Transcription

The novel opens in 1981 as sixty-year-old Juliet Armstrong lies on Wigmore Street in London after being struck by a car. She has recently returned to England after decades abroad and may have looked the wrong way while crossing the street. As paramedics attend to her, she thinks of her 26-year-old son, Matteo, the product of a brief relationship with an Italian musician. She senses she will not survive.

The narrative shifts to 1950, where Juliet works as a radio producer in the BBC's Schools Broadcasting department. During a lunchtime walk, she spots Godfrey Toby, an officer from MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence service, with whom she worked closely during a wartime surveillance operation. She calls out, but Godfrey denies knowing her and walks away, tapping his silver-topped cane. Shaken, Juliet retreats to Moretti's, a café she has frequented since before the war. There a strange man with pockmarked skin stares at her before leaving. Shortly after, she receives a menacing note at the BBC: "You will pay for what you did."

The story flashes back to 1940, revealing Juliet's wartime career. At eighteen, recently orphaned after her mother's death from illness, she is recruited into MI5 following an interview with Miles Merton, a shrewd interrogation specialist. She is assigned to Registry at Wormwood Scrubs, a repurposed prison where MI5 has relocated, and befriends Clarissa, a duke's daughter who becomes her first real friend.

Peregrine Gibbons, known as Perry, a charming MI5 officer who studied mesmerism and Classics at Cambridge, recruits Juliet for a surveillance operation at Dolphin Square, a residential complex in Pimlico. In one flat, Godfrey Toby, a mild-mannered man posing as a Gestapo agent, meets British Fascist sympathizers who believe they are reporting to the German government. In the neighboring flat, hidden microphones feed their conversations to recording equipment operated by Cyril Forbes, a young engineer from the General Post Office Research Station. Juliet transcribes the recordings. The informants, mostly former members of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, report fragmentary intelligence about troop movements and potential sympathizers, their conversations peppered with anti-Semitic remarks and frequently rendered inaudible by Dolly's yapping poodle, Dib.

Perry creates an undercover identity for Juliet: "Iris Carter-Jenkins," a War Office clerk. Armed with false documents and a small Mauser pistol, she infiltrates the Right Club, a Fascist organization drawn from the British Establishment. She gains the trust of Mrs. Scaife, a wealthy Right Club leader whose husband has been interned under Defence Regulation 18b, which allowed the wartime detention of suspected enemy sympathizers. Juliet works alongside Mrs. Ambrose, a veteran MI5 agent whose real name is Florence Eckersley, and Giselle Bouchier, another of Perry's agents.

Oliver Alleyne, Perry's ambitious superior, secretly asks Juliet to watch Godfrey for signs of disloyalty. Alleyne also places a miniature schnauzer named Lily in Juliet's care as collateral for Nelly Varga, a Hungarian double agent sent on a mission to France. Juliet cultivates Mrs. Scaife's timid maid, Beatrice Dodds, as a source, but when Juliet accidentally leaves her real handbag in Mrs. Scaife's house, Beatrice turns up strangled. Juliet identifies the body at the mortuary under the name "Madge Wilson," claiming the dead girl is her sister "Ivy."

Perry orchestrates a sting: In a wired MI5 flat, Juliet introduces Mrs. Scaife to Chester Vanderkamp, an American embassy cipher clerk passing classified Roosevelt-Churchill telegrams. When Vanderkamp hands the documents to Mrs. Scaife, Juliet blows her nose as the prearranged signal and police storm in. Both are arrested. Perry then proposes marriage to Juliet, but the engagement is loveless; he sleeps beside her without touching her. When Perry is arrested for soliciting men, the charges are dropped, but he is transferred to the Ministry of Information.

The narrative returns to 1940 to reveal the "hideous act" binding Juliet and Godfrey. One afternoon, Dolly, one of the informants, arrives early at Dolphin Square, and her poodle Dib wanders through the unlocked door into Juliet and Cyril's flat. Dolly follows and discovers the recording equipment, her own transcripts, and Godfrey's reports exposing him as an MI5 agent. Enraged, she attacks Godfrey. Juliet shoots Dolly with the Mauser; Cyril shoots her again, but neither shot is fatal. Godfrey unsheathes a hidden sword from his cane and pierces Dolly through the heart, then drowns Dib. They wrap Dolly's body in a bedspread and rug and place it in Beatrice Dodds's coffin, buried the next morning at Kensal Green Cemetery. To preserve the operation, Juliet fabricates Dolly's dialogue in the transcripts, even inventing lines for the dead dog.

The war exacts a heavy toll. Clarissa is killed in the bombing of the Café de Paris, a London nightclub. Lily bolts during an air raid and is never found. Cyril dies from a V2 rocket. Giselle, sent into occupied France by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), is never heard from again. The Dolphin Square operation winds down in 1944. Juliet works for Merton until the war ends, then joins the BBC.

Back in 1950, MI5 asks Juliet to run a safe house for a Czech scientist code-named "Pavel." She shelters him overnight, but after she delivers him the next morning, the Americans spirit him away. Perry, now a nature broadcaster at the BBC, reappears in Juliet's life and expresses concern about the threatening notes but cannot identify their source. Juliet discovers that the people following her are Nelly Varga and her husband, the pockmarked man from the café. Nelly wants Juliet to pay for Lily's death, and the conspiracy Juliet feared collapses into the absurdity of a decade-old grudge over a dog.

The deeper threat, however, is real. Juliet meets Merton at the National Gallery, where she passes him a copy of The Times containing microfilm. Merton has been her Soviet handler since before the war, having recruited her through her school headmistress. That evening, a man who identifies himself as "Mr. Fisher," a counter-intelligence operative representing a shadowy tier of British intelligence that monitors MI5 itself, is waiting in her darkened flat. Fisher reveals that Godfrey was recalled to England to flush out a mole: Juliet herself. She photographed Pavel's secret documents while he slept and intended to pass the microfilm to the Soviets. Fisher offers a deal: Juliet will avoid a treason trial if she becomes a double agent, feeding disinformation to Merton. The microfilm she already passed contains fabricated data. She has no choice but to accept.

Juliet prepares to flee the country. At Victoria station, two men seize her, but Nelly Varga appears and attacks them, giving Juliet the chance to escape. Perry picks her up on Vauxhall Bridge and drives her to Lowestoft, where he has arranged passage to Holland on a trawler. As the boat leaves the harbor in the morning mist, the figure of Godfrey Toby stands on the harbor wall. He raises his hat; she raises her hand. The mist closes around him.

Juliet spends thirty years abroad, eventually settling in Ravello, Italy, until intelligence officers bring her home to testify against Merton, whose treachery has been exposed. Oliver Alleyne was unmasked as a Soviet agent in 1954 and fled to Moscow. Perry died in mysterious circumstances in 1961. Godfrey vanished. In 1981, Juliet lies dying on Wigmore Street. She wishes she could see Matteo one last time. A paramedic asks what she said. Someone answers, "I think she said 'It's all right.'"