Charles Cumming - The Trinity Six

‘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.’

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.