‘So you were involved in the political scene yourself?’ he asked. ‘You were studying French as well? You were socializing with Eddie?’
Neame halted the flow of questions with a pained sigh and Gaddis realized that he had moved too fast. He had to learn to allow the story to emerge at its own pace. Neame would continue to manipulate him, certainly, but if Gaddis was patient, he would eventually be rewarded with a complete picture of Crane’s time at Cambridge.
‘Eddie and Guy were the two I was closest to, certainly at Trinity,’ he said. ‘I eventually lost touch with Burgess during the war, although of course one kept up with his exploits. The interesting thing was that he and Eddie were in many ways polar opposites. Where Eddie was self-contained, disciplined, very much a realist, Guy was perpetually drunk, always wearing filthy clothes, living on high ideals. But a marvellous talker. Such control of the language, you know?’
‘I’ve heard,’ Gaddis said. Something regretful in the tone of Neame’s recollections caused him to wonder if he and Burgess had been lovers. The old man’s next remark did nothing to lessen this suspicion.
‘Guy was also, of course, a famous philanderer. What Kim was to the girls, Guy was to the boys. And not just pretty little Cambridge undergraduates. He liked rough trade: truck drivers, working men. Couldn’t get enough of that sort of thing.’
‘Do you think he was involved with Eddie?’
Gaddis might as well have asked if Neame himself was gay.
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Was Eddie homosexual? He had no children. He never married. I wondered if he was ever romantically involved with Blunt or Burgess?’ He longed to add: ‘Or you, Tom?’ but lacked the courage.
‘How on earth am I supposed to know?’ Neame seemed more embarrassed than angry, as if Gaddis had crossed some threshold of decency.
‘There’s a theory in one of the Blunt biographies that Blunt’s sexuality may have had an influence on his preparedness to betray his country. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain in the 1930s. Therefore any homosexual was, by definition, regarded as a criminal outsider by the state.’
Neame straightened the fabric of his trousers and stared into his lap. ‘That seems a bit far-fetched to me.’ He tried to divert Gaddis with an anecdote. ‘Eddie and I arrived in Guy’s third year. Both of us immediately fell under his spell. It was Guy, for example, who organized the waiters’ strike. Do you know about that?’
‘No.’ Gaddis was lying, but he wanted to hear Neame’s version of events.
‘Quite straightforward, really. At that time, many of the staff who worked behind the scenes at Trinity weren’t paid a salary during the holidays. Guy believed, with some justification, that this was outrageous and, with Eddie’s assistance, persuaded them to down tools.’
‘How did they do that?’
Neame looked annoyed to have been interrupted.
‘Because Guy and Eddie were both, in their different ways, absolutely marvellous with people. Guy could tell you that the sun wasn’t going to come up tomorrow morning and you’d believe him. Eddie was the same. There were any number of reluctant souls among the waiters and kitchen staff but he convinced them not only that it would be in their best interests to strike, but that they would also be in no danger of losing their jobs. He had no guarantee of this, of course, but that was the calibre of the man. If Eddie told you something, you believed him. The whole saga was a rare example of him sticking his head above the parapet. Very few people really knew how central Eddie had been to orchestrating the whole thing.’
‘So who knew the full truth? Burgess? Blunt?’
‘Blunt certainly. He and Guy were inseparable and, as far as I know, on the lookout for recruits all the time. No doubt they tipped off their NKVD controller that Eddie was cut from the right cloth.’
‘That’s all it took? Surely membership of the Party was a pre-requisite for the Russians?’
‘If you say so.’
Gaddis pushed again.
‘Does Eddie write about his recruitment in the document? Does he shed any light on that?’
It was better to refer to the memoirs simply as a document; Gaddis didn’t want to give Neame the impression that he was sitting on material of incalculable value to his investigation.
‘Well, you see, that’s where it gets interesting. The Soviets did a very clever thing, which was probably the reason Eddie was able to survive undetected for as long as he did.’ Another party of tourists, this time Japanese, shuffled past the pew. ‘A gentleman by the name of Arnold Deutsch was tipped off about Eddie by Guy. Have you heard of Deutsch?’
Gaddis had certainly heard of him. Deutsch - known by the codename ‘OTTO’ - had been responsible for the recruitment of the Ring of Five.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Well, Deutsch recruited Eddie, but without telling Burgess or Blunt.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Moscow was worried that the network was already too big. They had Kim, they had Anthony, Guy, Donald and John. All it would take was for one of them to crack and the Brits would be able to dismantle the entire cell. So Eddie was set up on his own. In due course, Cairncross became what they call “conscious” that Crane was an asset, but none of the others, not even Guy, had a clue what was going on. Eddie was given the codename ATTILA. Deutsch told Burgess that he had no interest in working for the Party and that was that. Everybody moved on.’
Gaddis reached out and ran his hand along the wrought-iron radiator beside his chair. He was trying to work out the implications of what Neame had revealed, trying to walk the cat back.
‘That makes sense,’ he muttered, but Neame interrupted him.
‘As things turned out, the Soviets had actually done MI5 a favour.’
‘How’s that?’
The old man appeared to amuse himself with a private thought. It was clear that he enjoyed toying with Gaddis’s appetite for information. ‘Well, that’s another part of the story,’ he replied softly. ‘I’d be jumping ahead if I told you.’
‘Jump away.’
Neame smiled. ‘Oxford first.’
‘Oxford?’
‘Didn’t you know, Doctor?’ Neame turned in his seat, first to the left, then to the right, reassuring himself that they were not being observed. Gaddis could feel another secret coming. ‘The Russians sent Eddie to Oxford.’
Chapter 16
Calvin Somers left the Michael Sobel Centre via the staff entrance just after six o’clock and walked in pale evening sunlight towards Batchworth Heath. On autumn nights he preferred to take one of the narrow, overgrown paths through the woods and to cross a network of open fields towards the outskirts of Harefield, where he lived in a one-bedroom flat in the centre of town. It was mid September and there would be only a few more opportunities to walk to work before the clocks went back and the nights closed in and he was obliged to take his car. Beneath a thick Land’s End fleece, he was still wearing his pale green nurse’s uniform because he liked to wash when he returned home, rather than to use the showers in the more impersonal surroundings of the Mount Vernon Hospital.
A thirty-four-year-old cancer patient had died on the ward three hours earlier but Somers wasn’t thinking about him, wasn’t thinking about the patient’s grieving relatives or the student doctor who had cried when she glimpsed the mother collapsing in tears in the car park just after lunch. He was thinking about the box of Wolf Blass Chardonnay he was going to finish that night and the range of microwaveable ready-meals stacked in his fridge. What did he feel like for dinner? A curry? Fish pie? Nowadays - and he would happily admit this to anyone who asked, even to colleagues who felt quite differently about things - the deaths on the ward just seemed to blend into one another. You forgot who was who, who had suffered from what, which family member went with which patient. Maybe he was just sick of the job. Maybe Calvin Somers was finally sick of the sick.
He was about to cross the main road towards the Heath when he heard
a noise behind him in the north-west car park and turned to find a man stepping out of a dark blue C-Class Mercedes with blacked-out windows. For a brief moment, Somers considered breaking into a run, because panic had surged inside his chest like an electric charge. But to run was a stupid idea. You didn’t run from a man like Alexander Grek. Grek could find you. Grek knew where you lived. The best thing, Somers decided, would be to do what he always did when it came to moments of uncertainty. He would become confrontational.
‘Are you following me?’
‘Mr Somers?’
‘You know who I am. Why are you here? Why have you come to my place of work? I thought our business was concluded. You assured me that our business was conclu—’
Grek interrupted him. ‘Please stop walking, Mr Somers.’ He had a deep voice, almost baritone in texture, with a certain music in it, a certain appalling charm. He was wearing a dark grey suit and a crisp white shirt with button-down collars and a navy tie.
‘I wonder if I might join you on your walk?’ he said. Grek spoke a precise, formal English, but it was a coat of varnish on an utter ruthlessness. ‘You are walking home, are you not? This is the route that you always take?’
Somers felt the panic again, the charge in his chest, and knew that he had been rumbled. Why else had Grek come for him? They must have found out about the academic and Charlotte Berg. Why had he been so greedy? The FSB had paid him twenty grand for the Crane story, for the tale of Douglas Henderson and St Mary’s Hospital. There had been one condition to that transaction: that he never again speak to anyone about Edward Anthony Crane. But since then he’d been paid twice for the same information; he just hadn’t been able to help himself. And now Alexander Grek had come to find out why.
‘You’ve been following me,’ he said, but his voice betrayed him, stuttering twice on the word ‘following’.
‘No, no,’ Grek replied, smiling like an old friend. ‘We just have two more questions that we would like you to answer.’ He held up his fingers, splayed like a V for Victory. ‘Two.’
Somers unzipped the fleece. He was suddenly very hot.
‘Why don’t we walk as we talk?’ the Russian suggested, and Somers agreed, not least because he did not want to be seen with Grek by other members of staff. They turned towards the main road, crossed it and joined a narrow, overgrown path into the woods. They were obliged to walk in single file and Somers moved quickly, desperate to reach the open ground of a field. Grek was no more than three metres behind him at any point, but barely made a sound as his five-hundred-dollar loafers caressed the damp path.
‘So what was it you wanted?’ Somers asked, carrying the fleece now because the vest beneath his uniform was soaked with sweat.
Grek came to a halt. They were still on the path, bent trees and summer grasses hemming them in on all sides. Somers had to stop and turn around, pale sunlight filtering through the branches.
‘I wanted to ask you about Waldemar.’
At first, Somers didn’t understand what Grek was asking, because the Russian had pronounced the name of the Polish janitor at St Mary’s with a Slavic expertise that stripped ‘Waldemar’ of recognizable consonants. Then he put two and two together and decided to stall.
‘Waldemar? The porter? What about him?’
‘We cannot find him.’ From his relaxed tone of voice, Grek might have been reporting on the status of nothing more significant than a lost watch. ‘We have had difficulty in tracking this man down.’
Somers laughed. ‘I thought you were meant to be Russian Intelligence? Doesn’t say much for your capabilities, does it? Doesn’t say much for your, er, intelligence?’ It was a mistake, of course, to sound glib, to taunt a man like Grek, but Somers couldn’t help himself. He was always like this when the cards were stacked against him: cocky and sarcastic, fighting fire with fire.
‘Perhaps,’ Grek said, and Somers couldn’t work out what he was referring to. Perhaps what? He experienced a renewed desire to get off the path, because he felt that Grek, at any moment, might throw a punch at him. Calvin Somers had a profound fear of physical violence and knew that he would not be able to defend himself if the Russian attacked. He turned and saw the edge of a field no more than fifty metres away. If only they could keep walking.
‘So you do not know where we can find this Waldemar?’ Grek continued. ‘You have had no contact with him in the intervening period?’
‘In the what?’ Somers was laughing again, choosing to mock Grek’s choice of phrase.
‘You heard me, Calvin.’
To hear his Christian name spoken in such a context was nauseating. To control his fear, Somers turned and began to walk towards the field, praying that Grek would follow him. He did not.
‘What about Benedict Meisner?’ the Russian called after him and Somers was again obliged to stop, to turn around and to walk back along the path. It felt as if he was heading into a spider’s web.
‘What about him?’ His voice quickened as he added: ‘Can we move along, please? I’m keen to get home. Can we start walking towards my—’
‘You will remain here while we speak.’ Grek gestured in the direction of the car park. ‘I do not want to move far from my vehicle. Where is Meisner, please?’
Somers spluttered another laugh and wondered why Grek was asking him questions about colleagues he hadn’t seen for more than ten years. How was he supposed to answer? He wasn’t friends with Meisner, he wasn’t friends with Waldemar, never had been. The Crane deception was all that they had in common.
‘Look, I don’t have a fucking clue,’ he said, and regretted swearing, because the temperature dropped in Grek’s eyes.
‘I see.’ They were narrow eyes, a very pale brown, and within them Somers could see the extent of his own betrayal. ‘This is interesting. Nor have we had any success in locating Mr Crane himself.’
Somers felt as though he was being swung from point to point, as if the Russian had no real interest in the answers to the questions he was asking, only in generating a sense of unease. Was that a standard spy tactic? Why did Grek even suspect that Crane was still alive?
‘Why do you keep telling me how bad you are at your job?’ he said. ‘I don’t get it. I don’t walk around telling people when I’ve made a mistake on the ward. All you’ve seemed interested in talking about for the last ten minutes is what a fuck-up you’re making of your investigation.’
Grek did something now that was commonplace, and yet utterly unsettling. He spat on the ground. The Russian then reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a cigarette, not from a packet, but from a pristine silver case. He placed the cigarette in his mouth, rolled a Zippo lighter across his thigh and held Somers’s gaze as he brought the flame to his lips. He was no longer a suit-wearing officer in the Russian FSB with a chauffeur-driven car and five-hundred-dollar loafers; you could see in his movements, in the stillness of his eyes, the remnants of the St Petersburg thug that he had once been.
‘A cigarette case,’ Somers said, his throat narrow and dry. The words were barely audible. ‘Don’t see those very often.’
Grek closed the Zippo. Click.
‘No, you do not.’ Then, as calmly as slipping a knife into Somers’s ribs, he said: ‘Have you spoken to anybody else about Edward Crane, Calvin? Anybody apart from Charlotte Berg?’
Somers lost a breath as he realized what Grek had said. The Russians knew about Charlotte. If that was the case, Christ, they probably knew about the academic. For the second time in a matter of minutes he thought that his legs were going to go. He cursed his own stupidity, his cowardice.
‘What?’ he said, trying to buy time. ‘Who’s Charlotte Berg?’
Grek exhaled a lungful of smoke which held in a neat column above the path before it was parted by a gust of wind. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘We are both men of the world, Mr Somers. Do not waste my time.’
‘Have you been bugging my telephone? Have you been hacking into my computer? How do you know about Charlotte?
’
This was a confession, of course, and if Grek had possessed any lingering doubts about the nature of Somers’s betrayal, they were now finally dispelled.
‘This is England,’ he replied, gesturing at the countryside. He was smiling. ‘We do not have jurisdiction to bug telephones.’ A fly settled on Grek’s arm, but he ignored it. ‘My colleagues have seen transcripts of your email correspondence with Miss Berg. These were in strict violation of our agreement.’
‘And you’re in strict violation of my human fucking rights getting your “contacts” to bug my computer. How dare you?’
Somers was surprised by the ferocity of his response, even taking a step towards Grek in an attempt to impose himself. But neither his words nor his actions had any visible impact at all.
‘Please calm down,’ he was told, as the Russian took another drag on the cigarette. ‘Tell us who else you have been talking to.’
Us? Who else was here? Somers had never felt more isolated in his life, but Grek was talking as if their conversation was being monitored by a dozen members of the FSB. ‘What do you mean “us“? Look, I haven’t been speaking to anybody, OK? Charlotte got the story off her own back. She came to me because somebody had told her I was working at St Mary’s that night. Maybe that person was you.’
‘This is unlikely.’ Grek was looking at his cigarette, turning it in his fingers, speaking calmly. Somers knew that he had tried a feeble tactic and wished that Grek would just come out and call him a liar to his face. He couldn’t bear the faux politeness, the sense of fair play. He heard a dog barking in the distance and hoped that somebody - a walker, a jogger - would come past and interrupt what was happening.
‘Why is it unlikely?’ he asked, moving away from Grek and again heading towards the field. Still the Russian did not follow him and, once again, Somers was obliged to turn and to walk back along the path.
The Trinity Six (2011) Page 10
