more impact. ‘I watched the ambulance turn past the Post Office, had a quick smoke and went back inside. Took the lift up to Crane’s room, cleared it out, threw away the bags and catheter and sent the medical notes down to Patient Records. You could probably check them if you want. Far as the hospital was concerned, a seventy-six- year-old cancer patient had come in suffering from liver failure and died during the night. The sort of thing that happened all the time. It was a new day, a new shift. Time to move on.’
‘And Crane?’
‘What about him?’
‘You never heard another word?’
Somers looked as if he had been asked an idiotic question. That was the trouble with intellectuals. So fucking stupid.
‘Why would I hear another word?’ He took a long draw on the pint and did something with his eyes which made Gaddis want to deck him. ‘Presumably he was given a new identity. Presumably he enjoyed another ten years of happy life and died peacefully in his bed. Who knows?’
Two smokers, one coming in, one going out, pushed past their table. Gaddis was obliged to move a leg out of the way.
‘And you never breathed a word about it? Nobody asked you any questions? Nobody apart from Charlotte has brought up this subject for over ten years?’
‘You could say that, yeah.’
Gaddis sensed a lie here, but knew there was no point pursuing it. Somers was the type who shut down once you caught them in a contradiction. He said: ‘And did Crane talk? What kind of man was he? What did he look like?’
Somers laughed. ‘You don’t do this very often, do you, Professor?’
It was true. Sam Gaddis didn’t often meet male nurses in pubs on the outskirts of London and try to extract information about seventy-six-year-old diplomats whose deaths had been faked by men who paid out twenty grand in return for a lifetime of silence. He was divorced and forty-three. He was a senior lecturer in Russian History at University College London. His normal beat was Pushkin, Stalin, Gorbachev. Nevertheless, that remark took him to the edge of his patience and he said: ‘And how often do you do it, Calvin?’ just so that Somers knew where he stood.
The reply did the trick. A little frown of panic appeared in the gap between Somers’s eyes which he tried, without success, to force away. The nurse sought refuge in some peanuts and got salt on his fingers as he wrestled with the packet.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘Crane didn’t speak at all. Before he was admitted, they’d given him a mild anaesthetic which had rendered him unconscious. He had grey hair, shaved to look like he’d undergone chemotherapy, but his skin was too healthy for a man supposedly in his condition. He probably weighed about seventy kilos, between five foot ten and six foot. I never saw his eyes, on account of the fact they were always closed. That good enough for you?’
Gaddis didn’t answer immediately. He didn’t need to. He let the silence speak for him. ‘And Henderson?’
‘What about him?’
‘What kind of man was he? What did he look like? All you’ve told me so far is that he wore a long black overcoat and sounded like somebody doing a bad impression of David Niven.’
Somers turned his head and stared at the far corner of the room.
‘Charlotte never told you?’
‘Told me what?’
Somers blinked rapidly and said: ‘Pass me that newspaper.’ There was a damp, discarded copy of The Times lying in a trickle of beer on the next-door table. A black girl listening to a pink iPod smiled her assent when Gaddis asked if he could take it. He straightened it out and handed the newspaper across the table.
‘You’ve heard of the Leighton Inquiry?’ Somers asked.
Leighton was a judicial inquiry into an aspect of government policy relating to the war in Afghanistan. Gaddis had heard of it. He had read the op-eds, caught the reports on Channel Four News.
‘Go on,’ he said.
Somers turned to page five. ‘You see this man?’
He flattened out the newspaper, spinning it through a hundred and eighty degrees. The nurse’s narrow, nail- bitten finger skewered a photograph of a man ducking into a government Rover on a busy London street. The man was in late middle-age and surrounded by a crush of reporters. Gaddis read the caption.
Sir John Brennan leaves Whitehall after giving evidence to the inquiry.
There was a smaller, formal Foreign Office portrait of Brennan set inside the main photograph. Gaddis looked up. Somers saw that he had made the connection.
‘Henderson is John Brennan? Are you sure?’
‘As sure as I’m sitting here looking at you.’ Somers drained his pint. ‘The man who paid me twenty grand sixteen years ago to cover everything up wasn’t just any old spook. The man who called himself Douglas Henderson in 1992 is now the head of MI6.’
Chapter 2
It was a long way from Daunt Books on Holland Park Avenue to that suburban September pub in West Hyde.
A month earlier, Gaddis had been launching his latest book — Tsars, a comparative study of Peter the Great and the current Russian president, Sergei Platov — at a bookshop in central London. His editor, the part-owner of a boutique publishing house which had paid the princely sum of 4750 for the book, hadn’t made it to the event. A lone diarist, on work experience at the Evening Standard, had poked her head around the door of the bookshop at six twenty-five, picked up a glass of room temperature Sauvignon Blanc and, having established that she had more chance of finding a story on the top deck of the number 16 bus, left after ten minutes. No celebrity historian, no literary editor, nor any representative of the BBC had replied to the invitations which the PR girl insisted had gone out — ‘first class’ — in the second week of July. A solitary notice in Saturday’s Independent had turned up one ashen-faced matriarch who had come ‘all the way from Hampstead because I so enjoyed your book on Bulgakov’, as well as a former student of Sam’s named Colin who claimed that he had spent the previous year ‘walking around Kazakhstan reading Herman Hesse’. The rest were staff — the manager of the shop, someone to operate the till — about a dozen colleagues and students from UCL, Sam’s next-door neighbour, Kath, who was highly-sexed and always opened the front door in her dressing-gown, and his close friend, the journalist Charlotte Berg.
Did Gaddis care that the new book would most probably disappear without trace? Yes and no. Though politically active, he was under no illusions that a single book could change attitudes to Sergei Platov. Tsars would be politely reviewed by the broadsheet press in London and dismissed in Moscow as Western propaganda. It had taken three years to write and would sell perhaps a thousand copies in hardback. Long ago, Gaddis had decided to write solely for the pleasure of writing: to expect greater rewards was to invite frustration. If the public enjoyed his books, he was happy; if they didn’t, so be it. They had better things to be spending their hard-earned cash on. He had no desire for fame, no innate interest in making money: what mattered to him was the quality of the work. And Tsars was a book that he was proud of. It amounted to a sustained attack on the Platov regime, an attack which he had tried to condense, as succinctly as possible, into a 750-word op-ed in the Guardian which had appeared three days earlier.
Thus far, that had been the extent of the book’s publicity campaign. Gaddis wasn’t particularly interested in cultivating a public image. Four years earlier, for example, he had published a biography of Trotsky which had been enthusiastically talked up on Radio 4. An enterprising young television producer had invited him to screen test for a series of programmes about ‘Great Revolutionary Figures’. Gaddis had declined. Why? Because he felt at the time that it would mean spending too long away from his baby daughter, Min, and abandoning his students at UCL. His friends and colleagues had thought it was a missed opportunity. What was the point of being a successful academic in twenty-first-century Britain if you didn’t want to appear on BBC4? Think of the tie-ins, they said. Think of the money. With his crooked good looks, Gaddis would have been a natural for television, but he valued his privacy too much and didn’t want to sideline the career he loved for what he described as ‘the dubious pleasure of seeing my
