She gestured Gaddis into the living room, a compact area with a large window on the street side, a staircase in the centre, and a door at the back leading into what appeared to be a small kitchen. The sitting room was lined with hardback books and hung with various portraits and landscapes by artists Gaddis did not recognize. There was a varnished wooden dining table parallel to the window and two sofas arranged in an L-shape around a large, flat- screen television. It wasn’t a house that felt particularly cosy or hospitable and for a moment he entertained the thought that Tanya had tricked him yet again. The photograph could have been posed with an SIS colleague; the pictures of Tanya dotted around the room, taken at various stages of her life, might easily have been transferred from her real home. But he could see no sense in that particular conspiracy. Why would she do it? What would be the point in continuing to fool him?
‘Tea?’ she asked.
‘Sure.’
The kitchen was as slick and contemporary as a mock-up in IKEA, but at least it felt lived-in. There were messages and newspaper clippings attached to the fridge by magnets, well-worn recipe books on a shelf in the corner, a burned wok hanging from a hook near the garden window. So this is how spies live, Gaddis thought. Just like the rest of us. He told Tanya that he liked his tea black with two sugars and she made a remark about taking it ‘in the Russian style’. To watch her move around the room — removing spoons from a drawer, pouring milk from the fridge — was as strange to him as the sight of the wristwatch at Gatwick. It was something that he had thought he would never see, something that he had never imagined.
‘What are you smiling at?’ she asked.
He decided to be honest. ‘It’s just interesting to see where you live,’ he said. ‘You don’t think of spies having toasters and microwave ovens. I was expecting a gun cabinet, an E-Type Jag.’
‘Oh, I sold those.’
He wondered how much time she had spent in the house, how often she and Jeremy were together. Was ‘NGO’ a cover for SIS? Almost certainly. They had probably met and fallen in love at work. Their jobs took them to all the corners of the Earth; they were probably lucky to meet for dinner three or four times a year.
‘The video,’ Tanya said.
Gaddis went back into the sitting room and retrieved the tape from the plastic bag. He turned to find her walking up the stairs.
‘I think Jeremy has an old machine in his office.’
Moments later, she was back, bearing a dusty video recorder and a tangle of leads.
‘Success.’
They knelt in front of the television. He could smell her perfume and wondered if she had applied more in the bedroom upstairs. The television was state of the art, a screen the size of a small deckchair, and Gaddis was concerned that the technology in the video would be out of date.
‘There’s a SCART plug,’ Tanya said hopefully, and slotted it into the back.
His next concern was the tape itself.
‘We need to take it easy,’ Gaddis said. ‘These things can chew.’
He pushed the power button. The television was already on and automatically switched to an AV channel which appeared to support the video.
‘Give it a try,’ Tanya told him.
Gaddis slid the tape into the mouth of the VHS, felt it pull away from his fingers and clunk down on to the heads of the recorder. He heard the noise of the tape beginning to spool.
‘Don’t chew, you bastard,’ he muttered. ‘Don’t fucking chew.’
Tanya laughed. Her knee was touching his and he was aware that she did not seem interested in moving it. Suddenly, the television flared into life. But there was no sign of Sergei Platov. Instead, they were confronted by the credit sequence of the Parkinson show.
‘Can you turn the sound on?’ Gaddis asked.
Tanya pushed a button on a remote control and the theme tune jumped out at them. ‘Hang on,’ she said, and turned down the volume.
It appeared to be a relatively recent episode. The identity of the first guest — Jamie Oliver — confirmed that the show had been recorded within the last ten years.
‘Can we get past this?’ Tanya asked.
Gaddis held down the fast-forward button and they watched the programme spinning past in a blur of close- ups. Joan Rivers. Cliff Richard. Parky. For five minutes they were hunched on the ground, their eyes fixed on the screen, growing dizzy for any sign of a break in the transmission. But it never came. There was no film of Sergei Platov secluded in a Berlin safe house; instead, there was an episode of Cheers, followed by over an hour of blank, unrecorded fizz and static. As the tape came to an end, ejecting from the machine, Gaddis felt a dead weight of disappointment and voiced the thought that perhaps he had been too optimistic.
‘There’s always the other one,’ Tanya said, nodding at the plastic bag. As she stood up, the joints in her knees creaked.
Gaddis retrieved the BASF cassette. Tanya had opened a cupboard near the table containing a small Denon hi-fi. A tape deck was stacked halfway down. He handed her the cassette and sat in a hard wooden dining chair. She pressed ‘Play’. There was a three-second silence as the tape began, then the opening bars of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Gaddis met her eyes.
‘Patience,’ she said. ‘Patience.’
For more than an hour they listened to the ballet, wandering around the room, drinking second cups of tea, making scrambled eggs on toast. Halfway through the second side, Tanya gave up and opened a bottle of wine, convinced that no recording of Platov existed. Gaddis dutifully heard the tape to the end, then took his plate through to the kitchen.
‘Back to square one,’ he said.
‘Back to square one.’
She was sitting on a stool in the corner of the kitchen. He began to wash up the pan in which Tanya had made the eggs, a guest earning his keep. It was past ten o’clock, the long, strange day drawing to an end.
‘You must be exhausted,’ she said. ‘Holly can’t have given me all the boxes.’ Gaddis rinsed the pan in a stream of hot water. ‘Her house is a tip. Most of the files were in a store room in the basement of her building. It’s possible there are more of them in Tite Street.’
‘You can’t call Holly,’ Tanya said.
The finality of the instruction annoyed him. ‘What?’
‘We don’t know if her phone is compromised, if her house is being watched.’ Tanya’s tone was businesslike and matter of fact, as if she was deliberately killing off the intimacy which had built up between them since the airport. ‘You ring her and it could draw the Russians right to you.’
Gaddis was silent as he dried their plates. He wondered why Tanya’s mood had changed at the very mention of Holly’s name. Was she jealous? As the evening had drawn on, they had been as relaxed in each other’s company as lovers. Now she had offered him a stark, blunt reminder of his circumstances. He began to resent the power that she held over him.
‘How am I supposed to reach her then?’
‘Let me work it out,’ she replied, though it sounded as if she was running short of ideas. ‘I have to go to the Office first thing in the morning. Brennan knows about Wilkinson. There have been reports on the news. He probably won’t know that I got you out of Vienna. He certainly doesn’t know that you’re staying here. I’ll have a lot of explaining to do. But there’s a possibility that we can still find a way of protecting you and resolve everything with the Russians.’
It sounded like hot air. Gaddis looped the tea-towel over the back of a chair. ‘You’re not listening to me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be wrapped in cotton wool. I don’t need protecting. There’s a chance that Holly has the Platov tape gathering dust in the basement of her house. All I’m asking is that you give me the chance to call her to see if she’ll look for it. It’s that simple.’
‘Patience,’ Tanya replied, for what seemed like the tenth time in as many hours, and Gaddis’s anger boiled over.
‘Is there any chance you could stop saying that? It’s like you’re talking to a four-year-old. I’m grateful for everything you’re doing, Tanya. Seriously. But I’m not going to sit on my arse for the next few days and hope that
