The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [141]
* * *
He woke at eight to find that Tanya had already left for work. There was a note on the kitchen table reiterating her demand that Gaddis remain in the house. ‘If you have to smoke,’ she said, ‘keep doing it in the garden.’ He scrunched the note into a ball and threw it into a bin, noticing a spare set of house keys hanging on a nearby hook. He pocketed them, fixed some cereal and a percolator of coffee, read the second half of the Spectator and smoked a cigarette through an open window. At about nine o’clock he had another shower, changed into a shirt which Tanya had hung for him on the landing – ‘another one of Jeremy’s’, the note had said – and wondered how he was going to kill the next ten hours under effective house arrest. He was not nosey by nature and had no interest in going through Tanya’s private possessions; his own encounter with a permanent blanket of MI6 surveil-lance had made him more, not less respectful of other people’s privacy. He flicked through a couple of photo albums, which were lying on a table in the sitting room, but learned only that Tanya and Jeremy had been on holiday together in Paris and Egypt and that Jeremy wore Speedos – without apparent irony – whenever he came within striking distance of a body of water.
By ten o’clock, Gaddis was bored out of his mind. He washed his clothes using the machine in the kitchen and hung them up on a line in the garden. By eleven he had resorted to watching daytime TV, settling on an old black-and-white thriller starring Jimmy Cagney. Was this his future? Whenever he stopped to think about what Brennan and Tanya were cooking up for him, he could only conclude that he would soon be sucked into the same witness protection programme which had claimed Edward Crane. It was no kind of life. It was too depressing even to contemplate. Such an existence would shut him off irreversibly from Min, from his work at UCL, from the entire structure of his life. He had to contact Holly. Finding the tape was his only route to freedom.
At half-past two, he found a Tesco spaghetti bolognese and some salad in the fridge. It was only as he was mopping up the sauce with a slice of stale brown bread that he remembered the package which had been posted through his door in Shepherd’s Bush. He retrieved the carrier bag from the sitting room and sat on the sofa with a kitchen knife, slicing through the seals on the envelope.
He did not recognize the handwriting on the front of the package. He assumed it was a book of some kind, a document sent by a colleague.
But it was not.
There were photographs inside. Seven of them. Gaddis pulled them out, along with a note which had been typed, unsigned, on a folded sheet of A4 paper.
THE SUM OF ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND POUNDS WILL BE PAID INTO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT. THIS BUYS MORE THAN YOUR SILENCE.
He turned the photographs over and felt his soul twist like a corkscrew.
There were seven pictures of Min.
Min at the beach. Min with a friend. Min with Natasha. Min outside her school.
Gaddis stood up and ran to the door.
Chapter 52
Gaddis found a phone box fifty metres from the Cromwell Road, the roar of six lanes of traffic funnelling into the booth as he picked up the receiver. He scrabbled in his pockets for change and had to turn the contents out into his hands as he searched for a twenty-pence piece. He had only pound coins, pushing one of them into the slot and accidentally dropping three others on to the floor of the booth as he did so.
The money clunked through, but did not register on the read-out. Gaddis swore and tried a second time, losing