make it back home. And he passed in and out of consciousness with the sorry realization that she, too, had been murdered by these men. Why hadn’t he realized that Charlotte Berg hadn’t died of a heart attack?
He wondered if her friend knew, the academic. What was his name? For some reason, Somers couldn’t remember. He wondered if he should get a message to him, to somehow let him know that his friend had been killed. Somers tried to reach for his phone but found that it had disappeared.
Sam Gaddis. That was it. Gaddis. He should try to call him. He should try to get in touch. Somebody needed to let this guy know that the things he was getting himself involved in were going to get him killed.
Chapter 17
There was a seven-mile traffic jam on the M3 out of Winchester, which gave Gaddis all the time he needed to digest what Neame had told him about Eddie Crane’s year at Oxford. If true, it was an astonishing story.
In the summer of his graduation from Cambridge, Crane had been instructed by his NKVD handler, Arnold Deutsch, to apply for a postgraduate position at Oxford. Moscow’s requirements were simple: Crane was to spend a year talent-spotting Communists whom he felt had the potential to work as agents for the Soviet Union. In other words, he was to perform the same job that Burgess had done, to such great effect, in the earlier part of the decade at Trinity.
Crane’s controller at Oxford was a man named Theodore Maly, an undercover Soviet intelligence officer. Maly had already succeeded in recruiting Arthur Wynn, a former student at Trinity, to the Soviet cause. According to Neame, ATTILA and Wynn had succeeded in penetrating Oxford’s left-wing community and had effectively green-lit a ring of at least seven spies which, it transpired, had been every bit as successful as their counterparts at Cambridge. For Gaddis, this wasn’t just a major development in the Crane story; it was a huge scoop in its own right. An Oxford Ring had always been one of the great conspiracy theories of the Cold War. He now had evidence that such a ring had existed.
Yet that wasn’t the end of it. What Neame had told him about the identity of one of the members of the Oxford Ring was little short of astonishing. Crane’s memoirs apparently contained a cryptic reference to a Modern History under graduate from Yorkshire named ‘James’ who had been talent-spotted by ATTILA and subsequently recruited as an agent by the Soviets in 1938. Russian Intelligence had given ‘James’ the code name AGINCOURT. In the memoirs, Crane had revealed that AGIN-COURT had gone on to hold ‘one of the highest offices in the land’. Gaddis was convinced that this was the revelation that Charlotte had referred to at dinner in Hampstead three weeks earlier: a secret which would ‘rock London and Moscow to their foundations’. Neame had insisted that he did not know AGINCOURT’s identity, but Gaddis felt certain that, with enough time, he would be able to put the clues together and, at the very least, draw up a shortlist of suspects.
There were three days until his next scheduled meeting with Neame. Gaddis used the time to find out what was already in the public domain about Arthur Wynn. He also turned his attention to Oxford in the pre-war years. In his memoirs, Spycatcher, the former MI5 officer Peter Wright had raised the possibility of an Oxford Ring, identifying the academic Jennifer Hart, the Labour MP Bernard Floud and his brother, Peter, as suspected members. According to Neame, all three names appeared in Crane’s memoirs as active Soviet agents.
What intrigued Gaddis was that several suspects in the Oxford Ring had died in suspicious circumstances; one had even taken her life shortly after being interrogated by MI5. This had prompted the Security Service to suspend its investigations and to cover up the existence of the Oxford Ring for fear of a public scandal. But was Peter Wright’s version of events true, or a clever attempt to create a smokescreen not only for ATTILA and Wynn, but also for AGINCOURT?
That night, Gaddis went to the Donmar Warehouse theatre with Holly to watch a new play written by a friend with whom she had been at university.
‘You look bored,’ she said at the interval. ‘You look distracted.’
She was right. He couldn’t concentrate on the production. He wanted to walk out, to take Holly to dinner and tell her about Neame and Lampard, about ‘James’ and the Oxford spy ring. But it was impossible; he could not involve her. If he was honest with himself, he still did not know why Holly had approached Charlotte with her mother’s research papers. Had it just been a coincidence, or had Katya Levette in some way been involved in the Crane conspiracy? His mind was scrambled with possibilities.
The barman at the Donmar was a friend of Holly’s, an outof-work actor called Piers whose girlfriend was performing in the play. Afterwards, the four of them went for dinner in Covent Garden and he found that he enjoyed their company, and that Piers, in particular, was easygoing and likeable. But a part of him was floating through the meal, killing time until he was able to get home and attack the books once again. He persuaded Holly to spend the night at his house but left her asleep in his bed while he went to his office and trawled the Internet looking for information about AGINCOURT. All he was able to dig up was an old conspiracy theory about the former British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, working for the Soviet Union. Had Neame sent him on a wild-goose chase?
On Thursday morning he set off for Winchester, following the instructions that Neame had given him when they left the cathedral. He was to return to Waterstone’s and to wait for Peter on the first floor. This time, they had joked, there would be no need to carry a copy of the Herald Tribune.
Peter duly appeared at 11 a.m. wearing a red Manchester United shirt with ‘ROONEY’ emblazoned across the back. They were alone in the room and Gaddis laughed when he saw the shirt, Peter grinning back and handing him a small box and a piece of paper on which he had written a set of instructions.
‘Sat-nav,’ he said. ‘It’s already switched on. Just press the green button and do what it tells you. Your friend is waiting in the pub.’
Gaddis opened the box and found a small TomTom loosely wrapped in bubble plastic. The written instructions explained that he was to take the route pre-programmed into the sat-nav, a journey which would eventually lead to a village outside Winchester. Peter would be following Gaddis’s car at a discreet distance to ensure that he was not being tailed. If, at any point, he suspected that Gaddis was under surveil-lance, he would text the word ‘LONDON’ to his mobile phone, thereby aborting the meeting.
The plan seemed straightforward and, by now, Gaddis was familiar enough with the eccentric customs of the secret world to be neither surprised nor concerned by it. He returned to his car, put the TomTom on the passenger seat, switched on the engine and pressed ‘Go’.
‘At the end of the road, turn left.’
He was startled to hear the voice of Sean Connery, preprogrammed into the software. Another of Peter’s private jokes; Gaddis was beginning to like him. Pulling out into shuffling late-morning traffic, he was soon being slung around the narrow lanes and B-roads of southern Hampshire by an actor doing his very best impression of Commander James Bond. Peter had programmed the sat-nav with a series of turns and loops which often brought Gaddis back to a roundabout or junction that he had passed five or ten minutes earlier. The purpose of this was clear: any vehicle attempting to follow him would quickly be exposed. Gaddis kept an eye on his rear-view mirror, certain that Peter was driving a red Toyota. It would appear, six or seven cars back, on dual carriageways and at sets of traffic lights, and Gaddis found himself slowing down at regular intervals to allow him the chance to catch up.
When he had been on the road for almost half an hour, a text message came through on Gaddis’s phone. He reached for it and saw with a feeling of dread that the message had come from a ‘Withheld’ number. To his relief, though, Peter was simply instructing him to switch off the phone, doubtless to prevent it being tracked to the pub. Within five minutes, the sat-nav had brought him into the car park of a mock-Tudor inn in the village of Easton, just a few miles north of Winchester.
Neame was already seated in the corner of the dining room, far enough from neighbouring tables that their conversation would not be overheard. He was wearing the same tweed suit, the same wool tie and the same polished brown brogues that he had sported at their first meeting. It was almost as if he had walked directly from Winchester and had been waiting in the pub ever since. There was a pint of what looked like real ale in front of him and he appeared to be in jovial spirits.
‘Ah. The good doctor.’
Neame rose to his feet.
‘Is this your local, Tom?’
