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Chapter 12

Some things are so obvious that they can embarrass you with their simplicity.

Gaddis had been working at home over the weekend – preparing a lecture for the new term at UCL, fixing a leaking pipe in his leaking bathroom – when he needed to boot up an old laptop in his office in order to find an email sent to him by a colleague several years earlier. As he was scrolling through the cluttered inbox, he saw a cluster of emails sent to him by Charlotte from a hotmail address that Paul had known nothing about: bergotte965@hotmail. com. Charlotte had set up the account during a difficult period in her marriage in order to communicate privately with three of her closest friends, Gaddis among them. It was a eureka moment, a solution that had been staring him in the face. More than a week had passed since Gaddis had spent the fruitless day in Hampstead searching through Charlotte’s office. It had never occurred to him that she might have used the hotmail to communicate with Thomas Neame.

He needed a password, of course, but that was easy. Gaddis simply had to type Charlotte’s mother’s maiden name into a security check, give her date of birth, and the details were forwarded instantly to her Outlook inbox. Gaddis could access this via webmail and within five minutes was staring at the messages.

It was like a sequence of lights illuminating a darkened highway. Before his eyes was a list of every main player in the St Mary’s cover-up. There were emails from Benedict Meisner, messages with the subject heading ‘Lucy Forman’, as well as frequent exchanges with Calvin Somers. Gaddis had surely stumbled upon the key which would unlock the door of Charlotte’s research. It was all here, everything he would need to find Neame.

He began with the Meisner correspondence, but quickly realized that it was a legal and factual dead end. Now working as a homeopathic doctor in Berlin, Meisner denied ever having met Calvin Somers or playing any role in faking the death of Edward Crane.

As I have repeatedly pointed out to you, any suggestion that I was involved in gross professional misconduct of the sort you describe is as absurd as it is defamatory. Should you continue to pursue this matter, I would have no hesitation in instructing my lawyers to instigate proceedings against you, and against any newspaper or publication which chooses to publish these bizarre allegations.

Gaddis turned to the message with the subject heading ‘Lucy Forman’. The email was from Forman’s sister. It transpired that Forman had died in a car accident in December 2001. In a second email, the sister confirmed that Forman had indeed been working in London in February 1992, the winter of Crane’s supposed death.

As Gaddis was finishing Charlotte’s correspondence with Somers – most of which related to arrangements for various meetings in West Hyde and Chorleywood – he noticed a new message in the Hotmail inbox, addressed to bergotte965@hot mail.com from ‘Tom Gandalf’ with the subject heading ‘Wednesday’. It could have been spam, but he clicked it.

tomgandalf@hushmail.com has sent you a secure email using Hushmail. To read it please visit the following web page …

A weblink was listed below. For a moment, Gaddis was concerned that it would download a virus into his computer. But the coincidence of the Christian name ‘Tom’, added to the clandestine nature of the message, convinced him that the email had originated with Neame. He clicked the link and was taken to the website for an email encryption service.

Your message has been protected using a question and answer which was created by the sender. You must correctly answer this question, word for word, to retrieve your message. You will be limited to five incorrect responses.

Question: Who was in the photograph that I showed you at our last meeting?

Gaddis typed ‘Crane’, then ‘Edward Crane’ into the response box, but his guesses were rejected. What had Neame shown Charlotte? A photograph of Sir John Brennan? A picture of Maclean or Philby? Christ, for all he knew, it could have been a shot of the Loch Ness Monster swimming to Fort William and clambering up Ben Nevis before breakfast. Without an answer to the question, he was no closer to Neame, no closer to Crane. All of his initial enthusiasm over the hotmail account had evaporated inside an hour: Forman was dead, Somers had spilled his guts and Meisner would doubtless slam the door in his face if he hopped on a plane to Berlin.

It was square one again. Gaddis Redux. Charlotte had been carrying around the entire story in her head. He looked at his desk, where he had scribbled down the cost of a cheap flight to Sheremetyevo on the back of a bank statement. His only hope now was a miracle in Moscow.

The Trinity Six

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