The English Girl: A Novel

curiously silent. Finally, at six that evening, the black door of Number Ten swung open, and Lancaster emerged alone to face the country. His tone was remorseful, but he remained dry-eyed and steady. He acknowledged that he had carried on a brief and unwise affair with a young woman from Party headquarters. He also admitted that he had retained the services of a foreign intelligence operative to find the young woman after her disappearance, that he had improperly withheld information from the British authorities, and that he had paid ten million euros in ransom and extortion money. At no point, he insisted, did he ever suspect that the young woman was actually a Russian-born sleeper spy. Nor did he suspect that her disappearance was part of a well-orchestrated conspiracy by a Kremlin-owned energy company to obtain drilling rights in the North Sea. He had approved the Volgatek license, he said, at the suggestion of his longtime aide and chief of staff, Jeremy Fallon. And that deal, he added pointedly, was now dead.
    Fallon wisely issued his first statement in written form, for even on his best days he looked like a man who was guilty of something. He acknowledged having helped the prime minister deal with the consequences of his “reckless personal conduct” but denied categorically that he had accepted a payment of money from anyone connected to Volgatek Oil & Gas. The commentators took note of the statement’s sharp tone. It was clear, they said, that Jeremy Fallon believed that Lancaster might not survive and that the premiership might be his for the taking. This was shaping up to be a fight for survival, they said. Perhaps even a fight to the death.
    The next statement came not in London but in Moscow, where the Russian president called the allegations against the Kremlin and its oil company a malicious Western lie. In a clear sign the affair would have geopolitical repercussions, he accused British intelligence of involvement in the disappearance of Pavel Zhirov, the man upon whose word the allegations were based. Then, without offering any evidence, he suggested that Viktor Orlov, the Russian oil oligarch now residing in the United Kingdom, was somehow linked to the affair. Orlov issued a taunting denial from his Mayfair headquarters in which he called the Russian president a congenital liar and kleptocrat who had finally shown his true stripes. Then he promptly handed himself over to an MI5 security detail for protection and disappeared from view.
    But who was the mysterious operative from a foreign intelligence service whom Lancaster had retained to find Madeline Hart after her disappearance in Corsica? Citing issues of national security, Lancaster refused to identify him. Nor did Jeremy Fallon shed any light on the matter. Initially, speculation centered on the Americans, with whom Lancaster was known to be close. That changed, however, when the Times reported that the noted Israeli intelligence operative Gabriel Allon had been seen entering Downing Street on two separate occasions during the period in question. The Daily Mail then reported that a senior MP had spotted the same Gabriel Allon having coffee with a young woman at Café Nero, one day before the scandal broke. The Mail story was dismissed as tabloid silliness—surely the great Gabriel Allon would not be so foolish as to sit openly in a busy London coffeehouse—but the Times account proved tougher to deflate. In a break with tradition, the Office released a terse statement denying both reports, which the British press saw as ironclad confirmation of Allon’s involvement.
    With that, the scandal fell into a predictable cycle of leaks, counterleaks, and naked political warfare. The opposition leader declared his revulsion and demanded Lancaster’s resignation. But when a head count in the Commons revealed that Lancaster would narrowly survive a vote of no confidence, the opposition leader didn’t bother to schedule one. Even Jeremy Fallon seemed to have weathered the storm. After all, there was no proof he had accepted any payment from Volgatek, only the word of a Russian oil executive who seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth.
    And there it all might have ended, with the Lancaster-Fallon marriage badly damaged but still intact, were it not for the edition of the Daily Telegraph that landed with a thud on Simon Hewitt’s doorstep on the second Tuesday of January. On the front page, next to an article by Samantha Cooke, was a