The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [71]
Several hours passed before Gaddis allowed himself to think that he was perhaps overreacting. There was, after all, every possibility that Charlotte had died of natural causes. As for Somers, people were knifed in London all the time. Who was to say that Calvin hadn’t just been the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time? True, the coincidence of their sudden deaths, so recent and so close together, was unsettling, but Gaddis had no proof of foul play beyond a hunch that the Russian government was bumping off anybody associated with ATTILA.
What happened next restored his faith still further. While booking a flight to Berlin at an Internet café on Uxbridge Road, Gaddis saw, to his consternation, that Ludmilla Tretiak had made contact on the email address which he had given to her in Moscow.
The message had gone into his Spam folder, perhaps because it was written in Russian.
Dear Dr Gaddis
I am sending you this message from a friend’s computer using her email address so I hope that it will not be discovered. I enjoyed talking to you when we met. I feel that I must thank you for bringing to my attention new information concerning my husband’s death.
I am in a position now to be able to help you further. You may already know that the MI6 Head of Station in Berlin while my husband was working in East Germany was Robert Wilkinson. Fyodor also knew him by the alias Dominic Ulvert. I do not know what use you will be able to make of this information, if any. But you asked me who else in Berlin might have known Mr Edward Crane and it seems likely to me that this man would have been in contact with the most senior officer from British Intelligence working in Berlin at that time.
This is all that I can think of at present which may be of assistance to you. But I could see in Moscow how dedicated you were to solving this mystery and your enthusiasm touched me.
It could have been a trap, of course, an attempt by the FSB to lure him into a meeting with a non-existent former SIS officer. Yet the slightly breathless, dreamy tone of the email sounded like Tretiak, and offered hope that she remained unharmed.
He looked again at the screen. Finding a loose scrap of paper in his trouser pocket, Gaddis scribbled down the names ‘Robert Wilkinson’ and ‘Dominic Ulvert’ and tried to remember if he had seen them before, either in Charlotte’s files or in the boxes which Holly had given to him. He couldn’t recall. He knew that there was a risk in trusting Tretiak and that his natural optimism was both a strength and a weakness at times like this, but there was no way he could ignore what she had told him. The information was crying out to be investigated. At the very least, he could ask Josephine Warner to run the names through the Foreign Office archives. Where was the harm in that?
Gaddis rang her an hour later from a payphone on Uxbridge Road.
‘Josephine?’
‘Sam! I was just thinking about you.’
‘Good thoughts, I hope,’ he said. ‘How are things down at Kew?’
They briefly exchanged pleasantries but Gaddis wasn’t in the mood for small talk. He was keen to secure Josephine’s help in tracking down the information.
‘Do you think you could do me a favour?’
‘Of course.’
‘Next time you’re at work, could you see if there’s anything in the records about a Foreign Office diplomat named Robert Wilkinson? If that doesn’t work, try Dominic Ulvert. Anything you can get on them at all. Letters, minutes from meetings in which they were involved, conferences they may have attended. Anything.’
It was only the second time that they had spoken since their dinner in Brackenbury Village and Gaddis was aware that his manner was direct and businesslike. It surprised him