The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [7]
‘It’s a good idea.’ Gaddis looked at the card. There was nothing on it except a name and a telephone number. ‘And you say your mother was researching the history of Soviet intelligence?’
‘The KGB, yes.’
A pause. There were so many questions to ask that he could say nothing; if he started, they would never stop. A male colleague from UCL materialized beside Gaddis and stared, with abandon, deep into Holly’s cleavage. Gaddis didn’t bother introducing them.
‘I should go,’ she said, touching his arm as she took a step backwards. ‘It was so lovely to meet you. Your talk was fantastic.’
He shook her hand again, the one with all the rings. ‘I’ll call you,’ he said. ‘And I’ll definitely take you up on that offer.’
‘What offer?’ asked the colleague.
‘Oh, the best kind,’ replied Holly Levette. ‘The best kind.’
Chapter 3
Two days later, on a rain-drenched Saturday morning in August, Gaddis rang the number on the card and arranged to go to Chelsea to pick up the boxes. Five minutes after walking through the door of her flat on Tite Street, he was in bed with Holly Levette. He did not leave until eight o’clock the following evening, the boot of his car sagging under the weight of the boxes, his head and body aching from the sweet carnal impact of a woman who remained, even after all that they had shared, something of a stranger to him, an enigma.
Her flat had been a bombsite, a deep litter field of newspapers, books, back issues of the New Yorker, half-finished glasses of wine and ashtrays overflowing with old joints and crushed cigarette packets. The kitchen had three days of washing up piled at the sink, the bedroom more rugs and more clothes strewn over more chairs than Gaddis had ever seen in his life. It reminded him of his own house which, in the years since Natasha had left him, had become a bachelor’s labyrinth of paperbacks, take-away menus and DVD box sets. He had a Belarussian cleaning lady, but she was near-arthritic and spent most her time chatting to him in the kitchen about life in post-Communist Minsk.
Holly’s search for the KGB material had taken them downstairs, to the basement of the apartment block, where Katya Levette had filled a storage cupboard to capacity with dozens of unmarked boxes. It had taken them both more than an hour to locate the files and to carry them outside to Gaddis’s car. Even then, Holly said that she could not be sure that he had taken everything with him.
‘But it’s a start, right?’ she said. ‘It’s something to be getting on with.’
‘Where did all this stuff come from?’ he asked.
The sheer volume of material in the basement suggested that Katya Levette had either been extremely well connected in the intelligence firmament or an inveterate hoarder of useless, second-hand information. Gaddis had Googled her, but most of the articles available under her name were either book reviews or hagiographic profiles of middle-ranking business figures in the UK and United States. At no point had she been a staff writer on any recognized publication.
‘Mum was friendly with a lot of Russian ex-pats in London,’ Holly explained. ‘Oligarchs, ex-KGB. You probably know most of them.’
‘Not socially.’
‘And she had a boyfriend once upon a time. Someone in MI6. I think a lot of the stuff may have come from him.’
‘You mean he leaked it?’
Holly nodded and looked away. She was concealing something, but Gaddis did not feel that he knew her well enough to push for more information. There had already been hints of a fraught relationship between mother and daughter; the truth would come out in good time.
He had driven home and put the boxes – fifteen of them – on the floor of Min’s bedroom, making a silent promise to get to them within a few days. And he would have called Holly again almost immediately had it not been for the grim surprise of Monday’s post.
* * *
There were two letters.
The first