The Trinity Six (2011)

by Charles Cumming

  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 PS3000? 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 PS3000 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 PS1000 on three separate cards, maxing out his current account, putting PS400 on his already debt-ridden Visa bill, and, to his shame, making up the difference with PS100 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 PS500 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 PS2000. 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 PS3000 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.