The English Girl: A Novel

encountered since leaving the army. He searched the room quickly but discovered nothing out of the ordinary—nothing except that it contained no object or slip of paper that bore the name of the creature who resided there.
    The last room Gabriel entered was Madeline’s room. It was not the Madeline who had been Jonathan Lancaster’s lover, or the remnant of Madeline whom Gabriel had encountered in France, but the Madeline who had somehow survived a childhood spent in this sad little house. It seemed to Gabriel that she had accomplished it the same way she had survived a month in captivity, with neatness and order. Her bed was crisply made; her tiny schoolgirl’s desk was ready for inspection. On it stood a row of classic English novels—Dickens, Austen, Forster, Lawrence. The volumes looked as though they had been read many times, and their pages were filled with underlined passages and notations written in a small, precise hand. Gabriel was about to slip one of the books, A Room with a View , into his coat pocket when his mobile phone vibrated softly. He picked up the call and brought the phone quickly to his ear.
    “We’ve got company,” said Keller.
    “How many?”
    “It looks like just one, but I can’t be sure.”
    Gabriel parted the gauzy curtains of Madeline’s window a fraction of an inch and saw a woman walking along Blackwater Way beneath the shelter of an umbrella. As she passed through a cone of yellow lamplight, he glimpsed her face briefly and realized at once that he had seen it somewhere before. The answer came to him as she veered into the concrete drive. It had been in an ancient church, in the mountains of the Lubéron. She was the woman who had crossed herself as though the movement were unfamiliar to her. And for some reason she was now inserting a key into Madeline Hart’s front door.
    G abriel switched off the phone and drew the gun from the small of his back. He was tempted to steal down the stairs and confront the woman immediately, but decided it was better to wait. Eventually, he thought, the woman would tell him who she was and why she was here, preferably without realizing she had done so. That was always the best way to acquire a piece of intelligence—without the knowledge of the target. As Shamron always preached, it was better for a spy to be a pickpocket than a mugger.
    And so Gabriel stood stock-still in Madeline Hart’s childhood room, the barrel of the gun pressed reassuringly to his cheek, as the woman stepped into the entrance hall and quietly closed the door. She emitted a single syllable that was unfamiliar to Gabriel. Then came a series of swishes and rustles that suggested she was gathering up the post and placing it into a plastic bag. Next she moved into the sitting room, where she spent approximately two minutes. Then she entered the kitchen and again uttered the same single syllable. Gabriel suspected it was a vulgarity from a language other than English, Hebrew, French, Italian, or German. He suspected something else, too. The woman, whoever she was, was searching the house, just as Gabriel had before her arrival.
    When her footfalls reached the base of the stairs, Gabriel was seized by a moment of indecision. If he was right about the woman’s intentions—that she was looking for something—she would surely search Madeline’s bedroom. He glanced around to see if there was a place to conceal himself but saw nothing suitable; the room was scarcely larger than the cell where Madeline had been held captive in France. As the woman’s steps grew louder, Gabriel decided he had no choice but to leave. But where? The bathroom was just across the hall. As he entered it without a sound, he wondered what Shamron would be thinking if he could see the future chief of Israeli intelligence at this moment. He would approve, thought Gabriel. In fact, he was certain the great Ari Shamron had taken cover in places that were far more professionally degrading than the bathroom of a Basildon council house.
    He left the door slightly ajar—a quarter inch, no more—and held the gun in his outstretched hands as the woman completed her journey up the stairs. She entered the largest bedroom first and, judging from the sound of opening drawers and slamming doors, searched it thoroughly. Five minutes later she emerged and walked past the bathroom without pausing, seemingly unaware a gun was at that instant pointed at her head. She was wearing the same tan raincoat she had worn