The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [49]
‘Patient for what?’
‘I really have absolutely no idea about AGINCOURT. Eddie said he climbed fairly high in the Labour Party in the sixties and seventies. But that was all a long time ago.’
‘The Labour Party?’
Neame looked up. Beneath his eyes were patches of discoloured skin, years marked on the face as black stains. ‘Labour, yes.’
‘It’s just that you didn’t mention that in the cathedral.’
‘And?’
‘It’s helpful, that’s all.’
‘Well, he was hardly likely to be a Tory, was he? We’re talking about a working-class Yorkshireman, a Communist.’
Suddenly, some of the energy seemed to go out of Neame, like the fading grandeur of a once great house, and he was left looking breathless and tired. As if to confound this impression, he reached down to the floor and, with considerable effort, lifted a flimsy plastic carrier bag up on to the table.
‘I wanted to give you something,’ he said, stifling a cough.
‘Are you all right, Tom?’
‘I’m all right.’ Neame’s half-smile was almost paternal in its affection. Gaddis looked down at the bag and realized, with an excitement close to euphoria, what it contained.
‘Is that what I think it is?’
He was convinced it was the memoirs: there was something in the looseness of the plastic, the weightlessness of it as Neame had lifted the bag to the table. When he again glanced down, he could see the stapled corner of what looked like a manuscript. There was not much of it, just a few pages, but it was surely at least a part of the prize he craved.
‘Call this an act of faith,’ Neame said, encouraging Gaddis to open the bag. ‘It’s also evidence of my faltering memory. I’m afraid I have proved quite incapable of memorizing the details of ATTILA’s behaviour during the war.’
‘His behaviour during the war.’ Gaddis repeated the phrase without inflection, because he now had the stapled manuscript in his hands and was focused solely on what it contained. To his disappointment, he saw that it was merely three pages of hastily scrawled notes, written on fresh sheets of A4. The handwriting was identical to that on the notes which Peter had handed to him in Waterstone’s. In other words, Edward Crane hadn’t been anywhere near it. ‘What is this?’
‘A brief summary of what Eddie admits to having passed to the Soviets.’ Neame was looking beyond him, at the bar. ‘The extent of his treachery.’
Gaddis didn’t understand. Crane had continued working for MI6 until the 1980s. He had betrayed his country for the better part of fifty years. How could these three flimsy pages constitute the full extent of his treachery? He was suddenly sick of questions and dead ends, sick of being misled. He didn’t care if Neame was feeling unwell. He wanted answers.
‘Tom, I thought this was—’
‘I know what you thought it was.’ Neame was again touching the knot on his wool tie, as if doing so would somehow preserve the dignity of their discussion. ‘I’m not ready to give you that yet. But have a look at what there is. It should still be of considerable interest to you.’
Gaddis felt like an errant child being set a task by a particularly exacting father. He saw a word which he recognized as ‘Bletchley’ and read what Neame had scribbled underneath:
E works briefly at Bletchley in 42
First-hand access to ULTRA/ in tandem with the Carelian
Armour-piercing shells + Tiger tanks (Kurskaia Douga)
‘I’m having trouble understanding this,’ Gaddis told him, flicking to the next page. Here, Neame appeared to have copied out verbatim a passage from the memoirs.
That winter, with Cairncross’s assistance, we were able to save the lives of thousands of Soviet soldiers on the eastern Front. This was the period of the Citadel offensive. Thanks to the code-breakers, I was able to pass detailed information about Nazi troop movements to MANN, allowing the Soviet commanders to move their men out of harm’s way in good time.
MANN, Gaddis knew, was the