The Trinity Six (2011)

by Charles Cumming

  ‘You shouldn’t have agreed to meet me,’ he said. ‘It’s not safe for you. You could get in a lot of trouble over this. You need to sort yourself out.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she replied.

  ‘You must destroy the letter that I wrote to you.’

  ‘Take it,’ she said, instantly producing the note from the pocket of her jeans.

  ‘And don’t speak to anyone about this, OK? It’s for your safety as well as mine. Think of your son, Mrs Tretiak. Our conversation didn’t happen. Do you understand?’

  She nodded dumbly. Gaddis surprised himself by gripping her by the arms. They were so thin he felt that he could have snapped them with a flick of his wrists.

  ‘Ludmilla. Focus.’ He looked into her eyes and saw that she must once have been transfixingly beautiful. All that was gone now. The waitress, changing a CD behind the counter, looked across as he released her. ‘Forget about our conversation. Forget what I have told you. About Edward Crane, about ATTILA, about your husband’s murder. It’s for your own safety, OK? Be smart. This situation is far more dangerous than I imagined.’

  Chapter 21

  Dresden didn’t make sense until Gaddis was somewhere over the North Sea drinking a Bloody Mary on the Aeroflot back to London. In 1985, as a fledgling spy, Sergei Platov had been posted to Dresden by the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. He would have worked alongside Tretiak. He would almost certainly have known that ATTILA was operating out of Berlin.

  Gaddis spent most of the journey trying to untangle the implications of this. Why was the Russian president personally interfering in the ATTILA cover-up more than fifteen years after leaving the KGB? Had Charlotte uncovered a scandal with the potential to obliterate Platov’s career and reputation? She hadn’t mentioned anything about that at dinner; the threat from ATTILA, as she saw it, was to the British, not the Russian government. Perhaps Platov, as a loyal KGB man, was simply keen to uphold the reputation of his former employers by ensuring that the Crane story never came to light.

  There was a darker possibility, of course; that Charlotte had died not from natural causes, not from a heart attack brought on by too many cigarettes and too much booze, but that she had been murdered by Platov’s cronies to ensure her silence. Trapped between a sprawling, restless teenager on the aisle, and an overweight Estonian businessman sleeping fitfully in the window seat, Gaddis picked at a freeze-dried stroganoff and a stale bread roll, his mouth dry, his appetite lost to the sickening thought that Charlotte might have become the latest victim of the Russian government’s near-psychotic determination to silence journalists, at home and abroad, who failed to toe the party line. His only cause to doubt this theory was his own continued wellbeing. Ludmilla Tretiak was also alive and well, albeit pickled in vodka and tranquilizers. Who else had Charlotte spoken to? Thomas Neame. But the old man was still going strong in Winchester. And Calvin Somers, as far as he knew, was still doing his shifts at the Mount Vernon Hospital.

  Five hours later, Gaddis returned home to find that he had been contacted by a researcher at the National Archives in Kew. A woman named Josephine Warner had left a sprightly message on his landline informing him that she had dug up a copy of Edward Crane’s will. It was the last thing that Gaddis had been expecting - he had forgotten even lodging the request - but it helped to give some direction to his thoughts and he drove down to Kew the following morning, planning to continue to Winchester if he could get Peter to answer his phone. He needed to see Neame. Tom was still the only contact he could think of who might have information about Tretiak’s career in Dresden.

  On the first floor of the archive building he asked a member of staff to point out Josephine Warner and was directed towards the enquiries desk. There were two women seated next to one another on red plastic chairs. Gaddis knew one of them on sight, an Afro-Caribbean woman called Dora who had helped him with his enquiries several times before. The second woman was new. She was in her late twenties, with black hair cut to shoulder length and a face whose beauty revealed itself only slowly as he walked towards her; in the stillness of her dark eyes, in the lucidity of her pale skin.

  ‘Josephine Warner?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m Sam Gaddis. You left a message on my phone yesterday.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ She stood up immediately, as if sprung from her seat, and turned towards the bank of cabinets behind her. Gaddis nodded as Dora gave him a smile of recognition and Warner opened a drawer, fingers flicking rapidly through a file of documents. ‘Here it is,’ she said, almost to herself, picking out a manila envelope and handing it to Gaddis.

  ‘It’s very kind of you,’ he said. ‘Thanks for digging it out. It could be very useful.’

  ‘Pleasure.’

  He would happily have spoken to her for longer, but Josephine Warner was already looking beyond him, inviting the next customer with her eyes. Gaddis took the envelope to a reading table on the far side of the room, removed the Will and began to read.

  The contents were relatively straightforward. Crane had left the bulk of his estate to a nephew, Charles Crane, now sixty-seven and resident in Greece. Gaddis wrote down the address in Athens. Substantial donations had been made to Cancer Research and to the SIS Widow’s Fund. The Will had been executed by Thomas Neame, to whom Crane had left ‘the contents of my library’ and witnessed by a ‘Mrs Audrey Slight’ and a ‘Mr Richard Kenner’. Addresses were given for both and Gaddis wrote them down. He had no recollection of Neame mentioning that he had acted as executor on Crane’s Will, nor that he had been left any books, but he was at least now reassured that the two men were separate individuals.

  At about eleven o’clock, two hours behind Athens, Gaddis went downstairs and called international directory enquiries from a phone box in the foyer. The operator found Charles Crane’s number within a couple of minutes and Gaddis called it from his mobile. A man answered in Greek.

  ‘Embros?’

  The voice sounded slightly dotty, with a laboured Greek accent. Gaddis had an image of an ageing Englishman, sunburned and decked out in linen, reading Gibbon on the steps of the Parthenon.

  ‘Charles Crane?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘My name is Sam Gaddis. I’m an academic in London, at UCL. I’m sorry to bother you out of the blue. I’m researching a book on the history of the Foreign Office and wondered if I might be able to ask you some questions about your late uncle, Edward Crane.’

  ‘Good Lord, Eddie.’ It sounded as though the nephew who had benefited so handsomely from the generosity of his late uncle had not given a moment’s thought to him since 1992. ‘Yes, of course. What would you like to know?’

  Gaddis told him what he knew of Crane’s career in the Diplomatic Service, sticking firmly to the template of The Times obituary and avoiding any mention of Cambridge, SIS or the NKVD. To draw him out further, he flattered Crane by telling him that his late uncle had played a vital, yet unheralded role in the winning of the Cold War.

  ‘Really? Is that so? Yes, well I suppose Eddie was quite a character.’

  Gaddis now began to wish that he had been sitting somewhere more comfortable, because Crane embarked on a series of rambling, near-nonsensical anecdotes about his uncle’s ‘mysterious life’. It transpired that the two men had met ‘only a handful of times’ and that Charles had been ‘stunned, absolutely stunned’ to be the main beneficiary of his Will.

  ‘He never married, of course,’ he said, the spectre of a black sheep hovering over the good name of the Crane family. ‘Entrenous, I think he was batting for the other side. Dormant, perhaps, but certainly a feature of his youth, if you know what I’m driving at.’

  Gaddis found himself saying that, yes, he knew exactly what Charles Crane was driving at.

  ‘Retired rather late. No children to look after, you see. Not like the rest of us. Nothing to occupy his time except the Foreign Office.’

  It was clear that Crane did not even know that his uncle had worked for SIS. As far as he wa
s concerned, he had just been a middle-ranking diplomat with ‘one or two postings overseas’.

  ‘Does the name Audrey Slight mean anything to you?’

  ‘Afraid not, Mr Gaddis.’

  ‘She was one of the two witnesses on your uncle’s Will.’

  The name finally rang a bell. ‘Oh, Audrey. She was Eddie’s housekeeper for yonks.’ Crane sounded like a contestant on a game show who discovers the answer to a question fractionally late. ‘I think she died a few years ago. Getting on a bit. Thomas Neame was my main point of contact for the estate.’

  ‘You didn’t speak to Richard Kenner?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The other witness.’

  ‘No. But if memory serves, Kenner was also Foreign Office. A colleague of Eddie’s. Might be worth looking him up.’

  Most probably another wild-goose chase. Kenner would almost certainly be dead, or erased from the official records to protect ATTILA’s anonymity. Gaddis asked Crane about his dealings with Neame but learned nothing that he did not already know; simply that the old man was ‘highly intelligent’, ‘irascible’ and ‘occasionally bloody rude’.

  ‘So you met him?’

  ‘Only once. Lawyer’s office in London. I spoke to him on the telephone a number of times as we ironed out the flat in Bloomsbury, the house here in Athens. The estate was rather substantial.’

  This, at least, was new information, although Gaddis was still desperately short of facts about Crane’s post-war career. Then it occurred to him that he did not have a photograph of Crane and took a chance that a nephew might at least have an old family Polaroid lying around in an attic.

  ‘I was wondering,’ he said. ‘Would you have a picture of your uncle? Anything at all? I’ve had trouble tracking one down. When a man dies without children, with no siblings or close relatives, there are very few people who keep hold of such things.’

  Crane was immediately sympathetic to Gaddis’s predicament. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’m sure I can dig one up for you from somewhere. There’s bound to be one lurking around. I’ll get on to it.’

  ‘That would be very kind.’

  Gaddis gave an address at UCL to which Crane could send the photograph and then hung up. As he did so, he wondered if he should have invited himself out to Greece. If Crane was living in his late uncle’s property, there might be files or boxes lurking in a basement which could be of use to the ATTILA investigation. Instead, he put the mobile back in his pocket, walked to the ground-floor cafe and ordered a cup of tea.

  Chapter 22

  Gaddis bumped into Josephine Warner in the car park. She was unlocking a black Volkswagen hatchback and putting a Waitrose carrier bag on the back seat. She might not have seen him if Gaddis hadn’t waved and shouted ‘Hi!’ across a line of parked cars. He was halfway through a cigarette, having abandoned yet another attempt to quit, and stubbed it out on the ground.

  ‘Hello. Doctor Gaddis, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is,’ he said. He came towards her, looking at his watch. ‘You already going home?’

  He privately hoped that she was. Peter still wasn’t answering his phone and he had given up on going to Winchester. He was at a loose end, feeling restless, and might invite her out to lunch.

  ‘Not home,’ she said. ‘Just popping to Richmond to pick up a colleague. I’m the new kid on the block, so they’ve got me running errands.’

  She looked at him, a quiet appraisal, and Gaddis was certain that he detected the faintest trace of an invitation in her eyes. Then he thought of Holly and wondered why the hell he was succumbing to a car park flirtation with an archivist from Kew. No good was ever going to come of it.

  ‘Thanks again for the Will,’ he said, taking a step back.

  ‘Was it useful?’ Instinctively, she had moved forwards, following him. A wind kicked up, sharp and autumnal. Warner held loose strands of hair away from her face as she said: ‘I read your Bulgakov biography. Are you writing a new book?’

  This took him by surprise. She had appeared indifferent earlier in the morning, showing no indication that she even knew who he was. ‘You did? Why? Were you stuck for something to read on the Trans-Siberian? Killing time in prison?’

  She smiled and said that she had loved the book and Gaddis felt the awful, shallow thrill of a woman’s flattery. If he was honest with himself, within moments of seeing her at the reception desk he had wanted to pursue her, just as he and Natasha had pursued other lovers during their marriage. Why had they done it? Their behaviour had fractured the relationship irreparably. And yet he would happily go through the very same process again with this woman whom he did not know, jeopardizing something promising with Holly. Perhaps the distraction of an affair would take his mind off Crane and Neame. In which case - walk away. The book was far more important. But he found that he wanted to keep talking to her, to see where the conversation led them.

  ‘A boyfriend put me on to The Master and Margarita at Oxford,’ she said, stepping beyond the Volkswagen so that they were now no more than a metre apart. ‘In fact I think he plagiarized most of your book for his dissertation.’

  ‘There’s a good Russian department at Oxford,’ Gaddis said, noting the cool, gliding reference to a past lover. ‘I haven’t seen you here before.’

  ‘I just started. Part-time. Finished my PhD in June.’

  ‘And you couldn’t stand being away from archives and librarians?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  What followed, in the next few minutes, was an exchange as commonplace as it was predictable. Gaddis said that he was heading back to Shepherd’s Bush and Josephine Warner, seizing on this, happened to mention that she lived ‘just around the corner’ in Chiswick. Gaddis then found a way of suggesting that they should get together for a drink one night and Warner enthusiastically agreed, supplying another inviting gaze as she offered her mobile number in exchange for his. It was a first dance, a step on the road to the possibility of seduction, with both parties playing their roles to practised perfection.

  Gaddis gave it forty-eight hours before telephoning to arrange to meet for a drink. Josephine sounded pleased to hear from him and encouraged the idea of meeting up for dinner. He suggested a restaurant in Brackenbury Village and, three nights later, they were ensconced at a candlelit table, working their way through a bottle of Givry. He was surprised by the candour of their conversation, almost from its first moments.

  ‘Let’s just say that my love life is complicated,’ Josephine told him, before they had even ordered their food, and Gaddis had felt obliged to reveal that he, too, had been ‘seeing someone for the last month or so’. It was obvious to both parties that they were sizing one another up. Gaddis was not one of those people who believed that a platonic friendship between a man and a woman was impossible, but he was also realistic enough to know that he and Josephine hadn’t agreed to meet solely for the pleasure of discussing historical archives. She was continuously and discreetly flirtatious all night and he returned the compliment, trying as best he could to ease her towards a second date. As the meal progressed, he began to think that she was almost too good to be true: quick-witted, funny and sharp, and able to talk engagingly on seemingly any subject, from cricket to Tolstoy, from Seinfeld to Graham Greene. She was also astonishingly beautiful, but without an apparent trace of vanity or self-regard. Every now and again, as if sensing his attraction, Josephine found a way of reminding Gaddis that there was a more-or-less permanent boyfriend lurking in the background of her life, but these reminders served only to convince him that she was looking for a way out of the relationship.

  ‘He’s asked me to marry him twice,’ she said, spinning spaghetti on her fork.

  ‘And you keep saying no?’

  ‘I keep asking him to give me more time.’

  She asked him why his own marriage had ended, which was a subject Gaddis had avoided with Holly for a considerable time, but there was something in Josephine’s open, trusting spirit which encouraged h
im towards full disclosure.

  ‘Neither of us was suited to it,’ he said. ‘Marriage put bars around us, restrictions which we weren’t prepared to respect.’

  ‘You were unfaithful?’

  ‘We were both unfaithful,’ he said, and was grateful when Josephine turned her attention to Min.

  ‘And you said that your daughter lives in Barcelona?’

  ‘Yes. With her mother. And a boyfriend that I do my best to …’

  ‘Torture?’

  Gaddis smiled. ‘Tolerate.’

  ‘But it’s complicated?’

  ‘Past a certain point, everything becomes complicated, don’t you think?’

  They ordered a second bottle of wine and Gaddis talked of his frustration at missing out on Min’s formative years. He said that he tried to go to Spain ‘at least once a month’, but that it was difficult for Min herself to come to London because she was still too young to fly unaccompanied by an adult. He revealed that, from time to time, he would discover one of her toys stuck behind the sofa, or a single pink sock hidden at the bottom of a laundry basket. He might have added that there had been nights when he had found himself curled up on Min’s bed in the house, sobbing into her pillow, but that was a revelation for a fifth or sixth date; there was no point in entirely dismantling the image he was trying to project of a robust and civilized man.

  Pudding came and finally they talked about his research at Kew. It was, out of necessity, the only point in the evening when Gaddis lied outright, claiming that he was preparing a lecture on the activities of the NKVD during World War II. The truth about Edward Crane was a secret that he could share only with himself; it certainly could not be trusted to Josephine Warner. He mentioned the possibility that his research might take him to Berlin.