a cab outside a branch of Waterstone’s bookshop. The taxi headed south. Grek lit a cigarette and walked back towards his vehicle. Halfway along the street, clamping the cigarette between his lips, he urinated at the base of a chestnut tree concealed from the street by a tarpaulin-covered skip.
Murders, he had long ago concluded, broke down into three distinct categories. They could be political, they could be military, and they could have a moral characteristic. Alexander Grek did not concern himself with conventional morality. His work was either military or political, and usually defensive. Tonight’s plan, for example, had the laudable goal of preventing graver consequences for his government. Grek was not an assassin in the formal sense. He could not be hired. As a young man, he had been trained by his country’s domestic intelligence service — commonly known as the FSB — and, following his retirement in 1996, had run a small, highly successful security company with offices in London and St Petersburg. In such circumstances, a man learns a great deal about the business of death. Yet Grek considered himself, first and foremost, a political animal. The ATTILA investigation was a threat to the state. That threat must therefore be removed. He was simply responding to his patriotic duty.
Setting down a half-empty bottle of mineral water, he pulled a woollen hat low over his head, exited the vehicle and walked across the street. Pilgrim’s Lane was deserted. Grek moved towards the eastern side of the house and picked the simple lock on the wooden gate which led into the garden. He had oiled the hinges the previous night so that the gate opened without a sound. He was now in a narrow channel in which were kept a bicycle, some garden tools and several rusted cans of paint. He looked up at the house to ensure that no lights were on in the upper floors. He then walked across the garden.
During the day, Charlotte Berg worked in a converted shed at the southern end of the property. She used a laptop computer which, at night, was kept inside the house. The shed contained a cheap colour printer, an outdated telephone and fax machine, some filing cabinets, a battered wooden chair and one or two photographs of sentimental value. To Paul, she would argue that it was better to keep the shed unlocked rather than to fit a padlock, which might convey the impression to any potential burglar that the office contained something worth stealing. Grek opened the shed, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him.
Sodium fluoracetate is a fine white powder, derived from pesticide. Odourless and inexpensive, it is commonly used as a poison to control the spread of rats in sewers. Grek had 10mg, in liquid form, in a vial which he now removed from his jacket pocket. The tiny surveillance camera, fitted in a light above Berg’s desk, had shown a small bottle of Evian, half-finished, beside the printer. Grek picked it up, poured the colourless liquid into the water and sealed the cap. Sufficient moonlight was coming into the room that he was able to remove the camera without the need for a torch. He also withdrew a listening device from the underside of Berg’s desk. He placed both items, and their tangle of wires, in the pockets of his jacket. When he had finished, Grek studied the paperwork on the desk. A telephone bill. An invoice for some painting and decorating. A copy of the second volume of The Mitrokhin Archive. Nothing which seemed to refer directly to ATTILA.
A noise outside. Something within three or four metres of the shed. Grek dropped to his knees. He heard the noise a second time and recognized it as an animal, possibly a fox. The Berg’s dog, Polly, had no access to the garden at night and would presumably be asleep indoors.
Grek stood up slowly. He opened the door of the shed and walked back along the garden. He checked the street as he emerged from the shadows of the house and crossed Pilgrim’s Lane when he was sure that he was not being observed. He unlocked the car, emptied his pockets on the passenger seat and pulled out in the direction of Hampstead High Street.
Chapter 6
Gaddis was in his study at UCL when he received the call. The number had come up as ‘Unknown’.
‘Sam? It’s Paul.’
‘You sound terrible. Is everything all right?’
‘It’s about Charlotte.’ His voice was strangely apologetic. Even at this wretched hour, he somehow managed to maintain a sense of decorum. ‘I’m sorry to have to be the one who tells you. She had a heart attack this morning. She’s gone.’
Gaddis had had three such telephone conversations in the course of his life. When he was sixteen, his older brother had been killed in a car crash in South America. At Cambridge, a close friend had hanged himself on the eve of Finals. And, just before his fortieth birthday, he had learned that Katarina Tikhonov had been assassinated at her apartment in Moscow, the victim of a contract killing tacitly approved by Sergei Platov. He remembered each conversation, each occasion, very clearly, and his distinct reactions to them. He found himself saying: ‘What? A heart attack?’ because he needed words with which to douse the nausea of shock.
Paul replied simply: ‘Yes,’ then, almost immediately, because this was just one of a dozen calls he would have to make: ‘Nothing more to be said now.’
‘Yes, of course. I’m so sorry, Paul.’
‘I’m sorry for you, too.’
Gaddis went to the floor in a slow crouch, with the strange and vivid sensation of his bones expanding, his skin stretching, as if his body wanted to escape itself. The news did not at first seem coherent, but then generated a grim logic. Charlotte drank too much. Charlotte smoked too much. Charlotte’s heart had given out. He stood and leaned on his desk. He was concerned that a student or colleague might knock on the door of the office and walk in. He locked it from the inside and, needing fresh air, went to the window, struggling with the latch until it opened suddenly, the noise of building works bursting into the tiny, cramped room. And Sam was ashamed of himself, because within minutes of absorbing what Paul had told him, he was thinking about Edward Crane. With Charlotte gone, it would no longer be possible to co-write the book. He would have to find another source of income, another way of paying off his debts. He felt utterly bereft.
Charlotte had apparently gone to her office in the morning, typed a few emails, read the Guardian online. At some point, probably between ten and eleven o’clock, she had come back into the house to make some toast, bringing the wastepaper basket from the office. Paul had found her on the floor of the kitchen, Polly whimpering at her side, the toast popped. No autopsy had been carried out. The doctors and coroner had both agreed that Charlotte had suffered a massive heart attack as a result of a genetic coronary weakness allied to an unhealthy lifestyle.
In the ensuing days, Gaddis helped Paul to arrange the funeral. He wrote a eulogy, at the family’s request, and drew up the Order of Service, which he arranged to have printed at a small shop in Belsize Park. It helped to have practical tasks to occupy his mind, to lift his constant sense of despair. He felt that he was a support to Paul, who had withdrawn into an almost impenetrable privacy. Day and night, Sam’s mind shuttled back and forth across more than two decades of memories: the first years of his friendship with Charlotte at Cambridge; their brief love affair; then the span of Sam’s eight-year marriage to Natasha, and the long-running tension between the two women. Sam reflected that there was now nobody in his life — certainly no woman — with whom he had a comparable friendship. Over the previous ten years his group of friends had thinned out, either side-tracked by the demands of small children, or living with partners with whom he felt no real affinity. It was part of the journey into middle-age. Charlotte had been one of the few longterm friends who had survived this period and who remained as a link to his past.
The funeral took place eight days after her death, with a wake at the house in Hampstead. By then, time had partly numbed Sam’s sense of grief and he was capable of putting on a front of charm and fortitude, acting almost as a host in the absence of Paul, who spent most of the afternoon upstairs in his room.
‘I just can’t face them, you know?’ he said, and Gaddis realized that there was nothing he could do to comfort him. Sometimes people are just better left to grieve. Polly was with him, as well as a dozen photographs of Charlotte, strewn across the bed. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked Gaddis. ‘Are you surviving down there?’
‘We’re surviving,’ Gaddis said, and reassured him with his eyes. ‘Everything’s fine.’
By six o’clock, only half a dozen people remained. Colleagues who had known Charlotte from her days on The Times had long since returned to their offices, filing copy on deadline for a morning edition which would not wait. Acquaintances from every nook and cranny of her life had paid their respects and dispersed into the late afternoon. When Paul came back downstairs, only a few members of the close family remained.
