The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming Page A

microwaved a supermarket Chilli con Carne and ate it while picking through the contents. The drawer was awash in gas bills, half-finished strips of paracetamol, cheque books and rubber bands. Chaos. He was reminded of Holly’s flat and sent her a text message to which she did not respond.
    Finally, while mopping up the dregs of the chilli with a hunk of stale bread, he found an envelope of expenses receipts, dated within two months of Charlotte’s death. Gaddis pushed the plate to one side and poured the receipts, perhaps thirty or forty of them, on to the table. He might as well have been looking at grains of rice. How was a till receipt from WH Smith going to lead him to Edward Crane? He said to himself, in an audible whisper: ‘You’re an idiot’ and put the receipts back in the envelope. Then he found a beer in Paul’s fridge, drank it from the bottle and contemplated the possibility of going into the garden for a smoke. He had given up cigarettes twenty-four hours earlier. Was one more packet going to give him lung cancer? Would five quid break the bank? No.
    He drained the beer, took Paul’s house keys from the kitchen table and headed towards the front door. He would buy a packet of Camels, his usual brand, on Hampstead High Street and, when they were finished, quit for good. No point in spending a tortuous day in Charlotte’s house without the back-up of tobacco. It was counter-productive.
    As he was opening the front door, jingling a lighter against the loose change in his pocket, a gust of wind shot into the house, sending junk mail scattering down the corridor. Gaddis spotted one of Charlotte’s handbags on a hook behind the door. He closed the door, took the bag down and freed the brass catch. Her purse was inside, bulging with credit cards and cash. He took the purse out and held it in his hand. Of all the objects which had belonged to Charlotte that he had touched that day, this was the one to trigger his grief. A hoop of sadness came up through his body and he had to stop for a moment to compose himself. There was £120 in cash in the purse, as well as a Press ID card and several more receipts. He wondered if the credit cards had been cancelled. Should he do that himself and save Paul the trouble? Visible behind a plastic cover, perhaps so that Charlotte could press the purse against a ticket machine without the need to take it out, was an Oyster card. Thanks to the common room ravings of a colleague at UCL who was obsessed, to the point of paranoia, by the ‘surveillance society’, Gaddis knew that it was possible to go to any Tube station in London and to see a computer listing for the last ten journeys undertaken by Oyster. That gave him a plan. If he could discover where Charlotte had travelled in the last few days of her life, he might be able to match that information to details on her phone bills or expenses receipts. This would at least provide him with the possibility of a link to Thomas Neame.
    At Hampstead station he queued behind a backpacking German tourist and placed the Oyster on a reader at the ticket machine. What he saw intrigued him. The same five journeys, there and back, over a period of fifteen days, from Finchley Road station, which was a fifteen-minute walk from Charlotte’s house, to Rickmansworth, in the suburbs of northwest London. He found a Tube map and traced the simple journey north on the Metropolitan line. It would have taken about forty minutes. For some reason, this small triumph of amateur detection was enough to persuade him not to buy the cigarettes and Gaddis returned to the house with a renewed sense of purpose.
    He took the receipts from the envelope a second time, pouring them on to the kitchen table: WH Smith’s, Daunt Books, Transport for London. Some writing caught his eye: scrawled on the back of two receipts which were from the same pub in Chorleywood, Charlotte had written: Lunch C Somers . The dates matched the days on which she had travelled north