Free The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming Page B

16 April 1911. Educated at Eton College, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Granted a Certificate for Branch B of the Foreign Service 1 October 1947 and appointed with effect from 1 January 1947 to be an Officer, Grade 4. Transferred to Washington as 2nd Secretary, 7 August 1950. Suspended from duty, 1 June 1951. Appointment terminated 1 June 1952, with effect from 1 June 1951.
    Donald Maclean was included in the same volume:
    MACLEAN, DONALD DUART
    Born 25 May 1913. Educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. M. 1940, Melinda Marling. Granted a Certificate as 3rd Secretary in the Foreign Office or Diplomatic Service, 11 October 1935, and appointed to the Foreign Office, 15 October 1935. Transferred to Paris, 24 September 1938. Transferred to the Foreign Office, 18 June 1940.
    This last detail caught Gaddis’s eye. Crane had also been posted back to London in June 1940. Had he worked alongside Maclean? Were the two men friends?
    The entry continued:
    Promoted to be a 2nd Secretary, 15 October 1940. Transferred to Washington, 2 May 1944. Promoted to be an Acting 1st Secretary, 27 December 1944. Promoted to be a Foreign Service Officer, Grade 6, 25 October 1948, and appointed Counsellor at Cairo, 7 November 1948. Transferred to the Foreign Office and appointed Head of American dept., 6 November 1950. Suspended from duty, 1 June 1951. Appointment terminated 1 June 1952, with effect from 1 June 1951.
    The same phrases. ‘Appointment terminated.’ ‘Suspended from duty.’ 1951 had marked Burgess and Maclean’s flight from England. Two of Her Majesty’s brightest stars escaping to Moscow aboard a cross-Channel ferry on a cold spring morning, tipped off – by their fellow traitors, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt – that MI5 had exposed them as agents of the KGB.
    Gaddis now looked for Philby’s name, under ‘P’ in the Statement of Services. Nothing. He picked up the Foreign Office List from 1942 and drew the same blank. Gaddis checked the volume for 1960. Again, no mention of Philby. Why had he not been included in the list of Foreign Office employees? Did MI6 officers enjoy anonymity? Gaddis began to go through every volume of the List, from 1940 to 1959, finding no reference to Philby at any stage. Instead, he stumbled upon an anomaly: Edward Crane’s listings disappeared between 1946 and 1952, the period in which The Times obituary had placed him in Italy. Had he joined MI6 during this period? Or had Crane taken an extended, post-war sabbatical? There were so many questions; too many, if Gaddis was honest with himself. To research a story on this scale, to do justice to Charlotte’s book, would take years, not months. There were historians who had dedicated their lives to the search for the sixth man; none of them had been successful. If only he could track down a surviving employee of the Foreign Office who might have known Crane. Surely there was a colleague who had sat on the same delegation or attended a conference at which Crane had been present?
    Towards midday he walked downstairs, ate a tasteless cheese sandwich at the National Archives café and took a seat at a public Internet terminal. He had one more line of enquiry: a colleague at UCL had tipped him off that senior diplomats often deposited their papers and private correspondence in the archive at Churchill College, Cambridge. Gaddis might find a cross-reference between Crane and, say, a retired British ambassador to Argentina, or a 1st Secretary in Berlin. Seagulls were clacking outside as he typed ‘Churchill College, Cambridge’ into Google. He pulled up the Janus webserver at Cambridge and typed ‘Edward Crane’ into the search bar. Three catalogue entries came up, none of which made specific reference to Crane. When he typed in ‘Thomas Neame’, the server returned no results at all.
    It was hugely frustrating. He went out to the car park, found an old packet of Camels in the glove box of his car and abandoned his latest