The Trinity Six Part 12

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 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. 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 was 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 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 b.u.mped 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.

'h.e.l.lo. 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 h.e.l.l he was succ.u.mbing 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 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.' 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 him 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.

'There's a contact there who I'd like to talk to.'

'Somebody who was working for the Russians during the war?'

'Yes.'

Josephine straightened the napkin in her lap.

'My sister lives in Berlin.'

'Really?'

'Yes. Moved there two years ago. I still haven't been to visit.'

Looking up from his plate, with a mixture of surprise and delight, Gaddis realized that Josephine was presenting him with the opportunity to invite her to Germany.

'Maybe I should look her up when I go over,' he suggested.

'She's trouble,' Josephine replied and Gaddis was sure that he caught a flash of jealousy in her eyes.

However, this proved to be the high tide of their flirtatious rapport. By eleven o'clock, Gaddis had paid the bill and they had walked north towards Goldhawk Road, where Josephine's behaviour changed markedly. Within seconds she had flagged down a cab, aware perhaps that they were both a little drunk, both attracted to one another and, in different circ.u.mstances, might easily have succ.u.mbed to a late-night pavement clinch.

'I had fun tonight,' she said, ducking into the back seat after kissing Gaddis cursorily on the cheek.

'I enjoyed it, too,' he replied, surprised by how quickly Josephine had cut off the romantic possibilities of the evening. He concluded that she was returning to the 'complicated' love life that she had referred to at the beginning of dinner.

'Got to be up at five,' she explained and waved briefly through the rear window of the cab as it pulled away towards Chiswick. Gaddis had known dates like this before and wondered if he would see her again. She had promised to 'dig up' a photograph of Edward Crane at Kew, but they had crossed a professional and personal boundary tonight and he suspected that she would pa.s.s the job to a colleague, to avoid any unnecessary complications. Perhaps he was being unduly pessimistic, but there had been something in Josephine's manner as they walked away from the restaurant which had seemed to shut down any possibility of a relationship. Throughout the meal, she had been unquestionably seductive, raising oblique prospects of further meetings movies, lunches, even Berlin but that playfulness had disappeared once he had paid the bill. It was a pity, because he liked her. Walking home through a criss-cross of dimly lit residential streets, he realized that it had been a long time since a woman had crept under his skin like Josephine Warner.

Chapter 23.

Two days later, Gaddis was sifting through his mail at the start of the new term at UCL when he turned up an A4-sized manila envelope with a Greek postmark.

Inside, he found a handwritten note on monogrammed paper from Charles Crane.

What a wonderful surprise to speak to you on the telephone yesterday. I've managed to track down a couple of photographs of Uncle Eddie. One taken during the war and another at my mother's house in Berkshire in the late 1970s (possibly '80 or even '81). If memory serves, Eddie had just retired from the Foreign Office and was about to take up a position on the Board of Deutsche Bank in West Berlin.When you're finished with them, could I ask that you send them back to the address above? I would be most grateful.

Gaddis pulled out the photographs, his hand snagging on the envelope in his enthusiasm to see them. At last he was going to set eyes on Edward Crane.

The picture from the war was a formal, black-and-white portrait of a soldier in full uniform. It was mounted on a frayed square of greying cardboard and signed and dated '1942' in near-illegible blue ink. Crane was in his early thirties, with brooding, saturnine features and thick black hair which had been carefully combed, parted to one side and run through with oil. It was not the face that Gaddis had been expecting; in his imagination, Crane had been a less physically imposing figure, slim and cunning, perhaps even a touch effete. This Crane was a bruiser, tough and thick-set. It was difficult to imagine that the man in the photograph had possessed the subtlety to hoodwink intelligence services on both sides of the Iron Curtain for more than fifty years. And why the soldier's uniform? At the time the photograph was taken, Crane would most probably have been working in counter-espionage at MI5, pa.s.sing the names of potential Soviet defectors to Theodore Maly. Gaddis concluded that Crane had perhaps worn a soldier's uniform while a.s.sisting Cairncross at Bletchley.

The second photograph was a close-up Polaroid taken in a hazy, sun-filled English garden. The hair was still carefully tended, but thinner now and white as chalk. Gaddis was reminded of pictures of the older W.H. Auden because Crane's face was craggy and tanned, loose about the neck. Calvin Somers had described his skin as looking 'too healthy' for a man suffering from pancreatic cancer, but perhaps he had been referring to the colour and texture of Crane's face, rather than to his apparent youthfulness. The nose, he noted, was flushed, either with wine or sunburn Gaddis couldn't tell and the smile was broad and energetic; this time you could see the charm of the master spy. Gaddis felt relieved, because this second image conformed far more closely to his mental picture of Crane. Furthermore, it put to rest any lingering doubts he might have possessed that Crane and Neame were the same person. It was not difficult, for example, to imagine the man in the photograph as an avuncular figure pa.s.sing himself off as a patrician banker in Berlin; at the same time, Crane's face had a bohemian quality, the eyes betraying a wild streak bordering on the eccentric. Gaddis could only guess at the secrets stacked up behind those eyes, five decades of bluff and counter-bluff, culminating in the mysteries of Dresden.

He was not to know that Charles Crane did not exist. The man Gaddis had spoken to on the telephone was one Alistair Chapman, a colleague of Sir John Brennan's from an era in which the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service had been a mid-level officer operating in Cold War Vienna. Chapman had agreed to allow SIS to divert an Athens phone number to his London home and to masquerade as Crane's nephew as a favour to Brennan. The Chief had been delighted with his performance.

'Thank you, Alistair,' he had said, speaking to Chapman that evening. 'I doubt that in the long history of the Secret Intelligence Service we have ever employed a more distinguished backstop.'

The photographs that Charles Crane had supposedly posted to Gaddis were, in fact, pictures of a former SIS officer named Anthony Kitto, who had died in 1983. Brennan had simply dug them up from an archive and placed them in the envelope. Gaddis, of course, was none the wiser, and even made a mental note to write Crane a letter of thanks as he turned to his other post.

There was a letter from a colleague in America, a postcard of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia signed by Min and, at the bottom of the pile, a bank statement from Barclays. He was in the habit of throwing away correspondence from the myriad organizations to which he owed money, but on this occasion he glanced at the statement and was surprised to see that his balance was healthier than he had imagined. Over a month after he had handed Calvin Somers a cheque for 2000, the money had still not been cashed. The cheque had been post-dated, but at least two weeks had pa.s.sed in which Somers could have presented it to his bank.

Gaddis was confronted by a dilemma. He could cross his fingers and hope that Somers had forgotten about the cheque, but it was hopeless to think that a man as grasping and as manipulative as that would simply forget he was sitting on two grand. More likely Somers had lost the cheque and would come asking for a replacement in three or four weeks' time. The last thing Gaddis needed was somebody asking him for two grand in the run-up to Christmas. By then, any cheque he wrote would almost certainly bounce. He ran through the address book in his mobile phone, found the number of the Mount Vernon Hospital and called Somers's office.

The call was diverted to the main switchboard. Gaddis was fairly sure that the woman who answered was the same bored, impatient receptionist who had brushed him off in September.

'Could you put me through to Calvin Somers, please? I'm having difficulty getting him on his direct line.'

There was an audible intake of breath. It was definitely the same woman; she sounded irritated even by this modest request.

'Can I ask who's speaking, please?'