The English Girl: A Novel

moving along the pavements of Bridge Street. As though she had never seen them before, thought Gabriel. As though she would never see them again. He glanced around the interior of the café. No one recognized her. Why should they? She was dead and buried—buried in a churchyard in Basildon. A town without a soul for a girl without a name or a past.
    “You don’t have to do this,” he said after a moment.
    “Of course I do.”
    “I have enough without you. I have the video of Zhirov.”
    “The Kremlin can deny Zhirov,” she answered. “But it can’t deny me.”
    She was still staring out the window.
    “Take a good look,” Gabriel said, “because if you do this, it’s going to be a long time before they let you come back to London.”
    “Where do you suppose they’ll put me?”
    “A safe house in the middle of nowhere. Maybe a military base until the storm passes.”
    “It doesn’t sound very appealing, does it?”
    “You can always come back to Israel with me.”
    She made no reply. Gabriel leaned forward across the table and took hold of her hand. It was trembling slightly.
    “I keep a cottage in Cornwall,” he said quietly. “The town isn’t much, but it’s by the sea. You can stay there if you like.”
    “Does it have a view?” she asked.
    “A lovely view,” he answered.
    “I might like that.”
    She smiled bravely. Across the road Big Ben tolled four o’clock.
    “She’s late,” Gabriel said incredulously. “I can’t believe she’s late.”
    “She’s always late,” Madeline said.
    “You made quite an impression on her, by the way.”
    “She wasn’t the only one.”
    Madeline laughed in spite of herself and drank some of her tea. Gabriel frowned at his wristwatch. Then he looked up in time to see Samantha Cooke rushing through the door. A moment later she was standing at their table, slightly out of breath. She looked at Gabriel for a moment before turning her gaze toward the beautiful dark-haired girl seated across from him. And then she understood.
    “Dear God,” she whispered.
    “Can we get you something to drink?” Madeline asked in her English accent.
    “Actually,” stammered Samantha Cooke, “it might be better if we walked.”

60
    LONDON
    T hirteen hours later a junior functionary from Downing Street delivered a bundle of newspapers to a redbrick house in the Hampstead section of London. The house belonged to Simon Hewitt, press spokesman for Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster, and the thud the papers made upon hitting his doorstep woke him from an unusually sound sleep. He had been dreaming of an incident from his childhood when a schoolyard bully had blackened his eye. It was a slight improvement over the previous night, when he dreamed he was being torn to pieces by wolves, or the night before that, when a cloud of bees had stung him bloody. It was all part of a recurring theme. Despite Lancaster’s triumph at the polls, Hewitt was gripped by a sense of impending doom quite unlike any he had experienced since coming to Downing Street. He was convinced that the quiet in the press was illusory. Surely, he thought, the earth’s crust was about to move.
    All of which explained why Hewitt was slow to rise from his bed and open his front door that cold London morning. The act of retrieving the bundle of newspapers from his doorstep sent his back into spasm, a reminder of the toll the job had taken on his health. He carried the parcel into the kitchen, where the coffeemaker was emitting the wheezy death rattle that signaled it was nearing the end of its cycle. After pouring a large cup and whitening it with heavy cream, he removed the newspapers from their plastic cover. As usual, Hewitt’s old paper, the Times , was on top. He scanned it quickly, found nothing objectionable, then moved on to the Guardian . Next it was the Independent . Then, finally, the Daily Telegraph .
    “Shit,” he said softly. “Shit, shit, shit.”
    A t first the press was at a loss over exactly what to call it. They tried the Madeline Hart Affair, but that seemed too narrow. So did the Fallon Fiasco, which was en vogue for a few hours, or the Kremlin Connection, which enjoyed a brief run on ITV. By late morning the BBC had settled on the Downing Street Affair, which was bland but broad enough to cover all manner of sins. The rest of the press quickly fell into line, and a scandal was born.
    For most of that day, the man at the center of it, Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster, remained