The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [138]
‘Do you live together?’
‘A lot of questions, Sam.’
‘Forgive me. I don’t mean to intrude.’
Tanya threw the car keys on the side table. ‘Yes you do,’ she said and offered him a forgiving glance. ‘We normally live together, but he’s abroad this week. Works for an NGO in Zimbabwe. We’re getting married next year.’
She gestured Gaddis into the living room, a compact area with a large window on the street side, a staircase in the centre, and a door at the back leading into what appeared to be a small kitchen. The sitting room was lined with hardback books and hung with various portraits and landscapes by artists Gaddis did not recognize. There was a varnished wooden dining table parallel to the window and two sofas arranged in an L-shape around a large, flat-screen television. It wasn’t a house that felt particularly cosy or hospitable and for a moment he entertained the thought that Tanya had tricked him yet again. The photograph could have been posed with an SIS colleague; the pictures of Tanya dotted around the room, taken at various stages of her life, might easily have been transferred from her real home. But he could see no sense in that particular conspiracy. Why would she do it? What would be the point in continuing to fool him?
‘Tea?’ she asked.
‘Sure.’
The kitchen was as slick and contemporary as a mock-up in IKEA, but at least it felt lived-in. There were messages and newspaper clippings attached to the fridge by magnets, well-worn recipe books on a shelf in the corner, a burned wok hanging from a hook near the garden window. So this is how spies live, Gaddis thought. Just like the rest of us. He told Tanya that he liked his tea black with two sugars and she made a remark about taking it ‘in the Russian style’. To watch her move around the room – removing spoons from a drawer, pouring milk from the fridge – was as strange to him as the sight of the wristwatch at Gatwick. It was something that he had thought he would never see, something that he had never imagined.
‘What are you smiling at?’ she asked.
He decided to be honest. ‘It’s just interesting to see where you live,’ he said. ‘You don’t think of spies having toasters and microwave ovens. I was expecting a gun cabinet, an E-Type Jag.’
‘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