The Trinity Six (21 page)

He was at last beginning to feel tired. Time for bed. He put the phone back on the counter, emptied the ashtray, put his glass in the dishwasher and re-corked the wine. Two of Katya’s shoeboxes were still open on the table and he gathered up the loose pieces of paper in a half-hearted attempt to tidy up.

That was when he saw the letter. A single sheet of powder-blue, watermarked stationery with an address die-stamped at the top:

Robert Wilkinson

Drybread Road (RD2)

Omakau 9377

Central Otago

New Zealand

Chapter 32

It was a love letter.

At the end of their first weekend together, Holly had mentioned to Gaddis that her mother had once had a boyfriend in MI6 who had leaked material to her about the KGB. This was surely him. Wilkinson was the source of the archive. The letter was dated 5 May 2000. But what had he meant by the lines in the first paragraph? ‘Keep your eye on Platov. He is the prize.’

It was almost half-past four in the morning. Gaddis read the letter again, trying to work out the precise nature of the relationship between Wilkinson and Katya Levette. Had they been married? Christ, was he Holly’s
father
? Only Holly would be able to provide the answers, but he could hardly wake her in the middle of the night. His questions would have to wait until morning.

‘What are you doing?’

She was standing on the far side of the room with scrunched eyes and sleep-twisted hair, a section of it stuck to her face. He was startled by the sound of her voice and put the letter on the table, as if he had been caught reading Holly’s private correspondence. She was wearing his dressing-gown, the cord hanging loose at the side.

‘Did I wake you?’

‘No. I just needed a glass of water. You weren’t there. I wondered what had happened to you.’ Her eyes were squinting against the light. ‘What are you doing up? What time is it?’

Gaddis looked beyond her, at the handbag on the floor, and felt a pang of remorse. ‘About half-four,’ he said. He was wide awake again, the soporific effects of the wine and the paracetamol long since worn off. ‘Who’s Robert Wilkinson?’

‘
What?
’

Her head had fallen to one side. She looked startled.

‘So you know him?’

‘Bob? Of course I know him. He was Mum’s boyfriend. How did his name come up?’

‘I found a letter.’ Gaddis held it up in his hand, inviting her to read it. But she was still half asleep and said: ‘Can’t I see it in the morning?’

He shook his head. ‘No. It’s important. Did he give your mum this stuff?’

He indicated the files on the table. It was surely too much of a coincidence that a letter from Robert Wilkinson should have been hiding all that time in a shoebox in the boot of her car. Why had she brought it over today, of all days? Holly was frowning, her half-open eyes still resisting the bright light of the kitchen.

‘Sam, it’s the middle of the fucking night. You’ve had this stuff for
weeks
.’

‘Not this.’ He tapped the letter with the print of his index finger. ‘This came today.’

‘Come back to bed,’ she said. ‘Bob was just in love with Mum. Obsessed by her. I’ll tell you about him in the morning.’

‘What do you mean, “obsessed”?’

She walked forward and grabbed his arm. ‘In the
morning
.’

‘No. Please.’ He had one hand on her waist, holding her. He caught the sudden sharp smell of her sex and thought of Tanya’s betrayal. ‘I need to know. You have to tell me. You have to wake up. Can I make you some tea? Some coffee?’

‘This is ridiculous.’ She allowed him to pull her into a chair. ‘If I tell you, will you promise to let me sleep?’

‘I promise to let you sleep.’

‘Fine.’ She leaned her elbows on the kitchen table, eyes closed, head bowed, as if in the early stages of prayer. ‘Bob Wilkinson,’ she muttered to herself. She was plainly having difficulty remembering the details. ‘Mum’s last boyfriend before Dad. Possibly first love. Can’t remember.’

‘And you’ve met him?’

‘Sure.’

‘What’s he like?’

She looked up and stared at Gaddis in irritation, as if a character sketch was far beyond her remit at half-past four in the morning.

He backed off. ‘OK, fine. Then tell me when they were involved.’

He had stood up as he asked the question and switched on a small digital radio in the corner of the kitchen. He didn’t want the conversation to be overheard. Classical music began to pour into the room. Holly frowned, but she was too tired to question his bizarre behaviour. ‘Oh, I don’t know, Sam. Early seventies, probably.’ She curled a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘Mum would have been about my age. They almost got engaged but Bob was sent abroad by the Foreign Office or something and they had to break up.’

Gaddis didn’t like that. ‘Foreign Office or something.’ It sounded as though she was overcompensating for a lie.

‘He chose his career over your mother?’

‘Well, that’s one way of looking at it.’ She laughed. ‘Mum was actually
relieved
. She’d met my father, they got married soon after, they had me. And we all lived happily ever after.’ She began to play with the lid on one of the shoeboxes. ‘Only Bob never forgot about her. Got married, got divorced, always stayed in touch with Mum, then helped her a lot with her career after Dad died.’

Gaddis saw that she was frowning.

‘Why are you looking like that?’

Holly shook her head. ‘I think they may have had an affair, a rekindled thing, about ten years ago.’ She turned towards the radio. ‘Why the fuck have you turned on Classic FM?’

‘Give me some credit. It’s Radio 3.’

Holly stood up. She poured herself a glass of water from a bottle in the fridge then turned down the volume on the radio. Gaddis wanted to object but understood the absurdity of his behaviour; he could not afford to alienate her with a paranoid rant about audio surveillance. Instead, he watched as she drank the water – the entire glass, like a cure for a hangover – before returning to her chair.

‘Mum wrote about political issues, geo-politics, espionage.’ Holly dropped into a stage whisper, putting a finger to her lips. She was beginning to enjoy herself. ‘Bob was a
huge
spy. Iron Curtain. Cold War. Is that why you’re worried about being bugged?’ She looked as though she was about to burst out laughing. ‘Are you using Mum’s stuff to write a book about MI6?’

He gestured at her to keep talking.

‘Far as I know, Bob would feed Mum titbits of information all the time. Spy gossip, rumours from Washington and Westminster.’ She tapped the table with her knuckles. ‘He probably gave her fifty per cent of this stuff. It was his way of expressing his affection. Either that, or a way of assuaging his guilt for running off to Moscow. He said he wanted her to write a great book about Western intelligence, all the things Bob Wilkinson couldn’t say because he was bound by the Official Secrets Act.’ She took Gaddis’s hand in hers and her lively mood suddenly subsided. ‘But Mum never got round to it. She probably never even read the files. At the end of the day, Bob annoyed her. He was like a fly she couldn’t brush off. And she was never well enough to do any work. I think Bob lives in New Zealand now. I haven’t seen him for ages.’

‘Didn’t he come to your mother’s funeral?’

Holly shook her head. ‘Can’t remember. I’d broken the world record for valium consumption. Possibly. He may not even know that she’s died.’

Gaddis picked up the letter and passed it to her. A lorry tore past the sitting-room windows, hurtling over speed bumps in the dead of the night. He pointed to the line about Platov. ‘What do you think he meant by this?’

‘Here?’ Holly squinted, like an old woman in need of glasses. ‘Platov? I haven’t got a clue.’

Gaddis studied her face intently, still unsure whether he was being manipulated. ‘Your mother never mentioned that she was investigating anyone in the Kremlin?’

‘Never, no.’ Holly leaned back in her chair with a scrutinizing frown. ‘I thought
you
were the expert on Platov. What’s going on, Sam?’

‘You tell me.’

Chapter 33

Inevitably, international directory enquiries had no listing in New Zealand for a Robert Wilkinson so Gaddis had to ask Holly for a favour. Did her mother keep an address book? Would it be possible to track down a number for Bob? Holly asked him why he was so keen to speak to Wilkinson, but Gaddis was deliberately vague about the details.

‘He was in Berlin during an important phase of the Cold War. It’s for the MI6 book. I want to try to set up a meeting.’

The following evening, Holly had called from Tite Street with the details. There was no way of preventing her from reading out Wilkinson’s number over an open line, so Gaddis had written it down and immediately walked outside to a phone box a quarter of a mile away on South Africa Road. If GCHQ had been eavesdropping on Holly’s call, he reckoned it would still take them several hours to establish a bug on Wilkinson’s phone in New Zealand.

It was eight o’clock in the evening in London, eight o’clock in the morning in New Zealand. He rolled four pound coins into the payphone and tapped in the number.

‘Hello?’

‘Is that Robert Wilkinson?’

‘Speaking. Who is this?’

The line was very clear. Gaddis was surprised by the class-lessness of Wilkinson’s accent: he had grown up with the idea that all senior MI6 personnel sounded like members of the Royal Family.

‘My name is Sam Gaddis. I’m a lecturer in Russian History at UCL. I’ve also just completed a biography of Sergei Platov. Does my name mean anything to you?’

‘It means nothing to me whatsoever.’

Silence. Gaddis could sense that he had another Thomas Neame on his hands.

‘Is it a good time to talk?’

‘As good as any.’

‘It’s just that I wanted to speak to you about Katya Levette.’ That got his attention. Gaddis heard a sharp, near-anxious intake of breath, the arrogance going out of him, then half a word – ‘Kat—’

‘I understand that you were good friends.’

‘Yes. Who told you this?’

‘Holly is a friend of mine.’

‘Good God. Holly. How is she?’

Wilkinson was opening up. Gaddis took out a pen and a scrap of paper and tried to pin them on the phone casing with his elbow. ‘She’s very well. She wanted me to send you her love.’

‘How kind of her.’ There was a brief interruption on the line, perhaps a technical fault, perhaps the sound of Wilkinson finding a quieter and more comfortable place in his house from which to speak. ‘Who did you say you were again? Who am I speaking to?’

‘My name is Sam Gaddis. I’m an academic, a writer. I’m calling you from London.’

‘Of course. And you’re working with Katya on a story?’

He obviously didn’t know about Katya. Wilkinson hadn’t been told that Levette was dead. Gaddis was going to have to break it to him.

‘You hadn’t heard, sir?’ He was surprised that he called him that, but had felt a sense of deference in the moment. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t know that I would be the one to tell you. I just assumed that you already knew. Katya has died, Mr Wilkinson. I’m very sorry. Six months ago.’

‘Dear me, that’s terrible news.’ The reply was instant and stoic; Gaddis felt that he could picture the resilience in Wilkinson’s face. He had just lost the great love of his life, but he was not going to display his grief to a stranger. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said. ‘How is Holly coping?’

‘So, so,’ said Gaddis. ‘She’s all right.’

Wilkinson asked how Katya had died and Gaddis told him that she had suffered from liver failure, a euphemism which the older man immediately understood.

‘Yes. I was afraid that would take her in the end. The bloody drink was a lifelong struggle for her. I’ll write to Holly with my condolences. Is she still at the flat in Tite Street?’

‘She is. And I’m sure she’d appreciate that.’

‘In fact, Catherine is getting married later this month. I might see if Holly can come along to the wedding. It would be wonderful to meet her again.’

Gaddis knew, from conversations with Holly, that Catherine was Wilkinson’s daughter, but he felt that he should feign ignorance.

‘Catherine?’

‘My youngest. Marrying an Austrian in Vienna. I’ll be coming over for the wedding. We must try to entice Holly along.’

‘I’ll certainly mention that.’

Gaddis looked at the read-out and saw that he was down to fifty pence of credit. He put four further pounds into the slot and coughed to conceal the noise of the coins chugging into the phone.

It did no good.

‘Are you speaking to me from a phone box?’ Wilkinson asked.

Even if Gaddis had wanted to lie, it would have been impossible to do so: a souped-up Volkswagen Golf had pulled up on the street beside him. The driver leaned on his horn repeatedly in an effort to gain the attention of someone in a nearby housing estate. It must have sounded to Wilkinson as though Gaddis was calling from the middle of the M4.

‘The phone at my house is out of order,’ he said, accidentally knocking the pen and the scrap of paper on to the floor of the booth. As he bent down to retrieve them, stretching the receiver to his ear, he said: ‘I was just very keen to ring you as soon as possible.’

‘About what, Doctor Gaddis?’

‘I’ve come into possession of some documents that I think you gave to Katya.’

A pause. Wilkinson was weighing up his options. ‘I see.’

‘Holly gave them to me. A mutual friend thought that I might be interested in the material.’

‘And are you?’

Some of the obstructiveness which had characterized Wilkinson’s tone in the early part of the conversation had returned.

‘I haven’t really had a proper chance to go through it all yet. I’ve been busy working on something else. I wondered if you knew what Katya was planning to do with the documents?’

‘I’m afraid I really wouldn’t know.’

It sounded like a lie but Gaddis had not expected a straight answer. Wilkinson was guilty of passing potentially sensitive intelligence information to a journalist. He had no means of knowing whether Gaddis was a
bona fide
historian or an
agent provocateur
hired by SIS to elicit a confession.

‘Perhaps we could meet in Vienna to discuss this?’ Gaddis suggested, a wild idea which was out of his mouth before he had thought through its implications.

‘Perhaps,’ Wilkinson replied, with a complete lack of conviction. Time was running out. If Gaddis wasn’t careful, the conversation would soon be brought to an abrupt end.

‘There was just one person in particular that I’m keen to talk to you about,’ he said.

‘Yes? And who’s that?’

‘Sergei Platov.’

Wilkinson produced a grunt of indifference. ‘But you told me that you’ve already written his biography. Why would you want to start all over again?’

‘It’s a different angle this time.’ Gaddis was wondering how best to play his trump card. ‘I’m interested in Platov’s relationship with three former intelligence officers from the Soviet era.’

‘Intelligence officers—’

‘Fyodor Tretiak was a high-ranking KGB resident in Dresden. Edward Crane was a British double agent for more than fifty years. The man who ran him from Berlin in the mid-1980s used the pseudonym Dominic Ulvert.’

Wilkinson’s shock came down the long-distance line as a whispered expletive.

‘You bloody idiot. Is this line secure?’

‘I think so—’

‘I will thank you not to contact me here again.’