Free The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming Page A

to pan the stream of history to reveal a nugget of priceless information.
    First off, he made a visit to the British Library’s newspaper archive in Colindale, retrieving Crane’s faked obituary and making a copy of it from a 1992 microfilm of The Times . There was no photograph accompanying the piece, but the text matched the broad facts that Somers had given him beside the canal: that Crane had been educated at Marlborough and Trinity College; that the Foreign Office, over a twenty-year period, had posted him to Russia, Argentina and Germany; that he had never married nor produced any children. Further biographical information was thin on the ground, but Gaddis was certain that some of it would later prove useful. The obituary stated that Crane had been sent to Greece in 1938 and had spent several years in Italy after the war. It transpired that his mother had been a society beauty, twice married, whose first husband – Crane’s father – was a middle-ranking civil servant in India who was later briefly imprisoned for embezzlement. In Argentina, in the 1960s, Crane had been seconded to a British diplomat whom the obituarist – perhaps with a flourish of poetic licence – suspected of having an affair with Eva Peron. Having retired from the Foreign Office, Crane had sat on the board of several leading corporations, including a well-known British oil company and a German investment bank with an office in Berlin.
    Two days later, Gaddis drove the short journey from his house in Shepherd’s Bush, via Chiswick, to the National Archives, a complex of buildings in Kew which stores official government records. At the enquiries desk he made a formal request for Crane’s war record and ran Crane’s name through the computerized database. The search produced more than five hundred results, most of them relating to Edward Cranes born in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Gaddis tried ‘Thomas’ and ‘Tommy’ and ‘Tom Neame’ but found only the Medal Card of a Thomas Neame who had been a private in the Welsh Regiment and Army Service Corps between 1914 and 1920. The wrong generation. Another dead end.
    Finally, he got lucky. A National Archives assistant directed Gaddis to the Foreign Office Lists, which comprised several shelves of well-thumbed hardback volumes in burgundy leather containing basic biographical information about employees of the Foreign Office. He picked up the volume marked ‘1947’ and began searching the Statement of Services for the surname ‘Crane’. What he saw almost brought him to his feet with relief. Here, at last, was concrete proof of ATTILA’s existence.
    CRANE, EDWARD ANTHONY
    Born 10 December 1916. Educated at Marlborough College, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Granted a Certificate as 3rd Secretary in the Foreign Office, 11 October 1937, and appointed to the Foreign Office, 17 October 1937. Transferred to Athens, 21 August 1938. Transferred to the Foreign Office, 5 June 1940. Promoted to be 2nd Secretary, 15 November 1942. Transferred to Paris, 2 November 1944. Promoted to be an Acting 1st Secretary, 7 January 1945.
    He went back to the shelves and drew out the List for 1965, which was the last available volume before the Foreign Office records were computerized. By then, Crane had served all over the world but, as the obituary confirmed, had never been promoted to ambassador. Why? Did it have something to do with the fact that Crane had never married? Was he homosexual, and therefore – back in those days – regarded as unreliable? Or had the government, in the wake of Burgess and Maclean, developed suspicions about Crane’s links to Soviet Russia?
    Charlotte had told Gaddis that Crane had been known to the Ring of Five, so he picked up the volume for 1953. When he found what he was looking for, he experienced that particular buzz to which he had been addicted for more than twenty years: the thrill of history coming alive at his fingertips.
    BURGESS, GUY FRANCIS DE MONCY
    Born