In the end, he didn’t need to. As the launch was beginning to thin out, she approached him at the makeshift bar and held out her hand.
‘Holly Levette.’
‘Sam.’ Her hand was slim and warm and had rings all over it. She was about twenty-eight with huge blue eyes. ‘You were the one who was late.’
A smile of what looked like genuine embarrassment. Her right cheek had a little scar on the bone which he liked. ‘Sorry, I was held up on the Tube. I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.’
They moved away from the bar.
‘Not at all.’ He was trying to work out what she did for a living. Something in the arts, something creative. ‘Have we met before?’
‘No, no. I just read your article in the Guardian and knew that you were speaking tonight. I have something that I thought you might be interested in.’
They had found themselves in a small clearing in the Travel section. In his peripheral vision, Gaddis could sense somebody trying to catch his eye.
‘What kind of something?’
‘Well, my mother has just died.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
It didn’t look as though Holly Levette needed much comforting.
‘Her name was Katya Levette. Before her death she was working on a book about the history of the KGB. A lot of her information came from sources in British and Russian intelligence. I don’t want her papers to go to waste. All that hard work, all those interviews. I wondered whether you might like to have a look at her research, see if there’s any value in it?’
It could have been a trap, of course. A mischievous source in MI6 or the Russian FSB looking to use a mid-level British historian for purposes of propaganda. After all, why come all the way to the bookshop? Why not just phone him at UCL or send an email to his website? But the chances of a honey-trap were slim. If the spooks wanted a scandal, if they wanted headlines, they would have gone for Beevor or Sebag Montefiore, for Andrew or West. Besides, Gaddis would be able to tell in five minutes if the documents were genuine. He’d spent half his life in the museums of London, Moscow and St Petersburg. He was a citizen of the historical archive.
‘Sure, I could take a look at them. You’re kind to think of me. Where are the papers?’
‘At my flat in Chelsea.’
And suddenly the tone of the conversation shifted. Suddenly Holly Levette was looking at Dr Sam Gaddis in the way that mischievous female students sometimes look at attractive, fortysomething bachelor academics when they are up to no good. As if her flat in Chelsea promised more than just dust-gathering notebooks on the KGB.
‘Your flat in Chelsea,’ Sam repeated. He caught the smell of her perfume as he drank more wine. ‘I should probably take your number.’
She was smiling, enjoying the game, promising him something with those huge blue eyes. From the hip pocket of her slim jeans, Holly Levette produced a card which she pressed into his hand. ‘Why don’t you ring me when you’re not so busy?’ she suggested. ‘Why don’t you call and we can arrange for you to come and pick them up?’
‘It’s a good idea.’ Gaddis looked at the card. There was nothing on it except a name and a telephone number. ‘And you say your mother was researching the history of Soviet intelligence?’
‘The KGB, yes.’
A pause. There were so many questions to ask that he could say nothing; if he started, they would never stop. A male colleague from UCL materialized beside Gaddis and stared, with abandon, deep into Holly’s cleavage. Gaddis didn’t bother introducing them.
‘I should go,’ she said, touching his arm as she took a step backwards. ‘It was so lovely to meet you. Your talk was fantastic.’
He shook her hand again, the one with all the rings. ‘I’ll call you,’ he said. ‘And I’ll definitely take you up on that offer.’
‘What offer?’ asked the colleague.
‘Oh, the best kind,’ replied Holly Levette. ‘The best kind.’
Chapter 3
Two days later, on a rain-drenched Saturday morning in August, Gaddis rang the number on the card and arranged to go to Chelsea to pick up the boxes. Five minutes after walking through the door of her flat on Tite Street, he was in bed with Holly Levette. He did not leave until eight o’clock the following evening, the boot of his car sagging under the weight of the boxes, his head and body aching from the sweet carnal impact of a woman who remained, even after all that they had shared, something of a stranger to him, an enigma.
Her flat had been a bombsite, a deep litter field of newspapers, books, back issues of the New Yorker, half-finished glasses of wine and ashtrays overflowing with old joints and crushed cigarette packets. The kitchen had three days of washing up piled at the sink, the bedroom more rugs and more clothes strewn over more chairs than Gaddis had ever seen in his life. It reminded him of his own house which, in the years since Natasha had left him, had become a bachelor’s labyrinth of paperbacks, take-away menus and DVD box sets. He had a Belarussian cleaning lady, but she was near-arthritic and spent most her time chatting to him in the kitchen about life in post-Communist Minsk.
Holly’s search for the KGB material had taken them downstairs, to the basement of the apartment block, where Katya Levette had filled a storage cupboard to capacity with dozens of unmarked boxes. It had taken them both more than an hour to locate the files and to carry them outside to Gaddis’s car. Even then, Holly said that she could not be sure that he had taken everything with him.
‘But it’s a start, right?’ she said. ‘It’s something to be getting on with.’
‘Where did all this stuff come from?’ he asked.
The sheer volume of material in the basement suggested that Katya Levette had either been extremely well connected in the intelligence firmament or an inveterate hoarder of useless, second-hand information. Gaddis had Googled her, but most of the articles available under her name were either book reviews or hagiographic profiles of middle-ranking business figures in the UK and United States. At no point had she been a staff writer on any recognized publication.
‘Mum was friendly with a lot of Russian ex-pats in London,’ Holly explained. ‘Oligarchs, ex-KGB. You probably know most of them.’
‘Not socially.’
‘And she had a boyfriend once upon a time. Someone in MI6. I think a lot of the stuff may have come from him.’
‘You mean he leaked it?’
Holly nodded and looked away. She was concealing something, but Gaddis did not feel that he knew her well enough to push for more information. There had already been hints of a fraught relationship between mother and daughter; the truth would come out in good time.
He had driven home and put the boxes — fifteen of them — on the floor of Min’s bedroom, making a silent promise to get to them within a few days. And he would have called Holly again almost immediately had it not been for the grim surprise of Monday’s post.
There were two letters.
The first came in an ominous brown envelope marked HM
REVENUE & CUSTOMS / PRIVATE and was a demand for late payment of tax. A demand for?21,248, to be exact, which was about?21,248 more than Gaddis had in the bank. Failure to pay the sum in full by mid-October, the letter stated, would result in legal action. In the meantime, interest on the debt was accumulating at a rate of 6.5 per cent.
The second letter bore the unmistakable handwriting of his ex-wife, complete with a Spanish postmark and a stain in the left-hand corner which he put down to a wayward cup of cafe con leche.