The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [63]
On the first floor of the archive building he asked a member of staff to point out Josephine Warner and was directed towards the enquiries desk. There were two women seated next to one another on red plastic chairs. Gaddis knew one of them on sight, an Afro-Caribbean woman called Dora who had helped him with his enquiries several times before. The second woman was new. She was in her late twenties, with black hair cut to shoulder length and a face whose beauty revealed itself only slowly as he walked towards her; in the stillness of her dark eyes, in the lucidity of her pale skin.
‘Josephine Warner?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m Sam Gaddis. You left a message on my phone yesterday.’
‘Oh, right.’ She stood up immediately, as if sprung from her seat, and turned towards the bank of cabinets behind her. Gaddis nodded as Dora gave him a smile of recognition and Warner opened a drawer, fingers flicking rapidly through a file of documents. ‘Here it is,’ she said, almost to herself, picking out a manila envelope and handing it to Gaddis.
‘It’s very kind of you,’ he said. ‘Thanks for digging it out. It could be very useful.’
‘Pleasure.’
He would happily have spoken to her for longer, but Josephine Warner was already looking beyond him, inviting the next customer with her eyes. Gaddis took the envelope to a reading table on the far side of the room, removed the Will and began to read.
The contents were relatively straightforward. Crane had left the bulk of his estate to a nephew, Charles Crane, now sixty-seven and resident in Greece. Gaddis wrote down the address in Athens. Substantial donations had been made to Cancer Research and to the SIS Widow’s Fund. The Will had been executed by Thomas Neame, to whom Crane had left ‘the contents of my library’ and witnessed by a ‘Mrs Audrey Slight’ and a ‘Mr Richard Kenner’. Addresses were given for both and Gaddis wrote them down. He had no recollection of Neame mentioning that he had acted as executor on Crane’s Will, nor that he had been left any books, but he was at least now reassured that the two men were separate individuals.
At about eleven o’clock, two hours behind Athens, Gaddis went downstairs and called international directory enquiries from a phone box in the foyer. The operator found Charles Crane’s number within a couple of minutes and Gaddis called it from his mobile. A man answered in Greek.
‘Embros?’
The voice sounded slightly dotty, with a laboured Greek accent. Gaddis had an image of an ageing Englishman, sunburned and decked out in linen, reading Gibbon on the steps of the Parthenon.
‘Charles Crane?’
‘Speaking.’
‘My name is Sam Gaddis. I’m an academic in London, at UCL. I’m sorry to bother you out of the blue. I’m researching a book on the history of the Foreign Office and wondered if I might be able to ask you some questions about your late uncle, Edward Crane.’
‘Good Lord, Eddie.’ It sounded as though the nephew who had benefited so handsomely from the generosity of his late uncle had not given a moment’s thought to him since 1992. ‘Yes, of course. What would you like to know?’
Gaddis told him what he knew of Crane’s career in the Diplomatic Service, sticking firmly to the template of The Times obituary and avoiding any mention of Cambridge, SIS or the NKVD. To draw him out further, he flattered Crane by telling him that his late uncle had played a vital, yet unheralded role in the winning of the Cold War.
‘Really? Is that so? Yes, well I suppose Eddie was quite a character.’
Gaddis now began to wish that he had been sitting somewhere more comfortable, because Crane embarked on a series of rambling, near-nonsensical anecdotes about his uncle’s ‘mysterious life’. It transpired that the two men had met ‘only a handful of times’ and that Charles had been ‘stunned, absolutely stunned’ to be the main beneficiary of his Will.
‘He never married, of course,’ he said, the spectre of a black sheep hovering over the good name of the Crane family. ‘Entrenous, I think