Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2011
Copyright © Charles Cumming 2011
Charles Cumming asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007337835
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2011 ISBN: 9780007337811 Version: 2018-02-28
Dedication
For my sister, Alex for her children, Lucy, Edward and Sophie and to the memory of Simon Pilkington (1938–2009)
Epigraph
You know, you should never catch a spy. Discover him and then control him, but never catch him. A spy causes far more trouble when he’s caught.
Harold Macmillan
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Acknowledgements
A note on ‘The Cambridge Five’
An Excerpt from A Foreign Country
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
About the Author
By Charles Cumming
Chapter 1
‘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 patient’s name was Edward Crane. It said he was seventy-six on his notes, but none of us knew what was true and what wasn’t. He looked mid-sixties to me.’ They started walking again, black boots pressing through the mud. ‘They’d 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.’
‘Who’s “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. I’m 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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t supposed to.’
‘Did that happen? Did anybody see Crane?’
Somers scratched