The English Girl: A Novel

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 photograph of Jeremy Fallon entering a small private bank in Zurich. A few hours later Lancaster again appeared alone outside the famous black door of 10 Downing Street, this time to announce the firing of his chancellor of the exchequer. A few minutes later Scotland Yard announced that Fallon was now the target of a bribery-and-fraud investigation. Once again, Fallon declared his innocence. Not a single member of the Whitehall press corps believed him.

 

 

 

He left Downing Street for the last time at sunset and returned to his empty bachelor’s apartment in Notting Hill, which was surrounded, it seemed, by every reporter and cameraman in London. The inquest would never determine how or when he eluded them, though a CCTV camera captured a clear image of his stricken face at 2:23 the next morning as he walked along a deserted stretch of Park Lane, one end of a rope already tied around his neck. Using a nautical knot taught to him by his father, he tied the other end of the rope to a lamppost at the center of the Westminster Bridge. No one happened to see Fallon hurl himself over the edge, and so he hung there through the long night, until the sun finally shone upon his slowly swaying body. Thus lending proof to an ancient and wise Corsican proverb: He who lives an immoral life dies an immoral death.

 

 

 

 

 

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CORSICA

 

 

But who had been the source of the damning photograph that drove Jeremy Fallon from office and over the railing of Westminster Bridge? It was a question that would dominate British political circles for months to come; but on the enchanted island where the scandal had its genesis, only a few north-looking sophisticates gave much thought to it. Occasionally, a couple would have their photograph taken at Les Palmiers, posed as Madeline Hart and Pavel Zhirov on the afternoon of their fateful lunch, but for the most part the island did its best to forget the small role it had played in the death of a senior British statesman. As the winter took hold, the Corsicans instinctively returned to the old ways. They burned the macchia for warmth. They waggled their fingers at strangers to ward off the evil eye. And in an isolated valley near the southwestern coast, they turned to Don Anton Orsati for help when they could turn to no one else.