The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [59]
As it transpired, he had no need to be concerned. Twenty minutes after sitting down towards the back of the Coffee House, Ludmilla Tretiak walked in, appeared to recognize Gaddis immediately and came towards his table. She was younger than he had imagined, perhaps no more than forty, and looked almost amused as she shook his outstretched hand and removed a bottle-green overcoat secured around her waist by a narrow leather belt.
‘I wish you good health,’ he said in Russian. ‘You are kind to come.’
‘How could I not? I was intrigued by your letter, Dr Gaddis.’
She was dressed in designer jeans and a dark red blouse which fitted her pale, slender frame so precisely it might almost have been tailored. Gaddis was reminded of a certain type of married woman in the wealthier avenues of Kensington and Notting Hill, preserved in the dignity of early middle age, manicured and undernourished. He wondered if Ludmilla had remarried and searched her hands for a ring which wasn’t there. Had she had children with Tretiak? They would be teenagers by now, schooled in Moscow.
‘I apologize for all the subterfuge,’ he said. He used the word ‘uhlovka’ for ‘subterfuge’ and Tretiak’s calm eyes flared for a split second as she acknowledged his proficiency in Russian.
‘You must have been warned about me,’ she replied.
Was this the same woman that he had spoken to from the phone box in London? Her voice was very faint, but oddly playful. He tried to recall her end of the conversation, how she had pitched it, but his memory failed him.
‘I think you were supposed to meet Charlotte in Moscow last month,’ he said.
‘That is correct. I never heard from her again.’ Ludmilla took off a pair of leather gloves and set them on the table. Her fingers were witch-thin and bitten. ‘You said in your letter that you were a friend of hers. I hope that she is all right.’
‘I’m afraid I have to tell you that Charlotte died suddenly.’
Ludmilla reacted in a way that reminded Gaddis of Holly’s indifference towards her late mother’s death. ‘I am sorry for your loss,’ she replied, without inflection.
He craved a cigarette, but had made yet another private pact to quit. The Aeroflot flight had started it: smoking was banned on board, of course, but the upholstery of his seat had been so marinated in nicotine that he had considered lighting up in the toilet at 35,000 feet.
‘Did Charlotte mention why she wanted to talk to you?’
‘Of course.’ A waitress wearing a beige shirt and a long brown skirt approached them. Tretiak ordered a cup of tea with lemon. Gaddis was increasingly unnerved by her almost glacial sense of calm. ‘She told me that she was a reporter who knew about the circumstances leading to my husband’s death. In fact, she adopted almost exactly the same phrase that you used in your letter. “I know what happened to your husband in 1992.” Nothing more, nothing less. Only this.’
Gaddis could see that he was expected to reply, to explain himself, but he was confused by Tretiak’s manner, which was at once confident and yet oddly disconnected.
‘Perhaps I should explain why I am here,’ he suggested.
‘Perhaps you should.’
She suddenly smiled with a jarring, false rictus. Had she popped a pill before leaving her apartment? Sunk a couple of shots of vodka? Something had taken the edge off her anxiety and calmed her nerves. It was like talking to a doll.
‘I’m an academic in the Department of Eastern European and Slavonic Studies at UCL. Charlotte and I were friends. She was investigating a story relating to an NKVD operation in the United Kingdom before World War II which involved a graduate of Cambridge University named Edward Crane. When Charlotte died, I took on the story myself, with the idea of writing a book about it. My primary source of information is a man named Thomas Neame, a British citizen resident in England. It was Mr