Abewa’s own phone pinged. ‘Ah, apparently Nabokov’s already gone. Flew out this morning on KLM. Rats leaving a sinking ship, eh?’
Half an hour later, they took a break. Mnogo Abewa looked at his watch. ‘Interview interrupted at 10:45a.m.’ he said.
Jane Porter, head of MI5, who had been watching the interview through the one-way window, was waiting for Abewa outside the room. ‘I don’t have to tell you,’ she said, ‘that this is pretty sensitive stuff. What do you think the Russians have been trying to do with Harriet Marshall?’
She made the question seem so innocent, so naive.
‘How about trying to influence the result of the Referendum? Will that do for starters?’ Mnogo Abewa replied.
‘You’re going to have to do better than a newsagent’s card dug out of someone’s rubbish bin,’ Jane Porter said. ‘And a casual meeting on Westminster Bridge. Did anyone hear what they actually said?’
Mnogo Abewa was a Tigger, not an Eeyore. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll get there,’ he assured her. ‘I’ll try my “enhanced interrogation techniques”. They usually work.’
‘Tell me about Yuri Yasonov,’ Mnogo Abewa asked Harriet when he came back into the interview room. ‘You met him at Oxford. When you were Howard, not Harriet. You were friends there. Must have been. You were both officers of the Oxford Union, as I understand. Then, after you left Oxford, you went to Russia for two years. What did you do there? Why didn’t you tell Barnard you knew Yasonov? What were you concealing? Did Yasonov himself recruit you? Did you ever meet Igor Popov? Why did you go to Amsterdam? Why did you meet Yasonov in the Rijksmuseum?’
The questions came thick and fast. Harriet blocked them all. Just pushed her pawns forward, keeping her king well-guarded. If you played chess as well as Harriet did, you soon realized that – contrary to expectations – defence was often the best form of attack.
At the end of the morning, Mnogo Abewa came, crucially, to the attempt on Edward Barnard’s life.
‘Why were you fanning your face with the order paper, when Barnard got up to speak?’ Mnogo asked. ‘It wasn’t particularly hot, as I understand. I think you were sending a signal. A signal which meant, “When I wave my order paper to fan my face, be sure to shoot the next man who gets up to speak”. Isn’t that what you were telling him? So what does that make you? A murderer or at least an accessory to murder? This is serious stuff, Harriet. You can’t go on stonewalling.’
After a while, Harriet Marshall said, ‘I’d like to call a lawyer.’
Later that morning, Jane Porter went to see the home secretary.
‘We’ve some pretty clear prima facie evidence that Russia has been trying to influence the result of the Referendum,’ she said.
Mabel Killick sighed. ‘I wish the beastly thing was over. Okay, Jane, just summarize the key points. What exactly is Russia doing? It’s all very well having stuff in the Guardian, but where’s the hard evidence?’
‘Well, Home Secretary.’ Jane Porter chose her words carefully. ‘We’ve been building the case for some time. First, there’s the so-called Referendum dossier, the one Barnard brought back from Russia. Did the Russians actually pay good money to the Conservative Party as a whole, or to the PM or Conservative Party chairman in particular, so as to ensure there was a commitment to the Referendum, first in the prime minister’s Bloomberg speech, and then in the Conservative manifesto?’
‘And what’s the answer to that question? Remind me,’ Mabel Killick asked. ‘I read Sir Oliver Holmes’ report. Very diplomatically phrased. Couldn’t make head or tail of it.’
‘I agree it’s complicated. Sir Oliver’s people are convinced the documents are genuine in the sense that that they were genuinely sent to or from the prime minister’s office. On the other hand, there is no evidence that money ever changed hands.’
‘No evidence of “cash for Brexit” transactions?’
‘None that they can find. But that’s not conclusive of course. These City folk are quite adept at covering their tracks.’
Mabel Killick obviously didn’t want to go further down that route. ‘Let’s leave that one for the moment. We’ll have to revert at some later date, I’m sure. What else do we have?’
‘The Russians have helped Leave nobble large chunks of the press and media to ensure that the Leave message gets maximum attention’.
‘And the third point?’
‘We think the Russians influenced Helga Brun, at a crucial moment on the immigration issue. There’s some suggestion of a long-standing link between the chancellor and Russian Intelligence.’
Mabel Killick groaned. ‘I can’t believe this. Don’t tell me there’s more.’
‘I’m afraid there is. Though we haven’t yet found the man who fired the shot, we suspect there may be some active Russian involvement here too. Harriet Marshall had a long meeting with a man we assume is her Russian handler on Hampstead Heath the day of the Oxford Union debate. We think they planned the assassination attempt there.’
Mabel Killick looked shocked. ‘Are you telling me that Harriet Marshall was ready to have her own leader, Edward Barnard, assassinated if that helped the Leave campaign gain another point or two in the polls?’
‘That is precisely what I suspect. And I’m suggesting that the key player throughout, on the Leave side at least, has indeed been Harriet Marshall. Our feeling is that’s she’s been a Russian sleeper ever since she left Oxford. As a matter of fact, we believe she may have actually been recruited while she was an undergraduate there, known as Howard Marshall. She was to be properly trained later – following a sex-change operation – when she worked in Moscow after leaving university. We always focus on Cambridge as a hotbed for Russian spies and seem to forget about Oxford.’
The home secretary, who had been at Oxford herself, commented acidly, ‘It’s hardly a badge of honour to be recruited by the KGB or FSB.’
She rose and paced the room in her smart leopard-skin shoes. ‘It’s too late to cancel the Referendum,’ she said. ‘The damage is done. If we go public with what we know, or suspect, the Leave campaign will laugh us out of court. They’ll say we’ve cooked the whole thing up in a last desperate move to discredit them before the vote. They’ll throw the book at us. How many authorizations do you have, Jane, for all those wire taps and surveillance operations? Are you sure your hands are clean? And, from what you’ve told me, I’m not sure your interrogator was playing strictly by the rules.’
Mabel Killick made up her mind. And once she had made up her mind, she was hard to sway.
‘We may not like it,’ she said. ‘But we are where we are.’
‘What do we do about Harriet?’ Jane Porter asked.
‘Put her on a plane to Moscow,’ the home secretary said. ‘And tell her not to come back. Not ever.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
At 6:00a.m. exactly on Friday June 24th, 2016, Noel Garnett, the BBC’s veteran reporter and commentator, announced that Vote Leave had secured more than half the votes cast. Britain had voted for Brexit.
At 8:15a.m. on that day, the United Kingdom’s prime minister, Jeremy Hartley, with his wife Miranda at his side, emerged from the famous black door at Number 10 Downing Street to concede defeat.
He gave a moving and statesman-like address.
‘Good morning, everyone.’ Hartley began. ‘The country has just taken part in a giant democratic exercise, perhaps the biggest in our history.
‘Over thirty-three million people from England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Gibraltar have all had their say.