Charles Cumming - The Trinity Six

‘Oh, I sold those.’

He wondered how much time she had spent in the house, how often she and Jeremy were together. Was ‘NGO’ a cover for SIS? Almost certainly. They had probably met and fallen in love at work. Their jobs took them to all the corners of the Earth; they were probably lucky to meet for dinner three or four times a year.

‘The video,’ Tanya said.

Gaddis went back into the sitting room and retrieved the tape from the plastic bag. He turned to find her walking up the stairs.

‘I think Jeremy has an old machine in his office.’

Moments later, she was back, bearing a dusty video recorder and a tangle of leads.

‘Success.’

They knelt in front of the television. He could smell her perfume and wondered if she had applied more in the bedroom upstairs. The television was state of the art, a screen the size of a small deckchair, and Gaddis was concerned that the technology in the video would be out of date.

‘There’s a SCART plug,’ Tanya said hopefully, and slotted it into the back.

His next concern was the tape itself.

‘We need to take it easy,’ Gaddis said. ‘These things can chew.’

He pushed the power button. The television was already on and automatically switched to an AV channel which appeared to support the video.

‘Give it a try,’ Tanya told him.

Gaddis slid the tape into the mouth of the VHS, felt it pull away from his fingers and clunk down on to the heads of the recorder. He heard the noise of the tape beginning to spool.

‘Don’t chew, you bastard,’ he muttered. ‘Don’t fucking chew.’

Tanya laughed. Her knee was touching his and he was aware that she did not seem interested in moving it. Suddenly, the television flared into life. But there was no sign of Sergei Platov. Instead, they were confronted by the credit sequence of the Parkinson show.

‘Can you turn the sound on?’ Gaddis asked.

Tanya pushed a button on a remote control and the theme tune jumped out at them. ‘Hang on,’ she said, and turned down the volume.

It appeared to be a relatively recent episode. The identity of the first guest — Jamie Oliver — confirmed that the show had been recorded within the last ten years.

‘Can we get past this?’ Tanya asked.

Gaddis held down the fast-forward button and they watched the programme spinning past in a blur of close-ups. Joan Rivers. Cliff Richard. Parky. For five minutes they were hunched on the ground, their eyes fixed on the screen, growing dizzy for any sign of a break in the transmission. But it never came. There was no film of Sergei Platov secluded in a Berlin safe house; instead, there was an episode of Cheers, followed by over an hour of blank, unrecorded fizz and static. As the tape came to an end, ejecting from the machine, Gaddis felt a dead weight of disappointment and voiced the thought that perhaps he had been too optimistic.

‘There’s always the other one,’ Tanya said, nodding at the plastic bag. As she stood up, the joints in her knees creaked.

Gaddis retrieved the BASF cassette. Tanya had opened a cupboard near the table containing a small Denon hi-fi. A tape deck was stacked halfway down. He handed her the cassette and sat in a hard wooden dining chair. She pressed ‘Play’. There was a three-second silence as the tape began, then the opening bars of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Gaddis met her eyes.

‘Patience,’ she said. ‘Patience.’

For more than an hour they listened to the ballet, wandering around the room, drinking second cups of tea, making scrambled eggs on toast. Halfway through the second side, Tanya gave up and opened a bottle of wine, convinced that no recording of Platov existed. Gaddis dutifully heard the tape to the end, then took his plate through to the kitchen.

‘Back to square one,’ he said.

‘Back to square one.’

She was sitting on a stool in the corner of the kitchen. He began to wash up the pan in which Tanya had made the eggs, a guest earning his keep. It was past ten o’clock, the long, strange day drawing to an end.

‘You must be exhausted,’ she said. ‘Holly can’t have given me all the boxes.’ Gaddis rinsed the pan in a stream of hot water. ‘Her house is a tip. Most of the files were in a store room in the basement of her building. It’s possible there are more of them in Tite Street.’

‘You can’t call Holly,’ Tanya said.

The finality of the instruction annoyed him. ‘What?’

‘We don’t know if her phone is compromised, if her house is being watched.’ Tanya’s tone was businesslike and matter of fact, as if she was deliberately killing off the intimacy which had built up between them since the airport. ‘You ring her and it could draw the Russians right to you.’

Gaddis was silent as he dried their plates. He wondered why Tanya’s mood had changed at the very mention of Holly’s name. Was she jealous? As the evening had drawn on, they had been as relaxed in each other’s company as lovers. Now she had offered him a stark, blunt reminder of his circumstances. He began to resent the power that she held over him.

‘How am I supposed to reach her then?’

‘Let me work it out,’ she replied, though it sounded as if she was running short of ideas. ‘I have to go to the Office first thing in the morning. Brennan knows about Wilkinson. There have been reports on the news. He probably won’t know that I got you out of Vienna. He certainly doesn’t know that you’re staying here. I’ll have a lot of explaining to do. But there’s a possibility that we can still find a way of protecting you and resolve everything with the Russians.’

It sounded like hot air. Gaddis looped the tea-towel over the back of a chair. ‘You’re not listening to me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be wrapped in cotton wool. I don’t need protecting. There’s a chance that Holly has the Platov tape gathering dust in the basement of her house. All I’m asking is that you give me the chance to call her to see if she’ll look for it. It’s that simple.’

‘Patience,’ Tanya replied, for what seemed like the tenth time in as many hours, and Gaddis’s anger boiled over.

‘Is there any chance you could stop saying that? It’s like you’re talking to a four-year-old. I’m grateful for everything you’re doing, Tanya. Seriously. But I’m not going to sit on my arse for the next few days and hope that John Brennan suddenly changes his mind about me. What did you think I can achieve here? Watch some daytime TV? Do the crossword?’

Tanya, to his astonishment, took him at face value. ‘I’m afraid so. Until we can find somewhere safe for you to go, you’ll have to stay here. That means you can’t make phone calls. It means you can’t even go outside.’

He looked at her in disbelief. He had a glass of wine on the kitchen table and drained it as he absorbed what she had said. He was amazed by how quickly their flirtatious rapport had evaporated; there had been several moments during the course of the evening when he had even entertained the possibility that they might spend the night together. Now Tanya seemed to be taunting him with the stark fact of his imprisonment.

‘Fine,’ he said.

‘What do you mean “fine”?’

He recalled their conversation on the street outside UCL. Don’t go looking for Crane. Don’t go looking for Wilkinson. He had made promises to Tanya Acocella before. He could do so again.

‘I mean that I’ll do as you say. I’ll stay here while you go to work. I’ll watch Countdown and go through your knicker drawer. Forget about Holly. Forget about the tape.’

Tanya knew that he was lying.

‘That simple?’ She produced a look which suggested Gaddis was making her job even more difficult than it already was. ‘That’s not a Sam Gaddis “I-swear-I-won’t-go-to-Austria” type of promise, is it? The last time you said something like that, a few days later you were in a bar in Vienna.’