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Chapter 4

Eight hours later, Gaddis went for supper at the Hampstead house of Charlotte Berg. Berg had been his flatmate at Cambridge and his girlfriend – briefly – before he had been married. She was a former war correspondent who hid the scars of Bosnia, of Rwanda and the West Bank beneath a veneer of bonhomie and slightly fading glamour. Over roast chicken prepared by her husband, Paul, Charlotte began to share details of her latest piece, a freelance story to be sold to the Sunday Times which she claimed would be the biggest political scandal of the decade.

‘I’m sitting on a scoop,’ she said.

Gaddis reflected that it was the second time that day that he had heard the word.

‘What kind of scoop?’

‘Well, it wouldn’t be a scoop if I told you, would it?’

This was a game they played. Charlotte and Sam were rivals, in the way that close friends often keep a quiet, competitive eye on one another. The rivalry was professional, it was intellectual and it was almost never taken too seriously.

‘What do you remember about Melita Norwood?’ she asked. Sam looked over at Paul, who was concentratedly mopping up gravy with a hunk of French bread. Norwood was the so-called ‘Granny Spy’, exposed in 1999, who had passed British nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the 1940s and 50s.

‘I remember that she was swept under the carpet. Spied for Stalin, sped up his nuclear programme by about five years, but was allowed to die peacefully in her bed by a British government who didn’t want the negative publicity of trying an eighty-year-old woman for treason. Why?’

Charlotte pushed her plate to one side. She was a gestural, free-spirited woman of vast appetites: for cigarettes, for drink, for information. Paul was the only man she had ever been with who had been able to tolerate her many contradictions. ‘Fuck Melita Norwood,’ she said suddenly, grabbing Sam’s glass of wine by mistake and swallowing most of it.

‘If you say so.’

‘What about Roger Hollis?’ she asked quickly.

‘What about him?’

‘Do you think he was a traitor?’

Sir Roger Hollis was a grey area in the history of British intelligence. In 1981, the journalist Chapman Pincher had published a bestselling book, Their Trade is Treachery, in which it was alleged that Hollis, a former head of MI5, had been a KGB spy. Gaddis had read the book as a teenager. He remembered the bright red cover with the shadow of a sickle falling across it; his father asking to borrow it on a seaside holiday in Sussex.

‘To be honest, I haven’t thought about Hollis for a long time,’ he said. ‘Pincher’s allegations were never proved. Is that what you’re working on? Is that the scoop? Is there some kind of connection between Hollis and Norwood? She was associated with a KGB spy codenamed “HUNT” who was never identified. Was HUNT Hollis?’

Charlotte laughed. She was enjoying tapping into Gaddis’s reserves of expertise.

‘Fuck Hollis,’ she said, with the same abrasive glee with which she had dismissed Norwood. Gaddis was bemused.

‘Why do you keep saying that?’

‘Because they were small potatoes. Bit-part players. Minnows compared to what I’ve stumbled on.’

‘Which is …?’ Paul asked.

Charlotte finished off what must have been her ninth or tenth glass of wine. ‘What if I told you there was a sixth Cambridge spy who had never been unmasked? A contemporary of Burgess and Maclean, of Blunt, Philby and Cairncross, who is still alive today?’

At first, Gaddis couldn’t untangle precisely what Charlotte was telling him. He, too, had drunk at least a bottle of Côtes du Rhône. Hollis a Cambridge spy? Norwood a sixth member of the Ring of Five? Surely she wasn’t working on a crackpot theory like that? But he was a guest in her house, enjoying her hospitality, so he kept his doubts to himself.

‘I’d tell you that you were sitting on a fortune.’

‘This isn’t about money, Sam.’ There was no admonishment in Charlotte’s tone, just the bluntness for which she was renowned. ‘This is about history. I’m talking about a legendary KGB spy, codenamed ATTILA, who matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s. A man every bit as dangerous and as influential as Maclean and Philby. A mole at the heart of Britain’s political and intelligence infrastructure whose treason has been deliberately covered up by the British government for more than fifty years.’

‘Jesus.’ Gaddis tried to hide his scepticism. It surely wasn’t plausible that a sixth member of the Trinity ring had escaped detection. Every spook and academic and journalist with the slightest interest in the secret world had been hunting the sixth man for decades. Any Soviet defector, at any point after 1945, could have blown ATTILA’s cover at the drop of a hat. At the very least, Cairncross or Blunt would have given him up at the time of their exposure.

‘Where are you getting your information?’ he asked. ‘Why was there no mention of ATTILA in Mitrokhin?’

Vasili Mitrokhin was a major in the KGB who passed detailed accounts of Russian intelligence operations to MI6 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The documents were published in the UK in 1992.

‘Everybody thinks the entire history of Soviet espionage was contained in Mitrokhin.’ Charlotte lit a cigarette and looked utterly content. ‘But there was a ton of stuff he didn’t get his hands on. Including this.’

Paul put his knife and fork together. Charlotte’s husband was a tall, patient man, impassive to the point of diffidence. A successful City financier – hence the seven-figure, five-bedroom house in Hampstead – he loved Charlotte not least because she allowed him to blend into the background, to maintain the privacy he had worked so hard to protect. He was so inscrutable that Sam could never work out whether Paul viewed him as a threat to their marriage or as a valued friend. It was almost a surprise when he joined the fray, saying:

‘Come on, who’s your source?’

Charlotte leaned forward into an effectively conspiratorial cloud of cigarette smoke and looked at both men in turn. Her husband was the only person she could entirely trust with the information. Gaddis was a loyal friend, of course, a man of tact and discretion, but he also possessed a streak of mischievousness which made sharing a secret like this extremely risky.

‘Stays between these four walls, OK?’ she said, so that Gaddis was aware of what it meant to her. He felt a sudden thrust of envy, because she seemed so convinced of her prize.

‘Of course. Four walls. Won’t breathe a word.’

‘Can I tell Polly?’ Paul muttered, placing his hand on Charlotte’s back as he stood to clear the plates. Polly was their arthritic black Labrador and, in the absence of any children, their most cherished companion.

‘This is serious,’ she said. ‘I’m sworn to secrecy. But it’s so mind-boggling I can’t keep my mouth shut.’

Gaddis felt a historian’s excitement at the prospect of what Charlotte had uncovered. The sixth man. Was it really possible? It was like finding Lucan. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘Let me start at the beginning.’ Charlotte filled another glass of wine. Paul caught Sam’s eye and frowned imperceptibly. She was a functioning alcoholic: a bottle of wine at lunch, two at dinner; gins at six; a couple of tumblers of Laphroaig last thing at night. None of it ever seemed to affect her behaviour beyond a certain decibel increase in the volume of her voice. But the booze was undoubtedly beating her: it was putting years on, adding weight, black-bagging her eyes. ‘About a month ago I received a letter from a man called Thomas Neame. He claims to be the confidant of a British diplomat who spent his entire career, from World War II to the mid-1980s, working as a spy for the KGB. I made some basic enquiries, discovered that Thomas was kosher, and went to meet him.’

‘Went where?’ Paul was oblivious to the comings-and-goings of his wife’s career. Often she would disappear for weeks on end, pursuing a story in Iraq, in California, in Moscow.

‘That’s secret number one,’ Charlotte replied. ‘I can’t tell even you where Thomas Neame lives.’

‘Trust is such a wonderful thing between husband and wife,’ Gaddis muttered. ‘How old is this guy?’

‘Ninety-one.’ Charlotte gulped more wine. Her skin had darkened under the low lights of the kitchen, her mouth now ruby red with lipstick and wine. ‘But ninety-one going on seventy-five. You wouldn’t fancy taking him on in an arm wrestle. Very tough and fit, sort of war generation Scot who can smoke forty a day and still pop to the top of Ben Nevis before breakfast.’

‘Unlike someone else I know,’ said Paul pointedly, looking at the cigarette in his wife’s hand. Charlotte’s years of reporting overseas had weakened, rather than strengthened, what had once been an iron constitution. Both Paul and Gaddis worried about this but could no more have curtailed her lifestyle than they could have biked to the moon.

‘And how does Neame know that his friend was a spy?’ Gaddis asked. ‘How come it hasn’t leaked out before?’

His phone rang before Charlotte had a chance to respond. Gaddis plucked it from the pocket of his jacket and looked at the display. It was a text from Holly Levette.

NIGHTCAP …?

He was possessed by two contradictory impulses: to polish off his wine as quickly as possible and to grab a taxi south to Tite Street; or to come clean to Charlotte about his quest for a headline-grabbing story of his own.

‘Do you know this woman?’ he said, holding up the phone, as if there was a photograph of Holly on the screen. ‘Holly Levette?’

‘Rings a bell.’

‘Mother’s name was Katya. She was working on a history of the KGB when—’

‘Katya Levette!’ Charlotte reacted with mock horror. She shook her head and said: ‘Commonly regarded as the world’s worst hack.’

‘How so?’

She waved a hand in front of her face. ‘Not worth going into. Our paths crossed once or twice. She was constantly telling me how wonderful I was, but clearly looking for a quid pro quo. I think her daughter sent me an email after she died, saying how much Katya had admired something I’d written about Chechnya. Then offered me a load of old junk from her research papers.’

‘A load of old junk,’ Gaddis repeated, with a thump of despair.

‘Well, not junk.’ Charlotte looked sheepish. ‘Actually, I palmed her off on you. Told her to give them to a proper historian.’

‘Gee thanks.’

‘And now she’s been in touch?’

Gaddis nodded. ‘She didn’t mention that I was getting them second-hand. She told me how much she’d admired my Guardian article about Sergei Platov.’

Paul smothered a laugh. ‘Flattery will get you everywhere.’

Gaddis poured himself a glass of wine. Skirting around the dirty weekend in Chelsea, he explained that Holly had come to Daunt Books and offered him the KGB material on a plate.

‘A beautiful girl turns up like that, willing to hand over several hundred documents about Soviet intelligence, you don’t exactly turn a blind eye. How was I to know Katya was a fruitcake?’

‘Oh, she’s beautiful, is she?’ Charlotte asked, animated by the opportunity to tease him. ‘You never said.’

‘Holly is very beautiful.’

‘And she came to the launch? How come I didn’t meet her?’

‘Probably because you’d told her to get stuffed,’ Paul replied.

Charlotte laughed and picked at a chunk of candle wax on the table. ‘And now this girl is texting you at half-past ten at night. Is there something you’re not telling the group, Doctor Gaddis? Does Miss Levette need a bedtime story?’

Gaddis took a Camel from her open packet. ‘You’re lucky,’ he said, deliberately changing the subject. ‘Right now I’d sell my grandchildren for your Cambridge story.’ He lit the cigarette from the candle. Paul grimaced and waved a hand in front of his face, saying: ‘Christ, not you as well.’

‘The sixth man? Why?’

‘Financial problems.’ Gaddis made a gesture with upturned hands. ‘Nothing new.’

There was a strange kind of shame in being broke at forty-three. How had it come to this? He took the cigarette smoke deep into his lungs and exhaled at the ceiling.

Charlotte frowned. ‘Alimony? Is the fragrant Natasha turning out to be not quite as fragrant as we thought?’

Paul poured water into a cafetière of coffee and kept his counsel.

‘Tax bill. School fees. Debts,’ Gaddis replied. ‘I need to raise about twenty-five grand. Had lunch with my agent today. He says the only hope I have of working my way out of the situation is to write a hack job about Soviet intelligence. Doesn’t even have to be under my own name. So a sixth Cambridge spy is the perfect story. In fact, I’ll steal it off you. Bury you under the floorboards to get my hands on it.’

Charlotte looked genuinely concerned. ‘You don’t have to steal it,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you co-write a book with me? We can even use some of Katya’s magic files.’ Paul grinned. ‘Seriously. I’ll break the Cambridge story as an exclusive, but after that someone will want a book. You’d be perfect. I don’t have the patience to sit down and compose two hundred thousand words about a piece I’ve already written. I’ll want to move on to the next thing. But you could put ATTILA in context. You could add all the juice and flavour. Nobody knows more about Russia than you do.’

Gaddis declined outright. It would feel wrong to be piggybacking on Charlotte’s triumph. She was drunk and the booze was making promises she might not, in the cold light of morning, be willing to keep. Yet she persisted.

‘Sleep on it,’ she said. ‘Christ, sleep on it while you’re sleeping with Holly Levette.’ Paul plunged the coffee. ‘I’d love to work with you. It would be an honour. And it sounds as though it will get you out of a nasty situation.’

Gaddis slotted his mobile phone back in his jacket pocket and took Charlotte’s hand. ‘It’s an idea,’ he said. ‘No more than that. You’re incredibly kind. But let’s talk more in the morning.’

‘No. Let’s talk now.’ She wouldn’t let pride and British etiquette stand in the way of a good idea. Polly, her buckled legs seized by arthritis, came hobbling into the kitchen and lay at her feet. Charlotte leaned over and fed a piece of bread into her mouth, saying: ‘Do you think it’s a good idea, Pol?’ in a voice for a child. ‘I think it’s a good idea.’

‘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.

The Trinity Six

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