The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [89]
Holly. He wanted the opportunity to check her story, to ask her why she had handed over her mother’s files. Was it, as she had insisted at the time, because Katya Levette had admired Charlotte’s reporting, or had there been another, more sinister motive? He simply did not believe Tanya’s claim that Holly was an innocent party.
He called her from the lobby of a vast Gothic hotel on Southampton Row. She was free for dinner, which again aroused his suspicion. Why would a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old actress not be doing something on a Saturday night? Why was Holly Levette always available to see him, even at short notice? It was as if she had been deliberately planted into his life as another pair of eyes, another layer of surveillance to add to Josephine Warner and the spooks of Berlin.
She showed up at his house at half-past eight. Gaddis had spent the early part of the evening carrying the KGB boxes downstairs and piling them at one end of his open-plan kitchen. Holly was wearing a pair of cork-soled platform shoes, a vintage dress from the 1940s and, to judge by the strap of her bra, a set of extremely expensive underwear. She did a double-take when she saw the files blocking the door to Gaddis’s garden and looked at him as if he had gone mad.
‘Spring cleaning?’
‘Research,’ he said. ‘They’re the boxes you gave me. Your mother’s files.’
Her reaction only fed his growing sense of suspicion. Her hands went up to her face, closed together as if in prayer, and she let out a stagey gasp of relief.
‘Thank God you’ve reminded me. I’ve had six of the bloody things clogging up my car for the last two weeks. Do you want them?’
It seemed an uncanny coincidence. ‘There are more files?’
‘It’s never ending. We missed about a dozen boxes in the basement when you came over the first time. Next time you stay, will you take them?’
He scanned her face for the lie. Why would she have waited more than a month to offload more information from her mother’s archive? Why now? Had Tanya spoken to her since they had landed at Gatwick? It felt like a plan to test the seriousness of his promise to jettison Crane.
‘I’ll help you carry them in,’ he said.
Holly was parked fifty metres from Gaddis’s front door. The van across the street had disappeared. She unlocked the boot of her car and passed him the first of six small shoeboxes, piling four of them on top of one another so that he was obliged to stagger back into the house with a wobbling column of cardboard secured under his chin.
‘What’s in these?’ he said when he had piled the boxes on the kitchen table.
‘No idea,’ Holly replied.
They managed to avoid the subject for the next two hours, talking instead about Gaddis’s trip to Berlin – ‘A fantastic city. Wish I could have stayed longer.’ – and an audition Holly had done for a part in a new television series – ‘Another bloody medical drama. Why don’t they just turn the BBC into a hospital?’ Towards eleven o’clock, full of wine and conversation, they went to bed. To deny any eavesdropping spooks the dubious pleasure of listening to his pillow talk, Gaddis went into his office, loaded iTunes and slid the volume control beyond halfway.
‘Are you all right?’ Holly asked as he came back into the bedroom. ‘Why are you putting music on?’
‘Thin walls,’ Gaddis replied.
She looked at him. ‘You’re being a bit weird tonight, Sam.’
‘Am I?’
‘Very. Is everything OK?’
‘Everything’s fine.’
He thought of Harold Wilson, of all people, a Prime Minister so convinced that MI5 were out to get him that he resorted to holding sensitive conversations in bathrooms with the taps running. If only he could tell Holly what was going on. If only he could come clean about Meisner, Somers, Charlotte and Crane. Then again, perhaps she already