The Trinity Six (2011)

by Charles Cumming

  ‘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 built 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 PS120 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, lo
cated 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?’