The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [53]
‘Yet,’ said Brennan pointedly.
Tanya removed a single strand of hair from the sleeve of her jacket. She was a skilful judge of character and had a sure sense that Sam Gaddis was one of the good guys. Brennan was never going to control him with something as crass as blackmail.
‘You mentioned that Mr Neame was resident at a nursing home in Winchester,’ she said. Brennan was tapping something into a computer.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it’s just that Gaddis drove there last week.’
He looked up. ‘You followed him?’
‘I’m afraid there wasn’t the opportunity, sir.’
‘But you think he went to see Neame?’
Tanya set the file to one side. ‘I assume so, yes. I haven’t been able to trace any email or telephone communications between the two of them.’
‘Fuck it.’ Brennan spat the words into his keyboard. ‘What the hell is Tom up to?’
Tanya felt that the question was rhetorical and did not offer a response. She had run a trace on Neame through the SIS mainframe and drawn a blank. This, in itself, had struck her as strange, even obstructive, but she felt that to raise the subject with Brennan would only irritate him further.
‘You say that Gaddis has been looking into AGINCOURT?’ he said.
‘Yes, sir.’
The Chief smiled. He had regained his composure. He knew Thomas Neame. He knew the way his mind worked.
‘Then we may not need to worry.’ He turned to the window, putting both hands against the glass. ‘You keep going with Gaddis,’ he said. ‘Press on. I think Tom may be trying to put him off the scent.’
Chapter 19
‘So Crane was never the sixth Cambridge spy?’
Gaddis could feel the whole book crumbling around him, weeks of false leads culminating in a final dead end at a mock-Tudor pub in Hampshire.
‘Come again?’
‘You spent our last meeting telling me that Crane was recruited at Trinity by Arnold Deutsch, that he was a close friend of Guy Burgess, that he ran a ring of NKVD spies out of Oxford in the late 1930s. You’re now telling me that he was a double agent for MI6. Which was he?’
‘Both.’
Gaddis put his elbows on the table, his head in his hands and stared across at Neame, on the edge of losing his temper. He was going to have to think of another way of paying Min’s school fees, another way of paying the tax. He would have to write a book about oligarchs, pitch a bloody documentary about Abramovich to the BBC. Neame’s testimony was about as reliable as Peter Wright’s.
‘What do you mean “both”, Tom?’
It was the first time that Gaddis had raised his voice against him. Neame placed his walking stick against the wall and finished his pint with a gingerly sip. The bowl of soup had at last been carried away by the landlady.
‘After the war, Eddie suffered a crisis of conscience.’ Neame was speaking slowly, crisply, but without a hint of ill-feeling; it was as if he understood Gaddis’s frustration and wanted him to feel reassured. ‘He bitterly regretted his association with the Soviets. With the exception of some of the ULTRA intelligence, he felt that he should not have passed Allied information to Moscow. He could see the direction that Stalin had taken and didn’t like it. So, as soon as Guy and Donald had disappeared in ’51, he turned himself in.’
Gaddis felt a faint pulse of hope, life coming back to a dead circuit.
‘Eddie had a close friend in MI5, a man by the name of Dick White. I’m sure you’ve heard of him. Director B, counter-espionage. Went on to become Director-General of the Security Service, then Chief of the SIS. He was the golden boy of the post-war generation in British intelligence and therefore precisely the right man for Eddie to approach with his