‘How did your mother die?’
‘Wow. You really know how to sweet-talk a girl into bed.’
‘Seriously. You’ve never told me. I had the feeling the two of you weren’t close.’
Holly stopped undressing. She was standing barefoot in the middle of his bedroom with a strap of vintage dress halfway down her arm.
‘We had our problems. Mothers and daughters, you know?’ iTunes shuffled to ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’. Gaddis thought about going into his office to change it, but wanted a reply to his question.
‘She had cancer?’ he asked.
‘No. What makes you say that?’
‘I just wondered how she died.’
Holly’s face jagged in irritation. ‘Why the sudden interest?’
She was losing patience. If he wasn’t careful, she would grab her toothbrush from the bathroom, put on her platform shoes and drink-drive back to Chelsea.
‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I asked.’
He did know why he had asked, of course. He wanted to know if the circumstances surrounding the death of Katya Levette had been in any way suspicious. He wanted to know if she had been murdered by the FSB. Was there something in the files that he had not yet discovered, a smoking gun in a shoebox? Had Katya unravelled the riddle of Dresden and paid the price with her life? The theory made no sense, of course: if the Russians had wanted to silence her, they would surely have destroyed her research as well. But Gaddis was in a mood of such persistent suspicion that he could not see the folly of his own thinking.
‘She was an alcoholic.’
Holly’s declaration caught him off-guard. He had been switching off a light in the corridor and had come back into the room to find her sitting on the edge of the bed, unzipping her dress with a melancholy slowness.
‘I didn’t realize.’
‘Why would you?’
He walked across the room and knelt on the ground in front of her. He reached out his hand and stopped her in the act of undressing. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Not your fault,’ she said, smiling and ruffling his hair. He felt embarrassed and guilty. ‘If somebody wants to drink themselves to death, there isn’t much anybody can do about it.’
She continued to take off the dress. It was like an act of defiance against her mother, preventing her from ruining their evening. Gaddis saw the loveliness of her body and reached to touch her stomach. He knew that she had no intention of milking his sympathy, of playing the scene for emotional effect. It was one of the things that he most liked about her: she was an actress entirely incapable of melodrama.
‘Come to bed,’ she said, unbuttoning his shirt. The sweet moisturized scent of her skin was a balm. She began to smile. ‘Just one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Can we please turn off the Bob fucking Dylan?’
Three hours later, Gaddis was still awake. Being with Holly had done nothing to calm him. She was asleep in a peaceful curled ball beside him, but he was agitated in a way that he had not known since the worst periods of his divorce. He had barely slept since Berlin, yet the act of closing his eyes seemed to power up his imagination. He was haunted by images of Benedict Meisner, infuriated that he would have to shelve his work on Crane, determined to bring Charlotte’s killers to justice.
At about quarter-past two, abandoning any hope of sleep, he went downstairs, poured himself a glass of wine and — with nothing better to do — began to go through the files which Holly had brought over in the car.
It was the same old story: there was nothing of consequence in any of the boxes. Downing two paracetamol, Gaddis turned his attention to the original files which he had examined only cursorily two months earlier. This time, he found the odd item which he had missed on first examination of the material: Anthony Blunt’s death certificate, for example, and a copy of his Will. There was the transcript of an interview with Sir Dick White, conducted by an unnamed journalist in 1982. Gaddis was briefly intrigued by this, but of course found no reference to ATTILA, nor any mention of Edward Crane. In another box, he found a photocopied obituary of Jack Hewit, the former MI5 officer who had been Guy Burgess’s lover, as well as a newspaper review of Michael Straight’s memoirs. There was also an entire folder dedicated to newspaper cuttings about Goronwy Rees and Vladimir Petrov. Katya had plainly intended to write a book about the relationship between British Intelligence and the KGB in the post-war era, but there was nothing — as far as he could tell — which was not already in the public domain.
Just after four o’clock he poured himself a third glass of wine and smoked a cigarette on the sofa. Holly’s handbag was on the floor at his feet. It was open and some of the contents had spilled out on to the carpet, perhaps when she had retrieved her toothbrush. He was sure that she was asleep; if she woke up wondering what had happened to him, he would be able to hear her footfalls on the staircase. He just wanted to be certain that she was who she said she was. He just wanted to put his mind at rest.
So he reached for the bag.
In the main section he found a well-thumbed copy of A Doll’s House, another of The Time Traveller’s Wife and an issue of the NME. He put all three on the sofa beside him and rummaged deeper. He was amazed by how much noise he was making. He found a broken seashell, an unopened packet of Kleenex, a tangle of headphones, a packet of the contraceptive pill — up-to-date, thank God — and the browned core of a half-eaten apple. He laid these out on the floor. He then found what were surely keepsakes: a small amethyst stone; a length of silk wrapped up into a tight bundle and tied with a piece of string; and a postcard of the Eiffel Tower from Katya Levette, addressed to Holly, postmarked 1999.
What he wanted was her diary. He found it in a separate, zipped-up section of the bag and checked the entries for August and September, looking for anything unusual, for evidence of a double life. But there were just times of auditions, dates of parties, shorthand reminders to buy milk or to pay a bill. His own book launch was marked with the simple note: ‘Gaddis event / Daunt Holland Park’ and their subsequent meetings were also touchingly mundane: ‘Dinner S 830’; ‘S movie Kensington?’; ‘Lunch S Cafe Anglais’. On the morning of Charlotte’s funeral, Holly had written, in block capitals: ‘SAM FUNERAL CALL HIM!’ and he remembered that she had rung him at the house in Hampstead to make sure that he was all right. He felt wretched for not trusting her.
But still he was not done. Feeling around in the lint and the crumbs at the bottom of the handbag, he found Holly’s wallet and proceeded to unload its contents, item by item, on to the sofa. The credit cards were all in her name. There were frayed photographs of giggling friends in passport booths, loyalty cards to Sainsbury and Tesco, a dry cleaning receipt from a shop on King’s Road and a mini statement from an ATM in Hammersmith. He did not know what he was expecting to find. A number for Sir John Brennan? A business card belonging to Tanya Acocella? On the basis of what he had seen, there was no suggestion that Holly was anything other than an outof-work actress with an overdraft and an erratic social life.
Eventually, he gave up the search and replaced the wallet, more or less as he had found it, in the bag. In a second side pocket he found two sets of keys, a packet of Rizlas, a small tube of lip salve and an electricity bill, in Holly’s name, which was registered to the address in Tite Street. There was also an email from a woman in Australia which Holly had printed on to A4 paper. It was a letter between friends, full of news and gossip, and Gaddis felt ashamed to have read it.
He lit a second cigarette. He replaced the bag on the floor and looked around for Holly’s mobile. It was charging up on a plug beside the kettle. Without removing the flex, he checked her incoming and outgoing calls, her text messages, even the cookies on her Internet browser, but there was nothing at all to arouse his suspicion, only a man called ‘Dan C’ to whom Holly had sent a dismayingly flirtatious text message responding to an invitation to the theatre. It’s no more than I deserve, he thought. At least Dan won’t go through your stuff.
He was at last beginning to feel tired. Time for bed. He put the phone back on the counter, emptied the ashtray, put his glass in the dishwasher and re-corked the wine. Two of Katya’s shoeboxes were still open on the table and he gathered up the loose pieces of paper in a half-hearted attempt to tidy up.
That was when he saw the letter. A single sheet of powder-blue, watermarked stationery with an address die-stamped at the top:
Robert Wilkinson
Drybread Road (RD2)
Omakau 9377
