The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [46]
Crane’s controller at Oxford was a man named Theodore Maly, an undercover Soviet intelligence officer. Maly had already succeeded in recruiting Arthur Wynn, a former student at Trinity, to the Soviet cause. According to Neame, ATTILA and Wynn had succeeded in penetrating Oxford’s left-wing community and had effectively green-lit a ring of at least seven spies which, it transpired, had been every bit as successful as their counterparts at Cambridge. For Gaddis, this wasn’t just a major development in the Crane story; it was a huge scoop in its own right. An Oxford Ring had always been one of the great conspiracy theories of the Cold War. He now had evidence that such a ring had existed.
Yet that wasn’t the end of it. What Neame had told him about the identity of one of the members of the Oxford Ring was little short of astonishing. Crane’s memoirs apparently contained a cryptic reference to a Modern History under graduate from Yorkshire named ‘James’ who had been talent-spotted by ATTILA and subsequently recruited as an agent by the Soviets in 1938. Russian Intelligence had given ‘James’ the code name AGINCOURT. In the memoirs, Crane had revealed that AGIN-COURT had gone on to hold ‘one of the highest offices in the land’. Gaddis was convinced that this was the revelation that Charlotte had referred to at dinner in Hampstead three weeks earlier: a secret which would ‘rock London and Moscow to their foundations’. Neame had insisted that he did not know AGINCOURT’s identity, but Gaddis felt certain that, with enough time, he would be able to put the clues together and, at the very least, draw up a shortlist of suspects.
There were three days until his next scheduled meeting with Neame. Gaddis used the time to find out what was already in the public domain about Arthur Wynn. He also turned his attention to Oxford in the pre-war years. In his memoirs, Spycatcher, the former MI5 officer Peter Wright had raised the possibility of an Oxford Ring, identifying the academic Jennifer Hart, the Labour MP Bernard Floud and his brother, Peter, as suspected members. According to Neame, all three names appeared in Crane’s memoirs as active Soviet agents.
What intrigued Gaddis was that several suspects in the Oxford Ring had died in suspicious circumstances; one had even taken her life shortly after being interrogated by MI5. This had prompted the Security Service to suspend its investigations and to cover up the existence of the Oxford Ring for fear of a public scandal. But was Peter Wright’s version of events true, or a clever attempt to create a smokescreen not only for ATTILA and Wynn, but also for AGINCOURT?
That night, Gaddis went to the Donmar Warehouse theatre with Holly to watch a new play written by a friend with whom she had been at university.
‘You look bored,’ she said at the interval. ‘You look distracted.’
She was right. He couldn’t concentrate on the production. He wanted to walk out, to take Holly to dinner and tell her about Neame and Lampard, about ‘James’ and the Oxford spy ring. But it was impossible; he could not involve her. If he was honest with himself, he still did not know why Holly had approached Charlotte with her mother’s research papers. Had it just been a coincidence, or had Katya Levette in some way been involved in the Crane conspiracy? His mind was scrambled with possibilities.
The barman at the Donmar was a friend of Holly’s, an outof-work actor called Piers whose girlfriend was performing in the play. Afterwards, the four of them went for dinner in Covent Garden and he found that he enjoyed their company, and that Piers, in particular, was easygoing and likeable. But