is. It should still be of considerable interest to you.’
Gaddis felt like an errant child being set a task by a particularly exacting father. He saw a word which he recognized as ‘Bletchley’ and read what Neame had scribbled underneath: E works briefly at Bletchley in 42 First- hand access to ULTRA/ in tandem with the Carelian Armour-piercing shells + Tiger tanks (Kurskaia Douga)
‘I’m having trouble understanding this,’ Gaddis told him, flicking to the next page. Here, Neame appeared to have copied out verbatim a passage from the memoirs. That winter, with Cairncross’s assistance, we were able to save the lives of thousands of Soviet soldiers on the eastern Front. This was the period of the Citadel offensive. Thanks to the code-breakers, I was able to pass detailed information about Nazi troop movements to MANN, allowing the Soviet commanders to move their men out of harm’s way in good time.
MANN, Gaddis knew, was the NKVD cryptonym for Theodore Maly. Of course, John and I did not know that our efforts were having any impact at all, but that did not lessen our sense that the work we were doing was of profound importance to the cause.
‘Which cause?’ Gaddis muttered to himself, still coming to terms with what he was seeing. Was this an extract from the memoirs? Why would Neame bother to have copied it out? What value was there in playing such a game?
Neame saw his confusion but gestured at him to continue reading. During the same period, the Carelian was also able to obtain a list of Luftwaffe squadrons operating in the Kursk area. He became ill, so it fell to me to pass on that information to his handler. I believe that, as a result, fifteen Nazi aerodromes were bombed and 500 planes destroyed. A marvellous coup for which both John and I received The Order of the Red Banner.
‘Christ, is that true? Cairncross and Crane were both decorated?’
Neame nodded. ‘If that’s what it says.’
Gaddis went back to the first page. He pointed to the note: ‘Armour-piercing shells + Tiger tanks’, and asked Neame to elaborate.
‘Elaborate?’ The old man tapped a finger against a dried crust of skin, just beneath the hairline. ‘I believe “The Carelian” was one of the names by which John Cairncross was known to the Russians, yes?’
Gaddis nodded.
‘Well, Eddie recalls that the Soviets were able to develop armour-piercing shells capable of destroying Nazi Tiger tanks at the battle of…’ He did not appear to know how to pronounce ‘Kurskaia Douga’, so Gaddis did it for him. ‘Precisely. Again, he credits ULTRA for the intelligence which allowed for this.’
‘I see.’
Gaddis went to the final page, where Neame had written more notes. 1939. Appointed to Soviet counter- espionage at MI5. Gives names of potential Soviet defectors to MANN. Diplomats subsequently withdrawn to Moscow. Full knowledge of counter-espionage activities in London and beyond. Ditto extent of MI5 infiltration of Communist Party. Tell Dr SG about diplomatic bags 1943. Guy and E in Casablanca at clandestine talks between Churchill and Roosevelt. Passed plans for the Allied landing in Sicily and the invasion of the Italian peninsula to MANN.
‘It says here you’re supposed to tell me something about diplomatic bags.’
Neame was sipping his pint. A couple of men had walked into the pub. One of them appeared to know the landlady. Above the noise of their conversation, Neame said: ‘What was that?’
Gaddis leaned forward, pointing at the back page of the manuscript.
‘Something about diplomatic bags, Tom.’
‘Search me.’
Why had the energy gone out of him again, just at the point when he needed Neame to be at his most alert? Was he play-acting, or was age really defeating him?
‘Can I get you something to eat?’
‘That would be very kind.’
Perhaps that was all that it would take. Some bread, some soup to revive his spirits. It took ten minutes for the food to arrive, a period which Neame spent talking about the staff at the nursing home. He was bored, he told Gaddis, bored ‘out of my tiny mind’. That explains your parabolic mood swings, Gaddis thought, and bought himself another pint of lager. When the soup came, Neame took two spoonfuls of it and set the bowl to one side.
‘Did I tell you what happened to Eddie after the war?’
It was instantaneous. He was revived once again. In the space of a few seconds, Neame appeared to have regained his mental and physical acuity. Gaddis was reminded of an actor stepping back into character; it was unnerving to watch. He may have forgotten all about the manuscript, all about the diplomatic bags, preferring to talk about Crane’s experiences after the war, but as far as Gaddis was concerned, that was fine. Let the old man tell his story in his own way and in his own time. Just as long as he tells it.
‘You didn’t mention that, no.’
‘Do you know what, Sam?’
‘What?’
Neame leaned forward, almost slipping on the patched elbows of his tweed jacket. ‘I think Eddie may have experienced what might nowadays be called a nervous breakdown.’
‘Really?’
Now it was Gaddis’s turn to come forward in his chair. He felt as though he was involved in a piece of high theatre. Once or twice, in the dead of night, he had considered the possibility that Thomas Neame was nothing but a fraud, a mischievous, elderly conman spinning tall tales about a man called Eddie Crane who had never existed. That thought was not far away at this moment.
‘The truth is, we lost touch with one another.’ Neame looked depressed. ‘Eddie went to Italy in ’47 and the next few years are a blank. We didn’t see one another, we didn’t write. I even wondered if he had been killed.’
Gaddis nodded. Where was this going? What part of the story was he attempting to spin? Two elderly ladies sat down at the next-door table and popped their napkins.
‘I think there was a boyfriend,’ Neame added, a remark which took Gaddis completely by surprise. ‘In fact, I’m sure that there was a boyfriend.’ So Crane’s sexuality was no longer a delicate subject? In the cathedral, Neame had baulked at any mention of a male lover, yet here he was, happily outing Crane at the first opportunity. Perhaps he had decided that he could trust Gaddis with even the most delicate details of his friend’s story. That was now the best-case scenario. ‘What we do know is that Guy and Donald defected, yes? A ferry to France in ’51 and the Cambridge Ring gradually exposed.’
Gaddis nodded. He could feel his nerves quicken again at the hands of this master manipulator. Neame instinctively reached beside him for his walking stick, but his hand was shaking, like a man fumbling in the dark.
‘There’s a background to all this,’ he said. ‘To the breakdown. If you ask me, Eddie had never properly come to terms with the Pact.’
‘The Hitler-Stalin Pact?’ Gaddis looked down at the bowl of soup, which was giving off a vapour of curry powder. He wished that the landlady would take it away. ‘Seems odd that you would think that. The Pact was in ’39, more than ten years earlier.’
‘Yes, yes.’ Neame appeared to be aware of the contradiction. Crane, after all, had continued working for the Soviets long after Stalin had allied himself to Nazi Germany. ‘The others, you see — Guy, Anthony, Kim, Donald, John — all of them had been reconciled to the treaty. But Eddie never found the justification for it. It completely shook his faith in the Soviet system. He wasn’t programmatic, he wasn’t intellectual in the way that, say, Guy and Anthony were. He didn’t see a deal with Hitler as a necessary evil. He saw it as opportunistic, as a complete rebuttal of Marx.’
‘He wasn’t alone in feeling that way.’
‘No.’ Neame seized on this, meeting Gaddis’s eye, like a traveller who has at last found a sympathetic ear. ‘Eddie came deeply to regret his association with the Soviets. He was proud of some of the things that he had achieved, some of the things that we have touched on today’ — he indicated the papers on the table in front of them, and suddenly the purpose of the notes made sense to Gaddis — ‘but he saw the direction Stalin was taking and realized that he had backed the wrong horse.’
‘So why did he keep going?’ Gaddis asked. ‘Why did he carry on working for the Russians throughout his career?’
‘He didn’t.’
