It appeared to be a relatively recent episode. The identity of the first guest — Jamie Oliver — confirmed that the show had been recorded within the last ten years.
‘Can we get past this?’ Tanya asked.
Gaddis held down the fast-forward button and they watched the programme spinning past in a blur of close-ups. Joan Rivers. Cliff Richard. Parky. For five minutes they were hunched on the ground, their eyes fixed on the screen, growing dizzy for any sign of a break in the transmission. But it never came. There was no film of Sergei Platov secluded in a Berlin safe house; instead, there was an episode of Cheers, followed by over an hour of blank, unrecorded fizz and static. As the tape came to an end, ejecting from the machine, Gaddis felt a dead weight of disappointment and voiced the thought that perhaps he had been too optimistic.
‘There’s always the other one,’ Tanya said, nodding at the plastic bag. As she stood up, the joints in her knees creaked.
Gaddis retrieved the BASF cassette. Tanya had opened a cupboard near the table containing a small Denon hi-fi. A tape deck was stacked halfway down. He handed her the cassette and sat in a hard wooden dining chair. She pressed ‘Play’. There was a three-second silence as the tape began, then the opening bars of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Gaddis met her eyes.
‘Patience,’ she said. ‘Patience.’
For more than an hour they listened to the ballet, wandering around the room, drinking second cups of tea, making scrambled eggs on toast. Halfway through the second side, Tanya gave up and opened a bottle of wine, convinced that no recording of Platov existed. Gaddis dutifully heard the tape to the end, then took his plate through to the kitchen.
‘Back to square one,’ he said.
‘Back to square one.’
She was sitting on a stool in the corner of the kitchen. He began to wash up the pan in which Tanya had made the eggs, a guest earning his keep. It was past ten o’clock, the long, strange day drawing to an end.
‘You must be exhausted,’ she said. ‘Holly can’t have given me all the boxes.’ Gaddis rinsed the pan in a stream of hot water. ‘Her house is a tip. Most of the files were in a store room in the basement of her building. It’s possible there are more of them in Tite Street.’
‘You can’t call Holly,’ Tanya said.
The finality of the instruction annoyed him. ‘What?’
‘We don’t know if her phone is compromised, if her house is being watched.’ Tanya’s tone was businesslike and matter of fact, as if she was deliberately killing off the intimacy which had built up between them since the airport. ‘You ring her and it could draw the Russians right to you.’
Gaddis was silent as he dried their plates. He wondered why Tanya’s mood had changed at the very mention of Holly’s name. Was she jealous? As the evening had drawn on, they had been as relaxed in each other’s company as lovers. Now she had offered him a stark, blunt reminder of his circumstances. He began to resent the power that she held over him.
‘How am I supposed to reach her then?’
‘Let me work it out,’ she replied, though it sounded as if she was running short of ideas. ‘I have to go to the Office first thing in the morning. Brennan knows about Wilkinson. There have been reports on the news. He probably won’t know that I got you out of Vienna. He certainly doesn’t know that you’re staying here. I’ll have a lot of explaining to do. But there’s a possibility that we can still find a way of protecting you and resolve everything with the Russians.’
It sounded like hot air. Gaddis looped the tea-towel over the back of a chair. ‘You’re not listening to me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be wrapped in cotton wool. I don’t need protecting. There’s a chance that Holly has the Platov tape gathering dust in the basement of her house. All I’m asking is that you give me the chance to call her to see if she’ll look for it. It’s that simple.’
‘Patience,’ Tanya replied, for what seemed like the tenth time in as many hours, and Gaddis’s anger boiled over.
‘Is there any chance you could stop saying that? It’s like you’re talking to a four-year-old. I’m grateful for everything you’re doing, Tanya. Seriously. But I’m not going to sit on my arse for the next few days and hope that John Brennan suddenly changes his mind about me. What did you think I can achieve here? Watch some daytime TV? Do the crossword?’
Tanya, to his astonishment, took him at face value. ‘I’m afraid so. Until we can find somewhere safe for you to go, you’ll have to stay here. That means you can’t make phone calls. It means you can’t even go outside.’
He looked at her in disbelief. He had a glass of wine on the kitchen table and drained it as he absorbed what she had said. He was amazed by how quickly their flirtatious rapport had evaporated; there had been several moments during the course of the evening when he had even entertained the possibility that they might spend the night together. Now Tanya seemed to be taunting him with the stark fact of his imprisonment.
‘Fine,’ he said.
‘What do you mean “fine”?’
He recalled their conversation on the street outside UCL. Don’t go looking for Crane. Don’t go looking for Wilkinson. He had made promises to Tanya Acocella before. He could do so again.
‘I mean that I’ll do as you say. I’ll stay here while you go to work. I’ll watch Countdown and go through your knicker drawer. Forget about Holly. Forget about the tape.’
Tanya knew that he was lying.
‘That simple?’ She produced a look which suggested Gaddis was making her job even more difficult than it already was. ‘That’s not a Sam Gaddis “I-swear-I-won’t-go-to-Austria” type of promise, is it? The last time you said something like that, a few days later you were in a bar in Vienna.’
‘It’s not that type of promise.’
Tanya shook her head. She knew that Gaddis would stop at nothing to avenge Charlotte and to retrieve the tape. What choice did he have? She could hardly keep him under house arrest indefinitely. If he walked out of the mews, there was nothing she could do about it.
‘Fine,’ she said eventually, walking into the sitting room. She began to puff the cushions on the sofa, like a physical demonstration of her desire to bring the conversation to an end. ‘Why don’t we get some sleep? It’s been a long day. You must feel like a bath or something.’
‘In the morning, Mummy.’ Gaddis was surprised that she had let him off the hook so easily and seized the opportunity to lighten the mood with a joke. But Tanya did not laugh. Instead, she said: ‘I’ve laid out one of Jeremy’s T-shirts for you,’ which made Gaddis feel like an unwanted suitor who has outstayed his welcome.
‘Terrific.’
‘There’s a towel as well, whisky in the kitchen if you want it.’ She yawned in a way that was stagey and self-conscious and Gaddis began to resent her again. ‘You’re in the room at the end of the corridor. Jeremy uses it as a study.’
‘Is he likely to come back and climb into bed with me?’
She allowed herself a smile, the glow in her eyes like a break in bad weather. ‘No,’ she said softly, and Gaddis reflected that she was probably just tired and worried.
‘Thank you,’ he said, because it was right to acknowledge the huge sacrifice she had made. ‘I don’t know what I would have done without you. I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve made.’
‘All in a good cause.’ She surprised him by kissing him gently on the cheek. ‘Most of it, anyway.’ She turned and walked up the stairs. ‘Sleep well. Will you turn off the lights before you go to bed?’
‘Of course. I’ll be five minutes.’
Gaddis found the whisky in the kitchen and poured himself four fingers. Switching on the television, he surfed briefly for a twenty-four-hour news channel which might be covering developments in the Wilkinson shooting. But CNN was fixed on an American political story, Sky News broadcasting a business programme. He turned the television off, checked the bolt on the front door and made his way upstairs.