The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [36]
‘You’d known him since childhood?’
‘Since Trinity. That hardly qualifies as childhood. I will say this, though. Eddie sent me a document about a year after the St Mary’s operation. A sort of shortened autobiography, if you will. Highlights from the life of a master spy.’
This revived Gaddis. Here, at last, was something concrete. He felt a rush of satisfaction, a feeling of the pieces at last coming together. Charlotte had mentioned the document, but he did not want to betray to Neame too much of what he knew.
‘Jesus,’ he said, momentarily forgetting that he was sitting in the body of a thirteenth-century cathedral. Neame grinned.
‘This is a place of Christian worship, Doctor Gaddis. Do mind your language.’
‘Point taken.’ It was their first shared joke and Gaddis again tried to take quick advantage of Neame’s lighter mood. ‘So what happened to this document? Do you still have it? Have you attempted to get it published?’
‘Published!’
‘What’s so ridiculous about that?’
Neame coughed and again appeared to be seized by a short, intense pain in his chest. ‘Don’t be absurd. Eddie would have had a fit.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Because he was a creature of habit. That habit was privacy. He gave me his memoirs on the tacit understanding that I would not disseminate them.’
‘Do you really believe that?’
Neame looked as though nobody had questioned his judgement for forty years. Gaddis tried a different approach.
‘By writing down an account of his life and by sending it to you, wasn’t Crane subconsciously hoping that his story would see the light of day?’
‘Subconsciously?’ Neame made the word sound utterly absurd.
‘I take it from your reaction that you’re not a Freudian.’
A thread of spittle appeared on the old man’s lower lip which he was forced to wipe away with a folded white handkerchief. The effort appeared both to annoy and to embarrass him; here were the small humiliations of old age. Replacing the handkerchief in the pocket of his tweed trousers, he turned to face the altar.
‘Look, I have arranged to meet you here today because I have made a decision to set the record straight about Eddie Crane, whom I believe was a hero to our country.’
‘A hero.’ Gaddis repeated the word without inflection.
‘That is correct. And not the modern sort of hero, either. These days a young man can dip his toe in Afghanistan and be given a VC. It’s a nonsense. I mean the proper sort of heroism, the hero who risks not just life and limb, but reputation.’ Neame coughed with the effort of driving home his point. ‘But I want to be able to tell the story in my own way and in my own time. I cannot simply betray Eddie’s confidence by releasing his manuscript to the highest bidder. I want to be able to control the flow of information. I want to be dealing with somebody that I can trust.’
Gaddis wanted to say: ‘You can trust me,’ but thought better of it. He knew that he was slowly earning Neame’s respect, moment by moment, but did not want to jeopardize that with an incautious remark.
‘The manuscript came to me with some information about Eddie’s new circumstances. There was also a set of instructions.’ Just as he had felt beside the canal, Gaddis longed to be writing notes, but he was obliged to commit everything to memory. ‘Eddie told me that he was living quietly in Scotland under a new identity, protected by his former masters in the Foreign Office. He was not, he said, in particularly good health and did not expect to see me again. “These are some private recollections of an unusual life,” he wrote. “I have set them down for my own personal satisfaction.” That sort of thing. I have no idea if he made other copies. I very much doubt that he did. As I said, Eddie was in the privacy business. But I believe in history, Doctor Gaddis. I think Eddie knew that about me. And I believe the world has a right to know what this man did for his country.’
‘For Russia?