The Trinity Six (2011)

  CHARLES CUMMING

  The Trinity Six

  for my sister, Alex for her children, Lucy, Edward and Sophie and to the memory of Simon Pilkington (1938-2009)

  You know, you should never catch a spy. Discover him and then control him, but never catch him. A spy causes far more trouble when he’s caught.

  Harold Macmillan

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Acknowledgements

  A note on ‘The Cambridge Five’

  By the same author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  ‘The dead man was not a dead man. He was alive but he was not alive. That was the situation.’

  Calvin Somers, the nurse, stopped at the edge of the towpath and looked behind him, back along the canal. He was a slight man, as stubborn and petulant as a child. Gaddis came to a halt beside him.

  ‘Keep talking,’ he said.

  ‘It was the winter of 1992, an ordinary Monday night in February.’ Somers took an apple from his coat pocket and bit into it, chewing over the memories. ‘The patient’s name was Edward Crane. It said he was seventy-six on his notes, but none of us knew what was true and what wasn’t. He looked mid-sixties to me.’ They started walking again, black boots pressing through the mud. ‘They’d obviously worked out it was best if they admitted him at night, when there were fewer people around, when the day staff had gone off shift.’

  ‘Who’s “they”?’ Gaddis asked.

  ‘The spooks.’ A mallard lifted off the canal, quick wings shedding water as he turned towards the sun. ‘Crane was brought in on a stretcher, unconscious, just after ten on the evening of the third. I was ready for him. I’m always ready. He bypassed A&E and was put straight into a private room off the ward. The chart said he had no next of kin and wasn’t to be resuscitated in the event of cardiac arrest. Nothing unusual about that. Far as anyone was concerned, this was just another old man suffering from late-stage pancreatic cancer. Hours to live, liver failure, toxic. At least, that was the story MI6 was paying us to pedal.’

  Somers threw the half-eaten apple at a plastic bottle floating on the canal and missed by three feet.

  ‘Soon as I got Crane into the room, I hooked him up to some drips. Dextrose saline. A bag of Amikacin that was just fluid going nowhere. Even gave him a catheter. Everything had to look kosher just in case a member of staff stuck their head round the door who wasn’t supposed to.’

  ‘Did that happen? Did anybody see Crane?’

  Somers scratched the side of his neck. ‘Nah. At about two in the morning, Meisner called for a priest. That was all part of the plan. Father Brook. He didn’t suspect a thing. Just came in, administered the last rites, went home. Soon after that, Henderson showed up and did his little speech.’

  ‘What little speech?’

  Somers came to a halt. He didn’t make eye contact very often but did so now, assuming a patrician tone which Gaddis took to be an attempt at impersonating Henderson’s cut-glass accent.

  ‘“From this point onwards, Edward Crane is effectively dead. I would like to thank you all for your work thus far, but a great deal remains to be done.”’

  A man pushing a rusty bicycle came towards them on the towpath, ticking past in the dusk.

  ‘We were all there,’ said Somers. ‘Waldemar, Meisner, Forman. Meisner was so nervous he looked as if he was going to throw up. Waldemar didn’t speak much English and still didn’t really understand what he’d got himself involved in. He was probably just thinking about the money. That’s what I was doing. Twenty grand in 1992 was a lot of cash to a twenty-eight-year-old nurse. You any idea what we got paid under the Tories?’

  Gaddis didn’t respond. He didn’t want to have a conversation about under-funded nurses. He wanted to hear the end of the story.

  ‘Anyway, at some point Henderson took a checklist out of his coat pocket and ran through it. First, he turned to Meisner and asked him if he’d filled out the death certificate. Meisner said he had and produced a biro from behind his ear, as if that proved it. I was told to go back down to Crane’s room and wrap the body. “No need to clean him,” Henderson said. For some reason, Waldemar - we called him “Wally” - thought this was funny and we all just stood there watching him laugh. Then Henderson tells him to pull himself together and gives him instructions to have a trolley waiting, to take the old man down to the ambulance. I remember Henderson didn’t talk to Forman until the rest of us had gone. Don’t ask me what he’d agreed with her. Probably to tag a random corpse in the mortuary, some tramp from Praed Street with no ID, no history. How else could they have got away with it? They needed a second body.’

  ‘This is useful,’ Gaddis told him, because he felt that he needed to say something. ‘This is really useful.’

  ‘Well, you get what you pay for, don’t you, Professor?’ Somers produced a smug grin. ‘What was hard is that we had other patients to attend to. It was a normal Monday night. It wasn’t as if everything could just grind to a halt because MI6 were in the building. Meisner was the senior doctor, too, so he was always moving back and forth around the hospital. At one point I don’t think I saw him for about an hour and a half. Wally had jobs all over the place, me as well. Added to that, I had to try to keep the other nurses out of Crane’s room. Just in case they got nosey.’ The path narrowed beside a barge and the two men were obliged to walk in single file. ‘In the end, everything went like clockwork. Meisner got the certificate done, Crane was wrapped up with a small hole in the fabric he could breathe through, Wally took him down to the ambulance and the old man was gone by six a.m., out into his new life.’

  ‘His new life,’ Gaddis muttered. He looked up at the darkening sky and wondered, not for the first time, if he would ever set eyes on Edward Anthony Crane. ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘Almost.’ Somers wiped his nose in the failing light. ‘Eight days later I was going through The Times. Found an obituary for an “Edward Crane”. Wasn’t very long. Tucked down the right-hand side of the page under “Lives Remembered”, next to some French politician who’d fucked up
during Suez. Crane was described as a “resourceful career diplomat”. Born in 1916, educated at Marlborough College, then Trinity, Cambridge. Postings to Moscow, Buenos Aires, Berlin. Never married, no offspring. Died at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, after “a long battle with cancer”.’

  A light drizzle was beginning to fall. Gaddis passed a set of lock gates and moved in the direction of a pub. Somers pushed a hand through his hair.

  ‘So that’s what happened, Professor,’ he said. ‘Edward Crane was a dead man, but he was not a dead man. Edward Crane was alive but he was not alive. That was the situation.’

  The pub was packed.

  Gaddis went to the bar and ordered two pints of Stella Artois, a packet of peanuts and a double of Famous Grouse. Thanks to Somers, he was down to the loose change in his pockets and had to pay the barman with a debit card. Inside his jacket he found the torn scrap of paper on which he kept his passwords and pin numbers and punched in the digits while the landlord made a noise through his teeth. With Somers still in the Gents, Gaddis sank the whisky as a single shot then found a table at the back of the pub where he could watch groups of shivering smokers huddled outside and try to convince himself that he had made the right decision to quit.

  ‘Got you a Stella,’ he said when Somers came up to the table. For an instant it looked as though he wasn’t going to sit down, but Gaddis pushed the pint towards him and said: ‘Peanuts.’

  It was just past six o’clock. West Hyde on a Tuesday night. Suits, secretaries, suburbia. A jukebox was crooning Andy Williams. Tacked up beside a dartboard in the far corner of the room was an orange poster emblazoned with the words:

  CURRY NIGHT - WEDNESDAY. Gaddis took off his corduroy jacket and looped it over the arm of a neighbouring chair.

  ‘So what happened next?’

  He knew that this was the part Somers liked, playing the pivotal role, playing Deep Throat. The nurse - the senior nurse, as he would doubtless have insisted - produced another of his smug grins and took a thirsty pull on the pint. Something about the warmth of the pub had restored his characteristic complacency; it was as if Somers had reprimanded himself for being too open beside the canal. After all, he was in possession of information that Gaddis wanted. The professor had paid three grand for it. It was gold dust to him.

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘That’s right, Calvin. Next.’

  Somers leaned back in his chair. ‘Not much.’ He seemed to regret this answer and rephrased it, searching for more impact. ‘I watched the ambulance turn past the Post Office, had a quick smoke and went back inside. Took the lift up to Crane’s room, cleared it out, threw away the bags and catheter and sent the medical notes down to Patient Records. You could probably check them if you want. Far as the hospital was concerned, a seventy-six-year-old cancer patient had come in suffering from liver failure and died during the night. The sort of thing that happened all the time. It was a new day, a new shift. Time to move on.’

  ‘And Crane?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘You never heard another word?’

  Somers looked as if he had been asked an idiotic question. That was the trouble with intellectuals. So fucking stupid.

  ‘Why would I hear another word?’ He took a long draw on the pint and did something with his eyes which made Gaddis want to deck him. ‘Presumably he was given a new identity. Presumably he enjoyed another ten years of happy life and died peacefully in his bed. Who knows?’

  Two smokers, one coming in, one going out, pushed past their table. Gaddis was obliged to move a leg out of the way.

  ‘And you never breathed a word about it? Nobody asked you any questions? Nobody apart from Charlotte has brought up this subject for over ten years?’

  ‘You could say that, yeah.’

  Gaddis sensed a lie here, but knew there was no point pursuing it. Somers was the type who shut down once you caught them in a contradiction. He said: ‘And did Crane talk? What kind of man was he? What did he look like?’

  Somers laughed. ‘You don’t do this very often, do you, Professor?’

  It was true. Sam Gaddis didn’t often meet male nurses in pubs on the outskirts of London and try to extract information about seventy-six-year-old diplomats whose deaths had been faked by men who paid out twenty grand in return for a lifetime of silence. He was divorced and forty-three. He was a senior lecturer in Russian History at University College London. His normal beat was Pushkin, Stalin, Gorbachev. Nevertheless, that remark took him to the edge of his patience and he said: ‘And how often do you do it, Calvin?’ just so that Somers knew where he stood.

  The reply did the trick. A little frown of panic appeared in the gap between Somers’s eyes which he tried, without success, to force away. The nurse sought refuge in some peanuts and got salt on his fingers as he wrestled with the packet.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘Crane didn’t speak at all. Before he was admitted, they’d given him a mild anaesthetic which had rendered him unconscious. He had grey hair, shaved to look like he’d undergone chemotherapy, but his skin was too healthy for a man supposedly in his condition. He probably weighed about seventy kilos, between five foot ten and six foot. I never saw his eyes, on account of the fact they were always closed. That good enough for you?’

  Gaddis didn’t answer immediately. He didn’t need to. He let the silence speak for him. ‘And Henderson?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘What kind of man was he? What did he look like? All you’ve told me so far is that he wore a long black overcoat and sounded like somebody doing a bad impression of David Niven.’

  Somers turned his head and stared at the far corner of the room.

  ‘Charlotte never told you?’

  ‘Told me what?’

  Somers blinked rapidly and said: ‘Pass me that newspaper.’ There was a damp, discarded copy of The Times lying in a trickle of beer on the next-door table. A black girl listening to a pink iPod smiled her assent when Gaddis asked if he could take it. He straightened it out and handed the newspaper across the table.

  ‘You’ve heard of the Leighton Inquiry?’ Somers asked.

  Leighton was a judicial inquiry into an aspect of government policy relating to the war in Afghanistan. Gaddis had heard of it. He had read the op-eds, caught the reports on Channel Four News.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  Somers turned to page five. ‘You see this man?’

  He flattened out the newspaper, spinning it through a hundred and eighty degrees. The nurse’s narrow, nail-bitten finger skewered a photograph of a man ducking into a government Rover on a busy London street. The man was in late middle-age and surrounded by a crush of reporters. Gaddis read the caption.

  Sir John Brennan leaves Whitehall after giving evidence to the inquiry.

  There was a smaller, formal Foreign Office portrait of Brennan set inside the main photograph. Gaddis looked up. Somers saw that he had made the connection.

  ‘Henderson is John Brennan? Are you sure?’

  ‘As sure as I’m sitting here looking at you.’ Somers drained his pint. ‘The man who paid me twenty grand sixteen years ago to cover everything up wasn’t just any old spook. The man who called himself Douglas Henderson in 1992 is now the head of MI6.’

  Chapter 2

  It was a long way from Daunt Books on Holland Park Avenue to that suburban September pub in West Hyde.

  A month earlier, Gaddis had been launching his latest book - Tsars, a comparative study of Peter the Great and the current Russian president, Sergei Platov - at a bookshop in central London. His editor, the part-owner of a boutique publishing house which had paid the princely sum of PS4750 for the book, hadn’t made it to the event. A lone diarist, on work experience at the Evening Standard, had poked her head around the door of the bookshop at six twenty-five, picked up a glass of room temperature Sauvignon Blanc and, having established that she had more chance of finding a story on the top deck of the number 16 bus, left after ten minutes. No celeb
rity historian, no literary editor, nor any representative of the BBC had replied to the invitations which the PR girl insisted had gone out - ‘first class’ - in the second week of July. A solitary notice in Saturday’s Independent had turned up one ashen-faced matriarch who had come ‘all the way from Hampstead because I so enjoyed your book on Bulgakov’, as well as a former student of Sam’s named Colin who claimed that he had spent the previous year ‘walking around Kazakhstan reading Herman Hesse’. The rest were staff - the manager of the shop, someone to operate the till - about a dozen colleagues and students from UCL, Sam’s next-door neighbour, Kath, who was highly-sexed and always opened the front door in her dressing-gown, and his close friend, the journalist Charlotte Berg.

  Did Gaddis care that the new book would most probably disappear without trace? Yes and no. Though politically active, he was under no illusions that a single book could change attitudes to Sergei Platov. Tsars would be politely reviewed by the broadsheet press in London and dismissed in Moscow as Western propaganda. It had taken three years to write and would sell perhaps a thousand copies in hardback. Long ago, Gaddis had decided to write solely for the pleasure of writing: to expect greater rewards was to invite frustration. If the public enjoyed his books, he was happy; if they didn’t, so be it. They had better things to be spending their hard-earned cash on. He had no desire for fame, no innate interest in making money: what mattered to him was the quality of the work. And Tsars was a book that he was proud of. It amounted to a sustained attack on the Platov regime, an attack which he had tried to condense, as succinctly as possible, into a 750-word op-ed in the Guardian which had appeared three days earlier.