Thirty women, some from the nightclub, North’s modelling agency and brothels, paraded themselves in bikinis and smart outfits. Each contestant had to do a special dance, which ranged from rock and waltzes to the can-can and salsa.

One girl in particular—180-centimetre, fair-haired Natalia Moronova, a 27-year-old from St Petersburg—caught Haut’s eye. She happened to be best friends with North’s partner, Hannah. Natalia performed a gliding, seductive, hip-wiggling salsa, accompanied by the hit song ‘Mambo No. 5’, which Haut felt was directed at him. He voted her the winner, and persuaded the other four judges that she was the best all-rounder.

‘Good choice, my son,’ North said. ‘I ’ad her ear-marked for you, didn’t I?’

‘Her English is excellent, to the point of pedantic precision,’ Haut noted. ‘Her deportment is outstanding, and she has ingredient X. I can define this as charisma coupled with a vibrant character.’

‘Did you miss ’er tits and bum, then?’ North asked with a straight face.

Haut met Natalia and they seemed to hit it off. When he complimented her on her command of the language, she replied in a drawl that would make the British Royals proud, ‘I can speak like an upper-class Sloane, if I so desire.’

Haut was impressed by her mimicry, and the humour associated with it. He soon discovered this was the least of her talents. Apart from her native Russian, she spoke French and German and had basic Mandarin. Haut was enthralled and not a little surprised at the ease with which they became close. He took her out to dinner, with a guard from Magic in tow, and explained that he was getting engaged to another Russian girl, Catherine.

Natalia showed only mild interest. She appeared neither put off nor perturbed by his ties to someone else. Their relationship blossomed but not in an intimate sense. Haut asked Natalia to be his personal assistant, an apparently alluring proposition for a young, educated Russian woman loose in Europe for an as-yet-unspecified purpose, apart from doing a business degree part-time at the London School of Economics.

Haut wondered how he would break up with Catherine but was surprised to see that the two women got on when they met at the club. There was not an ounce of enmity between them. After several weeks Catherine dropped out of the picture and Natalia widened her job description to satisfy Haut’s amorous interests.

48 THE SET-UP

48

THE SET-UP

‘Dodgy,’ Cavalier’s senior MI6 contact, Liam Hunter, said when asked about the Magic club. Cavalier was on assignment in the UK and France, and on such occasions he always met with Hunter to chat about everything from cricket to terrorism, or anything else on the intelligence services radar. He was planning to meet up with Haut again.

Cavalier asked, ‘In what way is it dodgy?’