The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [41]
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Well, Deutsch recruited Eddie, but without telling Burgess or Blunt.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Moscow was worried that the network was already too big. They had Kim, they had Anthony, Guy, Donald and John. All it would take was for one of them to crack and the Brits would be able to dismantle the entire cell. So Eddie was set up on his own. In due course, Cairncross became what they call “conscious” that Crane was an asset, but none of the others, not even Guy, had a clue what was going on. Eddie was given the codename ATTILA. Deutsch told Burgess that he had no interest in working for the Party and that was that. Everybody moved on.’
Gaddis reached out and ran his hand along the wrought-iron radiator beside his chair. He was trying to work out the implications of what Neame had revealed, trying to walk the cat back.
‘That makes sense,’ he muttered, but Neame interrupted him.
‘As things turned out, the Soviets had actually done MI5 a favour.’
‘How’s that?’
The old man appeared to amuse himself with a private thought. It was clear that he enjoyed toying with Gaddis’s appetite for information. ‘Well, that’s another part of the story,’ he replied softly. ‘I’d be jumping ahead if I told you.’
‘Jump away.’
Neame smiled. ‘Oxford first.’
‘Oxford?’
‘Didn’t you know, Doctor?’ Neame turned in his seat, first to the left, then to the right, reassuring himself that they were not being observed. Gaddis could feel another secret coming. ‘The Russians sent Eddie to Oxford.’
Chapter 16
Calvin Somers left the Michael Sobel Centre via the staff entrance just after six o’clock and walked in pale evening sunlight towards Batchworth Heath. On autumn nights he preferred to take one of the narrow, overgrown paths through the woods and to cross a network of open fields towards the outskirts of Harefield, where he lived in a one-bedroom flat in the centre of town. It was mid September and there would be only a few more opportunities to walk to work before the clocks went back and the nights closed in and he was obliged to take his car. Beneath a thick Land’s End fleece, he was still wearing his pale green nurse’s uniform because he liked to wash when he returned home, rather than to use the showers in the more impersonal surroundings of the Mount Vernon Hospital.
A thirty-four-year-old cancer patient had died on the ward three hours earlier but Somers wasn’t thinking about him, wasn’t thinking about the patient’s grieving relatives or the student doctor who had cried when she glimpsed the mother collapsing in tears in the car park just after lunch. He was thinking about the box of Wolf Blass Chardonnay he was going to finish that night and the range of microwaveable ready-meals stacked in his fridge. What did he feel like for dinner? A curry? Fish pie? Nowadays – and he would happily admit this to anyone who asked, even to colleagues who felt quite differently about things – the deaths on the ward just seemed to blend into one another. You forgot who was who, who had suffered from what, which family member went with which patient. Maybe he was just sick of the job. Maybe Calvin Somers was finally sick of the sick.
He was about to cross the main road towards the Heath when he heard a noise behind him in the north-west car park and turned to find a man stepping out of a dark blue C-Class Mercedes with blacked-out windows. For a brief moment, Somers considered breaking into a run, because panic had surged inside his chest like an electric charge. But to run was a stupid idea. You didn’t run from a man like Alexander Grek. Grek could find you. Grek knew where you lived. The best thing, Somers decided, would be to do what he always did when it came to moments of uncertainty. He would become confrontational.
‘Are you following me?’
‘Mr Somers?’
‘You know who I am. Why are you here? Why have you come to my place of work? I thought our business was concluded. You assured me that our business was conclu—’
Grek interrupted him. ‘Please stop