Michael Latham, once a leading expert on Soviet affairs, finds himself becalmed at the age of thirty-seven transcribing Russian language broadcasts at the BBC’s monitoring service in Caversham. His wife has left him; he is having an affair with a colleague whom he despises; he visits a therapist twice a week. He broods on the worldly success of two friends from his days at Cambridge – Gordon Taylor, the editor of the Sunday Gazette and George Harding, a junior minister in the Ministry of Defence. Both men would like Britain to leave the European Union.
Then Harding’s body is found floating in the River Saar with marks that suggest some sadomasochistic orgy. Taylor, the Eurosceptic editor, suspects that he may have been murdered by a secret freemasonry of fanatic Europhiles – the aristocratic Catholic Knights of the Cross. The Knights run a charity that assists Catholics from the former Soviet Union, and Taylor asks Latham to infiltrate the organisation posing as a priest from a remote parish in Siberia. Bored with his life at Caversham, and attracted by a substantial fee, Latham accepts the offer. At Schloss Zelden, he meets the son and two very different daughters of his host, the Grand Master of the Knights of the Cross. He falls in love with the younger daughter, Monika, and discovers the truth about Harding’s death from her sister Babi who was Harding’s lover. However, imperceptibly Lambert is affected by playing the role of a priest. He returns to London a changed man.
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