John Brennan suddenly changes his mind about me. What did you think I can achieve here? Watch some daytime TV? Do the crossword?’
Tanya, to his astonishment, took him at face value. ‘I’m afraid so. Until we can find somewhere safe for you to go, you’ll have to stay here. That means you can’t make phone calls. It means you can’t even go outside.’
He looked at her in disbelief. He had a glass of wine on the kitchen table and drained it as he absorbed what she had said. He was amazed by how quickly their flirtatious rapport had evaporated; there had been several moments during the course of the evening when he had even entertained the possibility that they might spend the night together. Now Tanya seemed to be taunting him with the stark fact of his imprisonment.
‘Fine,’ he said.
‘What do you mean “fine”?’
He recalled their conversation on the street outside UCL. Don’t go looking for Crane. Don’t go looking for Wilkinson. He had made promises to Tanya Acocella before. He could do so again.
‘I mean that I’ll do as you say. I’ll stay here while you go to work. I’ll watch Countdown and go through your knicker drawer. Forget about Holly. Forget about the tape.’
Tanya knew that he was lying.
‘That simple?’ She produced a look which suggested Gaddis was making her job even more difficult than it already was. ‘That’s not a Sam Gaddis “I-swear-I-won’t-go-to-Austria” type of promise, is it? The last time you said something like that, a few days later you were in a bar in Vienna.’
‘It’s not that type of promise.’
Tanya shook her head. She knew that Gaddis would stop at nothing to avenge Charlotte and to retrieve the tape. What choice did he have? She could hardly keep him under house arrest indefinitely. If he walked out of the mews, there was nothing she could do about it.
‘Fine,’ she said eventually, walking into the sitting room. She began to puff the cushions on the sofa, like a physical demonstration of her desire to bring the conversation to an end. ‘Why don’t we get some sleep? It’s been a long day. You must feel like a bath or something.’
‘In the morning, Mummy.’ Gaddis was surprised that she had let him off the hook so easily and seized the opportunity to lighten the mood with a joke. But Tanya did not laugh. Instead, she said: ‘I’ve laid out one of Jeremy’s T-shirts for you,’ which made Gaddis feel like an unwanted suitor who has outstayed his welcome.
‘Terrific.’
‘There’s a towel as well, whisky in the kitchen if you want it.’ She yawned in a way that was stagey and self- conscious and Gaddis began to resent her again. ‘You’re in the room at the end of the corridor. Jeremy uses it as a study.’
‘Is he likely to come back and climb into bed with me?’
She allowed herself a smile, the glow in her eyes like a break in bad weather. ‘No,’ she said softly, and Gaddis reflected that she was probably just tired and worried.
‘Thank you,’ he said, because it was right to acknowledge the huge sacrifice she had made. ‘I don’t know what I would have done without you. I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve made.’
‘All in a good cause.’ She surprised him by kissing him gently on the cheek. ‘Most of it, anyway.’ She turned and walked up the stairs. ‘Sleep well. Will you turn off the lights before you go to bed?’
‘Of course. I’ll be five minutes.’
Gaddis found the whisky in the kitchen and poured himself four fingers. Switching on the television, he surfed briefly for a twenty-four-hour news channel which might be covering developments in the Wilkinson shooting. But CNN was fixed on an American political story, Sky News broadcasting a business programme. He turned the television off, checked the bolt on the front door and made his way upstairs.
He could hear a shower running when he reached the landing. There was a line of light under Tanya’s bedroom door. He thought of the pleasure, the blessed release of spending the night with her, but walked resignedly in the other direction, down the corridor towards Jeremy’s study. Sure enough, Tanya had laid out the towel and the T-shirt, as well as a packet of aspirin, a bottle of mineral water and an alarm clock to put beside his bed. Gaddis showered and changed into the T-shirt, briefly flicked through a copy of the Spectator and was asleep before midnight.
He woke at eight to find that Tanya had already left for work. There was a note on the kitchen table reiterating her demand that Gaddis remain in the house. ‘If you have to smoke,’ she said, ‘keep doing it in the garden.’ He scrunched the note into a ball and threw it into a bin, noticing a spare set of house keys hanging on a nearby hook. He pocketed them, fixed some cereal and a percolator of coffee, read the second half of the Spectator and smoked a cigarette through an open window. At about nine o’clock he had another shower, changed into a shirt which Tanya had hung for him on the landing — ‘another one of Jeremy’s’, the note had said — and wondered how he was going to kill the next ten hours under effective house arrest. He was not nosey by nature and had no interest in going through Tanya’s private possessions; his own encounter with a permanent blanket of MI6 surveil- lance had made him more, not less respectful of other people’s privacy. He flicked through a couple of photo albums, which were lying on a table in the sitting room, but learned only that Tanya and Jeremy had been on holiday together in Paris and Egypt and that Jeremy wore Speedos — without apparent irony — whenever he came within striking distance of a body of water.
By ten o’clock, Gaddis was bored out of his mind. He washed his clothes using the machine in the kitchen and hung them up on a line in the garden. By eleven he had resorted to watching daytime TV, settling on an old black- and-white thriller starring Jimmy Cagney. Was this his future? Whenever he stopped to think about what Brennan and Tanya were cooking up for him, he could only conclude that he would soon be sucked into the same witness protection programme which had claimed Edward Crane. It was no kind of life. It was too depressing even to contemplate. Such an existence would shut him off irreversibly from Min, from his work at UCL, from the entire structure of his life. He had to contact Holly. Finding the tape was his only route to freedom.
At half-past two, he found a Tesco spaghetti bolognese and some salad in the fridge. It was only as he was mopping up the sauce with a slice of stale brown bread that he remembered the package which had been posted through his door in Shepherd’s Bush. He retrieved the carrier bag from the sitting room and sat on the sofa with a kitchen knife, slicing through the seals on the envelope.
He did not recognize the handwriting on the front of the package. He assumed it was a book of some kind, a document sent by a colleague.
But it was not.
There were photographs inside. Seven of them. Gaddis pulled them out, along with a note which had been typed, unsigned, on a folded sheet of A4 paper. THE SUM OF ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND POUNDS WILL BE PAID INTO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT.THIS BUYS MORE THAN
YOUR SILENCE.
He turned the photographs over and felt his soul twist like a corkscrew.
There were seven pictures of Min.
Min at the beach. Min with a friend. Min with Natasha. Min outside her school.
Gaddis stood up and ran to the door.
Chapter 52
Gaddis found a phone box fifty metres from the Cromwell Road, the roar of six lanes of traffic funnelling into the booth as he picked up the receiver. He scrabbled in his pockets for change and had to turn the contents out into his hands as he searched for a twenty-pence piece. He had only pound coins, pushing one of them into the slot and accidentally dropping three others on to the floor of the booth as he did so.
The money clunked through, but did not register on the read-out. Gaddis swore and tried a second time, losing another pound in the same way. He dialled 155 for the international operator and was put through to a woman with a thick Liverpudlian accent.
‘I need to make a reverse charge call to Spain.’
