The Trinity Six

Chapter 17

There was a seven-mile traffic jam on the M3 out of Winchester, which gave Gaddis all the time he needed to digest what Neame had told him about Eddie Crane’s year at Oxford. If true, it was an astonishing story.

In the summer of his graduation from Cambridge, Crane had been instructed by his NKVD handler, Arnold Deutsch, to apply for a postgraduate position at Oxford. Moscow’s requirements were simple: Crane was to spend a year talent-spotting Communists whom he felt had the potential to work as agents for the Soviet Union. In other words, he was to perform the same job that Burgess had done, to such great effect, in the earlier part of the decade at Trinity.

Crane’s controller at Oxford was a man named Theodore Maly, an undercover Soviet intelligence officer. Maly had already succeeded in recruiting Arthur Wynn, a former student at Trinity, to the Soviet cause. According to Neame, ATTILA and Wynn had succeeded in penetrating Oxford’s left-wing community and had effectively green-lit a ring of at least seven spies which, it transpired, had been every bit as successful as their counterparts at Cambridge. For Gaddis, this wasn’t just a major development in the Crane story; it was a huge scoop in its own right. An Oxford Ring had always been one of the great conspiracy theories of the Cold War. He now had evidence that such a ring had existed.

Yet that wasn’t the end of it. What Neame had told him about the identity of one of the members of the Oxford Ring was little short of astonishing. Crane’s memoirs apparently contained a cryptic reference to a Modern History under graduate from Yorkshire named ‘James’ who had been talent-spotted by ATTILA and subsequently recruited as an agent by the Soviets in 1938. Russian Intelligence had given ‘James’ the code name AGINCOURT. In the memoirs, Crane had revealed that AGIN-COURT had gone on to hold ‘one of the highest offices in the land’. Gaddis was convinced that this was the revelation that Charlotte had referred to at dinner in Hampstead three weeks earlier: a secret which would ‘rock London and Moscow to their foundations’. Neame had insisted that he did not know AGINCOURT’s identity, but Gaddis felt certain that, with enough time, he would be able to put the clues together and, at the very least, draw up a shortlist of suspects.

There were three days until his next scheduled meeting with Neame. Gaddis used the time to find out what was already in the public domain about Arthur Wynn. He also turned his attention to Oxford in the pre-war years. In his memoirs, Spycatcher, the former MI5 officer Peter Wright had raised the possibility of an Oxford Ring, identifying the academic Jennifer Hart, the Labour MP Bernard Floud and his brother, Peter, as suspected members. According to Neame, all three names appeared in Crane’s memoirs as active Soviet agents.

What intrigued Gaddis was that several suspects in the Oxford Ring had died in suspicious circumstances; one had even taken her life shortly after being interrogated by MI5. This had prompted the Security Service to suspend its investigations and to cover up the existence of the Oxford Ring for fear of a public scandal. But was Peter Wright’s version of events true, or a clever attempt to create a smokescreen not only for ATTILA and Wynn, but also for AGINCOURT?

That night, Gaddis went to the Donmar Warehouse theatre with Holly to watch a new play written by a friend with whom she had been at university.

‘You look bored,’ she said at the interval. ‘You look distracted.’

She was right. He couldn’t concentrate on the production. He wanted to walk out, to take Holly to dinner and tell her about Neame and Lampard, about ‘James’ and the Oxford spy ring. But it was impossible; he could not involve her. If he was honest with himself, he still did not know why Holly had approached Charlotte with her mother’s research papers. Had it just been a coincidence, or had Katya Levette in some way been involved in the Crane conspiracy? His mind was scrambled with possibilities.

The barman at the Donmar was a friend of Holly’s, an outof-work actor called Piers whose girlfriend was performing in the play. Afterwards, the four of them went for dinner in Covent Garden and he found that he enjoyed their company, and that Piers, in particular, was easygoing and likeable. But a part of him was floating through the meal, killing time until he was able to get home and attack the books once again. He persuaded Holly to spend the night at his house but left her asleep in his bed while he went to his office and trawled the Internet looking for information about AGINCOURT. All he was able to dig up was an old conspiracy theory about the former British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, working for the Soviet Union. Had Neame sent him on a wild-goose chase?

On Thursday morning he set off for Winchester, following the instructions that Neame had given him when they left the cathedral. He was to return to Waterstone’s and to wait for Peter on the first floor. This time, they had joked, there would be no need to carry a copy of the Herald Tribune.

Peter duly appeared at 11 a.m. wearing a red Manchester United shirt with ‘ROONEY’ emblazoned across the back. They were alone in the room and Gaddis laughed when he saw the shirt, Peter grinning back and handing him a small box and a piece of paper on which he had written a set of instructions.

‘Sat-nav,’ he said. ‘It’s already switched on. Just press the green button and do what it tells you. Your friend is waiting in the pub.’

Gaddis opened the box and found a small TomTom loosely wrapped in bubble plastic. The written instructions explained that he was to take the route pre-programmed into the sat-nav, a journey which would eventually lead to a village outside Winchester. Peter would be following Gaddis’s car at a discreet distance to ensure that he was not being tailed. If, at any point, he suspected that Gaddis was under surveil-lance, he would text the word ‘LONDON’ to his mobile phone, thereby aborting the meeting.

The plan seemed straightforward and, by now, Gaddis was familiar enough with the eccentric customs of the secret world to be neither surprised nor concerned by it. He returned to his car, put the TomTom on the passenger seat, switched on the engine and pressed ‘Go’.

‘At the end of the road, turn left.’

He was startled to hear the voice of Sean Connery, preprogrammed into the software. Another of Peter’s private jokes; Gaddis was beginning to like him. Pulling out into shuffling late-morning traffic, he was soon being slung around the narrow lanes and B-roads of southern Hampshire by an actor doing his very best impression of Commander James Bond. Peter had programmed the sat-nav with a series of turns and loops which often brought Gaddis back to a roundabout or junction that he had passed five or ten minutes earlier. The purpose of this was clear: any vehicle attempting to follow him would quickly be exposed. Gaddis kept an eye on his rear-view mirror, certain that Peter was driving a red Toyota. It would appear, six or seven cars back, on dual carriageways and at sets of traffic lights, and Gaddis found himself slowing down at regular intervals to allow him the chance to catch up.

When he had been on the road for almost half an hour, a text message came through on Gaddis’s phone. He reached for it and saw with a feeling of dread that the message had come from a ‘Withheld’ number. To his relief, though, Peter was simply instructing him to switch off the phone, doubtless to prevent it being tracked to the pub. Within five minutes, the sat-nav had brought him into the car park of a mock-Tudor inn in the village of Easton, just a few miles north of Winchester.

Neame was already seated in the corner of the dining room, far enough from neighbouring tables that their conversation would not be overheard. He was wearing the same tweed suit, the same wool tie and the same polished brown brogues that he had sported at their first meeting. It was almost as if he had walked directly from Winchester and had been waiting in the pub ever since. There was a pint of what looked like real ale in front of him and he appeared to be in jovial spirits.

‘Ah. The good doctor.’

Neame rose to his feet.

‘Is this your local, Tom?’

The old man’s hand was soft and damp as Gaddis shook it. His walking stick was resting in the crook of the wall behind his chair and he still carried about him the same smell of lavender which had drifted between the pews of Winchester Cathedral.

‘There’s a tunnel from the nursing home. Certain residents refer to it as the Great Escape. How’s Peter?’

Gaddis considered mentioning the Rooney shirt, but thought better of it.

‘I didn’t know he was such a joker,’ he replied instead. ‘Sent me here with Sean Connery as a tour guide.’

‘I’m not sure that I follow you.’

Gaddis privately conceded that it was an unhelpful way to have started the interview and spent the next three minutes trying to explain that actors’ voices could be downloaded on to sat-navs via the Internet. Neame looked utterly baffled. The ‘good doctor’ might as well have been speaking in Swahili.

‘I really don’t understand all this new-fangled technology,’ he said. ‘Peter’s the one who keeps himself up-to-date. I’m very lucky to have him.’

‘Where did you find him?’ Gaddis asked, because it wasn’t every day that a ninety-one-year-old resident of an old people’s home had an expert in counter-surveillance at his beck and call.

‘State secret,’ Neame replied, tapping the side of his nose. His mood was relaxed and amenable. He looked well-rested, not a day older than seventy-five. ‘Let’s just say that Eddie introduced us shortly before he went into hiding.’

There was something too convenient in this answer, but Gaddis was certainly not going to accuse Neame of lying. It was perfectly possible that the two men were still in regular contact and that Crane was using Neame as a willing go-between, drip-feeding information as and when it suited him. Equally, Crane could have hired Peter from the private sector to give his old friend an extra layer of protection.

‘Talking of new-fangled technology,’ Gaddis said, ‘would you mind if I took your photograph?’

Neame hesitated. ‘In principle, no, but it must only be for the book. You mustn’t show the picture to anybody before publication. That’s absolutely vital for my security.’

‘I understand,’ Gaddis replied with a smile.

It was a cynical move, not least because he planned to take the picture with nothing more sophisticated than the camera on his mobile phone. No lights, no make-up, just a shot of Crane’s best friend drinking a pint in an English pub. He was rather touched as the old man steadied himself, adjusted his jacket and flattened down his hair, then held a steady gaze as Gaddis lined up the shot.

‘Don’t say cheese.’

The photograph looked perfectly good, but Gaddis took a couple more for luck. Every meeting with Neame could be his last; he might never have the same opportunity again.

‘Can we talk a little more about Oxford?’ he said, when he had put the phone away. He had ordered a pint of lager from the bar and had a list of questions to get through before Neame grew tired.

‘Of course.’

‘I’m still interested in the identity of AGINCOURT.’

‘Aren’t we all.’

‘In Spycatcher, Peter Wright suggests that-’

Neame did not even allow him to complete the sentence.

‘For goodness’ sake, Sam. Please don’t take anything that man says seriously. Wright was an absolute charlatan. Eddie couldn’t stand him. Always playing people off against one another. Obsessed by money, obsessed by petty vengeance. If the government had handled Peter with even a modicum of common sense, he would have evaporated into anonymity.’

‘So you knew Wright as well?’

Neame looked confused. ‘Did I know him?’

‘It’s just that you called him “Peter”. As if you were on first-name terms.’

Neame frowned, dismissing the theory with a slow shake of the head. ‘You’re mistaken.’

Was he? Always with Neame there was the feeling that he was holding something back, dissembling, protecting Crane from exposure. He wondered if they had worked together at SIS. ‘So where does that leave us?’

‘ Us?’

‘I mean, how can I find out more about the Oxford Ring?’

‘Well, there’s very little about it in Eddie’s memoirs. I’ve told you all I can remember.’

The bluntness of this reply tested Gaddis’s goodwill.

‘Mind if I check that?’

Neame smiled. ‘Patience,’ he said, and Gaddis felt the irritation rise still further. It was so hard to be anything other than compliant and reasonable with a man of such advanced years, but he longed to be freed from the shackles of respect for the elderly.

‘Patient for what?’

‘I really have absolutely no idea about AGINCOURT. Eddie said he climbed fairly high in the Labour Party in the sixties and seventies. But that was all a long time ago.’

‘The Labour Party?’

Neame looked up. Beneath his eyes were patches of discoloured skin, years marked on the face as black stains. ‘Labour, yes.’

‘It’s just that you didn’t mention that in the cathedral.’

‘And?’

‘It’s helpful, that’s all.’

‘Well, he was hardly likely to be a Tory, was he? We’re talking about a working-class Yorkshireman, a Communist.’

Suddenly, some of the energy seemed to go out of Neame, like the fading grandeur of a once great house, and he was left looking breathless and tired. As if to confound this impression, he reached down to the floor and, with considerable effort, lifted a flimsy plastic carrier bag up on to the table.

‘I wanted to give you something,’ he said, stifling a cough.

‘Are you all right, Tom?’

‘I’m all right.’ Neame’s half-smile was almost paternal in its affection. Gaddis looked down at the bag and realized, with an excitement close to euphoria, what it contained.

‘Is that what I think it is?’

He was convinced it was the memoirs: there was something in the looseness of the plastic, the weightlessness of it as Neame had lifted the bag to the table. When he again glanced down, he could see the stapled corner of what looked like a manuscript. There was not much of it, just a few pages, but it was surely at least a part of the prize he craved.

‘Call this an act of faith,’ Neame said, encouraging Gaddis to open the bag. ‘It’s also evidence of my faltering memory. I’m afraid I have proved quite incapable of memorizing the details of ATTILA’s behaviour during the war.’

‘His behaviour during the war.’ Gaddis repeated the phrase without inflection, because he now had the stapled manuscript in his hands and was focused solely on what it contained. To his disappointment, he saw that it was merely three pages of hastily scrawled notes, written on fresh sheets of A4. The handwriting was identical to that on the notes which Peter had handed to him in Waterstone’s. In other words, Edward Crane hadn’t been anywhere near it. ‘What is this?’

‘A brief summary of what Eddie admits to having passed to the Soviets.’ Neame was looking beyond him, at the bar. ‘The extent of his treachery.’

Gaddis didn’t understand. Crane had continued working for MI6 until the 1980s. He had betrayed his country for the better part of fifty years. How could these three flimsy pages constitute the full extent of his treachery? He was suddenly sick of questions and dead ends, sick of being misled. He didn’t care if Neame was feeling unwell. He wanted answers.

‘Tom, I thought this was-’

‘I know what you thought it was.’ Neame was again touching the knot on his wool tie, as if doing so would somehow preserve the dignity of their discussion. ‘I’m not ready to give you that yet. But have a look at what there is. It should still be of considerable interest to you.’

Gaddis felt like an errant child being set a task by a particularly exacting father. He saw a word which he recognized as ‘Bletchley’ and read what Neame had scribbled underneath: E works briefly at Bletchley in 42 First-hand access to ULTRA/ in tandem with the Carelian Armour-piercing shells + Tiger tanks (Kurskaia Douga)

‘I’m having trouble understanding this,’ Gaddis told him, flicking to the next page. Here, Neame appeared to have copied out verbatim a passage from the memoirs. That winter, with Cairncross’s assistance, we were able to save the lives of thousands of Soviet soldiers on the eastern Front. This was the period of the Citadel offensive. Thanks to the code-breakers, I was able to pass detailed information about Nazi troop movements to MANN, allowing the Soviet commanders to move their men out of harm’s way in good time.

MANN, Gaddis knew, was the NKVD cryptonym for Theodore Maly. Of course, John and I did not know that our efforts were having any impact at all, but that did not lessen our sense that the work we were doing was of profound importance to the cause.

‘Which cause?’ Gaddis muttered to himself, still coming to terms with what he was seeing. Was this an extract from the memoirs? Why would Neame bother to have copied it out? What value was there in playing such a game?

Neame saw his confusion but gestured at him to continue reading. During the same period, the Carelian was also able to obtain a list of Luftwaffe squadrons operating in the Kursk area. He became ill, so it fell to me to pass on that information to his handler. I believe that, as a result, fifteen Nazi aerodromes were bombed and 500 planes destroyed. A marvellous coup for which both John and I received The Order of the Red Banner.

‘Christ, is that true? Cairncross and Crane were both decorated?’

Neame nodded. ‘If that’s what it says.’

Gaddis went back to the first page. He pointed to the note: ‘Armour-piercing shells + Tiger tanks’, and asked Neame to elaborate.

‘Elaborate?’ The old man tapped a finger against a dried crust of skin, just beneath the hairline. ‘I believe “The Carelian” was one of the names by which John Cairncross was known to the Russians, yes?’

Gaddis nodded.

‘Well, Eddie recalls that the Soviets were able to develop armour-piercing shells capable of destroying Nazi Tiger tanks at the battle of…’ He did not appear to know how to pronounce ‘Kurskaia Douga’, so Gaddis did it for him. ‘Precisely. Again, he credits ULTRA for the intelligence which allowed for this.’

‘I see.’

Gaddis went to the final page, where Neame had written more notes. 1939. Appointed to Soviet counter-espionage at MI5. Gives names of potential Soviet defectors to MANN. Diplomats subsequently withdrawn to Moscow. Full knowledge of counter-espionage activities in London and beyond. Ditto extent of MI5 infiltration of Communist Party. Tell Dr SG about diplomatic bags 1943. Guy and E in Casablanca at clandestine talks between Churchill and Roosevelt. Passed plans for the Allied landing in Sicily and the invasion of the Italian peninsula to MANN.

‘It says here you’re supposed to tell me something about diplomatic bags.’

Neame was sipping his pint. A couple of men had walked into the pub. One of them appeared to know the landlady. Above the noise of their conversation, Neame said: ‘What was that?’

Gaddis leaned forward, pointing at the back page of the manuscript.

‘Something about diplomatic bags, Tom.’

‘Search me.’

Why had the energy gone out of him again, just at the point when he needed Neame to be at his most alert? Was he play-acting, or was age really defeating him?

‘Can I get you something to eat?’

‘That would be very kind.’

Perhaps that was all that it would take. Some bread, some soup to revive his spirits. It took ten minutes for the food to arrive, a period which Neame spent talking about the staff at the nursing home. He was bored, he told Gaddis, bored ‘out of my tiny mind’. That explains your parabolic mood swings, Gaddis thought, and bought himself another pint of lager. When the soup came, Neame took two spoonfuls of it and set the bowl to one side.

‘Did I tell you what happened to Eddie after the war?’

It was instantaneous. He was revived once again. In the space of a few seconds, Neame appeared to have regained his mental and physical acuity. Gaddis was reminded of an actor stepping back into character; it was unnerving to watch. He may have forgotten all about the manuscript, all about the diplomatic bags, preferring to talk about Crane’s experiences after the war, but as far as Gaddis was concerned, that was fine. Let the old man tell his story in his own way and in his own time. Just as long as he tells it.

‘You didn’t mention that, no.’

‘Do you know what, Sam?’

‘What?’

Neame leaned forward, almost slipping on the patched elbows of his tweed jacket. ‘I think Eddie may have experienced what might nowadays be called a nervous breakdown.’

‘Really?’

Now it was Gaddis’s turn to come forward in his chair. He felt as though he was involved in a piece of high theatre. Once or twice, in the dead of night, he had considered the possibility that Thomas Neame was nothing but a fraud, a mischievous, elderly conman spinning tall tales about a man called Eddie Crane who had never existed. That thought was not far away at this moment.

‘The truth is, we lost touch with one another.’ Neame looked depressed. ‘Eddie went to Italy in ’47 and the next few years are a blank. We didn’t see one another, we didn’t write. I even wondered if he had been killed.’

Gaddis nodded. Where was this going? What part of the story was he attempting to spin? Two elderly ladies sat down at the next-door table and popped their napkins.

‘I think there was a boyfriend,’ Neame added, a remark which took Gaddis completely by surprise. ‘In fact, I’m sure that there was a boyfriend.’ So Crane’s sexuality was no longer a delicate subject? In the cathedral, Neame had baulked at any mention of a male lover, yet here he was, happily outing Crane at the first opportunity. Perhaps he had decided that he could trust Gaddis with even the most delicate details of his friend’s story. That was now the best-case scenario. ‘What we do know is that Guy and Donald defected, yes? A ferry to France in ’51 and the Cambridge Ring gradually exposed.’

Gaddis nodded. He could feel his nerves quicken again at the hands of this master manipulator. Neame instinctively reached beside him for his walking stick, but his hand was shaking, like a man fumbling in the dark.

‘There’s a background to all this,’ he said. ‘To the breakdown. If you ask me, Eddie had never properly come to terms with the Pact.’

‘The Hitler-Stalin Pact?’ Gaddis looked down at the bowl of soup, which was giving off a vapour of curry powder. He wished that the landlady would take it away. ‘Seems odd that you would think that. The Pact was in ’39, more than ten years earlier.’

‘Yes, yes.’ Neame appeared to be aware of the contradiction. Crane, after all, had continued working for the Soviets long after Stalin had allied himself to Nazi Germany. ‘The others, you see — Guy, Anthony, Kim, Donald, John — all of them had been reconciled to the treaty. But Eddie never found the justification for it. It completely shook his faith in the Soviet system. He wasn’t programmatic, he wasn’t intellectual in the way that, say, Guy and Anthony were. He didn’t see a deal with Hitler as a necessary evil. He saw it as opportunistic, as a complete rebuttal of Marx.’

‘He wasn’t alone in feeling that way.’

‘No.’ Neame seized on this, meeting Gaddis’s eye, like a traveller who has at last found a sympathetic ear. ‘Eddie came deeply to regret his association with the Soviets. He was proud of some of the things that he had achieved, some of the things that we have touched on today’ — he indicated the papers on the table in front of them, and suddenly the purpose of the notes made sense to Gaddis — ‘but he saw the direction Stalin was taking and realized that he had backed the wrong horse.’

‘So why did he keep going?’ Gaddis asked. ‘Why did he carry on working for the Russians throughout his career?’

‘He didn’t.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Eddie was a double, Sam. That’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you. ATTILA was the greatest post-war coup in the history of the SIS and only a few men on the face of this Earth know about it. Eddie Crane spent thirty years convincing Moscow he was working for the KGB, but in all that time, he was secretly working for us. Isn’t that marvellous? It was an epic of disinformation. And that’s why I want the world to know his story.’