Kompromat

‘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.

‘There can be no doubt about the result.

‘I was absolutely clear about my belief that Britain is stronger, safer and better off inside the European Union, and I made clear the Referendum was about this and this alone—not the future of any single politician, including myself.

‘But the British people have made a very clear decision to take a different path, and I think the country requires fresh leadership to take it in this direction.’

Many people in Britain, and indeed around the world, had stayed up all night. Others had just switched on their television sets or radios. Few doubted the sincerity of the prime minister’s feelings. Mabel Killick was one of them.

Later that morning, Jeremy Hartley received an urgent message from the home secretary, a message he could not ignore.

Soon after 1:00p.m., she entered Downing Street by the back door and was shown to the prime minister’s study with no officials present.

‘I’ve sat on it as long as I could, Prime Minister?’ Mrs Killick continued. ‘I wanted to be sure I had all the facts. But now I do have the facts, I don’t think I can keep quiet any longer.’

‘Keep quiet about what?’

‘The Referendum dossier, of course,’ the home secretary replied.

She took him through the evidence step by step.

‘Our experts have subjected the dossier to the most rigorous examination. We are convinced that every single document is genuine, and that includes the additions in your own handwriting to the draft of your Bloomberg speech, back in January 2013, when you wrote: “that is why I am in favour of a Referendum”. I admit we have not been able to trace the £10 million or £12 million paid by persons unknown in exchange for this commitment. But that doesn’t mean the transaction never occurred. Wouldn’t you agree? The expression “Laundromat” has a whole new meaning nowadays.