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‘It was the winter of 1992, an ordinary Monday night in February.’ Somers took an apple from his coat pocket and bit into it, chewing over the memories. ‘The patient’s name was Edward Crane. It said he was seventy-six on his notes, but none of us knew what was true and what wasn’t. He looked mid-sixties to me.’ They started walking again, black boots pressing through the mud. ‘They’d obviously worked out it was best if they admitted him at night, when there were fewer people around, when the day staff had gone off shift.’
‘Who’s “they”?’ Gaddis asked.
‘The spooks.’ A mallard lifted off the canal, quick wings shedding water as he turned towards the sun. ‘Crane was brought in on a stretcher, unconscious, just after ten on the evening of the third. I was ready for him. I’m always ready. He bypassed A&E and was put straight into a private room off the ward. The chart said he had no next of kin and wasn’t to be resuscitated in the event of cardiac arrest. Nothing unusual about that. Far as anyone was concerned, this was just another old man suffering from late-stage pancreatic cancer. Hours to live, liver failure, toxic. At least, that was the story MI6 was paying us to pedal.’
Somers threw the half-eaten apple at a plastic bottle floating on the canal and missed by three feet.
‘Soon as I got Crane into the room, I hooked him up to some drips. Dextrose saline. A bag of Amikacin that was just fluid going nowhere. Even gave him a catheter. Everything had to look kosher just in case a member of staff stuck their head round the door who wasn’t supposed to.’
‘Did that happen? Did anybody see Crane?’
Somers scratched the side of his neck. ‘Nah. At about two in the morning, Meisner called for a priest. That was all part of the plan. Father Brook. He didn’t suspect a thing. Just came in, administered the last rites, went home. Soon after that, Henderson showed up and did his little speech.’
‘What little speech?’
Somers came to a halt. He didn’t make eye contact very often but did so now, assuming a patrician tone which Gaddis took to be an attempt at impersonating Henderson’s cut-glass accent.
‘“From this point onwards, Edward Crane is effectively dead. I would like to thank you all for your work thus far, but a great deal remains to be done.”’
A man pushing a rusty bicycle came towards them on the towpath, ticking past in the dusk.
‘We were all there,’ said Somers. ‘Waldemar, Meisner, Forman. Meisner was so nervous he looked as if he was going to throw up. Waldemar didn’t speak much English and still didn’t really understand what he’d got himself involved in. He was probably just thinking about the money. That’s what I was doing. Twenty grand in 1992 was a lot of cash to a twenty-eight-year-old nurse. You any idea what we got paid under the Tories?’
Gaddis didn’t respond. He didn’t want to have a conversation about under-funded nurses. He wanted to hear the end of the story.
‘Anyway, at some point Henderson took a checklist out of his coat pocket and ran through it. First, he turned to Meisner and asked him if he’d filled out the death certificate. Meisner said he had and produced a biro from behind his ear, as if that proved it. I was told to go back down to Crane’s room and wrap the body. “No need to clean him,” Henderson said. For some reason, Waldemar – we called him “Wally” – thought this was funny and we all just stood there watching him laugh. Then Henderson tells him to pull himself together and gives him instructions to have a trolley waiting, to take the old man down to the ambulance. I remember Henderson didn’t talk to Forman until the rest of us had gone. Don’t ask me what he’d agreed with her. Probably to tag a random corpse in the mortuary, some tramp from Praed Street with no ID, no history. How else could they have got away with it? They needed a second body.’
‘This is useful,’ Gaddis told him, because he felt that he needed to say something. ‘This is really useful.’
‘Well, you get what you pay for, don’t you, Professor?’ Somers produced a smug grin. ‘What was hard is that we had other patients to attend to. It was a normal Monday night. It wasn’t as if everything could just grind to a halt because MI6 were in the building. Meisner was the senior doctor, too, so he was always moving back and forth around the hospital. At one point I don’t think I saw him for about an hour and a half. Wally had jobs all over the place, me as well. Added to that, I had to try to keep the other nurses out of Crane’s room. Just in case they got nosey.’ The path narrowed beside a barge and the two men were obliged to walk in single file. ‘In the end, everything went like clockwork. Meisner got the certificate done, Crane was wrapped up with a small hole in the fabric he could breathe through, Wally took him down to the ambulance and the old man was gone by six a.m., out into his new life.’
‘His new life,’ Gaddis muttered. He looked up at the darkening sky and wondered, not for the first time, if he would ever set eyes on Edward Anthony Crane. ‘And that’s it?’
‘Almost.’ Somers wiped his nose in the failing light. ‘Eight days later I was going through The Times. Found an obituary for an “Edward Crane”. Wasn’t very long. Tucked down the right-hand side of the page under “Lives Remembered”, next to some French politician who’d fucked up during Suez. Crane was described as a “resourceful career diplomat”. Born in 1916, educated at Marlborough College, then Trinity, Cambridge. Postings to Moscow, Buenos Aires, Berlin. Never married, no offspring. Died at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, after “a long battle with cancer”.’
A light drizzle was beginning to fall. Gaddis passed a set of lock gates and moved in the direction of a pub. Somers pushed a hand through his hair.
‘So that’s what happened, Professor,’ he said. ‘Edward Crane was a dead man, but he was not a dead man. Edward Crane was alive but he was not alive. That was the situation.’
The pub was packed.
Gaddis went to the bar and ordered two pints of Stella Artois, a packet of peanuts and a double of Famous Grouse. Thanks to Somers, he was down to the loose change in his pockets and had to pay the barman with a debit card. Inside his jacket he found the torn scrap of paper on which he kept his passwords and pin numbers and punched in the digits while the landlord made a noise through his teeth. With Somers still in the Gents, Gaddis sank the whisky as a single shot then found a table at the back of the pub where he could watch groups of shivering smokers huddled outside and try to convince himself that he had made the right decision to quit.
‘Got you a Stella,’ he said when Somers came up to the table. For an instant it looked as though he wasn’t going to sit down, but Gaddis pushed the pint towards him and said: ‘Peanuts.’
It was just past six o’clock. West Hyde on a Tuesday night. Suits, secretaries, suburbia. A jukebox was crooning Andy Williams. Tacked up beside a dartboard in the far corner of the room was an orange poster emblazoned with the words:
CURRY NIGHT – WEDNESDAY. Gaddis took off his corduroy jacket and looped it over the arm of a neighbouring chair.
‘So what happened next?’
He knew that this was the part Somers liked, playing the pivotal role, playing Deep Throat. The nurse – the senior nurse, as he would doubtless have insisted – produced another of his smug grins and took a thirsty pull on the pint. Something about the warmth of the pub had restored his characteristic complacency; it was as if Somers had reprimanded himself for being too open beside the canal. After all, he was in possession of information that Gaddis wanted. The professor had paid three grand for it. It was gold dust to him.
‘What happened next?’
‘That’s right, Calvin. Next.’
Somers leaned back in his chair. ‘Not much.’ He seemed to regret this answer and rephrased it, searching for more impact. ‘I watched the ambulance turn past the Post Office, had a quick smoke and went back inside. Took the lift up to Crane’s room, cleared it out, threw away the bags and catheter and sent the medical notes down to Patient Records. You could probably check them if you want. Far as the hospital was concerned, a seventy-six-year-old cancer patient had come in suffering from liver failure and died during the night. The sort of thing that happened all the time. It was a new day, a new shift. Time to move on.’
‘And Crane?’
‘What about him?’
‘You never heard another word?’
Somers looked as if he had been asked an idiotic question. That was the trouble with intellectuals. So fucking stupid.
‘Why would I hear another word?’ He took a long draw on the pint and did something with his eyes which made Gaddis want to deck him. ‘Presumably he was given a new identity. Presumably he enjoyed another ten years of happy life and died peacefully in his bed. Who knows?’
Two smokers, one coming in, one going out, pushed past their table. Gaddis was obliged to move a leg out of the way.
‘And you never breathed a word about it? Nobody asked you any questions? Nobody apart from Charlotte has brought up this subject for over ten years?’
‘You could say that, yeah.’
Gaddis sensed a lie here, but knew there was no point pursuing it. Somers was the type who shut down once you caught them in a contradiction. He said: ‘And did Crane talk? What kind of man was he? What did he look like?’
Somers laughed. ‘You don’t do this very often, do you, Professor?’
It was true. Sam Gaddis didn’t often meet male nurses in pubs on the outskirts of London and try to extract information about seventy-six-year-old diplomats whose deaths had been faked by men who paid out twenty grand in return for a lifetime of silence. He was divorced and forty-three. He was a senior lecturer in Russian History at University College London. His normal beat was Pushkin, Stalin, Gorbachev. Nevertheless, that remark took him to the edge of his patience and he said: ‘And how often do you do it, Calvin?’ just so that Somers knew where he stood.
The reply did the trick. A little frown of panic appeared in the gap between Somers’s eyes which he tried, without success, to force away. The nurse sought refuge in some peanuts and got salt on his fingers as he wrestled with the packet.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘Crane didn’t speak at all. Before he was admitted, they’d given him a mild anaesthetic which had rendered him unconscious. He had grey hair, shaved to look like he’d undergone chemotherapy, but his skin was too healthy for a man supposedly in his condition. He probably weighed about seventy kilos, between five foot ten and six foot. I never saw his eyes, on account of the fact they were always closed. That good enough for you?’
Gaddis didn’t answer immediately. He didn’t need to. He let the silence speak for him. ‘And Henderson?’
‘What about him?’
‘What kind of man was he? What did he look like? All you’ve told me so far is that he wore a long black overcoat and sounded like somebody doing a bad impression of David Niven.’
Somers turned his head and stared at the far corner of the room.
‘Charlotte never told you?’
‘Told me what?’
Somers blinked rapidly and said: ‘Pass me that newspaper.’ There was a damp, discarded copy of The Times lying in a trickle of beer on the next-door table. A black girl listening to a pink iPod smiled her assent when Gaddis asked if he could take it. He straightened it out and handed the newspaper across the table.
‘You’ve heard of the Leighton Inquiry?’ Somers asked.
Leighton was a judicial inquiry into an aspect of government policy relating to the war in Afghanistan. Gaddis had heard of it. He had read the op-eds, caught the reports on Channel Four News.
‘Go on,’ he said.
Somers turned to page five. ‘You see this man?’
He flattened out the newspaper, spinning it through a hundred and eighty degrees. The nurse’s narrow, nail-bitten finger skewered a photograph of a man ducking into a government Rover on a busy London street. The man was in late middle-age and surrounded by a crush of reporters. Gaddis read the caption.
Sir John Brennan leaves Whitehall after giving evidence to the inquiry.
There was a smaller, formal Foreign Office portrait of Brennan set inside the main photograph. Gaddis looked up. Somers saw that he had made the connection.
‘Henderson is John Brennan? Are you sure?’
‘As sure as I’m sitting here looking at you.’ Somers drained his pint. ‘The man who paid me twenty grand sixteen years ago to cover everything up wasn’t just any old spook. The man who called himself Douglas Henderson in 1992 is now the head of MI6.’
Chapter 2
It was a long way from Daunt Books on Holland Park Avenue to that suburban September pub in West Hyde.
A month earlier, Gaddis had been launching his latest book – Tsars, a comparative study of Peter the Great and the current Russian president, Sergei Platov – at a bookshop in central London. His editor, the part-owner of a boutique publishing house which had paid the princely sum of £4750 for the book, hadn’t made it to the event. A lone diarist, on work experience at the Evening Standard, had poked her head around the door of the bookshop at six twenty-five, picked up a glass of room temperature Sauvignon Blanc and, having established that she had more chance of finding a story on the top deck of the number 16 bus, left after ten minutes. No celebrity historian, no literary editor, nor any representative of the BBC had replied to the invitations which the PR girl insisted had gone out – ‘first class’ – in the second week of July. A solitary notice in Saturday’s Independent had turned up one ashen-faced matriarch who had come ‘all the way from Hampstead because I so enjoyed your book on Bulgakov’, as well as a former student of Sam’s named Colin who claimed that he had spent the previous year ‘walking around Kazakhstan reading Herman Hesse’. The rest were staff – the manager of the shop, someone to operate the till – about a dozen colleagues and students from UCL, Sam’s next-door neighbour, Kath, who was highly-sexed and always opened the front door in her dressing-gown, and his close friend, the journalist Charlotte Berg.
Did Gaddis care that the new book would most probably disappear without trace? Yes and no. Though politically active, he was under no illusions that a single book could change attitudes to Sergei Platov. Tsars would be politely reviewed by the broadsheet press in London and dismissed in Moscow as Western propaganda. It had taken three years to write and would sell perhaps a thousand copies in hardback. Long ago, Gaddis had decided to write solely for the pleasure of writing: to expect greater rewards was to invite frustration. If the public enjoyed his books, he was happy; if they didn’t, so be it. They had better things to be spending their hard-earned cash on. He had no desire for fame, no innate interest in making money: what mattered to him was the quality of the work. And Tsars was a book that he was proud of. It amounted to a sustained attack on the Platov regime, an attack which he had tried to condense, as succinctly as possible, into a 750-word op-ed in the Guardian which had appeared three days earlier.
Thus far, that had been the extent of the book’s publicity campaign. Gaddis wasn’t particularly interested in cultivating a public image. Four years earlier, for example, he had published a biography of Trotsky which had been enthusiastically talked up on Radio 4. An enterprising young television producer had invited him to screen test for a series of programmes about ‘Great Revolutionary Figures’. Gaddis had declined. Why? Because he felt at the time that it would mean spending too long away from his baby daughter, Min, and abandoning his students at UCL. His friends and colleagues had thought it was a missed opportunity. What was the point of being a successful academic in twenty-first-century Britain if you didn’t want to appear on BBC4? Think of the tie-ins, they said. Think of the money. With his crooked good looks, Gaddis would have been a natural for television, but he valued his privacy too much and didn’t want to sideline the career he loved for what he described as ‘the dubious pleasure of seeing my mug on television’. There was stubbornness in the decision, certainly, but Dr Sam Gaddis thought of himself, first and foremost, as a teacher. He believed in the unarguable notion that if a young person is lucky enough to read the right books at the right time in the company of the right teacher, it will change their life for ever.
‘So what do we have with Sergei Platov?’ he began. The manager of Daunts was sure that no more of the thirty seats set out in the bookshop would be filled by curious passers-by and had asked Gaddis to begin. ‘Is he saint or sinner? Is Platov guilty of war crimes in Chechnya, of personally authorizing the murder of journalists critical of his regime, or is he a statesman who has restored the might of Mother Russia, thereby rescuing his country from decadence and corruption?’
The question, as far as Gaddis was concerned, was rhetorical. Platov was a stain on the Russian character, a borderline sociopath who had, in less than ten years, destroyed the possibility of a democratic Russia. A former KGB spy, he had green-lit the murder of Russian civilians on foreign soil, held Eastern European countries to ransom over the supply of gas, and encouraged the murder of journalists and human rights activists brave enough to criticize his regime. One such journalist – Katarina Tikhonov – had been a good friend of Gaddis’s. They had corresponded for over fifteen years and met whenever he visited Moscow. She had been shot in the elevator of her apartment building three years earlier. Not a single suspect had been arrested in connection with the murder, an anomaly which he had exposed in his new book.
He turned to his notes.
‘History tells us that Sergei Platov is a survivor, from a family of survivors.’
‘What do you mean?’ The Hampstead matriarch was sitting in the front row and already asking questions. Gaddis flattered her with a patient smile which had the useful simultaneous effect of making her feel embarrassed for interrupting.
‘What I mean is that his family survived the worst excesses that twentieth-century Russia could throw at them. Platov’s grandfather worked as a chef for Josef Stalin and lived to tell the tale. That in itself is a miracle. His father was one of only four soldiers from a unit of twenty-eight men who survived after they were betrayed to the Germans at Kingisepp in 1941. Sergei Spiridonovich Platov was pursued into the surrounding countryside and only avoided capture by breathing through a hollow reed while submerged in a pond. Sean Connery had the same trick in Dr No.’
Somebody laughed. Traffic hummed on Holland Park Avenue. Sam Gaddis was looking at a sea of nodding, attentive faces.
‘Do you know about the siege of Leningrad?’ he asked. He hadn’t meant to start on that, not tonight, but it was a subject on which he had lectured many times at UCL and the Daunt crowd would go for it. The manager, standing near the door, was bobbing his head in a way that looked enthusiastic.
‘It’s the winter of 1942. Minus twenty degrees at night. Three million people in a city surrounded by German troops, a million of them women and children.’ The matriarch gasped. ‘There is so little food that people are dying at the rate of five thousand a day. Leningrad’s entire supply of flour has been destroyed by German firebombs. The fires cause molten sugar to saturate the earth at the Badayev warehouses. People are so hungry that they are prepared to dig into the frozen ground to extract the sugar and sell it on the black market. The top three feet of soil sells for one hundred roubles a glass, the next three feet for fifty.’
A bell and a sudden burst of traffic. The door of the bookshop opened and a young woman stepped inside: shoulder-length black hair, knee-high leather boots over denim jeans, and the sort of figure that a forty-three-year-old, divorced academic who has drunk three glasses of Sauvignon Blanc notices and photographs with his eyes, even while giving a talk at his own book launch. The woman whispered something to the manager, briefly caught Sam’s eye, then settled in a seat at the back.
Gaddis wished that he had brought his props. At UCL, his annual lecture on the siege of Leningrad was a must-see sellout, one of the very few events that every student in the Russian history programme felt both obliged and enthused to attend. Gaddis always began by standing behind a table on which he had placed a third of a loaf of sliced white bread, a pound of minced beef, a bowl of bran flakes, a small cup of sunflower oil and three digestive biscuits.
‘This,’ he tells the packed auditorium, ‘is all that you get to eat for the next thirty days. This is all that an adult citizen of Leningrad could claim on their ration cards in the early years of World War II. Kind of puts the January detox in perspective, doesn’t it?’ The lecture takes place in the early weeks of the New Year, so the joke always whips up a satisfying gale of nervous laughter. ‘But enjoy it while you can.’ Confused looks in the front row. Plate by plate, bowl by bowl, Dr Gaddis now tips the food on to the floor until all that remains on the table in front of him are ten slices of stale white bread. ‘By the time the siege really starts to bite, bread is more or less the only form of sustenance you’re going to get, and its nutritional value is nil. The people of Leningrad don’t have access to Hovis or Mother’s Pride. This bread’ – he picks up a piece and tears it into tiny pieces, like a child feeding ducks – ‘is made mostly from sawdust, from sweepings on the floor. If you’re lucky enough to have a job in a factory, you get 250 grams of it every week. How much is 250 grams?’ Gaddis now picks up six slices of the bread and hands them to a student in the front row. ‘That’s about how much it is. But if you don’t work in a factory’ – three of the slices come back – ‘you get only 125 grams.’
‘And I warn you not to be young,’ he continues, channelling Neil Kinnock now, a politician from yesteryear whom most of his students are too young to remember. ‘I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to grow old in the Leningrad of 1942. Because if you do’ – at this point, he gets hold of the final three slices of bread, tossing them to the floor – ‘if you do, you’ll most likely starve to death.’ He lets that one settle in before delivering the coup de grâce. ‘And don’t be an academic, either. Don’t be an intellectual.’ Another gale of nervous laughter. ‘Comrade Stalin doesn’t like people like us. As far as he’s concerned, academics and intellectuals can starve to death.’
The beautiful woman in the knee-high boots was staring at him intently. At UCL, Gaddis usually picked out a volunteer at this stage and asked them to take off their shoes, which he then placed on a table at the front of the lecture hall. He liked to pull grass clippings and pieces of bark from the pockets of his jacket. Christ, if Health and Safety had allowed it, he’d have brought a dead rat and a dog in, as well. That, after all, was what the citizens of Leningrad survived on as the Germans tightened the noose: grasses and bark; leather shoes boiled down for sustenance; the flesh of vermin and dogs. Cannibalism was also rife. Children would disappear. Limbs would mysteriously be removed from corpses left to freeze in the street. The meat pies on sale in the markets of war-torn Leningrad could contain anything from horse flesh to human being.
But tonight he kept things simple. Tonight Dr Gaddis spoke about Platov’s aunt and first cousin surviving three years in a German concentration camp in the Baltics. He related how, on one occasion, Platov’s mother had passed out from hunger only to wake up while she was being taken to a cemetery by men who had assumed she was dead. Towards eight o’clock, he read a short extract from the new book about Platov’s early years in the KGB and, by eight fifteen, people were applauding and he was taking questions from the floor, trying to make the case that Russia was reverting to totalitarianism and all the time wondering how to persuade the girl in the knee-high boots to join his party for dinner.
In the end, he didn’t need to. As the launch was beginning to thin out, she approached him at the makeshift bar and held out her hand.
‘Holly Levette.’
‘Sam.’ Her hand was slim and warm and had rings all over it. She was about twenty-eight with huge blue eyes. ‘You were the one who was late.’
A smile of what looked like genuine embarrassment. Her right cheek had a little scar on the bone which he liked. ‘Sorry, I was held up on the Tube. I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.’
They moved away from the bar.
‘Not at all.’ He was trying to work out what she did for a living. Something in the arts, something creative. ‘Have we met before?’
‘No, no. I just read your article in the Guardian and knew that you were speaking tonight. I have something that I thought you might be interested in.’
They had found themselves in a small clearing in the Travel section. In his peripheral vision, Gaddis could sense somebody trying to catch his eye.
‘What kind of something?’
‘Well, my mother has just died.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
It didn’t look as though Holly Levette needed much comforting.
‘Her name was Katya Levette. Before her death she was working on a book about the history of the KGB. A lot of her information came from sources in British and Russian intelligence. I don’t want her papers to go to waste. All that hard work, all those interviews. I wondered whether you might like to have a look at her research, see if there’s any value in it?’
It could have been a trap, of course. A mischievous source in MI6 or the Russian FSB looking to use a mid-level British historian for purposes of propaganda. After all, why come all the way to the bookshop? Why not just phone him at UCL or send an email to his website? But the chances of a honey-trap were slim. If the spooks wanted a scandal, if they wanted headlines, they would have gone for Beevor or Sebag Montefiore, for Andrew or West. Besides, Gaddis would be able to tell in five minutes if the documents were genuine. He’d spent half his life in the museums of London, Moscow and St Petersburg. He was a citizen of the historical archive.
‘Sure, I could take a look at them. You’re kind to think of me. Where are the papers?’
‘At my flat in Chelsea.’
And suddenly the tone of the conversation shifted. Suddenly Holly Levette was looking at Dr Sam Gaddis in the way that mischievous female students sometimes look at attractive, fortysomething bachelor academics when they are up to no good. As if her flat in Chelsea promised more than just dust-gathering notebooks on the KGB.
‘Your flat in Chelsea,’ Sam repeated. He caught the smell of her perfume as he drank more wine. ‘I should probably take your number.’
She was smiling, enjoying the game, promising him something with those huge blue eyes. From the hip pocket of her slim jeans, Holly Levette produced a card which she pressed into his hand. ‘Why don’t you ring me when you’re not so busy?’ she suggested. ‘Why don’t you call and we can arrange for you to come and pick them up?’
‘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.’
