Chapter 50
They parked three hundred metres from Gaddis’s front door, at the northern end of the street.
‘This isn’t my house,’ he said.
‘I’m aware of that. What number are you?’
‘I thought you knew everything about me, Josephine. You must be getting sloppy.’
Tanya explained that she would walk down the street and check for surveillance around Gaddis’s house. If there were Russian or British watchers positioned outside — in vehicles, in a first- or second-floor stakeout, dressed as street cleaners or parking attendants — she would be able to identify them.
‘Give me ten minutes,’ she said and stepped out of the car.
Gaddis smoked a cigarette while he waited. He saw one of his neighbours coming towards him, a widow walking her poodle, and ducked down in his seat, scrabbling around on the floor of the Renault until she had passed. Tanya came back just as he was dropping the cigarette butt into a storm drain.
‘Everything seems clear,’ she said, starting the engine. ‘I walked up to Uxbridge Road, came back down the other side, had a look around. But they may have a trigger on your front door. If you go in, it will tell them you’re back and they’ll send somebody round faster than the time it’s taking me to tell you about it. So you don’t have long. Get the tape, get your papers, get your toothbrush and your razor, then get out of there.’
She drove up to the house. Gaddis was obliged to negotiate a hop-scotch of pavement gob and dog turds en route to his front door, deposited by boxer dogs and uncastrated Dobermans whose owners used the street as a rat run between White City and the pubs and betting shops on Uxbridge Road. He put the larger of his two house keys into the Chubb lock and turned it, as he had turned it a thousand times before. He inserted the Yale and lifted the latch. His frayed nerves half-expected the obliteration of an explosion, the scream of an alarm, but the door opened and he found himself in the hall of his house, home again.
There was a small package on the doormat, addressed to Dr Sam Gaddis ‘BY HAND’, next to a bank statement and some junk mail. He went into the sitting room and walked straight towards the files in the corner of the kitchen. They may have a trigger on your front door. He turned each of the boxes upside-down so that their contents sprayed across the floor. It was like watching stones sliding on ice. Everywhere he looked there was paper. Gaddis could not remember which of the boxes contained the tapes and looked around in increasing desperation for signs of a package or cassette.
Wilkinson’s letter to Katya was still on the kitchen table, which he took as a sign that no one had broken into the house during his absence. There were two other boxes in the corner of the room, jammed up against the door which led out into the garden. Gaddis pulled open the cardboard flaps, inverted the boxes and again allowed the contents to pour out on to the floor.
Straight away he heard the clatter of a VHS cassette, saw it and picked it up. It was not labelled, but looked unscathed. He set it to one side and reached for the second box. He could feel how light it was in comparison with the others. He looked inside. There were just three pieces of A4 paper and — hidden beneath these — a blank BASF music cassette with ‘Prokofiev’ written down one side in faded blue biro.
He was sure that this was it: an audio recording of the interview with Platov. The VHS was also promising. Though relatively unmarked, it could have been a copy of the original film shot in the safe house in Berlin. He grabbed a plastic bag from a stash under the sink, put the tapes inside it and headed for the front door.
He stopped just as he was reaching for the latch. Gaddis turned and looked back at the house. Min had crawled up those stairs. The books in the hall were the books he had bought and shared with Natasha. In that sitting room, he had eaten dinner with friends, watched England win the Ashes. It was a place of memories. And now he would have to give it up. If what Tanya was saying was true — and he had no reason to doubt her now — the house would have to be put up for sale. That was the price of consorting with Edward Crane. That was the price of a blood feud with the FSB.
He picked up his post, put the package in the plastic bag alongside the tapes, opened the door and walked back out to the car.
Chapter 51
‘Did you find anything?’
‘Two tapes,’ he said and took them out of the plastic bag. Tanya pulled away towards Uxbridge Road.
‘What’s on them?’
‘One of them is a tape with “Prokofiev” written down the side. The other is a blank VHS. Is there a video machine at the safe house?’
‘Probably.’
They headed west, through the gridlock of the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, then south in the direction of Kensington High Street. The pavements were crowded with families heading home at the tail end of the long afternoon, mothers and fathers doing their Sunday thing. On Earl’s Court Road, Tanya turned left into Lexham Gardens.
‘Where are we going?’ Gaddis asked.
‘Patience.’
She drove into a narrow mews and parked beside a black four-by-four with tinted windows. An elderly couple wearing bottle-green Huskies were coming out of a house three doors down. They looked up and spotted Tanya.
‘Hello, dear,’ said the woman, raising an emaciated hand. Her husband, who was using a walking stick and looked even older than Edward Crane, struggled to lift his head as he greeted her.
‘You know those people?’ Gaddis whispered. He wondered how secure the safe house could be if members of the Secret Intelligence Service were on nodding terms with its neighbours.
‘Friends of mine,’ she said.
Her reply made sense as soon as they walked into the house. Gaddis saw a photograph on a side table and reacted in disbelief; it was a picture of Tanya with her arms around another man. This wasn’t a safe house. This was her home. The man in the photograph was her fiance.
‘You live here?’
‘I live here.’
‘Is that a good idea?’
‘You don’t like Kensington?’
‘I meant, is it a good idea to be inviting me back to your house?’
‘It’s fine for the time being.’ She closed the door behind them, hooked up the security chain and slid a bolt across the top of the door. It was a first, symbolic indication of Gaddis’s confinement. ‘We can work something else out tomorrow.’
He did not know whether to be alarmed by the fact that Tanya had no access to a safe house or grateful to her that she was prepared to risk her wellbeing in order to provide him with sanctuary. He looked again at the photograph, fascinated by the man who had won her heart.
‘What’s his name?’ he asked, tapping the glass.
‘Jeremy.’
Jeremy looked exactly as Gaddis had imagined he would when he had first had dinner with Josephine Warner: well financed, reliable, sporty. He felt a pulse of envy.
‘Do you live together?’
‘A lot of questions, Sam.’
‘Forgive me. I don’t mean to intrude.’
Tanya threw the car keys on the side table. ‘Yes you do,’ she said and offered him a forgiving glance. ‘We normally live together, but he’s abroad this week. Works for an NGO in Zimbabwe. We’re getting married next year.’
