The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [67]
Chapter 23
Two days later, Gaddis was sifting through his mail at the start of the new term at UCL when he turned up an A4-sized manila envelope with a Greek postmark.
Inside, he found a handwritten note on monogrammed paper from Charles Crane.
What a wonderful surprise to speak to you on the telephone yesterday. I’ve managed to track down a couple of photographs of Uncle Eddie. One taken during the war and another at my mother’s house in Berkshire in the late 1970s (possibly ’80 or even ’81). If memory serves, Eddie had just retired from the Foreign Office and was about to take up a position on the Board of Deutsche Bank in West Berlin.
When you’re finished with them, could I ask that you send them back to the address above? I would be most grateful.
Gaddis pulled out the photographs, his hand snagging on the envelope in his enthusiasm to see them. At last he was going to set eyes on Edward Crane.
The picture from the war was a formal, black-and-white portrait of a soldier in full uniform. It was mounted on a frayed square of greying cardboard and signed and dated ‘1942’ in near-illegible blue ink. Crane was in his early thirties, with brooding, saturnine features and thick black hair which had been carefully combed, parted to one side and run through with oil. It was not the face that Gaddis had been expecting; in his imagination, Crane had been a less physically imposing figure, slim and cunning, perhaps even a touch effete. This Crane was a bruiser, tough and thick-set. It was difficult to imagine that the man in the photograph had possessed the subtlety to hoodwink intelligence services on both sides of the Iron Curtain for more than fifty years. And why the soldier’s uniform? At the time the photograph was taken, Crane would most probably have been working in counter-espionage at MI5, passing the names of potential Soviet defectors to Theodore Maly. Gaddis concluded that Crane had perhaps worn a soldier’s uniform while assisting Cairncross at Bletchley.
The second photograph was a close-up Polaroid taken in a hazy, sun-filled English garden. The hair was still carefully tended, but thinner now and white as chalk. Gaddis was reminded of pictures of the older W.H. Auden because Crane’s face was craggy and tanned, loose about the neck. Calvin Somers had described his skin as looking ‘too healthy’ for a man suffering from pancreatic cancer, but perhaps he had been referring to the colour and texture of Crane’s face, rather than to his apparent youthfulness. The nose, he noted, was flushed, either with wine or sunburn – Gaddis couldn’t tell – and the smile was broad and energetic; this time you could see the charm of the master spy. Gaddis felt relieved, because this second image conformed far more closely to his mental picture of Crane. Furthermore, it put to rest any lingering doubts he might have possessed that Crane and Neame were the same person. It was not difficult, for example, to imagine the man in the photograph as an avuncular figure passing himself off as a patrician banker in Berlin; at the same time, Crane’s face had a bohemian quality, the eyes betraying a wild streak bordering on the eccentric. Gaddis could only guess at the secrets stacked up behind those eyes, five decades of bluff and counter-bluff, culminating in the mysteries of Dresden.
He was not to know that Charles Crane did not exist. The man Gaddis had spoken to on the telephone was one Alistair Chapman, a colleague of Sir John Brennan’s from an era in which the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service had been a mid-level officer operating in Cold War Vienna. Chapman had agreed to allow SIS to divert an Athens phone number