The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [90]
‘How did your mother die?’
‘Wow. You really know how to sweet-talk a girl into bed.’
‘Seriously. You’ve never told me. I had the feeling the two of you weren’t close.’
Holly stopped undressing. She was standing barefoot in the middle of his bedroom with a strap of vintage dress halfway down her arm.
‘We had our problems. Mothers and daughters, you know?’
iTunes shuffled to ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’. Gaddis thought about going into his office to change it, but wanted a reply to his question.
‘She had cancer?’ he asked.
‘No. What makes you say that?’
‘I just wondered how she died.’
Holly’s face jagged in irritation. ‘Why the sudden interest?’
She was losing patience. If he wasn’t careful, she would grab her toothbrush from the bathroom, put on her platform shoes and drink-drive back to Chelsea.
‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I asked.’
He did know why he had asked, of course. He wanted to know if the circumstances surrounding the death of Katya Levette had been in any way suspicious. He wanted to know if she had been murdered by the FSB. Was there something in the files that he had not yet discovered, a smoking gun in a shoebox? Had Katya unravelled the riddle of Dresden and paid the price with her life? The theory made no sense, of course: if the Russians had wanted to silence her, they would surely have destroyed her research as well. But Gaddis was in a mood of such persistent suspicion that he could not see the folly of his own thinking.
‘She was an alcoholic.’
Holly’s declaration caught him off-guard. He had been switching off a light in the corridor and had come back into the room to find her sitting on the edge of the bed, unzipping her dress with a melancholy slowness.
‘I didn’t realize.’
‘Why would you?’
He walked across the room and knelt on the ground in front of her. He reached out his hand and stopped her in the act of undressing. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Not your fault,’ she said, smiling and ruffling his hair. He felt embarrassed and guilty. ‘If somebody wants to drink themselves to death, there isn’t much anybody can do about it.’
She continued to take off the dress. It was like an act of defiance against her mother, preventing her from ruining their evening. Gaddis saw the loveliness of her body and reached to touch her stomach. He knew that she had no intention of milking his sympathy, of playing the scene for emotional effect. It was one of the things that he most liked about her: she was an actress entirely incapable of melodrama.
‘Come to bed,’ she said, unbuttoning his shirt. The sweet moisturized scent of her skin was a balm. She began to smile. ‘Just one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Can we please turn off the Bob fucking Dylan?’
Three hours later, Gaddis was still awake. Being with Holly had done nothing to calm him. She was asleep in a peaceful curled ball beside him, but he was agitated in a way that he had not known since the worst periods of his divorce. He had barely slept since Berlin, yet the act of closing his eyes seemed to power up his imagination. He was haunted by images of Benedict Meisner, infuriated that he would have to shelve his work on Crane, determined to bring Charlotte’s killers to justice.
At about quarter-past two, abandoning any hope of sleep, he went downstairs, poured himself a glass of wine and – with nothing better to do – began to go through the files which Holly had brought over in the car.
It was the same old story: there was nothing of consequence in any of the boxes. Downing two paracetamol, Gaddis turned his attention to the original files which he had examined only cursorily two months earlier. This time, he found the odd item which he had missed on first examination of the material: Anthony Blunt’s death certificate, for example, and a copy of his Will. There was the transcript of an interview with Sir Dick White, conducted by an unnamed journalist in 1982. Gaddis was briefly intrigued by this, but of course found no reference to ATTILA, nor any mention of Edward Crane. In another box,