Charles Cumming - The Trinity Six

She drove up to the house. Gaddis was obliged to negotiate a hop-scotch of pavement gob and dog turds en route to his front door, deposited by boxer dogs and uncastrated Dobermans whose owners used the street as a rat run between White City and the pubs and betting shops on Uxbridge Road. He put the larger of his two house keys into the Chubb lock and turned it, as he had turned it a thousand times before. He inserted the Yale and lifted the latch. His frayed nerves half-expected the obliteration of an explosion, the scream of an alarm, but the door opened and he found himself in the hall of his house, home again.

There was a small package on the doormat, addressed to Dr Sam Gaddis ‘BY HAND’, next to a bank statement and some junk mail. He went into the sitting room and walked straight towards the files in the corner of the kitchen. They may have a trigger on your front door. He turned each of the boxes upside-down so that their contents sprayed across the floor. It was like watching stones sliding on ice. Everywhere he looked there was paper. Gaddis could not remember which of the boxes contained the tapes and looked around in increasing desperation for signs of a package or cassette.

Wilkinson’s letter to Katya was still on the kitchen table, which he took as a sign that no one had broken into the house during his absence. There were two other boxes in the corner of the room, jammed up against the door which led out into the garden. Gaddis pulled open the cardboard flaps, inverted the boxes and again allowed the contents to pour out on to the floor.

Straight away he heard the clatter of a VHS cassette, saw it and picked it up. It was not labelled, but looked unscathed. He set it to one side and reached for the second box. He could feel how light it was in comparison with the others. He looked inside. There were just three pieces of A4 paper and — hidden beneath these — a blank BASF music cassette with ‘Prokofiev’ written down one side in faded blue biro.

He was sure that this was it: an audio recording of the interview with Platov. The VHS was also promising. Though relatively unmarked, it could have been a copy of the original film shot in the safe house in Berlin. He grabbed a plastic bag from a stash under the sink, put the tapes inside it and headed for the front door.

He stopped just as he was reaching for the latch. Gaddis turned and looked back at the house. Min had crawled up those stairs. The books in the hall were the books he had bought and shared with Natasha. In that sitting room, he had eaten dinner with friends, watched England win the Ashes. It was a place of memories. And now he would have to give it up. If what Tanya was saying was true — and he had no reason to doubt her now — the house would have to be put up for sale. That was the price of consorting with Edward Crane. That was the price of a blood feud with the FSB.

He picked up his post, put the package in the plastic bag alongside the tapes, opened the door and walked back out to the car.

‘Did you find anything?’

‘Two tapes,’ he said and took them out of the plastic bag. Tanya pulled away towards Uxbridge Road.

‘What’s on them?’

‘One of them is a tape with “Prokofiev” written down the side. The other is a blank VHS. Is there a video machine at the safe house?’

‘Probably.’

They headed west, through the gridlock of the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, then south in the direction of Kensington High Street. The pavements were crowded with families heading home at the tail end of the long afternoon, mothers and fathers doing their Sunday thing. On Earl’s Court Road, Tanya turned left into Lexham Gardens.

‘Where are we going?’ Gaddis asked.

‘Patience.’

She drove into a narrow mews and parked beside a black four-by-four with tinted windows. An elderly couple wearing bottle-green Huskies were coming out of a house three doors down. They looked up and spotted Tanya.

‘Hello, dear,’ said the woman, raising an emaciated hand. Her husband, who was using a walking stick and looked even older than Edward Crane, struggled to lift his head as he greeted her.

‘You know those people?’ Gaddis whispered. He wondered how secure the safe house could be if members of the Secret Intelligence Service were on nodding terms with its neighbours.

‘Friends of mine,’ she said.

Her reply made sense as soon as they walked into the house. Gaddis saw a photograph on a side table and reacted in disbelief; it was a picture of Tanya with her arms around another man. This wasn’t a safe house. This was her home. The man in the photograph was her fiance.

‘You live here?’

‘I live here.’

‘Is that a good idea?’

‘You don’t like Kensington?’

‘I meant, is it a good idea to be inviting me back to your house?’

‘It’s fine for the time being.’ She closed the door behind them, hooked up the security chain and slid a bolt across the top of the door. It was a first, symbolic indication of Gaddis’s confinement. ‘We can work something else out tomorrow.’

He did not know whether to be alarmed by the fact that Tanya had no access to a safe house or grateful to her that she was prepared to risk her wellbeing in order to provide him with sanctuary. He looked again at the photograph, fascinated by the man who had won her heart.

‘What’s his name?’ he asked, tapping the glass.

‘Jeremy.’

Jeremy looked exactly as Gaddis had imagined he would when he had first had dinner with Josephine Warner: well financed, reliable, sporty. He felt a pulse of envy.

‘Do you live together?’

‘A lot of questions, Sam.’

‘Forgive me. I don’t mean to intrude.’

Tanya threw the car keys on the side table. ‘Yes you do,’ she said and offered him a forgiving glance. ‘We normally live together, but he’s abroad this week. Works for an NGO in Zimbabwe. We’re getting married next year.’

She gestured Gaddis into the living room, a compact area with a large window on the street side, a staircase in the centre, and a door at the back leading into what appeared to be a small kitchen. The sitting room was lined with hardback books and hung with various portraits and landscapes by artists Gaddis did not recognize. There was a varnished wooden dining table parallel to the window and two sofas arranged in an L-shape around a large, flat-screen television. It wasn’t a house that felt particularly cosy or hospitable and for a moment he entertained the thought that Tanya had tricked him yet again. The photograph could have been posed with an SIS colleague; the pictures of Tanya dotted around the room, taken at various stages of her life, might easily have been transferred from her real home. But he could see no sense in that particular conspiracy. Why would she do it? What would be the point in continuing to fool him?

‘Tea?’ she asked.

‘Sure.’

The kitchen was as slick and contemporary as a mock-up in IKEA, but at least it felt lived-in. There were messages and newspaper clippings attached to the fridge by magnets, well-worn recipe books on a shelf in the corner, a burned wok hanging from a hook near the garden window. So this is how spies live, Gaddis thought. Just like the rest of us. He told Tanya that he liked his tea black with two sugars and she made a remark about taking it ‘in the Russian style’. To watch her move around the room — removing spoons from a drawer, pouring milk from the fridge — was as strange to him as the sight of the wristwatch at Gatwick. It was something that he had thought he would never see, something that he had never imagined.

‘What are you smiling at?’ she asked.

He decided to be honest. ‘It’s just interesting to see where you live,’ he said. ‘You don’t think of spies having toasters and microwave ovens. I was expecting a gun cabinet, an E-Type Jag.’