The English Girl: A Novel

of the British press applauded his restraint. With the domestic economy still on life support, they wrote, the last thing Britain needed was another cold war with the Russians.
    Upon returning to London, Lancaster was questioned at every turn as to whether he intended to call an election. For ten days he toyed with the press while Simon Hewitt orchestrated a steady stream of leaks that made it clear an announcement was imminent. Therefore, when Lancaster finally rose in the Commons to declare his intention to seek a new mandate, it was an anticlimax. In fact, the most surprising news concerned the future of Jeremy Fallon, who planned to leave his powerful post at Downing Street to run for a safe seat in Parliament. There were numerous press reports, all unconfirmed, that if Lancaster were to win a second term as prime minister, Fallon would be appointed the next chancellor of the exchequer. Fallon denied the reports categorically, going so far as to claim that he and the prime minister had held no substantive discussions about his future. Not a single member of the Whitehall press corps believed him.
    As October turned to November, and the campaign commenced in earnest, Madeline Hart again faded from the public consciousness. This proved to be a blessing for the French police, for it allowed them to conduct their investigation without the British press peering over their shoulders. Among the most promising developments was the discovery of four bodies at an isolated villa in the Lubéron. All four were known members of a violent Marseilles criminal gang. Three had been killed with professional-looking shots to the head; the fourth, a woman, had been hit twice in the upper torso. More important, however, was the discovery of a purpose-built holding cell in the lower level of the villa. It was clear to the police that Madeline had been held in the room after her abduction in Corsica, probably for a lengthy period of time. It was possible she was the victim of sexual enslavement, but it was unlikely, given the pedigrees of the four people who had been staying in the house with her. These people were not sexual predators; they were professional criminals interested only in money. All of which led the police to conclude that Madeline Hart had been held as part of a kidnap-for-ransom scheme—a scheme that, for some reason, was never reported to the authorities.
    But why kidnap a girl from a working-class family who had been raised in a council house in Essex? And who had killed the four Marseilles criminals at the villa in the Lubéron? Those were just two of the questions the French police still could not answer a month after Madeline’s terrible death on the beach at Audresselles. Nor did they have any clue about the identity of the man who had been spotted running past Monsieur Banville’s house at 5:09 a.m., minutes before the car exploded. One veteran detective who had worked numerous kidnapping cases had a theory, though. “The poor devil was the bagman,” he told his colleagues assuredly. “Somewhere along the line, he made a mistake, and the girl died for his sins.” But where was he now? They assumed he was lying low somewhere, licking his wounds and trying to figure out what had gone wrong. And though the French police would never know it, they were entirely correct.
    B ut there were many other things about the running man that the French police, even in their wildest dreams, would never imagine to be true. They would never know, for example, that he was Gabriel Allon, the legendary Israeli spy and assassin who had been operating with impunity on French soil since he was a boy of twenty-two. Or that the man who had spirited him to safety after the bomb exploded was none other than Christopher Keller, the Corsican-based assassin about whom the French police had been hearing whispers for years. Or that the two men, once bitter rivals, had proceeded to a seaside villa near Cherbourg where a team of four Israeli operatives waited on standby. Keller had stayed at the villa only a few hours before returning quietly to Corsica, but Gabriel and Chiara remained there for a week while they waited for the many small cuts on Gabriel’s face to heal. On the morning of Madeline Hart’s funeral, they drove to Charles de Gaulle Airport and boarded an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. And by nightfall they were once again at the apartment in Narkiss Street.
    In Gabriel’s absence, Chiara had moved the painting and his supplies