The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [52]
Tanya knew that Sam Gaddis downloaded Herbie Hancock albums on iTunes; that he bought most of his clothes in Zara and Massimo Dutti; that he ate take-away Lebanese at least two nights a week and rented old Howard Hawks movies from a store in Brook Green. She had read his book on Sergei Platov and was three-quarters of the way through the biography of Mikhail Bulgakov. She knew that he played squash in Ladbroke Grove every Wednesday morning and football under floodlights on Sunday evenings at six. He was popular with the students she had spoken to at UCL and widely admired by his colleagues. He had six points on his driving licence for two counts of speeding and hadn’t paid the BBC licence fee for seven years. He had attended A&E at Charing Cross Hospital, Hammersmith, with a dislocated jaw and a broken nose as a result of a fight on 5 October 1997. For a brief period, around the time of his divorce, he had been prescribed Temazepam for insomnia. He was otherwise in perfect health and had never seen a shrink. Tanya had ordered intercepts on Gaddis’s mail and had seen the postcards which he wrote to his five-year-old daughter, Min, in Barcelona. He was, by all accounts, a loving and dutiful father.
What else did she know about Sam Gaddis? That his current girlfriend, Holly Levette, was an out-of-work actress who spent a lot of time alone and was prone to bouts of melancholy which she kept hidden from Gaddis because she was increasingly serious about their relationship (an email to a friend had revealed as much). That he drank, on average, a case of wine and a bottle of whisky every month (a quick glance at his online account with Majestic had confirmed this). But it was Gaddis’s more recent Internet traffic which was of most interest to the Secret Intelligence Service. A URL history obtained from a source at AOL was alarming in its scope and intensity. It was this file which Tanya was taking to Sir John Brennan. Everything else, at this stage, was just background.
‘There’s a lot of interest in Edward Crane,’ she said, settling into the same chair in Brennan’s office at Vauxhall Cross which she had occupied at their first meeting. ‘A lot of interest in Crane and a lot of interest in Thomas Neame.’
Brennan looked out at the greying Thames. ‘I thought we’d already established that.’
Tanya betrayed no irritation at the slight.
‘It looks as though Doctor Gaddis was put on to the story by a journalist named Charlotte Berg. The late Charlotte Berg, as a matter of fact.’
Brennan kept his eyes on the river. ‘Late?’
‘She died suddenly a few weeks ago.’
‘How suddenly?’ He had turned to face her now, sensing something.
‘Heart attack. She was forty-five.’
‘History of that sort of thing in the family?’
‘I don’t know, sir. I can look into it.’
‘Do that.’
Tanya returned to her notes. ‘From email traffic, it looks as though Gaddis is going to put together a book proposal which his literary agent will then sell to the highest bidder. Newspaper serialization a certainty. There’s also been a lot of research activity on an old KGB cryptonym, AGINCOURT.’
This seemed to relieve Brennan, who snorted in satisfaction.
‘AGINCOURT? He’s not chasing that wild goose, is he? Well, long may it continue. If that’s all Doctor Gaddis has got to work on, we’re in the clear.’ He let out a deep sigh. ‘Christ, I thought the Russians were on to him. Anything seedy in his cookies?’
Tanya adjusted her skirt. She wasn’t sure what Brennan had implied by Russian involvement. ‘Nothing, sir. He’s been seeing a young woman, Holly Levette, for the past few weeks. The relationship appears to be becoming quite serious.’ She might have added that