The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [137]
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.
Chapter 51
‘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 fiancé.
‘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