The reply did the trick. A little frown of panic appeared in the gap between Somers’s eyes which he tried, without success, to force away. The nurse sought refuge in some peanuts and got salt on his fingers as he wrestled with the packet.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘Crane didn’t speak at all. Before he was admitted, they’d given him a mild anaesthetic which had rendered him unconscious. He had grey hair, shaved to look like he’d undergone chemotherapy, but his skin was too healthy for a man supposedly in his condition. He probably weighed about seventy kilos, between five foot ten and six foot. I never saw his eyes, on account of the fact they were always closed. That good enough for you?’
Gaddis didn’t answer immediately. He didn’t need to. He let the silence speak for him. ‘And Henderson?’
‘What about him?’
‘What kind of man was he? What did he look like? All you’ve told me so far is that he wore a long black overcoat and sounded like somebody doing a bad impression of David Niven.’
Somers turned his head and stared at the far corner of the room.
‘Charlotte never told you?’
‘Told me what?’
Somers blinked rapidly and said: ‘Pass me that newspaper.’ There was a damp, discarded copy of The Times lying in a trickle of beer on the next-door table. A black girl listening to a pink iPod smiled her assent when Gaddis asked if he could take it. He straightened it out and handed the newspaper across the table.
‘You’ve heard of the Leighton Inquiry?’ Somers asked.
Leighton was a judicial inquiry into an aspect of government policy relating to the war in Afghanistan. Gaddis had heard of it. He had read the op-eds, caught the reports on Channel Four News.
‘Go on,’ he said.
Somers turned to page five. ‘You see this man?’
He flattened out the newspaper, spinning it through a hundred and eighty degrees. The nurse’s narrow, nail-bitten finger skewered a photograph of a man ducking into a government Rover on a busy London street. The man was in late middle-age and surrounded by a crush of reporters. Gaddis read the caption.
Sir John Brennan leaves Whitehall after giving evidence to the inquiry.
There was a smaller, formal Foreign Office portrait of Brennan set inside the main photograph. Gaddis looked up. Somers saw that he had made the connection.
‘Henderson is John Brennan? Are you sure?’
‘As sure as I’m sitting here looking at you.’ Somers drained his pint. ‘The man who paid me twenty grand sixteen years ago to cover everything up wasn’t just any old spook. The man who called himself Douglas Henderson in 1992 is now the head of MI6.’
Chapter 2
It was a long way from Daunt Books on Holland Park Avenue to that suburban September pub in West Hyde.
A month earlier, Gaddis had been launching his latest book – Tsars, a comparative study of Peter the Great and the current Russian president, Sergei Platov – at a bookshop in central London. His editor, the part-owner of a boutique publishing house which had paid the princely sum of £4750 for the book, hadn’t made it to the event. A lone diarist, on work experience at the Evening Standard, had poked her head around the door of the bookshop at six twenty-five, picked up a glass of room temperature Sauvignon Blanc and, having established that she had more chance of finding a story on the top deck of the number 16 bus, left after ten minutes. No celebrity historian, no literary editor, nor any representative of the BBC had replied to the invitations which the PR girl insisted had gone out – ‘first class’ – in the second week of July. A solitary notice in Saturday’s Independent had turned up one ashen-faced matriarch who had come ‘all the way from Hampstead because I so enjoyed your book on Bulgakov’, as well as a former student of Sam’s named Colin who claimed that he had spent the previous year ‘walking around Kazakhstan reading Herman Hesse’. The rest were staff – the manager of the shop, someone to operate the till – about a dozen colleagues and students from UCL, Sam’s next-door neighbour, Kath, who was highly-sexed and always opened the front door in her dressing-gown, and his close friend, the journalist Charlotte Berg.
Did Gaddis care that the new book would most probably disappear without trace? Yes and no. Though politically active, he was under no illusions that a single book could change attitudes to Sergei Platov. Tsars would be politely reviewed by the broadsheet press in London and dismissed in Moscow as Western propaganda. It had taken three years to write and would sell perhaps a thousand copies in hardback. Long ago, Gaddis had decided to write solely for the pleasure of writing: to expect greater rewards was to invite frustration. If the public enjoyed his books, he was happy; if they didn’t, so be it. They had better things to be spending their hard-earned cash on. He had no desire for fame, no innate interest in making money: what mattered to him was the quality of the work. And Tsars was a book that he was proud of. It amounted to a sustained attack on the Platov regime, an attack which he had tried to condense, as succinctly as possible, into a 750-word op-ed in the Guardian which had appeared three days earlier.
Thus far, that had been the extent of the book’s publicity campaign. Gaddis wasn’t particularly interested in cultivating a public image. Four years earlier, for example, he had published a biography of Trotsky which had been enthusiastically talked up on Radio 4. An enterprising young television producer had invited him to screen test for a series of programmes about ‘Great Revolutionary Figures’. Gaddis had declined. Why? Because he felt at the time that it would mean spending too long away from his baby daughter, Min, and abandoning his students at UCL. His friends and colleagues had thought it was a missed opportunity. What was the point of being a successful academic in twenty-first-century Britain if you didn’t want to appear on BBC4? Think of the tie-ins, they said. Think of the money. With his crooked good looks, Gaddis would have been a natural for television, but he valued his privacy too much and didn’t want to sideline the career he loved for what he described as ‘the dubious pleasure of seeing my mug on television’. There was stubbornness in the decision, certainly, but Dr Sam Gaddis thought of himself, first and foremost, as a teacher. He believed in the unarguable notion that if a young person is lucky enough to read the right books at the right time in the company of the right teacher, it will change their life for ever.
‘So what do we have with Sergei Platov?’ he began. The manager of Daunts was sure that no more of the thirty seats set out in the bookshop would be filled by curious passers-by and had asked Gaddis to begin. ‘Is he saint or sinner? Is Platov guilty of war crimes in Chechnya, of personally authorizing the murder of journalists critical of his regime, or is he a statesman who has restored the might of Mother Russia, thereby rescuing his country from decadence and corruption?’
The question, as far as Gaddis was concerned, was rhetorical. Platov was a stain on the Russian character, a borderline sociopath who had, in less than ten years, destroyed the possibility of a democratic Russia. A former KGB spy, he had green-lit the murder of Russian civilians on foreign soil, held Eastern European countries to ransom over the supply of gas, and encouraged the murder of journalists and human rights activists brave enough to criticize his regime. One such journalist – Katarina Tikhonov – had been a good friend of Gaddis’s. They had corresponded for over fifteen years and met whenever he visited Moscow. She had been shot in the elevator of her apartment building three years earlier. Not a single suspect had been arrested in connection with the murder, an anomaly which he had exposed in his new book.
He turned to his notes.
‘History tells us that Sergei Platov is a survivor, from a family of survivors.’
‘What do you mean?’ The Hampstead matriarch was sitting in the front row and already asking questions. Gaddis flattered her with a patient smile which had the useful simultaneous effect of making her feel embarrassed for interrupting.
‘What I mean is that his family survived the worst excesses that twentieth-century Russia could throw at them. Platov’s grandfather worked as a chef for Josef