The Trinity Six (4 page)

‘OK, OK.’ Gaddis’s hands were again raised, this time in mock surrender. ‘I’ll think about it.’

Charlotte looked relieved. ‘Well, thank God for that. Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.’ She stood and found three cups for the coffee.

‘And you say ATTILA is presumed dead?’ It was a first, conscious signal of Gaddis’s desire to explore things further.

‘Yes. But this Neame guy is slippery. Says he hasn’t seen Crane for over ten years. I’m not sure I believe that.’

‘Crane? That’s his name?’

‘Edward Anthony Crane. Wrote everything down in a document which Neame claims to have partially destroyed. Says the document also contained a revelation that would “rock London and Moscow to their foundations”.’

‘You mean over and above the fact that our government has covered up the existence of a sixth Cambridge spy?’

‘Over and above even that, yes.’

Gaddis was staring at her, staring at Paul, trying to work out if Charlotte was being duped. It was too good to be true and, at the same time, impossible to ignore. ‘And he hasn’t said what this scandal involved?’

Charlotte shook her head. ‘No. Not yet. But Thomas was Crane’s confessor. His best friend. He knows everything. And he’s willing to spill his guts before he pops his clogs.’

‘Not to mix metaphors,’ Paul muttered.

‘They would both be about the same age,’ Charlotte continued. ‘Ninety, ninety-one. Contemporaries at Cambridge. What do you think are the chances of both of them still being alive?’

‘Slim,’ Gaddis replied.

Chapter 5

Alexander Grek had been watching the Berg residence for five hours. He had witnessed Paul returning from work with two bulging Waitrose carrier bags at 18.45. While smoking a cigarette at 19.12, he had seen Charlotte at the first-floor window, recently emerged from a bath or shower, closing a set of curtains after securing a towel around her chest. Just after eight o’clock, an unidentified white male – early forties, dishevelled hair, carrying two bottles of red wine – had entered the property. Grek assumed that the man was coming for supper.

The unidentified male left the building at 23.21. He was approximately six feet tall, about eighty kilos, wearing a corduroy jacket with a leather satchel slung over his shoulder. The man shook Paul Berg’s hand in the doorway of the house. He then embraced and kissed Berg’s wife, Charlotte. Grek had a long-lens camera on the passenger seat of his car, but was unable to take a photograph of the man’s face because he walked backwards from the front door, moving towards the street while continuing to converse with his hosts. Having reached the pavement, the subject walked in the direction of Hampstead High Street, away from Grek’s vehicle.

Grek decided to stretch his legs. He followed the subject the length of Pilgrim’s Lane and observed him hailing a cab outside a branch of Waterstone’s bookshop. The taxi headed south. Grek lit a cigarette and walked back towards his vehicle. Halfway along the street, clamping the cigarette between his lips, he urinated at the base of a chestnut tree concealed from the street by a tarpaulin-covered skip.

Murders, he had long ago concluded, broke down into three distinct categories. They could be political, they could be military, and they could have a moral characteristic. Alexander Grek did not concern himself with conventional morality. His work was either military or political, and usually defensive. Tonight’s plan, for example, had the laudable goal of preventing graver consequences for his government. Grek was not an assassin in the formal sense. He could not be hired. As a young man, he had been trained by his country’s domestic intelligence service – commonly known as the FSB – and, following his retirement in 1996, had run a small, highly successful security company with offices in London and St Petersburg. In such circumstances, a man learns a great deal about the business of death. Yet Grek considered himself, first and foremost, a political animal. The ATTILA investigation was a threat to the state. That threat must therefore be removed. He was simply responding to his patriotic duty.

Setting down a half-empty bottle of mineral water, he pulled a woollen hat low over his head, exited the vehicle and walked across the street. Pilgrim’s Lane was deserted. Grek moved towards the eastern side of the house and picked the simple lock on the wooden gate which led into the garden. He had oiled the hinges the previous night so that the gate opened without a sound. He was now in a narrow channel in which were kept a bicycle, some garden tools and several rusted cans of paint. He looked up at the house to ensure that no lights were on in the upper floors. He then walked across the garden.

During the day, Charlotte Berg worked in a converted shed at the southern end of the property. She used a laptop computer which, at night, was kept inside the house. The shed contained a cheap colour printer, an outdated telephone and fax machine, some filing cabinets, a battered wooden chair and one or two photographs of sentimental value. To Paul, she would argue that it was better to keep the shed unlocked rather than to fit a padlock, which might convey the impression to any potential burglar that the office contained something worth stealing. Grek opened the shed, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him.

Sodium fluoracetate is a fine white powder, derived from pesticide. Odourless and inexpensive, it is commonly used as a poison to control the spread of rats in sewers. Grek had 10mg, in liquid form, in a vial which he now removed from his jacket pocket. The tiny surveillance camera, fitted in a light above Berg’s desk, had shown a small bottle of Evian, half-finished, beside the printer. Grek picked it up, poured the colourless liquid into the water and sealed the cap. Sufficient moonlight was coming into the room that he was able to remove the camera without the need for a torch. He also withdrew a listening device from the underside of Berg’s desk. He placed both items, and their tangle of wires, in the pockets of his jacket. When he had finished, Grek studied the paperwork on the desk. A telephone bill. An invoice for some painting and decorating. A copy of the second volume of
The Mitrokhin Archive
. Nothing which seemed to refer directly to ATTILA.

A noise outside. Something within three or four metres of the shed. Grek dropped to his knees. He heard the noise a second time and recognized it as an animal, possibly a fox. The Berg’s dog, Polly, had no access to the garden at night and would presumably be asleep indoors.

Grek stood up slowly. He opened the door of the shed and walked back along the garden. He checked the street as he emerged from the shadows of the house and crossed Pilgrim’s Lane when he was sure that he was not being observed. He unlocked the car, emptied his pockets on the passenger seat and pulled out in the direction of Hampstead High Street.

Chapter 6

Gaddis was in his study at UCL when he received the call. The number had come up as ‘Unknown’.

‘Sam? It’s Paul.’

‘You sound terrible. Is everything all right?’

‘It’s about Charlotte.’ His voice was strangely apologetic. Even at this wretched hour, he somehow managed to maintain a sense of decorum. ‘I’m sorry to have to be the one who tells you. She had a heart attack this morning. She’s gone.’

Gaddis had had three such telephone conversations in the course of his life. When he was sixteen, his older brother had been killed in a car crash in South America. At Cambridge, a close friend had hanged himself on the eve of Finals. And, just before his fortieth birthday, he had learned that Katarina Tikhonov had been assassinated at her apartment in Moscow, the victim of a contract killing tacitly approved by Sergei Platov. He remembered each conversation, each occasion, very clearly, and his distinct reactions to them. He found himself saying: ‘What? A heart attack?’ because he needed words with which to douse the nausea of shock.

Paul replied simply: ‘Yes,’ then, almost immediately, because this was just one of a dozen calls he would have to make: ‘Nothing more to be said now.’

‘Yes, of course. I’m so sorry, Paul.’

‘I’m sorry for you, too.’

Gaddis went to the floor in a slow crouch, with the strange and vivid sensation of his bones expanding, his skin stretching, as if his body wanted to escape itself. The news did not at first seem coherent, but then generated a grim logic. Charlotte drank too much. Charlotte smoked too much. Charlotte’s heart had given out. He stood and leaned on his desk. He was concerned that a student or colleague might knock on the door of the office and walk in. He locked it from the inside and, needing fresh air, went to the window, struggling with the latch until it opened suddenly, the noise of building works bursting into the tiny, cramped room. And Sam was ashamed of himself, because within minutes of absorbing what Paul had told him, he was thinking about Edward Crane. With Charlotte gone, it would no longer be possible to co-write the book. He would have to find another source of income, another way of paying off his debts. He felt utterly bereft.

Charlotte had apparently gone to her office in the morning, typed a few emails, read the
Guardian
online. At some point, probably between ten and eleven o’clock, she had come back into the house to make some toast, bringing the wastepaper basket from the office. Paul had found her on the floor of the kitchen, Polly whimpering at her side, the toast popped. No autopsy had been carried out. The doctors and coroner had both agreed that Charlotte had suffered a massive heart attack as a result of a genetic coronary weakness allied to an unhealthy lifestyle.

In the ensuing days, Gaddis helped Paul to arrange the funeral. He wrote a eulogy, at the family’s request, and drew up the Order of Service, which he arranged to have printed at a small shop in Belsize Park. It helped to have practical tasks to occupy his mind, to lift his constant sense of despair. He felt that he was a support to Paul, who had withdrawn into an almost impenetrable privacy. Day and night, Sam’s mind shuttled back and forth across more than two decades of memories: the first years of his friendship with Charlotte at Cambridge; their brief love affair; then the span of Sam’s eight-year marriage to Natasha, and the long-running tension between the two women. Sam reflected that there was now nobody in his life – certainly no woman – with whom he had a comparable friendship. Over the previous ten years his group of friends had thinned out, either side-tracked by the demands of small children, or living with partners with whom he felt no real affinity. It was part of the journey into middle-age. Charlotte had been one of the few longterm friends who had survived this period and who remained as a link to his past.

The funeral took place eight days after her death, with a wake at the house in Hampstead. By then, time had partly numbed Sam’s sense of grief and he was capable of putting on a front of charm and fortitude, acting almost as a host in the absence of Paul, who spent most of the afternoon upstairs in his room.

‘I just can’t face them, you know?’ he said, and Gaddis realized that there was nothing he could do to comfort him. Sometimes people are just better left to grieve. Polly was with him, as well as a dozen photographs of Charlotte, strewn across the bed. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked Gaddis. ‘Are you surviving down there?’

‘We’re surviving,’ Gaddis said, and reassured him with his eyes. ‘Everything’s fine.’

By six o’clock, only half a dozen people remained. Colleagues who had known Charlotte from her days on
The Times
had long since returned to their offices, filing copy on deadline for a morning edition which would not wait. Acquaintances from every nook and cranny of her life had paid their respects and dispersed into the late afternoon. When Paul came back downstairs, only a few members of the close family remained.

Gaddis had briefly given up smoking in the early part of the year, but was at it again, twenty a day since her death. Life, as Charlotte had proved, was indisputably too short. He smiled as he thought of that, lighting a Camel at the bottom of the garden and realizing that he was alone for the first time in almost twelve hours. A couple of caterers – a teenage boy and girl, both dressed in black – were clearing glasses from window sills at the front of the house. Polly was watching them, stretched out on the grass, scratching behind her ear with a bent, arthritic paw.

In the fading light of the early evening Gaddis opened the door of Charlotte’s office and stood in the room where his friend had been working on the morning of her death. The shed was as she had left it. Her laptop was on the desk, some documents had spooled out of the printer, a copy of
The Mitrokhin Archive
was open on the floor. Sam sat at the desk. He was snooping, no question, pretending to himself and to anyone who might walk in that he was convening with Charlotte’s spirit. But the reality was tawdry. He was looking for Edward Crane.

He picked up the document from the printer. It was an article about John Updike from the
New York Review of Books
. He looked down at the floor. What was he hoping for? Photographs? CD-ROMs? He flicked through an address book on the desk, even thought about switching on her mobile phone. His breathing was sharper and he was looking out of the window of the shed, checking to make sure that he would not be disturbed as he opened the first few pages of her diary. He looked at the days leading up to her death, saw only ‘Dinner: S’ scrawled on the night that he had come for supper. The last night that he had seen her alive.

‘What are you doing?’

Paul was at the door, staring at him in disbelief.

Gaddis snapped the diary shut and placed it on the desk.

‘Just trying to get close to her,’ he muttered. ‘Just trying to make sense of everything.’

‘In her
diary
?’

Sam stood up. ‘I don’t know why I did that.’ He guessed that Paul knew. ‘I just ended up in here. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.’

‘I don’t either.’

They looked at one another. Paul was so tired, so strung out, that he simply shook his head and stepped ahead of Sam, trying to reclaim his wife’s office as his own by rearranging the items on her desk. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back to the house.’

When they got there, it was as if the incident had been forgotten, but it sat heavily with Sam, who felt the shame of an otherwise decent man who has inexplicably let himself down. Why had he allowed himself to behave in such a way? It was Paul, oddly, who broke the impasse between them, phoning Sam two days later and inviting him to dinner at the house. No sooner was he inside the door than Sam was apologizing for what had happened. Paul waved away the incident and invited him into the kitchen, where a homemade lasagne – prepared by a worried neighbour – was baking in the oven. He poured two glasses of red wine and sat at the table.

‘I’ve been thinking a lot about your eulogy,’ he said. ‘One particular section.’

This made Gaddis uneasy. He had been honest about Charlotte’s shortcomings in his speech, her ruthlessness in the early years of her career, her habit of abandoning friends who did not live up to expectations. Paul had asked for a printed copy and might easily have taken offence.

‘Which section?’ he asked.

Gaddis saw that Paul was holding the eulogy in his hand. He began to read aloud:

‘
In our lives, if we are lucky, we occasionally meet exceptional people. Sometimes, if we are even luckier, those people become our friends.
’ Paul stopped and cleared his throat before continuing. ‘
Charlotte was not just one of the most exceptional people that I have ever met, she was also my most treasured friend. I envied her and I admired her. I thought that she was reckless but I also thought that she was brave. Dostoyevsky wrote: “If you want to be respected by others, the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.” I cannot think of another person to whom this applies more than Charlotte Berg. And so death continues to take the best people first.
’

Gaddis put his hand on Paul’s shoulder.

‘You were absolutely right about that. I just wanted to tell you that what you said has been a great support to me.’

‘I’m glad.’

‘And I thought about what you were doing in her office. I tried to imagine what Charlotte would have made of it.’ Gaddis began to respond but Paul interrupted him. ‘I think she would have done the same thing. Or, at least, I think she would have understood why you were there. You wanted to go into her office to see where she had been that morning, to get close to her, as you said at the time. You found yourself reminded of Edward Crane, you became distracted by the possibility of looking at her research. It was a long day. You were tired.’

‘I was snooping,’ Gaddis replied bluntly. He was touched that Paul had tried to find a way of forgiving him, but didn’t want to be let off the hook. ‘I was saying goodbye to the Cambridge book. I knew it was over and I was feeling sorry for myself.’

‘What do you mean you knew it was over? Why?’

The reply to the question seemed so obvious that Gaddis did not bother making it. Paul went to the oven and checked the lasagne. He seemed more at ease than he had been two days earlier; his privacy had been restored. He had the luxury of being alone with his grief. Turning, he said: ‘Why don’t you keep going? Why don’t you take a look at Charlotte’s research and try to work it up into a book?’

Gaddis could think of nothing to say. Paul saw his confused reaction and tried to convince him.

‘I don’t want her efforts to go to waste. She’d agreed to write a book with you. She would have wanted you to continue.’

‘Paul, I’m not an investigative journalist, I’m an archives man.’

‘What’s the difference? You interview people, don’t you? You can follow a trail from A to B. You know how to use a telephone, the Internet, a public library? How hard can it be?’

Gaddis was taking a packet of cigarettes from his jacket but it was just a reflex and he quickly replaced them, fearful of seeming tactless.

‘Go ahead and smoke.’

‘I’m fine. I’m going to quit.’

‘Listen’ – Paul switched off the oven, took out the food – ‘I won’t take “no” for an answer. Next time you have a free afternoon, come up to the house. Have a look through Charlotte’s research and see what you make of it. If you think she was on to something, if you think you can track down this Cambridge spy, write the book and put Charlotte’s name alongside yours.’ He made an uncharacteristically extravagant gesture with his hand. ‘You have my blessing, Doctor. Go forth.’