Charles Cumming - The Trinity Six

My deepest thanks to Melissa, to my mother and father, and to Stanley and Iris. To Julia Wisdom, Rachel Rayner, Emad Akhtar, Anne OBrien and all the team at HarperCollins. To Keith Kahla, Dori Weintraub and everybody at St Martins Press. To Tif Loehnis, Luke Janklow, Will Francis, Rebecca Folland, Kirsty Gordon, Claire Dippel and their colleagues at Janklow and Nesbit. To Emily Hayward and Tanya Tillett at the Rod Hall Agency. And to all the staff at The Week .

I am also very grateful to Melinda Hughes, Sam Loewenberg, Craig Arthur, Matthew Beaumont, Maxim Chernavin, Rory Carleton Paget, Annabel Byng, Tom Miller, James Owen, Guy Walters, Rupert Allason, James Holland, Alanna OConnell, Giles Waterfield, Jonathan, Anna and Carolyn Hanbury, William and Mary Seymour, Grant Murray, Cal Flyn, Josie Jackson, Tom Cain, Sue and Stephen Lennane, Christian Spurrier, Annette Nielebock, Boris Starling, Nick Stone, Ali Karim, Michael Stotter, Nick, Bard, Chev and Viki Wilkinson.

The following books were very useful: Their Trade is Treachery by Chapman Pincher (New English Library, 1982); The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 by Professor Christopher Andrew (Allen Lane, 2009); My Five Cambridge Friends by Yuri Modin (Headline, 1995); The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGBs Archives by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev (HarperCollins, 1999); Anthony Blunt: His Lives by Miranda Carter (Pan, 2002). During his talk at Daunt Books, Sam Gaddis ought to have acknowledged the debt he owes to the scholarship of Peter Truscott.

C.C. London 2010

A Spy by Nature

The Hidden Man

The Spanish Game

Typhoon

Australia

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)

Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

Canada

HarperCollins Canada

2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

New Zealand

HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited

P.O. Box 1 Auckland,

New Zealand

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz

United Kingdom

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

77-85 Fulham Palace Road

London, W6 8JB, UK

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk

United States

HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

10 East 53rd Street

New York, NY 10022

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com

The dead man was not a dead man. He was alive but he was not alive. That was the situation.

Calvin Somers, the nurse, stopped at the edge of the towpath and looked behind him, back along the canal. He was a slight man, as stubborn and petulant as a child. Gaddis came to a halt beside him.

Keep talking, he said.

It was the winter of 1992, an ordinary Monday night in February. Somers took an apple from his coat pocket and bit into it, chewing over the memories. The patients name was Edward Crane. It said he was seventy-six on his notes, but none of us knew what was true and what wasnt. He looked mid-sixties to me. They started walking again, black boots pressing through the mud. Theyd obviously worked out it was best if they admitted him at night, when there were fewer people around, when the day staff had gone off shift.

Whos they? Gaddis asked.

The spooks. A mallard lifted off the canal, quick wings shedding water as he turned towards the sun. Crane was brought in on a stretcher, unconscious, just after ten on the evening of the third. I was ready for him. Im always ready. He bypassed A&E and was put straight into a private room off the ward. The chart said he had no next of kin and wasnt to be resuscitated in the event of cardiac arrest. Nothing unusual about that. Far as anyone was concerned, this was just another old man suffering from late-stage pancreatic cancer. Hours to live, liver failure, toxic. At least, that was the story MI6 was paying us to pedal.

Somers threw the half-eaten apple at a plastic bottle floating on the canal and missed by three feet.

Soon as I got Crane into the room, I hooked him up to some drips. Dextrose saline. A bag of Amikacin that was just fluid going nowhere. Even gave him a catheter. Everything had to look kosher just in case a member of staff stuck their head round the door who wasnt supposed to.

Did that happen? Did anybody see Crane?

Somers scratched the side of his neck. Nah. At about two in the morning, Meisner called for a priest. That was all part of the plan. Father Brook. He didnt suspect a thing. Just came in, administered the last rites, went home. Soon after that, Henderson showed up and did his little speech.

What little speech?

Somers came to a halt. He didnt make eye contact very often but did so now, assuming a patrician tone which Gaddis took to be an attempt at impersonating Hendersons cut-glass accent.

From this point onwards, Edward Crane is effectively dead. I would like to thank you all for your work thus far, but a great deal remains to be done.

A man pushing a rusty bicycle came towards them on the towpath, ticking past in the dusk.

We were all there, said Somers. Waldemar, Meisner, Forman. Meisner was so nervous he looked as if he was going to throw up. Waldemar didnt speak much English and still didnt really understand what hed got himself involved in. He was probably just thinking about the money. Thats what I was doing. Twenty grand in 1992 was a lot of cash to a twenty-eight-year-old nurse. You any idea what we got paid under the Tories?

Gaddis didnt respond. He didnt want to have a conversation about under-funded nurses. He wanted to hear the end of the story.

Anyway, at some point Henderson took a checklist out of his coat pocket and ran through it. First, he turned to Meisner and asked him if hed filled out the death certificate. Meisner said he had and produced a biro from behind his ear, as if that proved it. I was told to go back down to Cranes room and wrap the body. No need to clean him, Henderson said. For some reason, Waldemar we called him Wally thought this was funny and we all just stood there watching him laugh. Then Henderson tells him to pull himself together and gives him instructions to have a trolley waiting, to take the old man down to the ambulance. I remember Henderson didnt talk to Forman until the rest of us had gone. Dont ask me what hed agreed with her. Probably to tag a random corpse in the mortuary, some tramp from Praed Street with no ID, no history. How else could they have got away with it? They needed a second body.

This is useful, Gaddis told him, because he felt that he needed to say something. This is really useful.

Well, you get what you pay for, dont you, Professor? Somers produced a smug grin. What was hard is that we had other patients to attend to. It was a normal Monday night. It wasnt as if everything could just grind to a halt because MI6 were in the building. Meisner was the senior doctor, too, so he was always moving back and forth around the hospital. At one point I dont think I saw him for about an hour and a half. Wally had jobs all over the place, me as well. Added to that, I had to try to keep the other nurses out of Cranes room. Just in case they got nosey. The path narrowed beside a barge and the two men were obliged to walk in single file. In the end, everything went like clockwork. Meisner got the certificate done, Crane was wrapped up with a small hole in the fabric he could breathe through, Wally took him down to the ambulance and the old man was gone by six a.m., out into his new life.

His new life, Gaddis muttered. He looked up at the darkening sky and wondered, not for the first time, if he would ever set eyes on Edward Anthony Crane. And thats it?