Glass of wine in hand, Gaddis logged into his UCL account and clicked through his messages. There was one from Natasha in Spain, another from a colleague in Washington, and a round robin from a distant relative in Virginia trying to persuade friends and family to buy the paperback of his latest book. Gaddis checked the Spam folder — ‘Be a Master of the Universe with a Huge Broadsword in your Pants’ — and within the mass of junk offering him tertiary education courses and Viagra, he spotted a message that he could scarcely believe: tomgandalf@hushmail. com has sent you a secure email using Hushmail. To read it please visit the following web page
The same weblink that he had seen on Charlotte’s Hotmail account was listed below. Gaddis looked up at the kitchen door, expecting Holly to walk into the room with two steaming bowls of spaghetti. He clicked the link and was again taken to the Hushmail website: Your message has been protected using a question and answer which was created by the sender. You must correctly answer this question, word for word, to retrieve your message. You will be limited to five incorrect responses. Question: Who was the doctor at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, in 1992?
Gaddis quickly typed in the answer.
Benedict Meisner
It was wrong. He had only four responses left.
He tried ‘Ben Meisner’ and swore when the answer was again rejected. Third time lucky, gulping wine, Gaddis typed in ‘Dr Benedict Meisner’, whispering ‘Come on, come on’ under his breath as he hit ‘Return’.
Like the click of a lock on a safe, the door swinging open, he was taken to a private message: Dear Dr Gaddis I knew Eddie Crane very well. Indeed, he was my closest friend for more than fifty years. For reasons that will become obvious to you, this is not the sort of information that I tend to make public. If you would like to contact me, I suggest that you present yourself at the branch of Waterstone’s bookshop in Winchester High Street at 11 a.m. on Monday. If this is inconvenient for you, do not reply to this email directly. Instead, please send a blank email with the subject heading ‘Book’ to the following address: parrot1684@mac. com If you are able to make the journey to Winchester, please carry a copy of the International Herald Tribune with you and, having entered the bookshop, make your way upstairs. This is so that I might more easily recognize you. Eddie taught me a trick or two about tradecraft. Sincerely, Thomas Neame
Gaddis was flabbergasted. How did Neame know that he was investigating Crane’s death? Holly called out ‘Food’s ready!’ and her voice made him lurch half out of his seat in surprise. He quickly scanned the text a second time. He was aware that he should probably remove evidence of the correspondence from her computer, yet Gaddis had no idea how to clear the history quickly from an Internet browser.
He heard the strike of a match in the kitchen. Holly was lighting candles. Unsure of what to do, he simply signed out of his email account and shut off the computer. Holly put her head round the door just as he was closing the lid.
‘I was planning to eat the spaghetti tonight,’ she said.
‘Sure.’ Gaddis stood up. He had a head full of questions and an empty glass in his hand. ‘What do you know about Winchester?’
Chapter 14
Winchester was just as Holly had described: a well-scrubbed, moneyed cathedral city an hour south of London with a clogged-up one-way system and memorials, seemingly at every corner, of Alfred the Great.
Gaddis arrived an hour early. He had not slept well and left Holly’s flat at eight o’clock for fear of being stuck in traffic or, worse, of his superannuated Volkswagen Golf breaking down on the M3. He bought a copy of the Herald Tribune on the Fulham Road, knowing that it would be difficult to find one at any newsagent in Winchester, and drove, too fast, with a take-away cappuccino wedged between his legs and Blonde on Blonde on the CD player. In Winchester he ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs at a faux-French cafe in the centre of town, having established that Waterstone’s was not yet open. He had the latest issue of Private Eye and a photocopied Prospect article about Moscow to read, but found that he could concentrate on neither. The Herald Tribune lay untouched in a leather satchel at his feet. His waitress, a bottle-blonde Hungarian, was pretty and bored, stopping to chat to him in fractured English about a course she was taking in design and technology. Gaddis was grateful for the distraction.
At half-past ten, the morning moving with a tectonic slowness, he made his way to the entrance of the bookshop, drifting about on the ground floor with no discernible purpose other than to look up at every customer who walked through the entrance, hoping to see a ninety-one-year-old man. By force of habit, he searched for traces of his own work and found a single hardback copy of Tsars, nestled alphabetically in the History section. Ordinarily, Gaddis would have introduced himself to a member of staff and offered to sign it, but it seemed important to maintain a degree of anonymity.
At five to eleven, he walked upstairs. To his surprise, the first floor was not a large, open-plan area, comparable in scale to the ground floor, but instead a small, brightly lit room, no larger than the open-plan kitchen in his house, enclosed on all sides by shelves of travel guides and self-help manuals. There was one other customer present, a dreadlocked, tie-dyed girl of perhaps eighteen or nineteen who was working her way through a copy of South-East Asia on a Shoestring. Cross-legged on the floor, she looked up at Gaddis when he appeared at the top of the stairs, her mouth forming an acknowledging smile. Gaddis nodded back and took his copy of the Herald Tribune out of the satchel, preparing to make the signal. He tucked it under his arm, making sure that the banner was visible; the act of doing this felt both awkward and embarrassing and he drew a book at random from the shelves in front of him in an effort to make his behaviour appear less self-conscious.
It was a copy of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Gaddis felt the dreadlocked girl staring at him as he tried to pin the newspaper under his left elbow while at the same time flicking backwards through the pages. A minute passed. Two. His arm began to ache and his face was flushed with an involuntary embarrassment. What would Neame make of him for reading such a book? He put it back on the shelf and transferred the newspaper to his right hand, feeling as though he was standing in the middle of some vast stage, overlooked by a crowd of thousands. Would Neame approach him in the presence of the girl? Would he make himself known with a nod of the head and expect Gaddis to follow? It was like performing in a play that he had never rehearsed.
At precisely eleven o’clock, a second customer, a shaven-headed man in his mid-twenties, appeared at the top of the stairs. What excitement Gaddis had felt at the sound of his approach quickly dissipated. He was wearing torn denim jeans, white Adidas trainers and a blue Chelsea football shirt with the name ‘LAMPARD’ printed across the back. Hardly likely to be an associate of Neame’s. Without making eye contact, the man moved past Gaddis and headed straight for a stack of cut-price paperbacks at the far end of the room. Gaddis felt that he should still be seen to be browsing and picked up a second book from the Self-Help section, again pinning the Herald Tribune under his elbow. This one was called Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life and Gaddis quickly replaced it with another day-glo paperback, this one entitled The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need, which at least brought a smile to his face.
What had happened to Neame? He looked back at the staircase but could see only promotional posters, a swaying light and a beige carpet worn by years of use. Five long minutes later, the dreadlocked girl finally stood up from the floor, put her guide to Asia back on the shelf, and went downstairs. Lampard was now his only companion.
Things happened quickly. As soon as the woman had gone, Lampard turned and walked directly towards Gaddis. Gaddis prepared to move to one side to allow the man to pass, but saw, to his consternation, that he was taking a piece of paper from his back pocket and attempting to pass it to him.
‘You dropped this, mate,’ he muttered, in a thick Cockney accent. Gaddis took the paper in a state of bewildered euphoria. Before he had a chance to respond, Lampard was halfway down the stairs, leaving only a cloud of BO behind him and a memory of his pale, undernourished face.
Gaddis unfolded the piece of paper. There was a short message, handwritten in a spidery scrawl: GO TO THE CATHEDRAL. TURN RIGHT OUT OF WATERSTONES, LEFT INTO SOUTHGATE STREET. AT THE EXCHANGE PUB TURN LEFT INTO ST CLEMENT STREET. LEFT AGAIN AT BLINKERS. TURN RIGHT INTO THE HIGH STREET. GO AS FAR AS THE MEMORIAL AND TURN RIGHT AGAIN. AT THE PASTIE SHOP, DRINK AN ESPRESSO AT CAFE MONDE. DO NOT SIT IN THE WINDOW OR AT ANY OF THE OUTSIDE TABLES. WHEN YOU LEAVE, TAKE THE AVENUE TO
