Free The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming

death. So I conclude from this that the person involved must have been important, right? You see, I’ve been a nurse for over fifteen years, Professor. I’ve met a lot of other nurses. And when we get together, at the Christmas party, say, or a leaving do, it’s surprising how rarely we talk about being asked to pretend that someone’s dead. It’s not a daily occurrence. It’s not something we’re trained for. In fact, the departure of Edward Crane from planet Earth is probably the only time in the long and distinguished history of the National Health Service that something like that has ever happened.’
    ‘Drink?’ Far from annoying him, the speech had reassured Gaddis that Somers knew nothing about Crane’s link to the Cambridge spies.
    ‘What?’
    ‘I said, do you want another drink, Calvin? My round.’
    Somers looked at his watch. The strap was worn, the freckled wrist slim and pale.
    ‘Nah. I’ve got to go.’ Gaddis stared at him, deadening his lively eyes. It was a trick he sometimes employed on particularly recalcitrant students and it had the desired effect. Somers looked immediately sheepish and said: ‘Unless, of course, you’re not satisfied that you’ve got your money’s worth.’
    Gaddis moved very slightly to one side. ‘One more question.’
    ‘And what’s that?’
    Two more smokers moved past the table and disappeared outside. A cold blast of wind ran through the open door.
    ‘How were you first introduced to Charlotte? How did you find her?’
    ‘Oh, that’s easy.’
    ‘What do you mean “easy”?’
    ‘Bloke called Neame put her on to me.’
    ‘And would you have any idea how I can find him?’

Chapter 10
    It looked as though Thomas Neame did not want to be found. He wasn’t in the phone book. He couldn’t be traced online. Charlotte had told Gaddis nothing about his life, even less about his whereabouts. All he knew was that Neame was Crane’s oldest friend – his ‘confessor’, to use Charlotte’s description – and was willing to reveal everything about Crane’s work for the KGB. He was ‘ninety-one going on seventy-five’ and still in robust good health. How had Charlotte put it? ‘Very tough and fit, sort of war generation Scot who can smoke forty a day and still pop to the top of Ben Nevis before breakfast.’
    Why had she mentioned Ben Nevis? Was there a clue in that? Did Neame live in Scotland? Gaddis was lying in bed one night when that thought came to him, but it moved on as quickly as a car passing outside in the street. After all, what was he going to do about it? Take the sleeper to Fort William and start knocking on doors? It would be another wild-goose chase.
    Over a period of several days he went through the files that had been given to him by Holly Levette, but found no mention of Neame’s name. He felt, as each fruitless search led to the next, as though he was standing in a long queue that had not moved for hours. Gaddis had no contacts in the police, no friend in the Inland Revenue, and certainly no money to spend on a professional investigator who might be able to dig around in Neame’s past. He did not even know where Neame had been to school. Always in the back of his mind was the humiliating thought that he had handed Calvin Somers £3000 for what was effectively no more than a dinner party anecdote.
    It helped that Gaddis wasn’t melancholy or defeatist by nature. Four days after meeting Somers in the pub, he decided to abandon the search for Neame and to concentrate instead directly on Edward Crane. He would, in effect, be looking for a man who no longer existed, yet that prospect did not unsettle him. Historians specialize in the dead. Sam Gaddis had spent his entire career bringing people he had never met, faces he had never seen, names he had read about only in the pages of books, vividly to life. He was a specialist in reconstruction. He knew how to piece together the fragments of a stranger’s existence, to work through an archive,