Holly is very beautiful.’
‘And she came to the launch? How come I didn’t meet her?’
‘Probably because you’d told her to get stuffed,’ Paul replied.
Charlotte laughed and picked at a chunk of candle wax on the table. ‘And now this girl is texting you at half-past ten at night. Is there something you’re not telling the group, Doctor Gaddis? Does Miss Levette need a bedtime story?’
Gaddis took a Camel from her open packet. ‘You’re lucky,’ he said, deliberately changing the subject. ‘Right now I’d sell my grandchildren for your Cambridge story.’ He lit the cigarette from the candle. Paul grimaced and waved a hand in front of his face, saying: ‘Christ, not you as well.’
‘The sixth man? Why?’
‘Financial problems.’ Gaddis made a gesture with upturned hands. ‘Nothing new.’
There was a strange kind of shame in being broke at forty-three. How had it come to this? He took the cigarette smoke deep into his lungs and exhaled at the ceiling.
Charlotte frowned. ‘Alimony? Is the fragrant Natasha turning out to be not quite as fragrant as we thought?’
Paul poured water into a cafetière of coffee and kept his counsel.
‘Tax bill. School fees. Debts,’ Gaddis replied. ‘I need to raise about twenty-five grand. Had lunch with my agent today. He says the only hope I have of working my way out of the situation is to write a hack job about Soviet intelligence. Doesn’t even have to be under my own name. So a sixth Cambridge spy is the perfect story. In fact, I’ll steal it off you. Bury you under the floorboards to get my hands on it.’
Charlotte looked genuinely concerned. ‘You don’t have to steal it,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you co-write a book with me? We can even use some of Katya’s magic files.’ Paul grinned. ‘Seriously. I’ll break the Cambridge story as an exclusive, but after that someone will want a book. You’d be perfect. I don’t have the patience to sit down and compose two hundred thousand words about a piece I’ve already written. I’ll want to move on to the next thing. But you could put ATTILA in context. You could add all the juice and flavour. Nobody knows more about Russia than you do.’
Gaddis declined outright. It would feel wrong to be piggybacking on Charlotte’s triumph. She was drunk and the booze was making promises she might not, in the cold light of morning, be willing to keep. Yet she persisted.
‘Sleep on it,’ she said. ‘Christ, sleep on it while you’re sleeping with Holly Levette.’ Paul plunged the coffee. ‘I’d love to work with you. It would be an honour. And it sounds as though it will get you out of a nasty situation.’
Gaddis slotted his mobile phone back in his jacket pocket and took Charlotte’s hand. ‘It’s an idea,’ he said. ‘No more than that. You’re incredibly kind. But let’s talk more in the morning.’
‘No. Let’s talk now.’ She wouldn’t let pride and British etiquette stand in the way of a good idea. Polly, her buckled legs seized by arthritis, came hobbling into the kitchen and lay at her feet. Charlotte leaned over and fed a piece of bread into her mouth, saying: ‘Do you think it’s a good idea, Pol?’ in a voice for a child. ‘I think it’s a good idea.’
‘OK, OK.’ Gaddis’s hands were again raised, this time in mock surrender. ‘I’ll think about it.’
Charlotte looked relieved. ‘Well, thank God for that. Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.’ She stood and found three cups for the coffee.
‘And you say ATTILA is presumed dead?’ It was a first, conscious signal of Gaddis’s desire to explore things further.
‘Yes. But this Neame guy is slippery. Says he hasn’t seen Crane for over ten years. I’m not sure I believe that.’
‘Crane? That’s his name?’
‘Edward Anthony Crane. Wrote everything down in a document which Neame claims to have partially destroyed. Says the document also contained a revelation that would “rock London and Moscow to their foundations”.’
‘You mean over and above the fact that our government has covered up the existence of a sixth Cambridge spy?’
‘Over and above even that, yes.’
Gaddis was staring at her, staring at Paul, trying to work out if Charlotte was being duped. It was too good to be true and, at the same time, impossible to ignore. ‘And he hasn’t said what this scandal involved?’
Charlotte shook her head. ‘No. Not yet. But Thomas was Crane’s confessor. His best friend. He knows everything. And he’s willing to spill his guts before he pops his clogs.’
‘Not to mix metaphors,’ Paul muttered.
‘They would both be about the same age,’ Charlotte continued. ‘Ninety, ninety-one. Contemporaries at Cambridge. What do you think are the chances of both of them still being alive?’
‘Slim,’ Gaddis replied.
Chapter 5
Alexander Grek had been watching the Berg residence for five hours. He had witnessed Paul returning from work with two bulging Waitrose carrier bags at 18.45. While smoking a cigarette at 19.12, he had seen Charlotte at the first-floor window, recently emerged from a bath or shower, closing a set of curtains after securing a towel around her chest. Just after eight o’clock, an unidentified white male – early forties, dishevelled hair, carrying two bottles of red wine – had entered the property. Grek assumed that the man was coming for supper.
The unidentified male left the building at 23.21. He was approximately six feet tall, about eighty kilos, wearing a corduroy jacket with a leather satchel slung over his shoulder. The man shook Paul Berg’s hand in the doorway of the house. He then embraced and kissed Berg’s wife, Charlotte. Grek had a long-lens camera on the passenger seat of his car, but was unable to take a photograph of the man’s face because he walked backwards from the front door, moving towards the street while continuing to converse with his hosts. Having reached the pavement, the subject walked in the direction of Hampstead High Street, away from Grek’s vehicle.
Grek decided to stretch his legs. He followed the subject the length of Pilgrim’s Lane and observed him hailing a cab outside a branch of Waterstone’s bookshop. The taxi headed south. Grek lit a cigarette and walked back towards his vehicle. Halfway along the street, clamping the cigarette between his lips, he urinated at the base of a chestnut tree concealed from the street by a tarpaulin-covered skip.
Murders, he had long ago concluded, broke down into three distinct categories. They could be political, they could be military, and they could have a moral characteristic. Alexander Grek did not concern himself with conventional morality. His work was either military or political, and usually defensive. Tonight’s plan, for example, had the laudable goal of preventing graver consequences for his government. Grek was not an assassin in the formal sense. He could not be hired. As a young man, he had been trained by his country’s domestic intelligence service – commonly known as the FSB – and, following his retirement in 1996, had run a small, highly successful security company with offices in London and St Petersburg. In such circumstances, a man learns a great deal about the business of death. Yet Grek considered himself, first and foremost, a political animal. The ATTILA investigation was a threat to the state. That threat must therefore be removed. He was simply responding to his patriotic duty.
Setting down a half-empty bottle of mineral water, he pulled a woollen hat low over his head, exited the vehicle and walked across the street. Pilgrim’s Lane was deserted. Grek moved towards the eastern side of the house and picked the simple lock on the wooden gate which led into the garden. He had oiled the hinges the previous night so that the gate opened without a sound. He was now in a narrow channel in which were kept a bicycle, some garden tools and several rusted cans of paint. He looked up at the house to ensure that no lights were on in the upper floors. He then walked across the garden.
During the day, Charlotte Berg worked in a converted shed at the southern end of the property. She used a laptop computer which, at night, was kept inside the house. The shed contained a cheap colour printer, an outdated telephone and fax machine, some filing cabinets, a battered wooden chair and one or two photographs of sentimental value. To Paul, she would argue that it was better to keep the shed unlocked rather than to fit a padlock, which might convey the impression to any potential burglar that the office contained something worth stealing. Grek opened the shed, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him.
Sodium fluoracetate is a fine white powder, derived from pesticide. Odourless and inexpensive, it is commonly used as a poison to control the spread of rats in sewers. Grek had 10mg, in liquid form, in a vial which he now removed from his jacket pocket. The tiny surveillance camera, fitted in a light above Berg’s desk, had shown a small bottle of Evian, half-finished, beside the printer. Grek picked it up, poured the colourless liquid into the water and sealed the cap. Sufficient moonlight was coming into the room that he was able to remove the camera without the need for a torch. He also withdrew a listening device from the underside of Berg’s desk. He placed both items, and their tangle of wires, in the pockets of his jacket. When he had finished, Grek studied the paperwork on the desk. A telephone bill. An invoice for some painting and decorating. A copy of the second volume of The Mitrokhin Archive. Nothing which seemed to refer directly to ATTILA.
A noise outside. Something within three or four metres of the shed. Grek dropped to his knees. He heard the noise a second time and recognized it as an animal, possibly a fox. The Berg’s dog, Polly, had no access to the garden at night and would presumably be asleep indoors.
Grek stood up slowly. He opened the door of the shed and walked back along the garden. He checked the street as he emerged from the shadows of the house and crossed Pilgrim’s Lane when he was sure that he was not being observed. He unlocked the car, emptied his pockets on the passenger seat and pulled out in the direction of Hampstead High Street.
Chapter 6
Gaddis was in his study at UCL when he received the call. The number had come up as ‘Unknown’.
‘Sam? It’s Paul.’
‘You sound terrible. Is everything all right?’
‘It’s about Charlotte.’ His voice was strangely apologetic. Even at this wretched hour, he somehow managed to maintain a sense of decorum. ‘I’m sorry to have to be the one who tells you. She had a heart attack this morning. She’s gone.’
Gaddis had had three such telephone conversations in the course of his life. When he was sixteen, his older brother had been killed in a car crash in South America. At Cambridge, a close friend had hanged himself on the eve of Finals. And, just before his fortieth birthday, he had learned that Katarina Tikhonov had been assassinated at her apartment in Moscow, the victim of a contract killing tacitly approved by Sergei Platov. He remembered each conversation, each occasion, very clearly, and his distinct reactions to them. He found himself saying: ‘What? A heart attack?’ because he needed words with which to douse the nausea of shock.
Paul replied simply: ‘Yes,’ then, almost immediately, because this was just one of a dozen calls he would have to make: ‘Nothing more to be said now.’
‘Yes, of course. I’m so sorry, Paul.’
‘I’m sorry for you, too.’
Gaddis went to the floor in a slow crouch, with the strange and vivid sensation of his bones expanding, his skin stretching, as if his body wanted to escape itself. The news did not at first seem coherent, but then generated a grim logic. Charlotte drank too much. Charlotte smoked too much. Charlotte’s heart had given out. He stood and leaned on his desk. He was concerned that a student or colleague might knock on the door of the office and walk in. He locked it from the inside and, needing fresh air, went to the window, struggling with the latch until it opened suddenly, the noise of building works bursting into the tiny, cramped room. And Sam was ashamed of himself, because within minutes of absorbing what Paul had told him, he was thinking about Edward Crane. With Charlotte gone, it would no longer be possible to co-write the book. He would have to find another source of income, another way of paying off his debts. He felt utterly bereft.
Charlotte had apparently gone to her office in the morning, typed a few emails, read the Guardian online. At some point, probably between ten and eleven o’clock, she had come back into the house to make some toast, bringing the wastepaper basket from the office. Paul had found her on the floor of the kitchen, Polly whimpering at her side, the toast popped. No autopsy had been carried out. The doctors and coroner had both agreed that Charlotte had suffered a massive heart attack as a result of a genetic coronary weakness allied to an unhealthy lifestyle.
In the ensuing days, Gaddis helped Paul to arrange the funeral. He wrote a eulogy, at the family’s request, and drew up the Order of Service, which he arranged to have printed at a small shop in Belsize Park. It helped to have practical tasks to occupy his mind, to lift his constant sense of despair. He felt that he was a support to Paul, who had withdrawn into an almost impenetrable privacy. Day and night, Sam’s mind shuttled back and forth across more than two decades of memories: the first years of his friendship with Charlotte at Cambridge; their brief love affair; then the span of Sam’s eight-year marriage to Natasha, and the long-running tension between the two women. Sam reflected that there was now nobody in his life – certainly no woman – with whom he had a comparable friendship. Over the previous ten years his group of friends had thinned out, either side-tracked by the demands of small children, or living with partners with whom he felt no real affinity. It was part of the journey into middle-age. Charlotte had been one of the few longterm friends who had survived this period and who remained as a link to his past.
The funeral took place eight days after her death, with a wake at the house in Hampstead. By then, time had partly numbed Sam’s sense of grief and he was capable of putting on a front of charm and fortitude, acting almost as a host in the absence of Paul, who spent most of the afternoon upstairs in his room.
‘I just can’t face them, you know?’ he said, and Gaddis realized that there was nothing he could do to comfort him. Sometimes people are just better left to grieve. Polly was with him, as well as a dozen photographs of Charlotte, strewn across the bed. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked Gaddis. ‘Are you surviving down there?’
‘We’re surviving,’ Gaddis said, and reassured him with his eyes. ‘Everything’s fine.’
By six o’clock, only half a dozen people remained. Colleagues who had known Charlotte from her days on The Times had long since returned to their offices, filing copy on deadline for a morning edition which would not wait. Acquaintances from every nook and cranny of her life had paid their respects and dispersed into the late afternoon. When Paul came back downstairs, only a few members of the close family remained.
Gaddis had briefly given up smoking in the early part of the year, but was at it again, twenty a day since her death. Life, as Charlotte had proved, was indisputably too short. He smiled as he thought of that, lighting a Camel at the bottom of the garden and realizing that he was alone for the first time in almost twelve hours. A couple of caterers – a teenage boy and girl, both dressed in black – were clearing glasses from window sills at the front of the house. Polly was watching them, stretched out on the grass, scratching behind her ear with a bent, arthritic paw.
In the fading light of the early evening Gaddis opened the door of Charlotte’s office and stood in the room where his friend had been working on the morning of her death. The shed was as she had left it. Her laptop was on the desk, some documents had spooled out of the printer, a copy of The Mitrokhin Archive was open on the floor. Sam sat at the desk. He was snooping, no question, pretending to himself and to anyone who might walk in that he was convening with Charlotte’s spirit. But the reality was tawdry. He was looking for Edward Crane.
He picked up the document from the printer. It was an article about John Updike from the New York Review of Books. He looked down at the floor. What was he hoping for? Photographs? CD-ROMs? He flicked through an address book on the desk, even thought about switching on her mobile phone. His breathing was sharper and he was looking out of the window of the shed, checking to make sure that he would not be disturbed as he opened the first few pages of her diary. He looked at the days leading up to her death, saw only ‘Dinner: S’ scrawled on the night that he had come for supper. The last night that he had seen her alive.
‘What are you doing?’
Paul was at the door, staring at him in disbelief.
Gaddis snapped the diary shut and placed it on the desk.
‘Just trying to get close to her,’ he muttered. ‘Just trying to make sense of everything.’
‘In her diary?’
Sam stood up. ‘I don’t know why I did that.’ He guessed that Paul knew. ‘I just ended up in here. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.’
‘I don’t either.’
They looked at one another. Paul was so tired, so strung out, that he simply shook his head and stepped ahead of Sam, trying to reclaim his wife’s office as his own by rearranging the items on her desk. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back to the house.’
When they got there, it was as if the incident had been forgotten, but it sat heavily with Sam, who felt the shame of an otherwise decent man who has inexplicably let himself down. Why had he allowed himself to behave in such a way? It was Paul, oddly, who broke the impasse between them, phoning Sam two days later and inviting him to dinner at the house. No sooner was he inside the door than Sam was apologizing for what had happened. Paul waved away the incident and invited him into the kitchen, where a homemade lasagne – prepared by a worried neighbour – was baking in the oven. He poured two glasses of red wine and sat at the table.
‘I’ve been thinking a lot about your eulogy,’ he said. ‘One particular section.’
This made Gaddis uneasy. He had been honest about Charlotte’s shortcomings in his speech, her ruthlessness in the early years of her career, her habit of abandoning friends who did not live up to expectations. Paul had asked for a printed copy and might easily have taken offence.
‘Which section?’ he asked.
Gaddis saw that Paul was holding the eulogy in his hand. He began to read aloud:
‘In our lives, if we are lucky, we occasionally meet exceptional people. Sometimes, if we are even luckier, those people become our friends.’ Paul stopped and cleared his throat before continuing. ‘Charlotte was not just one of the most exceptional people that I have ever met, she was also my most treasured friend. I envied her and I admired her. I thought that she was reckless but I also thought that she was brave. Dostoyevsky wrote: “If you want to be respected by others, the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.” I cannot think of another person to whom this applies more than Charlotte Berg. And so death continues to take the best people first.’
Gaddis put his hand on Paul’s shoulder.
‘You were absolutely right about that. I just wanted to tell you that what you said has been a great support to me.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘And I thought about what you were doing in her office. I tried to imagine what Charlotte would have made of it.’ Gaddis began to respond but Paul interrupted him. ‘I think she would have done the same thing. Or, at least, I think she would have understood why you were there. You wanted to go into her office to see where she had been that morning, to get close to her, as you said at the time. You found yourself reminded of Edward Crane, you became distracted by the possibility of looking at her research. It was a long day. You were tired.’
‘I was snooping,’ Gaddis replied bluntly. He was touched that Paul had tried to find a way of forgiving him, but didn’t want to be let off the hook. ‘I was saying goodbye to the Cambridge book. I knew it was over and I was feeling sorry for myself.’
‘What do you mean you knew it was over? Why?’
The reply to the question seemed so obvious that Gaddis did not bother making it. Paul went to the oven and checked the lasagne. He seemed more at ease than he had been two days earlier; his privacy had been restored. He had the luxury of being alone with his grief. Turning, he said: ‘Why don’t you keep going? Why don’t you take a look at Charlotte’s research and try to work it up into a book?’
Gaddis could think of nothing to say. Paul saw his confused reaction and tried to convince him.
‘I don’t want her efforts to go to waste. She’d agreed to write a book with you. She would have wanted you to continue.’
‘Paul, I’m not an investigative journalist, I’m an archives man.’
‘What’s the difference? You interview people, don’t you? You can follow a trail from A to B. You know how to use a telephone, the Internet, a public library? How hard can it be?’
Gaddis was taking a packet of cigarettes from his jacket but it was just a reflex and he quickly replaced them, fearful of seeming tactless.
‘Go ahead and smoke.’
‘I’m fine. I’m going to quit.’
‘Listen’ – Paul switched off the oven, took out the food – ‘I won’t take “no” for an answer. Next time you have a free afternoon, come up to the house. Have a look through Charlotte’s research and see what you make of it. If you think she was on to something, if you think you can track down this Cambridge spy, write the book and put Charlotte’s name alongside yours.’ He made an uncharacteristically extravagant gesture with his hand. ‘You have my blessing, Doctor. Go forth.’
Chapter 7
As it turned out, Gaddis didn’t need much persuading. A letter had arrived from his accountant flagging up the outstanding tax bill. At the weekend, he had sat through a telephone conversation with Natasha, who was worried that Min would have to drop out of school altogether if the fees weren’t paid by Christmas. Needing to secure an advance as quickly as possible, he had no choice but to set to work on the Cambridge book and to put together a proposal for Paterson.
Paul had left a set of keys at a newsagent in Hampstead. Gaddis let himself into the house late on Monday morning. He made a cup of coffee in the kitchen, found Charlotte’s laptop, and walked out to the garden. He went to the shed and closed the door behind him. There was a cobweb in the apex of the roof and he felt that he could still catch the faint smell of Charlotte’s perfume, a thing which unsettled him. A biro mark was scrawled down one wall, torn newspaper cuttings and postcards pinned to a mottled corkboard which looked as if it had succumbed to a bout of woodworm.
Sitting down, his arms braced on the desk in front of him, he experienced an acute sense of trespass, and wondered if he should just stand up and walk away from the whole thing. Was he honouring Charlotte’s memory or just making a fast buck?
A bit of both, he admitted to himself. A bit of both.
He opened the laptop and powered it up, attaching the flex to a socket in the wall. He did the same with her mobile phone, realizing at once that there would be text messages and voicemails from friends and colleagues who had not yet learned of Charlotte’s death. Sure enough, the phone beeped repeatedly as it powered up, three texts from people whose names he did not recognize. He took down the numbers on a scrap of newspaper and knew that, before the day was out, he would have to phone them and tell them that Charlotte Berg had passed away.
There were so many files, so many folders and photographs on the computer’s desktop that Sam was at first overwhelmed. Where to begin? He thought of his own computer at UCL, of the thousands of emails and essays, research notes and photographs which, if accessed, would build up to an almost total picture of his personal and professional life. How does a person begin to pick his way through that?
He double-clicked all of the documents on her desktop, one by one, moving across the field of files, none of which appeared to relate to the Cambridge investigation. To simplify things, he ran a hard drive search for ‘Edward Crane’ and ‘Thomas Neame’, but the results were meaningless. He tried ‘Philby’, ‘Blunt’, ‘Maclean’, ‘Burgess’ and ‘Cairncross’, but again drew a blank. There was clearly no first draft of Charlotte’s story, no interview transcripts, no notes. It was as if they had been wiped away.
Towards midday, Gaddis became so frustrated that he sent Paul a text message with the question: Did C use a second computer? to which Paul replied: Not to my knowledge. None of her emails related to work on the story. Searches for ‘Cambridge’, ‘Neame’ and ‘Crane’ within Outlook also proved useless. He concluded that Charlotte must have been carrying around most of the research in her head.
Towards two o’clock, Gaddis found a small, alphabetized box of files, designed as a portable case, in the far corner of the office. He opened it and began to go through her private papers: bank statements; details of her pension plan; letters from accountants. All of it would have to be given to Paul, who had been left with the task of completing probate. Another box contained cuttings from newspaper and magazine articles which Charlotte had written, dating back to the early 1990s, a gone-away world of Clinton and Lewinsky, of Rwanda and Timothy McVeigh.
At last he discovered something which he was sure would start him on the path to Thomas Neame: a Sony digital recorder lodged in the inside pocket of a coat which Charlotte had left hanging behind the door of her office. Gaddis switched it on, but found only an old interview about Afghanistan. It was as if the Cambridge investigation had never taken place. Had she made a deliberate decision to write nothing down? What else could explain the complete absence of a paper trail?
By three o’clock, Gaddis was hungry and stir crazy. He took out an entire drawer from her desk and carried it into the kitchen, where he microwaved a supermarket Chilli con Carne and ate it while picking through the contents. The drawer was awash in gas bills, half-finished strips of paracetamol, cheque books and rubber bands. Chaos. He was reminded of Holly’s flat and sent her a text message to which she did not respond.
Finally, while mopping up the dregs of the chilli with a hunk of stale bread, he found an envelope of expenses receipts, dated within two months of Charlotte’s death. Gaddis pushed the plate to one side and poured the receipts, perhaps thirty or forty of them, on to the table. He might as well have been looking at grains of rice. How was a till receipt from WH Smith going to lead him to Edward Crane? He said to himself, in an audible whisper: ‘You’re an idiot’ and put the receipts back in the envelope. Then he found a beer in Paul’s fridge, drank it from the bottle and contemplated the possibility of going into the garden for a smoke. He had given up cigarettes twenty-four hours earlier. Was one more packet going to give him lung cancer? Would five quid break the bank? No.
He drained the beer, took Paul’s house keys from the kitchen table and headed towards the front door. He would buy a packet of Camels, his usual brand, on Hampstead High Street and, when they were finished, quit for good. No point in spending a tortuous day in Charlotte’s house without the back-up of tobacco. It was counter-productive.
As he was opening the front door, jingling a lighter against the loose change in his pocket, a gust of wind shot into the house, sending junk mail scattering down the corridor. Gaddis spotted one of Charlotte’s handbags on a hook behind the door. He closed the door, took the bag down and freed the brass catch. Her purse was inside, bulging with credit cards and cash. He took the purse out and held it in his hand. Of all the objects which had belonged to Charlotte that he had touched that day, this was the one to trigger his grief. A hoop of sadness came up through his body and he had to stop for a moment to compose himself. There was £120 in cash in the purse, as well as a Press ID card and several more receipts. He wondered if the credit cards had been cancelled. Should he do that himself and save Paul the trouble? Visible behind a plastic cover, perhaps so that Charlotte could press the purse against a ticket machine without the need to take it out, was an Oyster card. Thanks to the common room ravings of a colleague at UCL who was obsessed, to the point of paranoia, by the ‘surveillance society’, Gaddis knew that it was possible to go to any Tube station in London and to see a computer listing for the last ten journeys undertaken by Oyster. That gave him a plan. If he could discover where Charlotte had travelled in the last few days of her life, he might be able to match that information to details on her phone bills or expenses receipts. This would at least provide him with the possibility of a link to Thomas Neame.
At Hampstead station he queued behind a backpacking German tourist and placed the Oyster on a reader at the ticket machine. What he saw intrigued him. The same five journeys, there and back, over a period of fifteen days, from Finchley Road station, which was a fifteen-minute walk from Charlotte’s house, to Rickmansworth, in the suburbs of northwest London. He found a Tube map and traced the simple journey north on the Metropolitan line. It would have taken about forty minutes. For some reason, this small triumph of amateur detection was enough to persuade him not to buy the cigarettes and Gaddis returned to the house with a renewed sense of purpose.
He took the receipts from the envelope a second time, pouring them on to the kitchen table: WH Smith’s, Daunt Books, Transport for London. Some writing caught his eye: scrawled on the back of two receipts which were from the same pub in Chorleywood, Charlotte had written: Lunch C Somers. The dates matched the days on which she had travelled north from Finchley. Gaddis knew that Chorleywood and Rickmansworth were no more than a couple of miles apart. He went back outside and returned to the computer, running a search for the name ‘Somers’. Nothing came up. Just the same black hole of false leads and dead ends which had wiped out his morning.
Perhaps she had made telephone calls to a landline in the Rickmansworth area? Gaddis typed ‘Dialling code for Rickmansworth’ into Google and wrote down the number: 01923. The same prefix was listed for Chorleywood. He then checked the results against an itemized phone bill which he had discovered while drinking a cup of coffee at her desk almost five hours earlier. Sure enough, in the three weeks of her journeys from Finchley, Charlotte had made half a dozen calls to the same 01923 number. Gaddis took his own phone from the pocket of his coat and dialled it.
A woman answered, bored to the point of despair.
‘Mount Vernon Hospital.’
Gaddis said ‘Hello?’ because he was unsure precisely what she had said and wanted it repeated.
‘Yes,’ she said, sounding impatient. ‘Mount Vernon Hospital.’
He scribbled the name down. ‘Please. Yes. I’m looking for a patient of yours. Thomas Neame. Would it be possible to speak to him?’
The line went dead. Gaddis assumed that he was being connected to a separate part of the hospital. If Neame answered, what the hell was he going to say? He hadn’t thought things through. He couldn’t even be sure that the old man would know what had happened to Charlotte. He would have to tell him about her heart attack and then somehow explain his interest in Edward Crane.
‘Sir?’ It was the receptionist again. Her tone was fractionally less hostile. ‘We don’t have a patient of that name here.’
There didn’t seem to be any future in asking to check the spelling of ‘Neame’. Nor could he enquire about Somers. The receptionist might smell a rat. Instead Gaddis thanked her, hung up and called Paul at work.
‘Do you have a relative who works at the Mount Vernon Hospital in Rickmansworth?’
‘Come again?’
‘Rickmansworth. Chorleywood. Hertfordshire suburbs.’
‘Never been there in my life.’
‘What about Charlotte? Could she have had a relative up there or a friend that she was visiting?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
Somers was obviously the key. But was he a patient at the hospital or a member of staff? Gaddis redialled Mount Vernon using the phone in the house and was put through to a different receptionist.
‘Could I speak to Doctor Somers please?’
‘Doctor Somers?’
It was the wrong call. Somers was a patient, a porter, a nurse.
‘Sorry …’
‘You mean Calvin?’
The Christian name was a lucky break. ‘Yes.’
‘Calvin’s not a doctor.’
‘Of course not. Did I say that? I wasn’t concentr—’
‘He’s a Senior Nurse in Michael Sobel.’ Gaddis scrawled down Michael Sobel. ‘He’s not due back on shift until the morning. Is there anything else? Would you like to leave a message for him?’
‘No, no message.’
Gaddis replaced the receiver. He pulled up Google on Charlotte’s computer. Michael Sobel was the name of a new cancer treatment centre at the Mount Vernon. He would go there in the morning. If he could find Somers on shift, he might be able to find out why Charlotte Berg kept taking him out to lunch in the days leading up to her death. That information, at the very least, would take him a step closer to Edward Crane.
Chapter 8
The Mount Vernon Hospital was only half an hour by car from Gaddis’s house in west London, but he took the Tube in order to recreate, largely for sentimental reasons, the journey on the Metropolitan line which Charlotte had taken from Finchley Road to Rickmansworth in the last week of her life.
These were the suburbs of his childhood, red-brick, post-war houses of indistinct character with gardens just large enough to play a game of Swingball or French cricket. Gaddis remembered his racquet-wielding father launching a tennis ball into near-orbit one hot summer afternoon, a yellow dot disappearing towards the sun. The train passed through Harrow, Pinner, Northwood Hills, the indifferent streets and parks of outer London, starved of sunlight. The hospital itself, far from being the gleaming twenty-first-century new-build of Gaddis’s imagination, was a vaguely sinister, neo-Gothic mansion with a gabled roof and views across the Hertfordshire countryside. It looked like the sort of place that a soldier might have gone to recuperate in the aftermath of World War II; he could picture starchy nurses attending to men in wheel-chairs, veterans and their visitors spread out across the spacious lawn like guests at a garden party.
Gaddis had taken a taxi from Rickmansworth station and was deposited at the hospital’s main reception, located in a modern building a few hundred metres east of the mansion. He followed the signs to the Michael Sobel Centre and drifted around the ground floor until a female doctor, no older than most of his students, saw that Gaddis was lost, offered him an accommodating smile and asked if she could ‘help in any way’.
‘I’m looking for one of the nurses here. Calvin.’ He had assumed that the use of Somers’s Christian name might generate an effect of familiarity. ‘Is he around?’
The doctor was wearing a stethoscope around her neck, like a gesture to Central Casting. She took a good long look at his shoes. Gaddis never gave much thought to his appearance and wondered what it was that people thought they could discern from analysing a stranger’s footwear. Today, he was wearing a pair of scuffed desert boots. In the eyes of a pretty twenty-five-year-old doctor, was that a good or a bad thing?
‘Calvin? Sure,’ she said, her face suddenly opening up to him. It was as if he had passed some unspecified test. ‘I’ve seen him around this morning. He has an office on the second floor, just beyond Pathology. Do you know it?’
‘It’s my first time,’ Gaddis replied. He was not a natural liar and there seemed no point in misleading her. The doctor duly gave him directions, all the while touching her stethoscope. Two minutes later, Gaddis was standing at the door of Somers’s office, knocking on chipped paint.
‘Enter.’
The voice was reedy and slightly strangulated. Gaddis put an age and appearance to it before he had even turned the handle. Sure enough, Calvin Somers was mid-forties, slightly built, with the stubborn, defensive features of a man who has spent the bulk of his life wrestling a corrosive insecurity. He was wearing a pale green nurse’s uniform and there was gel in his thinning black hair. Sam Gaddis had good instincts about people and he disliked Calvin Somers on sight.
‘Mr Somers?’
‘Who wants to know?’
It was a smartarse line from a second-rate American cop show. Gaddis almost laughed.
‘I was a friend of Charlotte Berg’s,’ he said. ‘My name is Sam Gaddis. I’m an academic. I wondered if you might have time for a quick chat?’
He had closed the door behind him as he asked the question and Somers looked grateful for the privacy. The mention of Charlotte’s name had caught him off-guard; there was perhaps some shameful or calculating element to their relationship which he was keen to obscure.
‘Was?’ Somers had noted the use of the past tense. He pulled himself up in his chair but did not stand to shake Gaddis’s hand, as if by doing so he might undermine an idea he possessed of his own innate authority. Gaddis noticed that his right hand was spinning a ballpoint pen nervously around the surface of his desk.
‘I’m afraid I have some bad news,’ he said.
‘And what’s that?’
The manner was artificially confident, even supercilious. Gaddis watched Somers’s face carefully.
‘Charlotte had a heart attack. Suddenly. Last week. I think you may have been one of the last people to see her alive.’
‘She what?’
The reaction was one of annoyance, rather than shock. Somers was looking at Gaddis in the way that you might look at a person who has just fired you.
‘She’s dead,’ Gaddis felt obliged to repeat, though he was angered by the callous response. ‘And she was a friend of mine.’
Somers stood up in the narrow office, walked past Gaddis and double-checked that the door was properly closed. A man with a secret. He carried with him a strange, mingled smell of cheap aftershave and hospital disinfectant.
‘And you’ve come to give me the three grand, have you?’ It was a completely unexpected remark. Why was Charlotte in debt to this prick by £3000? Gaddis frowned and said: ‘What’s that?’ as he took a small, disbelieving step backwards.
‘I said have you brought the three grand?’ Somers sat at the edge of his desk. ‘You say you were a friend of hers, she obviously told you about our arrangement or you wouldn’t be here. Were you working on the story together?’
‘What story?’ It was an instinctive tactic, a means of protecting his scoop, but Gaddis saw that it was the wrong move. Somers shot him a withering glance that developed into a smile which bared surprisingly polished teeth.
‘Probably best if you don’t play the innocent,’ he sneered. Two sheets of paper slid off the desk beside him, undermining the remark’s dramatic impact. Somers was obliged to stoop down and pick them up as they floated to the ground.
‘Nobody’s playing the innocent, Calvin. I’m just trying to ascertain who you are and what your relationship was with my friend. If it helps, I can tell you that I’m a senior lecturer in Russian History at UCL. In other words, I am not a journalist. I’m just an interested party. I am not a threat to you.’
‘Who said anything about a threat?’
Somers was back in his chair again, swivelling, trying to regain control. Gaddis saw now that this embittered, hostile man had probably felt threatened for most of his adult life; men like Calvin Somers could not afford to display a moment’s self-doubt. The room had grown hot, central heating pumping out of a radiator beneath a locked window. Gaddis removed his jacket and hooked it on the door.
‘Let’s start again,’ he said. He was used to awkward conversations in cramped rooms. Students complaining. Students crying. Every week at UCL brought a fresh crisis to his office: illness, bereavement, poverty. Students and colleagues alike came to Sam Gaddis with their problems.
‘Why did Charlotte owe you money?’ he asked. He set his voice low, trying to offload any inference from the question. ‘Why hadn’t she paid you?’
A laugh. Not from the belly but from the throat. Somers shook his head.
‘I’ll tell you what, Professor. Cough up the money and I’ll talk to you. Get me three thousand quid in the next six hours and I’ll tell you what your friend Charlotte was paying me to tell her. If not, then can I politely ask you to get the fuck out of my office? I’m not sure I appreciate strangers coming to my place of work and—’
‘Fine.’ Gaddis took the sting out of the attack by raising his hand in a gesture of conciliation. It was a moment of considerable self-control on his part, because he would rather have grabbed Somers by the narrow lapels of his cheap polyester nurse’s uniform and flung him against the radiator. He would prefer to have coaxed even the smallest gesture of respect for Charlotte out of this shiftless parasite, but he needed to keep Calvin Somers onside. The nurse was the link to Neame. Without him, there was no Edward Crane. ‘I’ll get the money,’ he said, with no idea how he would find £3000 before sunset.
‘You will?’ Somers seemed almost to wilt at the prospect of it.
‘Sure. I won’t be able to get more than a thousand out on my cards today, but if you’ll accept a cheque as a guarantee of good faith, I’m sure we can come to some kind of an arrangement.’
Somers looked shocked, but Gaddis could see that a promise of immediate payment had done the trick. The nurse was ready to spill his guts.
‘I get off shift later this afternoon,’ he said. His earlier antagonism had entirely evaporated. ‘Do you know Batchworth Lake?’
Gaddis said that he did not.
‘It’s in a stretch of parkland. Runs beside the Grand Union Canal. Follow signs to the Three Rivers District Council and you’ll find it.’ Gaddis was astonished by how rapidly Somers was making arrangements for delivery of the cash. ‘Meet me in the car park there at five o’clock. If you’ve got the money, I’ll talk. Agreed?’
‘Agreed,’ said Gaddis, though the deal had been struck so quickly that he wondered if he was being played. Why hadn’t Charlotte paid this man? Was the information he possessed even worthwhile? Somers could have accomplices, engaged in a simple con. It was quite possible that Gaddis would now go back to Rickmansworth, withdraw a large sum of money from his bank accounts, hand it to Calvin Somers and be told only that the Earth was round and that there were seven days in the week.
‘What guarantees do I have that you have the kind of information I’m looking for?’
Somers paused. He picked up the pen and began tapping it on the desk. Somebody walked past the office, whistling the theme tune to EastEnders.
‘Oh, I’ve got the information you’re looking for,’ he said. ‘You see, I know about St Mary’s Paddington. I know what that nice MI6 did to Mr Edward Crane.’
Chapter 9
CURRY NIGHT – WEDNESDAY.
Gaddis was staring at the poster tacked up on the wall of the pub in West Hyde. The jukebox had shifted to a song he didn’t recognize, an anti-melodic squawk run through software and drum machines. Somers had gone to the Gents again, his second visit inside half an hour. Was he nervous, or had the peanuts disagreed with him? Gaddis didn’t much care either way.
Seven hours earlier, in a trance of determination to find out what Somers knew, he had called for a taxi and driven from Mount Vernon Hospital to a supermarket three miles up the road. At a cash machine he had withdrawn £1000 on three separate cards, maxing out his current account, putting £400 on his already debt-ridden Visa bill, and, to his shame, making up the difference with £100 from an account set up in Min’s name which contained Christening money given to her by her godparents. That had been an absolute low-point and he promised himself that he would put £500 back in the account as soon as he received the signature advance on the book.
As arranged, Somers had been waiting for him in the car park. Gaddis had handed over the cash, along with a post-dated cheque for £2000. He had then accompanied Somers on their damp, enlightening walk along the banks of the Grand Union Canal.
This is what he now knew. That in February 1992, Sir John Brennan, currently the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, had bribed four people to fake the death of Edward Anthony Crane, a former Foreign Office diplomat prominent enough to earn an obituary – albeit one that had been faked – in The Times. Crane was now almost certainly living under an assumed name in some FCO variant of the Witness Protection Programme, his whereabouts known only to Brennan and certain privileged members of MI6.
‘So who do you think he was?’ he asked Somers. ‘Why do you think it was necessary to kill him?’
‘Search me.’
Gaddis had put the questions as a means of discovering what, if anything, Somers had subsequently discovered about Crane’s identity.
‘You never looked into it? You never saw Brennan again?’
‘Haven’t we been over this?’ Somers picked up his pint and drained it. In the bathroom, he had swept his hair back with the assistance of a little water; the collar of his shirt had become soft and wet as a result. ‘Like I said, all I know is that MI6 was prepared to fake someone’s death. So I conclude from this that the person involved must have been important, right? You see, I’ve been a nurse for over fifteen years, Professor. I’ve met a lot of other nurses. And when we get together, at the Christmas party, say, or a leaving do, it’s surprising how rarely we talk about being asked to pretend that someone’s dead. It’s not a daily occurrence. It’s not something we’re trained for. In fact, the departure of Edward Crane from planet Earth is probably the only time in the long and distinguished history of the National Health Service that something like that has ever happened.’
‘Drink?’ Far from annoying him, the speech had reassured Gaddis that Somers knew nothing about Crane’s link to the Cambridge spies.
‘What?’
‘I said, do you want another drink, Calvin? My round.’
Somers looked at his watch. The strap was worn, the freckled wrist slim and pale.
‘Nah. I’ve got to go.’ Gaddis stared at him, deadening his lively eyes. It was a trick he sometimes employed on particularly recalcitrant students and it had the desired effect. Somers looked immediately sheepish and said: ‘Unless, of course, you’re not satisfied that you’ve got your money’s worth.’
Gaddis moved very slightly to one side. ‘One more question.’
‘And what’s that?’
Two more smokers moved past the table and disappeared outside. A cold blast of wind ran through the open door.
‘How were you first introduced to Charlotte? How did you find her?’
‘Oh, that’s easy.’
‘What do you mean “easy”?’
‘Bloke called Neame put her on to me.’
‘And would you have any idea how I can find him?’
Chapter 10
It looked as though Thomas Neame did not want to be found. He wasn’t in the phone book. He couldn’t be traced online. Charlotte had told Gaddis nothing about his life, even less about his whereabouts. All he knew was that Neame was Crane’s oldest friend – his ‘confessor’, to use Charlotte’s description – and was willing to reveal everything about Crane’s work for the KGB. He was ‘ninety-one going on seventy-five’ and still in robust good health. How had Charlotte put it? ‘Very tough and fit, sort of war generation Scot who can smoke forty a day and still pop to the top of Ben Nevis before breakfast.’
Why had she mentioned Ben Nevis? Was there a clue in that? Did Neame live in Scotland? Gaddis was lying in bed one night when that thought came to him, but it moved on as quickly as a car passing outside in the street. After all, what was he going to do about it? Take the sleeper to Fort William and start knocking on doors? It would be another wild-goose chase.
Over a period of several days he went through the files that had been given to him by Holly Levette, but found no mention of Neame’s name. He felt, as each fruitless search led to the next, as though he was standing in a long queue that had not moved for hours. Gaddis had no contacts in the police, no friend in the Inland Revenue, and certainly no money to spend on a professional investigator who might be able to dig around in Neame’s past. He did not even know where Neame had been to school. Always in the back of his mind was the humiliating thought that he had handed Calvin Somers £3000 for what was effectively no more than a dinner party anecdote.
It helped that Gaddis wasn’t melancholy or defeatist by nature. Four days after meeting Somers in the pub, he decided to abandon the search for Neame and to concentrate instead directly on Edward Crane. He would, in effect, be looking for a man who no longer existed, yet that prospect did not unsettle him. Historians specialize in the dead. Sam Gaddis had spent his entire career bringing people he had never met, faces he had never seen, names he had read about only in the pages of books, vividly to life. He was a specialist in reconstruction. He knew how to piece together the fragments of a stranger’s existence, to work through an archive, to pan the stream of history to reveal a nugget of priceless information.
First off, he made a visit to the British Library’s newspaper archive in Colindale, retrieving Crane’s faked obituary and making a copy of it from a 1992 microfilm of The Times. There was no photograph accompanying the piece, but the text matched the broad facts that Somers had given him beside the canal: that Crane had been educated at Marlborough and Trinity College; that the Foreign Office, over a twenty-year period, had posted him to Russia, Argentina and Germany; that he had never married nor produced any children. Further biographical information was thin on the ground, but Gaddis was certain that some of it would later prove useful. The obituary stated that Crane had been sent to Greece in 1938 and had spent several years in Italy after the war. It transpired that his mother had been a society beauty, twice married, whose first husband – Crane’s father – was a middle-ranking civil servant in India who was later briefly imprisoned for embezzlement. In Argentina, in the 1960s, Crane had been seconded to a British diplomat whom the obituarist – perhaps with a flourish of poetic licence – suspected of having an affair with Eva Peron. Having retired from the Foreign Office, Crane had sat on the board of several leading corporations, including a well-known British oil company and a German investment bank with an office in Berlin.
Two days later, Gaddis drove the short journey from his house in Shepherd’s Bush, via Chiswick, to the National Archives, a complex of buildings in Kew which stores official government records. At the enquiries desk he made a formal request for Crane’s war record and ran Crane’s name through the computerized database. The search produced more than five hundred results, most of them relating to Edward Cranes born in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Gaddis tried ‘Thomas’ and ‘Tommy’ and ‘Tom Neame’ but found only the Medal Card of a Thomas Neame who had been a private in the Welsh Regiment and Army Service Corps between 1914 and 1920. The wrong generation. Another dead end.
Finally, he got lucky. A National Archives assistant directed Gaddis to the Foreign Office Lists, which comprised several shelves of well-thumbed hardback volumes in burgundy leather containing basic biographical information about employees of the Foreign Office. He picked up the volume marked ‘1947’ and began searching the Statement of Services for the surname ‘Crane’. What he saw almost brought him to his feet with relief. Here, at last, was concrete proof of ATTILA’s existence.
CRANE, EDWARD ANTHONY
Born 10 December 1916. Educated at Marlborough College, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Granted a Certificate as 3rd Secretary in the Foreign Office, 11 October 1937, and appointed to the Foreign Office, 17 October 1937. Transferred to Athens, 21 August 1938. Transferred to the Foreign Office, 5 June 1940. Promoted to be 2nd Secretary, 15 November 1942. Transferred to Paris, 2 November 1944. Promoted to be an Acting 1st Secretary, 7 January 1945.
He went back to the shelves and drew out the List for 1965, which was the last available volume before the Foreign Office records were computerized. By then, Crane had served all over the world but, as the obituary confirmed, had never been promoted to ambassador. Why? Did it have something to do with the fact that Crane had never married? Was he homosexual, and therefore – back in those days – regarded as unreliable? Or had the government, in the wake of Burgess and Maclean, developed suspicions about Crane’s links to Soviet Russia?
Charlotte had told Gaddis that Crane had been known to the Ring of Five, so he picked up the volume for 1953. When he found what he was looking for, he experienced that particular buzz to which he had been addicted for more than twenty years: the thrill of history coming alive at his fingertips.
BURGESS, GUY FRANCIS DE MONCY
Born 16 April 1911. Educated at Eton College, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Granted a Certificate for Branch B of the Foreign Service 1 October 1947 and appointed with effect from 1 January 1947 to be an Officer, Grade 4. Transferred to Washington as 2nd Secretary, 7 August 1950. Suspended from duty, 1 June 1951. Appointment terminated 1 June 1952, with effect from 1 June 1951.
Donald Maclean was included in the same volume:
MACLEAN, DONALD DUART
Born 25 May 1913. Educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. M. 1940, Melinda Marling. Granted a Certificate as 3rd Secretary in the Foreign Office or Diplomatic Service, 11 October 1935, and appointed to the Foreign Office, 15 October 1935. Transferred to Paris, 24 September 1938. Transferred to the Foreign Office, 18 June 1940.
This last detail caught Gaddis’s eye. Crane had also been posted back to London in June 1940. Had he worked alongside Maclean? Were the two men friends?
The entry continued:
Promoted to be a 2nd Secretary, 15 October 1940. Transferred to Washington, 2 May 1944. Promoted to be an Acting 1st Secretary, 27 December 1944. Promoted to be a Foreign Service Officer, Grade 6, 25 October 1948, and appointed Counsellor at Cairo, 7 November 1948. Transferred to the Foreign Office and appointed Head of American dept., 6 November 1950. Suspended from duty, 1 June 1951. Appointment terminated 1 June 1952, with effect from 1 June 1951.
The same phrases. ‘Appointment terminated.’ ‘Suspended from duty.’ 1951 had marked Burgess and Maclean’s flight from England. Two of Her Majesty’s brightest stars escaping to Moscow aboard a cross-Channel ferry on a cold spring morning, tipped off – by their fellow traitors, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt – that MI5 had exposed them as agents of the KGB.
Gaddis now looked for Philby’s name, under ‘P’ in the Statement of Services. Nothing. He picked up the Foreign Office List from 1942 and drew the same blank. Gaddis checked the volume for 1960. Again, no mention of Philby. Why had he not been included in the list of Foreign Office employees? Did MI6 officers enjoy anonymity? Gaddis began to go through every volume of the List, from 1940 to 1959, finding no reference to Philby at any stage. Instead, he stumbled upon an anomaly: Edward Crane’s listings disappeared between 1946 and 1952, the period in which The Times obituary had placed him in Italy. Had he joined MI6 during this period? Or had Crane taken an extended, post-war sabbatical? There were so many questions; too many, if Gaddis was honest with himself. To research a story on this scale, to do justice to Charlotte’s book, would take years, not months. There were historians who had dedicated their lives to the search for the sixth man; none of them had been successful. If only he could track down a surviving employee of the Foreign Office who might have known Crane. Surely there was a colleague who had sat on the same delegation or attended a conference at which Crane had been present?
Towards midday he walked downstairs, ate a tasteless cheese sandwich at the National Archives café and took a seat at a public Internet terminal. He had one more line of enquiry: a colleague at UCL had tipped him off that senior diplomats often deposited their papers and private correspondence in the archive at Churchill College, Cambridge. Gaddis might find a cross-reference between Crane and, say, a retired British ambassador to Argentina, or a 1st Secretary in Berlin. Seagulls were clacking outside as he typed ‘Churchill College, Cambridge’ into Google. He pulled up the Janus webserver at Cambridge and typed ‘Edward Crane’ into the search bar. Three catalogue entries came up, none of which made specific reference to Crane. When he typed in ‘Thomas Neame’, the server returned no results at all.
It was hugely frustrating. He went out to the car park, found an old packet of Camels in the glove box of his car and abandoned his latest attempt to quit. The cigarette did little to ease his mood and he drove back to Shepherd’s Bush under light autumnal rain. It was as if all mention of Crane and Neame had been deliberately and methodically erased from the historical record. Why else was it proving so difficult to track them down? He had never known such slow progress on the early stages of a project. Locked in heavy traffic on the M4, Gaddis made a decision to take a flight to Moscow and to approach Crane from the Russian side. If ATTILA was a prized KGB asset, as Charlotte had claimed, somewhere in the vaults of Soviet intelligence there would be a file on Edward Crane. Whether or not, in the wake of Tsars, he would be granted access to the files by the Russian authorities was a different matter altogether.
Chapter 11
Ordinarily, the activities of an anonymous London academic conducting research at the National Archives in Kew would not have been drawn to the attention of the head of the Secret Intelligence Service. But Edward Crane was no ordinary spy. When Gaddis had made a formal request for his war record, an automated alert had been sent from Kew to Sir John Brennan’s private office at MI6 headquarters. When Gaddis had then typed ‘Edward Crane’ and, minutes later, ‘Thomas Neame’ into Google on a public computer, a second automated message had flashed up at Vauxhall Cross. Within an hour, Brennan’s secretary was placing a report on his desk.
PERSONAL FOR C / GOV86ALERT / 11-1545-09
Samuel Gaddis, Doctor of Russian History at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), made a formal request this morning at NA/KEW for the war record of Edward Anthony Crane.
Alert shows that a member of the public, also thought to be Gaddis, later conducted separate, related Google searches on a public computer at NA/KEW for ‘Edward Crane’ and ‘Thomas Neame’.
By the end of the day, Sir John Brennan had discovered, via a third automated message, that Gaddis had also run Crane and Neame through the Janus server at Churchill College, Cambridge. Who had tipped him off? Less than half a dozen people on the planet knew about the ATTILA cover-up. What had happened to make one of them start talking?
He found Neame’s number in his desk and dialled his private room at the nursing home in Winchester. It had been six months since Brennan had last given any thought to Edward Crane, and years since he had used the Henderson alias. For all he knew, Thomas Neame was dead.
The number rang nine times. Brennan was about to hang up when the old man picked up, his voice dry and cracked as he said: ‘Two double one seven.’
‘Mr Neame? This is Douglas Henderson. I’m calling you from London.’
‘Good Lord! Douglas. How long has it been?’
The accent was as clear and precise as the wireless announcers of Neame’s youth.
‘I’m very well, Tom. And you? How are you keeping?’
‘Oh, can’t complain at my age. So, so. To what do I owe the pleasure?’
‘Business, I’m afraid.’
‘It always is, isn’t it?’
Brennan heard the note change in Neame’s voice, the charm going out of it. ‘Have you been talking to anyone, Tom?’ he asked. ‘Had any visitors to your room? Been roaming around the Internet?’
Neame feigned ignorance. ‘The what?’ He was ninety-one years old and could comfortably pass for a Luddite, but Brennan recalled very well how much he liked to play the fool.
‘The Internet, Tom. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Tim BernersLee. The World Wide Web. Bringing us all closer together. Pulling us all further apart.’
‘Oh, the Internet. Yes. What about it?’
‘Let me be frank.’ Brennan was looking out at the grey Thames, pleasure boats sliding towards another winter. ‘Have you been in contact recently with anybody in relation to our friend Mr Crane?’
A prolonged silence. Brennan couldn’t tell if Neame was offended by the question or merely struggling to put together a reply. At one point it sounded as though he might have fallen asleep.
The old man eventually spoke. ‘Eddie? Good God no. Haven’t thought about him for twenty years.’
‘It hasn’t been that long,’ Brennan replied quickly. ‘An academic by the name of Samuel Gaddis has been asking questions. About you. About him. Running around Kew, requesting war records, that sort of thing.’
‘About bloody time.’
Brennan was stopped short. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It means exactly what you think it means. It means that it was only a matter of time before somebody started scratching around. You chaps couldn’t keep a secret like that for ever.’
‘We’ve done a pretty good job of keeping it secret for the past fifty years.’
When Neame did not respond, Brennan decided to take a risk. ‘So, are you helping him scratch around? Are you throwing light on Eddie’s past for some reason? I’m sorry, but it’s my duty to ask.’ He was surprised that he had landed the accusation so directly.
‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous. Every part of my body aches. I need help getting into the bath. If I walk down the corridor, a nurse has to hold my hand. I can barely remember my own name.’ The words sounded heartfelt, but when it came to Thomas Neame, Brennan didn’t know what to believe. ‘You know I’ve always taken a vow of silence about Eddie. If anybody came knocking on my door, I’d know what to do. And if this Gaddis chap, by some miracle, manages to associate me with him, believe me, I have ways and means of putting him off the scent.’
That, at least, was true. ‘Well, that’s good to hear.’
‘Was that all, Douglas?’
‘That was all.’
‘Good. Then I will thank you to leave me in peace.’
Brennan was, both by nature and by the definition of his chosen trade, a resourceful man, clear-sighted and unflappable. He would not allow the abruptness of Neame’s mood to unsettle him. Three floors below there was an open-plan office awash with thumb-twiddling spooks: fast-stream wünderkinds eagerly awaiting their first postings overseas, as well as older hands whose idealism had long ago been broken by one too many stints in the godforsaken outposts of a vanished empire. As he replaced the receiver, he realized that he would need an attractive woman. There was no way around this, no denying the implications of gender, no means of avoiding the ancient human truth that bachelor academics are as vulnerable to attractive women as they are to a pay rise. Brennan already knew that Gaddis was divorced. He also knew – from a cursory glance at his Internet and telephone traffic – that he had recently been seeing a woman named Holly Levette, who was almost half his age. Given a choice between spending an evening with a charming, intelligent man, and a charming, intelligent woman, Dr Samuel Gaddis was almost certainly going to opt for the latter.
One name sprang to mind immediately. Having spent two years as a graduate student at LSE prior to joining the Service, Tanya Acocella could speak the language of academia. She was fluent in Russian and had proved a vital, imaginative member of SIS Station in Tehran, playing a crucial role in the recent defection of a senior figure in the Iranian military. Since returning to London, Tanya had become engaged to her long-term boyfriend, much to the frustration of several fast-stream alpha males, and was scheduled to take a four-month sabbatical after her wedding in the summer. Matching her wits with an intellectual of Gaddis’s calibre would be just the sort of challenge she would relish.
He put a call down to her desk. Three minutes later, Acocella was in the mirrored lift to the fifth floor. It was a measure of her self-confidence that she felt no need to check her appearance in the panelled glass.
‘Tanya, do come in. Have a seat.’
They exchanged pleasantries for no more than a few seconds; an officer of Acocella’s pedigree did not need to be put at her ease.
‘I want you to put CHESAPEAKE to one side for a few weeks.’ CHESAPEAKE was an operation against a Russian diplomat in Washington whom SIS were sizing up for recruitment. Tanya was running the London end in conjunction with a junior colleague. ‘I’ve found something else to exercise your talents.’
She nodded. ‘Of course.’
Brennan stood up and paced in the direction of a bookshelf. He was aware that staff members who came into his office were often on their best behaviour. It was one of the drawbacks of his position: an excess of polite rigidity. Still, he stopped short of offering her a drink. A little hierarchical posturing never hurt anybody.
‘Long ago,’ he began, ‘I learned that spying isn’t about strengths in human nature – ideological conviction, duty, loyalty to one’s country. Spying is about weaknesses – the lust for money, for status, for sex. This is the guilty secret of our secret trade.’
Tanya felt that she was expected to agree with this thesis, so she said: ‘Right’ and stared at Brennan’s tie. He had a reputation in the Office for pompous longueurs.
‘I’d like you to find out everything you can about a man named Samuel Gaddis. He’s a doctor of Russian History at UCL, Department of Slavonic and East European Studies. Get close to him, befriend him, earn his trust. Gaddis has been digging around in a Cold War secret that the Office is rather keen to suppress.’
‘What sort of secret?’
There were other questions she wanted to ask. How close? Befriend in what way? Is Doctor Gaddis married? But she knew the nature of such operations. She would not be asked, nor would she be expected to do anything that would compromise her relationship with her fiancé.
‘Long ago, the Service took into its employment a gentleman by the name of Edward Crane, who subsequently operated in various different guises.’ Brennan, now standing beside the bookshelf, drew a finger along the spine of a volume by Sir Winston Churchill. He did not attempt to keep an edge of the sensational from what he was about to say. ‘Crane was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge in the 1930s.’ He looked into Tanya’s eyes and waited for the penny to drop. ‘He was known to Messrs Blunt and Philby, Messrs Burgess and Maclean. He was an associate of John Cairncross. Do you follow?’
Tanya felt a lurch of shock which quickly warped into a feeling of profound satisfaction. How many people knew what she had just been told? The identity of the sixth man was the most carefully guarded secret of the Cold War.
‘Crane’s operational codename was ATTILA. He’s managed to remain anonymous, largely because we’ve managed to keep people off his scent and largely because there was no record of ATTILA’s activities in Mitrokhin.’ Tanya had a sense, even as Brennan was talking to her, that he was holding back a vital piece of information. ‘The finger was pointed at Victor Rothschild, the finger was pointed at Tom Driberg. Christ, at one point they even suspected Roger bloody Hollis. But nobody has ever identified Crane. Until now.’ Brennan pivoted away towards a broad, sunless window in the north corner of the office. ‘Doctor Gaddis is on the trail of a gentleman by the name of Thomas Neame, a ninety-one-year-old currently resident at a nursing home near Winchester. Neame, for reasons that I am not yet in a position to divulge, knows more or less all there is to know about Crane’s work for the Russians. I’ve put some basic information in this file.’ He passed a slim manila envelope to Acocella, which she secured in her lap. ‘It goes without saying that this is a sealed operation. You will report solely and directly to me. I have given you the name of an officer at GCHQ Cheltenham who will assist you with any communications information you may require.’ Both of them took a beat to absorb the euphemism. ‘I don’t have the manpower to spare on surveillance, so you’ll be operating alone unless there are exceptional circumstances. Any questions?’
Tanya was experienced enough to send that one back over the net. It was better to say: ‘I think perhaps I should read the file first, sir,’ so that Brennan could be assured of her professionalism.
‘Good.’ He seemed pleased. ‘Have a look at it, come up with a plan of attack.’
She stood up, the file under her arm. ‘There was just one thing, sir.’
Brennan was planning to open the door for her, but stopped mid-carpet. ‘Yes?’
‘What did you mean when you referred to status, to sex, to the lust for money? Are you implying that these are particular weaknesses in the Gaddis character?’
Brennan reached for the door handle. ‘Well, who knows?’ he said. ‘That will be for you to find out.’
Chapter 12
Some things are so obvious that they can embarrass you with their simplicity.
Gaddis had been working at home over the weekend – preparing a lecture for the new term at UCL, fixing a leaking pipe in his leaking bathroom – when he needed to boot up an old laptop in his office in order to find an email sent to him by a colleague several years earlier. As he was scrolling through the cluttered inbox, he saw a cluster of emails sent to him by Charlotte from a hotmail address that Paul had known nothing about: bergotte965@hotmail. com. Charlotte had set up the account during a difficult period in her marriage in order to communicate privately with three of her closest friends, Gaddis among them. It was a eureka moment, a solution that had been staring him in the face. More than a week had passed since Gaddis had spent the fruitless day in Hampstead searching through Charlotte’s office. It had never occurred to him that she might have used the hotmail to communicate with Thomas Neame.
He needed a password, of course, but that was easy. Gaddis simply had to type Charlotte’s mother’s maiden name into a security check, give her date of birth, and the details were forwarded instantly to her Outlook inbox. Gaddis could access this via webmail and within five minutes was staring at the messages.
It was like a sequence of lights illuminating a darkened highway. Before his eyes was a list of every main player in the St Mary’s cover-up. There were emails from Benedict Meisner, messages with the subject heading ‘Lucy Forman’, as well as frequent exchanges with Calvin Somers. Gaddis had surely stumbled upon the key which would unlock the door of Charlotte’s research. It was all here, everything he would need to find Neame.
He began with the Meisner correspondence, but quickly realized that it was a legal and factual dead end. Now working as a homeopathic doctor in Berlin, Meisner denied ever having met Calvin Somers or playing any role in faking the death of Edward Crane.
As I have repeatedly pointed out to you, any suggestion that I was involved in gross professional misconduct of the sort you describe is as absurd as it is defamatory. Should you continue to pursue this matter, I would have no hesitation in instructing my lawyers to instigate proceedings against you, and against any newspaper or publication which chooses to publish these bizarre allegations.
Gaddis turned to the message with the subject heading ‘Lucy Forman’. The email was from Forman’s sister. It transpired that Forman had died in a car accident in December 2001. In a second email, the sister confirmed that Forman had indeed been working in London in February 1992, the winter of Crane’s supposed death.
As Gaddis was finishing Charlotte’s correspondence with Somers – most of which related to arrangements for various meetings in West Hyde and Chorleywood – he noticed a new message in the Hotmail inbox, addressed to bergotte965@hot mail.com from ‘Tom Gandalf’ with the subject heading ‘Wednesday’. It could have been spam, but he clicked it.
tomgandalf@hushmail.com has sent you a secure email using Hushmail. To read it please visit the following web page …
A weblink was listed below. For a moment, Gaddis was concerned that it would download a virus into his computer. But the coincidence of the Christian name ‘Tom’, added to the clandestine nature of the message, convinced him that the email had originated with Neame. He clicked the link and was taken to the website for an email encryption service.
Your message has been protected using a question and answer which was created by the sender. You must correctly answer this question, word for word, to retrieve your message. You will be limited to five incorrect responses.
Question: Who was in the photograph that I showed you at our last meeting?
Gaddis typed ‘Crane’, then ‘Edward Crane’ into the response box, but his guesses were rejected. What had Neame shown Charlotte? A photograph of Sir John Brennan? A picture of Maclean or Philby? Christ, for all he knew, it could have been a shot of the Loch Ness Monster swimming to Fort William and clambering up Ben Nevis before breakfast. Without an answer to the question, he was no closer to Neame, no closer to Crane. All of his initial enthusiasm over the hotmail account had evaporated inside an hour: Forman was dead, Somers had spilled his guts and Meisner would doubtless slam the door in his face if he hopped on a plane to Berlin.
It was square one again. Gaddis Redux. Charlotte had been carrying around the entire story in her head. He looked at his desk, where he had scribbled down the cost of a cheap flight to Sheremetyevo on the back of a bank statement. His only hope now was a miracle in Moscow.
Chapter 13
Miracles come in many different guises. This one came late on Sunday night, while Holly Levette was cooking supper at her flat in Tite Street. Gaddis was lying back on the sofa, reading the papers and drinking a glass of red wine. Holly’s laptop was open on a low table in front of him and he called out to her in the kitchen.
‘Mind if I check my emails?’
‘Be my guest.’
Glass of wine in hand, Gaddis logged into his UCL account and clicked through his messages. There was one from Natasha in Spain, another from a colleague in Washington, and a round robin from a distant relative in Virginia trying to persuade friends and family to buy the paperback of his latest book. Gaddis checked the Spam folder – ‘Be a Master of the Universe with a Huge Broadsword in your Pants’ – and within the mass of junk offering him tertiary education courses and Viagra, he spotted a message that he could scarcely believe:
tomgandalf@hushmail.com has sent you a secure email using Hushmail. To read it please visit the following web page
The same weblink that he had seen on Charlotte’s Hotmail account was listed below. Gaddis looked up at the kitchen door, expecting Holly to walk into the room with two steaming bowls of spaghetti. He clicked the link and was again taken to the Hushmail website:
Your message has been protected using a question and answer which was created by the sender. You must correctly answer this question, word for word, to retrieve your message. You will be limited to five incorrect responses.
Question: Who was the doctor at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, in 1992?
Gaddis quickly typed in the answer.
Benedict Meisner
It was wrong. He had only four responses left.
He tried ‘Ben Meisner’ and swore when the answer was again rejected. Third time lucky, gulping wine, Gaddis typed in ‘Dr Benedict Meisner’, whispering ‘Come on, come on’ under his breath as he hit ‘Return’.
Like the click of a lock on a safe, the door swinging open, he was taken to a private message:
Dear Dr Gaddis
I knew Eddie Crane very well. Indeed, he was my closest friend for more than fifty years. For reasons that will become obvious to you, this is not the sort of information that I tend to make public.
If you would like to contact me, I suggest that you present yourself at the branch of Waterstone’s bookshop in Winchester High Street at 11 a.m. on Monday. If this is inconvenient for you, do not reply to this email directly. Instead, please send a blank email with the subject heading ‘Book’ to the following address: parrot1684@mac.com If you are able to make the journey to Winchester, please carry a copy of the International Herald Tribune with you and, having entered the bookshop, make your way upstairs. This is so that I might more easily recognize you. Eddie taught me a trick or two about tradecraft.
Sincerely,
Thomas Neame
Gaddis was flabbergasted. How did Neame know that he was investigating Crane’s death? Holly called out ‘Food’s ready!’ and her voice made him lurch half out of his seat in surprise. He quickly scanned the text a second time. He was aware that he should probably remove evidence of the correspondence from her computer, yet Gaddis had no idea how to clear the history quickly from an Internet browser.
He heard the strike of a match in the kitchen. Holly was lighting candles. Unsure of what to do, he simply signed out of his email account and shut off the computer. Holly put her head round the door just as he was closing the lid.
‘I was planning to eat the spaghetti tonight,’ she said.
‘Sure.’ Gaddis stood up. He had a head full of questions and an empty glass in his hand. ‘What do you know about Winchester?’
Chapter 14
Winchester was just as Holly had described: a well-scrubbed, moneyed cathedral city an hour south of London with a clogged-up one-way system and memorials, seemingly at every corner, of Alfred the Great.
Gaddis arrived an hour early. He had not slept well and left Holly’s flat at eight o’clock for fear of being stuck in traffic or, worse, of his superannuated Volkswagen Golf breaking down on the M3. He bought a copy of the Herald Tribune on the Fulham Road, knowing that it would be difficult to find one at any newsagent in Winchester, and drove, too fast, with a take-away cappuccino wedged between his legs and Blonde on Blonde on the CD player. In Winchester he ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs at a faux-French café in the centre of town, having established that Waterstone’s was not yet open. He had the latest issue of Private Eye and a photocopied Prospect article about Moscow to read, but found that he could concentrate on neither. The Herald Tribune lay untouched in a leather satchel at his feet. His waitress, a bottle-blonde Hungarian, was pretty and bored, stopping to chat to him in fractured English about a course she was taking in design and technology. Gaddis was grateful for the distraction.
At half-past ten, the morning moving with a tectonic slowness, he made his way to the entrance of the bookshop, drifting about on the ground floor with no discernible purpose other than to look up at every customer who walked through the entrance, hoping to see a ninety-one-year-old man. By force of habit, he searched for traces of his own work and found a single hardback copy of Tsars, nestled alphabetically in the History section. Ordinarily, Gaddis would have introduced himself to a member of staff and offered to sign it, but it seemed important to maintain a degree of anonymity.
At five to eleven, he walked upstairs. To his surprise, the first floor was not a large, open-plan area, comparable in scale to the ground floor, but instead a small, brightly lit room, no larger than the open-plan kitchen in his house, enclosed on all sides by shelves of travel guides and self-help manuals. There was one other customer present, a dreadlocked, tie-dyed girl of perhaps eighteen or nineteen who was working her way through a copy of South-East Asia on a Shoestring. Cross-legged on the floor, she looked up at Gaddis when he appeared at the top of the stairs, her mouth forming an acknowledging smile. Gaddis nodded back and took his copy of the Herald Tribune out of the satchel, preparing to make the signal. He tucked it under his arm, making sure that the banner was visible; the act of doing this felt both awkward and embarrassing and he drew a book at random from the shelves in front of him in an effort to make his behaviour appear less self-conscious.
It was a copy of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Gaddis felt the dreadlocked girl staring at him as he tried to pin the newspaper under his left elbow while at the same time flicking backwards through the pages. A minute passed. Two. His arm began to ache and his face was flushed with an involuntary embarrassment. What would Neame make of him for reading such a book? He put it back on the shelf and transferred the newspaper to his right hand, feeling as though he was standing in the middle of some vast stage, overlooked by a crowd of thousands. Would Neame approach him in the presence of the girl? Would he make himself known with a nod of the head and expect Gaddis to follow? It was like performing in a play that he had never rehearsed.
At precisely eleven o’clock, a second customer, a shaven-headed man in his mid-twenties, appeared at the top of the stairs. What excitement Gaddis had felt at the sound of his approach quickly dissipated. He was wearing torn denim jeans, white Adidas trainers and a blue Chelsea football shirt with the name ‘LAMPARD’ printed across the back. Hardly likely to be an associate of Neame’s. Without making eye contact, the man moved past Gaddis and headed straight for a stack of cut-price paperbacks at the far end of the room. Gaddis felt that he should still be seen to be browsing and picked up a second book from the Self-Help section, again pinning the Herald Tribune under his elbow. This one was called Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life and Gaddis quickly replaced it with another day-glo paperback, this one entitled The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need, which at least brought a smile to his face.
What had happened to Neame? He looked back at the staircase but could see only promotional posters, a swaying light and a beige carpet worn by years of use. Five long minutes later, the dreadlocked girl finally stood up from the floor, put her guide to Asia back on the shelf, and went downstairs. Lampard was now his only companion.
Things happened quickly. As soon as the woman had gone, Lampard turned and walked directly towards Gaddis. Gaddis prepared to move to one side to allow the man to pass, but saw, to his consternation, that he was taking a piece of paper from his back pocket and attempting to pass it to him.
‘You dropped this, mate,’ he muttered, in a thick Cockney accent. Gaddis took the paper in a state of bewildered euphoria. Before he had a chance to respond, Lampard was halfway down the stairs, leaving only a cloud of BO behind him and a memory of his pale, undernourished face.
Gaddis unfolded the piece of paper. There was a short message, handwritten in a spidery scrawl:
GO TO THE CATHEDRAL. TURN RIGHT OUT OF WATERSTONES, LEFT INTO SOUTHGATE STREET. AT THE EXCHANGE PUB TURN LEFT INTO ST CLEMENT STREET. LEFT AGAIN AT BLINKERS. TURN RIGHT INTO THE HIGH STREET. GO AS FAR AS THE MEMORIAL AND TURN RIGHT AGAIN.
AT THE PASTIE SHOP, DRINK AN ESPRESSO AT CAFÉ MONDE. DO NOT SIT IN THE WINDOW OR AT ANY OF THE OUTSIDE TABLES. WHEN YOU LEAVE, TAKE THE AVENUE TO THE CATHEDRAL. SIT ON THE RIGHT-HAND SIDE OF THE NAVE, HALFWAY UP.
Gaddis read the instructions a second time. He had seen enough spy movies to realize that Neame wanted to ensure that he was not followed from Waterstone’s to the cathedral. Lampard was obviously a hired hand, a facilitator. An old man of ninety-one would not be capable of carrying out counter-surveillance of any kind; nor would he wish to expose himself in public without first being able to ascertain that Gaddis was bona fide. All of this seemed logical and straightforward, yet he felt a strange sense of unease, akin to a fear of the law, as he made his way to the exit, turning right into the pedestrianized high street. On Southgate Street, he checked the message a second time, unfolding it in a manner that he felt was certain to draw attention. He tried to make a mental note of its contents, but was forced to check them again at Blinkers, which turned out to be a small hairdressing boutique on a narrow road where sparrows hopped on the pavement and a young mother was pushing a pram. As he emerged from St Clement Street, Gaddis saw the entrance to Waterstone’s a few metres away and realized, with a dumb embarrassment, that Lampard’s directions had taken him in a simple clockwise loop.
He continued to walk downhill, as instructed, wondering how many eyes were watching him. He saw a narrow stone monument, about four metres high, on the right-hand side of the street. There was a shop selling pasties beside it and he concluded that this was the memorial mentioned in the note. Outside the pastie shop – a drifting smell of mince and curry powder – Gaddis found himself in a low, narrow alley which opened into a smaller, still pedestrianized street. The glass-fronted Café Monde was clearly visible a few metres to his left. He had no need for coffee – he’d drunk four cups in as many hours – but ordered an espresso all the same and took a seat at the back of the café, wondering how long he should take to drink it. He felt restless and pushed around, but was prepared to honour the tradecraft of Lampard’s note because it would surely guarantee a meeting with Neame.
After a minute of waiting, he drank the espresso, paid for it, and went outside. He had glimpsed the cathedral on his way into the café and now walked through the gates of a small park bisected by a tree-lined avenue, making his way towards the southern façade. Clumps of teenagers – French exchange students, anoraked Americans – were milling around outside, buffeted by an unruly wind. Gaddis was drawn into a short queue and paid five pounds to enter the cathedral. Whispers echoed off the vast vaulted ceiling as he walked between several rows of wooden chairs and took a seat on the right-hand side of the nave. He put his satchel on the ground, set his phone to mute, and looked around for Neame. There was an old, free-standing radiator next to his seat and he tapped his fingers against the scuffed iron as he waited. It was almost half-past eleven.
He had been seated for no more than a minute when he heard a noise behind him, the sound of a walking stick clicking briskly on stone. Gaddis turned to see an elderly man in a tweed suit moving towards him along the nave, his eyes catching a source of light as he looked up to greet him. The man was so close to Charlotte’s description of Thomas Neame as to remove all doubt about his identity. Gaddis began to stand, as a gesture of respect, but the old man made a brisk, sweeping movement with the base of the walking stick which had the effect of pushing him back into his seat.
Neame shuffled along the pew and settled beside Gaddis. He did so without apparent physical discomfort but was slightly breathless as he sat down. He did not offer to shake Gaddis’s hand, nor did he look him in the eye. Instead, he stared directly ahead, as if preparing to pray.
‘You’re not one of these Marxist academics, are you?’
Gaddis caught the ghost of a smile in Neame’s stately profile.
‘Born and bred,’ he replied.
‘What a pity.’ The old man moved a hand in front of his face, distracted by something in his field of vision. His back was stooped, the skin on his face and neck dark and loose, but he looked remarkably robust for a man of ninety-one. ‘Sorry about all the scurrying around,’ he said. The voice was imperially upper-class. ‘As you can probably understand, I need to be very careful who I’m seen to be talking to.’
‘Of course, Mr Neame.’
‘Call me Tom.’
Neame laid the walking stick across the three seats adjacent to his own. Gaddis looked at his hands. He was moving them constantly, as if squeezing a small exercise ball in the palm to strengthen the wrists. The near-transparent skin across his knuckles was as taut as parchment.
‘I don’t think I was followed here,’ Gaddis said. ‘Your colleague’s instructions were very clear.’
Neame frowned. ‘My what?’ He had not yet turned to face him.
‘Your friend from the bookshop. Your colleague, Lampard. The one wearing a Chelsea shirt.’
Neame generated a small but infinitely condescending silence before responding.
‘I see,’ he said. Now he turned, slowly, like a statue with a cricked neck, and Gaddis saw concern within the folds and lines of the old man’s face. It was as if he was worried that he had overestimated Gaddis’s intelligence. ‘My friend’s name is Peter,’ he said.
‘Is he a relative of yours? A grandson?’
Gaddis had no idea why he had asked the question; he wasn’t particularly interested in the answer.
‘He is not.’ Somebody, somewhere was dragging a steel trolley across a stone floor in the cathedral, the sound of the wheels squealing in the echo chamber of the nave. ‘You followed his instructions as requested.’
Gaddis couldn’t work out if Neame wanted an answer. He decided to change the subject.
‘As you can imagine, I have a lot of questions I’d like to ask.’
‘And I you,’ Neame replied. He turned to face the distant altar. There was already a tension between them, a fractiousness which Gaddis had not anticipated. He felt the gap in their respective ages as a chasm which he would struggle to cross, almost as if he was a small boy again in the presence of his grandfather. Neame was still exercising his hands, the counter to an apparent arthritis. ‘How did you come to hear about Eddie?’ he asked.
‘From Charlotte. She was one of my closest friends.’
Neame cleared a block in his throat. ‘Yes. I would like to express how sorry I was to hear about her death.’ The words sounded sincere. ‘A lovely girl. Very bright.’
‘Thank you. Yes, she was.’ Gaddis took advantage of the improving atmosphere between them to discover more about their relationship. ‘She said that she met you on several occasions.’
This was confirmed with no more than an abrupt nod. Neame then looked down at the satchel and asked if Gaddis was recording their conversation.
‘Not unless you’d like me to.’
‘I would not like you to.’ Again the response was quick and clipped; Neame clearly wanted to leave no doubt as to who was in charge. He winced as a sharp pain appeared to jag across his hunched shoulders, then quickly suppressed his discomfort with an almost imperceptible shake of the head. Gaddis recognized the familiar, uncomplaining stoicism of the war generation. His own grandfather had possessed it, his grandmother also. No fuss. No complaints. Survivors. ‘Charlotte visited me on three occasions,’ Neame continued. ‘I am resident at a nursing home not far from here. The Meredith. Twice we met at country pubs for a chat about Eddie, and once in my room. In fact, that occasion was rather amusing. She had to pretend to be my granddaughter.’ Gaddis thought of Charlotte engaged in the subterfuge and found himself smiling. It was the sort of ruse she would have enjoyed. ‘I must say that I was shocked when I heard that she had died.’
‘We all were.’
‘Do you suspect an element of foul play?’
Both the implication of the question and the calm, matter-of-fact way in which Neame had posed it took Gaddis by surprise. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Do you?’
Neame sighed deeply in a way that Gaddis thought of as overly theatrical.
‘Well, I wouldn’t know, would I? But now you’re the man on the scene. You’re the chap tracking the story. And I suppose you want me to tell you all about Eddie.’
‘You approached me,’ Gaddis replied, because he was becoming slightly irritated by Neame’s manner. ‘You were the one who wrote the emails. You were the one who sent Peter. I have absolutely no idea how you knew that I was taking over from Charlotte. I can only assume that she told you we were planning to write a book together.’
‘That is correct.’ Gaddis did not suspect that Neame was lying. The metal trolley was again being dragged across a distant stone floor, the metal scream of wheels further adding to the combative atmosphere between them. ‘I’m assuming that you know about St Mary’s?’
‘I know about St Mary’s.’
Here at last was an area of the story with which Gaddis was familiar. The old man turned to face him again, a smell of lavender in the air. His teeth were faded to yellow-grey, his blue eyes as clear and as deep as stained glass.
‘Then you’ll know that Eddie’s death was a put-up job. You’ll know that the Office cooked the whole thing up to protect him.’
‘Protect him from what?’
‘Or from whom?’ Neame reached out to touch the handle of his walking stick. The answer to the question appeared to be as much of a mystery to him as it was to Gaddis. ‘All I know is that Eddie wanted to say goodbye. He told me what was about to happen. I knew that this would probably be the last time that I ever saw him.’
‘And was it?’
Neame produced another of his deep, regretful sighs. ‘Oh, he’s probably dead by now. Most of us are by the time you get to my age.’
Gaddis acknowledged the remark with a half smile but felt the familiar sting of disappointment. A dead Cambridge spy wasn’t as valuable to him as a Cambridge spy who was alive and well. More out of frustration than common sense, he decided to test the limits of Neame’s knowledge.
‘So you don’t know for sure that Edward Crane has died?’
Neame leaned back very slightly, tilting his head upwards and gazing at the distant ceiling. It became clear, after a few seconds, that he had no intention of responding to the question. Gaddis tried a different tack.
‘You’d known him since childhood?’
‘Since Trinity. That hardly qualifies as childhood. I will say this, though. Eddie sent me a document about a year after the St Mary’s operation. A sort of shortened autobiography, if you will. Highlights from the life of a master spy.’
This revived Gaddis. Here, at last, was something concrete. He felt a rush of satisfaction, a feeling of the pieces at last coming together. Charlotte had mentioned the document, but he did not want to betray to Neame too much of what he knew.
‘Jesus,’ he said, momentarily forgetting that he was sitting in the body of a thirteenth-century cathedral. Neame grinned.
‘This is a place of Christian worship, Doctor Gaddis. Do mind your language.’
‘Point taken.’ It was their first shared joke and Gaddis again tried to take quick advantage of Neame’s lighter mood. ‘So what happened to this document? Do you still have it? Have you attempted to get it published?’
‘Published!’
‘What’s so ridiculous about that?’
Neame coughed and again appeared to be seized by a short, intense pain in his chest. ‘Don’t be absurd. Eddie would have had a fit.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Because he was a creature of habit. That habit was privacy. He gave me his memoirs on the tacit understanding that I would not disseminate them.’
‘Do you really believe that?’
Neame looked as though nobody had questioned his judgement for forty years. Gaddis tried a different approach.
‘By writing down an account of his life and by sending it to you, wasn’t Crane subconsciously hoping that his story would see the light of day?’
‘Subconsciously?’ Neame made the word sound utterly absurd.
‘I take it from your reaction that you’re not a Freudian.’
A thread of spittle appeared on the old man’s lower lip which he was forced to wipe away with a folded white handkerchief. The effort appeared both to annoy and to embarrass him; here were the small humiliations of old age. Replacing the handkerchief in the pocket of his tweed trousers, he turned to face the altar.
‘Look, I have arranged to meet you here today because I have made a decision to set the record straight about Eddie Crane, whom I believe was a hero to our country.’
‘A hero.’ Gaddis repeated the word without inflection.
‘That is correct. And not the modern sort of hero, either. These days a young man can dip his toe in Afghanistan and be given a VC. It’s a nonsense. I mean the proper sort of heroism, the hero who risks not just life and limb, but reputation.’ Neame coughed with the effort of driving home his point. ‘But I want to be able to tell the story in my own way and in my own time. I cannot simply betray Eddie’s confidence by releasing his manuscript to the highest bidder. I want to be able to control the flow of information. I want to be dealing with somebody that I can trust.’
Gaddis wanted to say: ‘You can trust me,’ but thought better of it. He knew that he was slowly earning Neame’s respect, moment by moment, but did not want to jeopardize that with an incautious remark.
‘The manuscript came to me with some information about Eddie’s new circumstances. There was also a set of instructions.’ Just as he had felt beside the canal, Gaddis longed to be writing notes, but he was obliged to commit everything to memory. ‘Eddie told me that he was living quietly in Scotland under a new identity, protected by his former masters in the Foreign Office. He was not, he said, in particularly good health and did not expect to see me again. “These are some private recollections of an unusual life,” he wrote. “I have set them down for my own personal satisfaction.” That sort of thing. I have no idea if he made other copies. I very much doubt that he did. As I said, Eddie was in the privacy business. But I believe in history, Doctor Gaddis. I think Eddie knew that about me. And I believe the world has a right to know what this man did for his country.’
‘For Russia?’
Neame suppressed a knowing smile and his eyes caught the light again. It was remarkable to see so much life, so many thoughts and ideas, pulsing through a man now in his tenth decade.
‘Not for Russia, Doctor Gaddis. For England.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Oh, it will all become clear,’ he said, settling a featherlight hand on Gaddis’s knee. There was something startling about the sudden intimacy. ‘Why don’t we begin by walking the cat back?’
Chapter 15
‘Walking the cat back?’
‘An old spying term, isn’t it?’ Neame could see that Gaddis was confused. ‘Tracing a man’s steps. Taking a jigsaw apart so that you can put it back together.’
He wiped his nose a second time on the carefully folded handkerchief. ‘Perhaps it’s best if we go back to the winter of 1933.’
‘Whatever is easiest for you.’
Neame leaned back in his chair, preparing to begin. But his balance was off. Gaddis had to reach out to steady him and felt the rough tweed of Neame’s suit as it stretched tight against the hunch of his back. When, finally, Neame was comfortable, he folded his arms across his chest and glanced briefly towards the aisle.
‘How much do you know about Eddie’s time at Cambridge? How much have you been able to discover?’
‘Very little.’
Neame pursed his lips. He was perhaps wondering where to begin.
‘Eddie and I went up at the same time,’ he said. ‘Met on the first day. Both of us eighteen, both of us from fairly similar backgrounds.’
‘What kind of backgrounds?’
Neame’s response was quick. ‘Like yours, I should imagine, Doctor. Aspirational middle class. What difference does it make?’
Gaddis was about to point out that it was Neame, and not he, who had raised the issue of class, but thought better of it. Best just to ignore his little slights and quips; they were evidence of the old man’s frustration at his ailing health, not criticisms to be taken seriously.
‘Could you tell me anything else about Crane’s family?’ he asked. Behind him, towards the main entrance, a party of perhaps twenty tourists were gathered in a loose group, listening intently to a guide. ‘How did you first come to be introduced to him?’
‘Oh, that’s quite straightforward.’ Neame’s tone implied that Gaddis was the only man in Winchester Cathedral who did not know the story. ‘We were both inveterate lovers of crossword puzzles. I came across Eddie and a copy of the London Illustrated News one evening in the junior common room. He was stuck on a rather ingenious clue. I helped him with it. Would you like to hear what it was?’
Gaddis reckoned Neame was going to tell him anyway, so he nodded.
‘“Are set back for a number of years.”’
‘How many letters?’
‘Three.’
Gaddis had a knack for crosswords and solved the clue in the time it took Neame to check the time on his wristwatch.
‘Era.’
‘Very good, Doctor, very good.’ Neame sounded impressed, but a restlessness in his hands betrayed his irritation. It was as if the speed of Gaddis’s mind was a threat to his intellectual superiority. ‘Well, after that introduction, the two of us became firm friends. Eddie’s father had been killed in the war, as had mine. There were rumours, never confirmed, that the senior Mr Crane had taken his own life. You might like to look into that, chat up a military historian or two. See what they make of it.’
‘I’ll do that,’ Gaddis told him.
‘Eddie’s mother, Susan, then remarried, a man whom Eddie detested.’ Neame’s mouth had tightened, but folds of skin hung loose beneath his chin. ‘His name escapes me, for some reason. I never met him. Scoundrel, by all accounts.’
‘Rather like Philby’s father.’
Gaddis hadn’t meant to draw other members of the Cambridge Ring into the conversation so quickly, but was pleased by the impact of his observation. Neame was nodding in agreement.
‘Precisely. Both absolute monsters. Kim’s father was an epic charlatan. Converted to Islam, if you can believe it, even took the name Abdullah and married a Saudi slave girl. Rumour has it he worked as a spy for the Saudi monarchy.’
‘I’ve heard that,’ Gaddis said. ‘Cherchez le père.’
Neame understood the implications of the remark and again nodded his agreement.
‘Indeed. Every member of the Trinity cell, to a greater or lesser extent, had complicated, in some cases non-existent, relationships with their fathers. Guy’s died when he was very young, ditto Anthony’s. Maclean was the same. What would they call Sir Donald nowadays? “An absentee father”?’ Neame gave the phrase the same withering tone of dismissal that he had reserved for the word ‘subconsciously’. ‘Strict Presbyterian, too. More interested in furthering his political career than he was in looking out for the welfare of his own son. In my experience, men are all, to a greater or lesser extent, at war with their fathers. Would you agree, Doctor?’
Gaddis wasn’t one for sharing family confidences, so he proffered a joke instead.
‘You’re a Freudian after all, Tom.’
Neame did not react. It struck Gaddis that he was as covetous of his moods as a small child.
‘Tell me about Cambridge at that time,’ he asked, skidding over the awkwardness. ‘What were your impressions of the place?’
The question appeared to lift the old man’s spirits, because he turned to face him and smiled through his clear blue eyes.
‘Well, of course there has been a good deal of nonsense spoken about that period. If certain “experts” are to be believed, we spent our entire time at Cambridge eating cucumber sandwiches, punting along the Cam and singing “Jerusalem” in chapel. Believe me, times were a lot tougher than that. Of course, there were any number of highly privileged undergraduates from wealthy backgrounds in situ, but it wasn’t all Brideshead Revisited and picnics on the lawn.’
‘Of course.’ Gaddis was wondering why Neame felt the need to set the record straight.
‘But one thing is certainly true. Oxford and Cambridge in the pre-war years were both absolutely riddled with Communists. Any self-respecting young man – or woman, for that matter – with even the vaguest sense of social justice was profoundly sceptical about the direction Western capitalism was taking. This wasn’t too long after the Great Depression, don’t forget. Unemployment was running at three million. Throw into the mix the lovely Adolf and you had a climate of apprehension unmatched by anything since.’
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