concentratedly mopping up gravy with a hunk of French bread. Norwood was the so-called ‘Granny Spy’, exposed in 1999, who had passed British nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the 1940s and 50s.
‘I remember that she was swept under the carpet. Spied for Stalin, sped up his nuclear programme by about five years, but was allowed to die peacefully in her bed by a British government who didn’t want the negative publicity of trying an eighty-year-old woman for treason. Why?’
Charlotte pushed her plate to one side. She was a gestural, free-spirited woman of vast appetites: for cigarettes, for drink, for information. Paul was the only man she had ever been with who had been able to tolerate her many contradictions. ‘Fuck Melita Norwood,’ she said suddenly, grabbing Sam’s glass of wine by mistake and swallowing most of it.
‘If you say so.’
‘What about Roger Hollis?’ she asked quickly.
‘What about him?’
‘Do you think he was a traitor?’
Sir Roger Hollis was a grey area in the history of British intelligence. In 1981, the journalist Chapman Pincher had published a bestselling book, Their Trade is Treachery, in which it was alleged that Hollis, a former head of MI5, had been a KGB spy. Gaddis had read the book as a teenager. He remembered the bright red cover with the shadow of a sickle falling across it; his father asking to borrow it on a seaside holiday in Sussex.
‘To be honest, I haven’t thought about Hollis for a long time,’ he said. ‘Pincher’s allegations were never proved. Is that what you’re working on? Is that the scoop? Is there some kind of connection between Hollis and Norwood? She was associated with a KGB spy codenamed “HUNT” who was never identified. Was HUNT Hollis?’
Charlotte laughed. She was enjoying tapping into Gaddis’s reserves of expertise.
‘Fuck Hollis,’ she said, with the same abrasive glee with which she had dismissed Norwood. Gaddis was bemused.
‘Why do you keep saying that?’
‘Because they were small potatoes. Bit-part players. Minnows compared to what I’ve stumbled on.’
‘Which is…?’ Paul asked.
Charlotte finished off what must have been her ninth or tenth glass of wine. ‘What if I told you there was a sixth Cambridge spy who had never been unmasked? A contemporary of Burgess and Maclean, of Blunt, Philby and Cairncross, who is still alive today?’
At first, Gaddis couldn’t untangle precisely what Charlotte was telling him. He, too, had drunk at least a bottle of Cotes du Rhone. Hollis a Cambridge spy? Norwood a sixth member of the Ring of Five? Surely she wasn’t working on a crackpot theory like that? But he was a guest in her house, enjoying her hospitality, so he kept his doubts to himself.
‘I’d tell you that you were sitting on a fortune.’
‘This isn’t about money, Sam.’ There was no admonishment in Charlotte’s tone, just the bluntness for which she was renowned. ‘This is about history. I’m talking about a legendary KGB spy, codenamed ATTILA, who matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s. A man every bit as dangerous and as influential as Maclean and Philby. A mole at the heart of Britain’s political and intelligence infrastructure whose treason has been deliberately covered up by the British government for more than fifty years.’
‘Jesus.’ Gaddis tried to hide his scepticism. It surely wasn’t plausible that a sixth member of the Trinity ring had escaped detection. Every spook and academic and journalist with the slightest interest in the secret world had been hunting the sixth man for decades. Any Soviet defector, at any point after 1945, could have blown ATTILA’s cover at the drop of a hat. At the very least, Cairncross or Blunt would have given him up at the time of their exposure.
‘Where are you getting your information?’ he asked. ‘Why was there no mention of ATTILA in Mitrokhin?’
Vasili Mitrokhin was a major in the KGB who passed detailed accounts of Russian intelligence operations to MI6 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The documents were published in the UK in 1992.
‘Everybody thinks the entire history of Soviet espionage was contained in Mitrokhin.’ Charlotte lit a cigarette and looked utterly content. ‘But there was a ton of stuff he didn’t get his hands on. Including this.’
Paul put his knife and fork together. Charlotte’s husband was a tall, patient man, impassive to the point of diffidence. A successful City financier — hence the seven-figure, five-bedroom house in Hampstead — he loved Charlotte not least because she allowed him to blend into the background, to maintain the privacy he had worked so hard to protect. He was so inscrutable that Sam could never work out whether Paul viewed him as a threat to their marriage or as a valued friend. It was almost a surprise when he joined the fray, saying:
‘Come on, who’s your source?’
Charlotte leaned forward into an effectively conspiratorial cloud of cigarette smoke and looked at both men in turn. Her husband was the only person she could entirely trust with the information. Gaddis was a loyal friend, of course, a man of tact and discretion, but he also possessed a streak of mischievousness which made sharing a secret like this extremely risky.
‘Stays between these four walls, OK?’ she said, so that Gaddis was aware of what it meant to her. He felt a sudden thrust of envy, because she seemed so convinced of her prize.
‘Of course. Four walls. Won’t breathe a word.’
‘Can I tell Polly?’ Paul muttered, placing his hand on Charlotte’s back as he stood to clear the plates. Polly was their arthritic black Labrador and, in the absence of any children, their most cherished companion.
‘This is serious,’ she said. ‘I’m sworn to secrecy. But it’s so mind-boggling I can’t keep my mouth shut.’
Gaddis felt a historian’s excitement at the prospect of what Charlotte had uncovered. The sixth man. Was it really possible? It was like finding Lucan. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Let me start at the beginning.’ Charlotte filled another glass of wine. Paul caught Sam’s eye and frowned imperceptibly. She was a functioning alcoholic: a bottle of wine at lunch, two at dinner; gins at six; a couple of tumblers of Laphroaig last thing at night. None of it ever seemed to affect her behaviour beyond a certain decibel increase in the volume of her voice. But the booze was undoubtedly beating her: it was putting years on, adding weight, black-bagging her eyes. ‘About a month ago I received a letter from a man called Thomas Neame. He claims to be the confidant of a British diplomat who spent his entire career, from World War II to the mid-1980s, working as a spy for the KGB. I made some basic enquiries, discovered that Thomas was kosher, and went to meet him.’
‘Went where?’ Paul was oblivious to the comings-and-goings of his wife’s career. Often she would disappear for weeks on end, pursuing a story in Iraq, in California, in Moscow.
‘That’s secret number one,’ Charlotte replied. ‘I can’t tell even you where Thomas Neame lives.’
‘Trust is such a wonderful thing between husband and wife,’ Gaddis muttered. ‘How old is this guy?’
‘Ninety-one.’ Charlotte gulped more wine. Her skin had darkened under the low lights of the kitchen, her mouth now ruby red with lipstick and wine. ‘But ninety-one going on seventy-five. You wouldn’t fancy taking him on in an arm wrestle. Very tough and fit, sort of war generation Scot who can smoke forty a day and still pop to the top of Ben Nevis before breakfast.’
‘Unlike someone else I know,’ said Paul pointedly, looking at the cigarette in his wife’s hand. Charlotte’s years of reporting overseas had weakened, rather than strengthened, what had once been an iron constitution. Both Paul and Gaddis worried about this but could no more have curtailed her lifestyle than they could have biked to the moon.
‘And how does Neame know that his friend was a spy?’ Gaddis asked. ‘How come it hasn’t leaked out before?’
His phone rang before Charlotte had a chance to respond. Gaddis plucked it from the pocket of his jacket and looked at the display. It was a text from Holly Levette.
Nightcap…?
He was possessed by two contradictory impulses: to polish off his wine as quickly as possible and to grab a taxi south to Tite Street; or to come clean to Charlotte about his quest for a headline-grabbing story of his own.
‘Do you know this woman?’ he said, holding up the phone, as if there was a photograph of Holly on the screen. ‘Holly Levette?’
‘Rings a bell.’
