The English Girl: A Novel

Jeremy Fallon and Madeline Hart were having an affair?”
    “Madeline wasn’t interested in Jeremy romantically,” she replied, shaking her head. “But that didn’t prevent her from using him to advance her career. She rose through the ranks rather too quickly, in my opinion. And I suspect it was all because of Jeremy.”
    A silence fell between them. They were standing on the pavement outside the Courtauld Gallery. Samantha Cooke was watching the traffic rushing along the Strand, but Gabriel was wondering why Jeremy Fallon had introduced a woman he loved to Jonathan Lancaster. Perhaps Fallon had wanted to create leverage over the man who was about to end his career in politics.
    “Are you sure?” Gabriel asked after a moment.
    “That Jeremy was smitten with Madeline?”
    Gabriel nodded.
    “As sure as one can be about something like that.”
    “Meaning?”
    “I had it from multiple sources I trust. Jeremy used to make up the flimsiest excuses to contact her. Apparently, it was all rather pathetic.”
    “Why didn’t you report it when she disappeared?”
    “Because it didn’t seem the right thing to do at the time,” she replied. “And now that she’s dead . . .”
    Her voice trailed off. They entered the gallery, purchased two tickets, and climbed the staircase to the exhibition rooms. As usual, they were largely empty of visitors. In Room 7 they paused before the empty frame commemorating the theft of the Courtauld’s signature piece, Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear by Vincent van Gogh.
    “A pity,” said Samantha Cooke.
    “Yes,” said Gabriel. He guided her to Gauguin’s Nevermore and asked whether she had ever met Madeline Hart.
    “Once,” she replied, pointing toward the woman on the canvas, as though she were speaking about her rather than a woman who was dead. “I was doing a piece on the Party’s efforts to connect with minority voters. Jeremy sent me to Madeline. I thought she was rather too pretty for her own good, but smart as a whip. Sometimes it seemed she was interviewing me rather than the other way around. I felt as though I was . . .” She lapsed into silence, as if searching for the right word. Then she said, “I felt as though I were being recruited—for what, I haven’t a clue.”
    As the sound of her words died, Gabriel heard footsteps and, turning, saw a middle-aged couple enter the room. The man wore tinted eyeglasses and was bald except for a monkish tonsure. The woman was several years his junior and carried a museum guidebook open to the wrong page. They moved from painting to painting without speaking, stopping before each canvas for only a few seconds before moving mechanically to the next. Gabriel watched as the couple entered the adjoining exhibition room. Then he led Samantha Cooke downstairs, to the vast internal courtyard at the center of the building. In warm weather it was a popular gathering spot for Londoners who worked in the office blocks along the Strand. But now, in the chill rain, the metal café tables were empty and the dancing fountain splashed with the sadness of a toy in a nursery without children.
    “You wrote well of Madeline after her disappearance,” said Gabriel as they walked slowly around the perimeter of the courtyard.
    “And I meant every word of it. She was remarkably composed and self-confident for someone of her upbringing.” She paused and furrowed her brow thoughtfully. “I never understood the way her mother behaved during the days after she went missing. Most parents of missing persons talk to the press constantly. But not her. She was tight-lipped and insular throughout. And now it seems she’s vanished from the face of the earth. Madeline’s brother, too.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “When I tried to contact her for that piece,” she said, nodding toward the newspaper article in Gabriel’s coat pocket, “there was no answer at their house. Ever . I finally drove out to bloody Essex and sat on the doorstep. A neighbor told me that Madeline’s family hadn’t been seen since shortly after the funeral.”
    Gabriel said nothing, but in his thoughts he was calculating the driving time between central London and Basildon, Essex, at the height of the evening rush.
    “I’ve done a great deal of talking,” Samantha Cooke was saying. “Now it’s your turn. Why on earth is the great Gabriel Allon interested in a dead English girl?”
    “I’m afraid I can’t tell you yet.”
    “Will you ever?”
    “That