About three weeks after we began living together, Laureano brought up the subject of money.

We were having dinner. I remember the conversation because it was so ordinary, so practical, and because of the happiness it gave me.

He earned a good salary, he explained, but he had considerable responsibilities. He had two children. His daughter was attending a top private school; his son would soon need money for the next stage of his education. There was also his divorce, still in progress, and the lawyers who would inevitably have to be paid.

Perhaps, he suggested, we could share the household expenses.

Of course, I said.

There was nothing to discuss.

I had my own income, my own career, my own financial life. I had not moved in with him because I needed somewhere to live. I was there because I wanted to be with him.

We opened a joint bank account. I transferred a substantial sum into it.

And then I made a suggestion of my own.

If we were going to share a home and its expenses, perhaps it was time to start building a life around that home.

Not merely sleeping together, eating together and disappearing into each other's arms whenever we had the opportunity.

A life.

Friends. Invitations. Family occasions. The small, apparently unimportant arrangements through which two people gradually become a couple in the eyes of the world.

I wanted to know his people.

I wanted him to know mine.

I wanted us to have somewhere to go on a Saturday evening other than our own bedroom.

It was November 2024. Christmas was approaching.

The timing seemed perfect.

I have thought about that conversation many times since.

It is a curious thing, the meaning we attach to money in relationships.

For some people, being financially supported is proof of love. For others, it is a source of security. For still others, it becomes a form of dependence.

I had never particularly wanted to be maintained by a man.

I am a solicitor, a mother and an adult who had spent decades making decisions about her own life. Financial independence was not an achievement I needed to announce. It was simply how I lived.

So when Laureano suggested sharing the expenses, I did not feel that romance had been interrupted by accounting.

Quite the opposite.

I felt that romance had become something more substantial.

I understood that his wife remained financially totally dependent upon him. His obligations to his children were entirely proper, and I had no wish to compete with them.

I was not asking him to redirect those resources towards me.

I was offering to contribute to a household we were creating together.

There was something wonderfully reassuring about the simplicity of it.

Half the expenses. Two adults. A shared account. A shared future.

No elaborate promises.

No grand declarations about forever for the time being.

Just two people making arrangements because they expected to wake up in the same home tomorrow, and the day after that.

At the time, I regarded this as a stronger expression of partnership than many marriage ceremonies.

I still think it can be.

What I did not know was that elsewhere, according to accounts I would discover much later, my presence in his life was being interpreted through an entirely different set of assumptions.

In my version of the story, I was contributing.

In another version, I was using him.

In my version, I was building a home.

In another, I was a dangerous woman who had entered a military officer's life for reasons that had nothing to do with love.

I did not know that second version existed.

Not yet.

Our children were already becoming part of our plans.

We had met each other's children. They were the same age. The introductions had gone well from my perspective, and I was pleased that the relationship was developing beyond the two of us.

We were also planning a New Year trip to Kraków.

The decision had been made in the same cheerful, practical way as so many of our domestic arrangements.

If we were travelling with children, I suggested, why not go somewhere with a strong Catholic tradition?

Poland was a Catholic country. I spoke the language. I knew Kraków well. I could organise things without difficulty. I could show around.

It would be lovely to spend the festive season there.

We bought the tickets.

I remember the pleasure of making those plans. Not because Kraków was exotic to me — quite the reverse. It was familiar territory, a place where I could contribute something of my own. Very nice memories from my youth. Whilst I am a Warsaw girl, Kraków was always a special place for me. There I received my real proposal to work for a foreign intelligence service, but this is a story I will tell in the following chapters. Here we continue with the December 2024 narrative.

Laureano had his Spanish world, his naval career, his colleagues and his professional history.
I had mine.

There was no reason why those worlds could not meet.

Indeed, I thought that was one of the pleasures of an international relationship.

We could introduce each other to things we knew, places we loved, traditions we understood.

I did not imagine that my knowledge of Poland, my Soviet birthplace or my Eastern European background could become evidence of some hidden identity.

Why would I?

They were simply parts of my life.

And so December 2024 arrived with the ordinary excitement of a new relationship beginning to acquire a future.

My first Spanish lessons were less romantic.

I had not yet learned the language.

Not properly. Not even badly.

I could recognise the occasional word as I know French quite well, but the conversations around me usually passed in a stream of sounds I could not separate into meaning.

Then, in early December, a particular expression began appearing with remarkable frequency.

Puta espía rusa.

It came amid angry exchanges connected with Laureano's marriage, including telephone calls and recorded WhatsApp messages.

I could hear the emotion even when I could not understand the words.

Eventually, I searched what the expression meant.

“Fucking Russian spy.”

I considered this.

It was certainly a creative way to refer to one's husband's new partner, who just helped his son to apply for a place at Loughborough University.

It was also, from a linguistic perspective, rather efficient. Three words, three new additions to my Spanish vocabulary.

I learned cojones and joder soon afterwards. This way I made some progress.

By the middle of December, therefore, I possessed five Spanish words, almost all of them unsuitable for polite conversation.

I found the situation absurd.

I also found it unpleasant.

But I did not yet attach to those words the significance I would attach to them later.

I understood that Laureano's marriage was ending and that his wife was angry and she was not able to control herself. I had no direct relationship with her. I was not a participant in their marriage, their history or the conversations in which they tried to resolve its ending. It was not my problem, as I do not interfere in a conflict between two adults who have instructed their own lawyers.

I could understand that a new partner might be unwelcome.

I could understand anger, jealousy, disappointment and fear.

I could even understand why an unfamiliar woman might become a convenient target for feelings that had accumulated long before she appeared.

What I could not understand was why I had become a spy. Especially, if this statement is made by a person who has zero connection with a security function.

I assumed it was an insult selected for maximum effect, but aimed at Laureano, not at me.

An absurdity.

A piece of theatrical language from a domestic conflict.

After all, people say ridiculous things when they are furious.

They do not necessarily mean them.

And surely no serious adult would confuse a woman's place of birth with evidence of espionage.
I was almost fifty years old. I had spent much of my professional life working with legal concepts, evidence, institutions and the distinction between an allegation and a fact.

It never occurred to me that I would eventually have to explain that distinction to defence authorities.

The Christmas event at Northwood was scheduled for 12 December 2024.

I was delighted.

This was precisely the kind of occasion I had hoped for when I suggested that we begin building a social life.

Laureano worked at NATO's Allied Maritime Command. The event would bring together members of different national delegations and their families.

I imagined meeting people, learning something about their lives, perhaps making friends.

It was not a particularly ambitious expectation.

I had spent 20 plus years living in Britain. I knew how to behave at a social gathering. I knew how to make polite conversation. I knew how to smile at strangers and ask them whether they were enjoying the evening.

I had also been told that the event would take place in a marquee, outside the main building.

So I dressed accordingly.

That morning I went to a beauty salon and had my hair done.

I wore trousers and a warm sweater. My hair was loose.

I wanted to look attractive, naturally, but I also wanted to be comfortable. It was December in England, not an evening on the Spanish coast.

I was going to a Christmas party, not an audition for a film.

The distinction would become unexpectedly important.

Laureano's son collected me in a taxi.

We travelled to Northwood and went to the Visitors Centre.

I remember that building with extraordinary clarity.

Not because anything alarming happened there that evening.

Quite the opposite.

The procedure was entirely routine.

Other visitors were being processed, including women from the Spanish community. I presented my British passport and received a visitor's pass.

I was a sponsored guest.

There was nothing clandestine about my arrival.

No attempt to conceal my identity.

No mysterious route through a back entrance.

I had come to a military establishment, presented my passport and been admitted through the ordinary visitor procedure.

Laureano met us, and once the formalities were complete, we got into his car.

He drove further into the establishment, parked, and we walked towards the marquee.
I remember feeling pleased.

I was meeting my partner's colleagues.

I had been invited into an important part of his world.

I felt like a woman being introduced into her partner's social circle.

Nothing more extraordinary than that.

Nothing less.

The marquee was packed.

There must have been a hundred people, perhaps a hundred and fifty. I cannot give an exact number, but I remember the density of the crowd, the movement and the noise.

People were talking over one another.

There were tables representing different national delegations, each offering food and drink.

The atmosphere was festive and slightly chaotic.

I walked from one table to another, tried something, exchanged a few words in all languages I knew, including Russian with Latvians and Lithuanians, smiled, moved on.

Hello.
How lovely.
Where are you from?
Merry Christmas.
Would you like to try this?

It was not an environment designed for long, searching conversations.

Most exchanges lasted seconds.

Perhaps twenty seconds, if you were particularly sociable.

I enjoyed it enormously.

I liked the international atmosphere. I liked the mixture of accents, uniforms, families and food. I think perhaps it was the moment, when I thought the first time to apply for a job at NATO. I wanted to be a part of that community.

I was curious about the traditions of the different delegations, especially the ways in which European countries celebrated Christmas. The food on the tables invited such reflection. It was delicious.

It was exactly the kind of evening I had been looking forward to.

Then we approached the Spanish table.

Laureano introduced me to Admiral José Enrique Delgado Roig.

And disappeared.

This was one of Laureano's habits and supernatural skills.

He could be standing beside me one moment and, the next, apparently dissolve into the surrounding crowd.

I never quite understood how he managed it.

On this occasion, however, his disappearance left me in conversation with his senior officer.

Delgado and I spoke in English.

He asked whether I spoke Spanish.

I explained that I did not, apart from a few rather unfortunate words I had recently acquired.

I did not elaborate on my language lessons.

Instead, we talked about religion.

I told him I was Roman Catholic.

He appeared surprised.

I remember that surprise because I found it rather curious.

Why should it be remarkable that a woman with my background was Catholic?

Poland was a Catholic country. My own life had crossed several national and cultural boundaries. I did not consider religion something that could be reliably inferred from an accent or a birthplace.

We talked about differences between Spanish and Polish Catholic traditions, particularly the food associated with Christmas.

He told me something about Spanish customs involving seafood. I learnt my sixth Spanish word - marisco. At least this one was digestible.

I explained that I would be celebrating a Catholic Christmas and that seafood would be part of it.

It was an entirely pleasant subject.

Or so I thought.

There was nothing in our conversation about military operations, security clearances, intelligence structures or the work of NATO.

I did not ask him about his previous postings, his reporting line or the professional responsibilities of the people around us.

Why would I?

I was standing at a Christmas buffet talking about Catholicism and seafood.

And yet something about that conversation stayed with me.

Not the words.

The space.

The marquee was so crowded that people stood almost shoulder to shoulder.

There was very little room to move.

Yet around Delgado and me, a peculiar emptiness seemed to form.

I remember the physical sensation of it.

There was perhaps a metre between us.

Not an extraordinary distance in an empty room, but an oddly conspicuous one in that densely packed marquee.

It was as though the crowd had drawn back.

I could not explain it.

I remember noticing that Delgado was looking at me very carefully.

He seemed to examine me from head to toe. I would call that sensation being scanned.

Perhaps he was merely curious about the woman his officer had brought to the party.

Perhaps I was conscious of being introduced to someone important.

I cannot know what he was thinking.

But I remember the impression.

The super-attentive gaze from the Admiral.

The unexpected distance from the people gathered around us, who, for some reason, decided to allow us to have explicitly private conversation.

The strange sensation of standing in a crowd and suddenly finding myself in an empty space with a man, who clearly excercised some strange judgment on me.

Then Laureano reappeared.

As abruptly as he had vanished.

And I say polite good-buys to that strange man and we moved on.

I left satisfied with myself.

I had met Laureano's senior officer.

We had spoken politely.

We had found a perfectly respectable subject on which to exchange a few thoughts.

I had explained that I was Catholic, that I knew something about Polish traditions and that I was looking forward to Christmas.

I thought we had made a good impression on each other.

I was pleased.

This may now sound astonishingly naive.

But what, exactly, should I have suspected?

I had been admitted lawfully to the establishment.

I had been introduced by my partner.

I had behaved politely.

I had discussed religion and Christmas food.

The idea that this might somehow be interpreted as suspicious behaviour would have struck me as absurd.

And if somebody had suggested that I was attempting to gather intelligence by asking a senior officer about seafood, I would probably have laughed.

In December 2024, I still believed that absurd insults from Laureano's wife are reactions of an abandoned spouse.

I had not yet learned how durable an absurdity can become when it is repeated by people who possess authority.

We continued around the marquee.

I smiled at people.

I sampled food.

I enjoyed the evening.

Eventually we left, took Laureano's son home and returned to our flat.

There was no dramatic confrontation.

No extraordinary discovery.

No ominous conversation on the journey back.

We went home.

We went to bed.

I was happy.

I had a man I loved, a home we were sharing, children we were gradually bringing into our plans, and tickets for a New Year trip to Kraków.

I had met his colleagues.

I had spoken to his senior officer.

I believed I had taken another small, successful step into the future.

That was my December.

Nearly two years later, I read a Spanish newspaper article about myself and that evening.

By then, my relationship with Laureano had ended in the most dramatic way, and the events that followed that Christmas had become the subject of legal proceedings, official correspondence and international media coverage.

The article, published in September 2026, reported that people in the NATO environment had called me Red Sparrow.

Gorrión Rojo.

It was a reference to the fictional Russian intelligence operative who uses sexual relationships as an instrument of espionage.

I stared at the words.

The expression was different from the one I had heard in December.

But the character was disturbingly familiar.

The Russian woman.

The spy.

The sexual danger.

The suggestion that a relationship with a naval officer could not simply be a relationship.

The article also attributed to an unnamed senior officer a claim that, at the Christmas gathering, I had asked inappropriate questions of senior military personnel.

According to that account, my accent, my shooting ability and my supposed questions had contributed to suspicion.

I recognised the evening being described.

I did not recognise the woman.

That woman had apparently moved through a military gathering asking intrusive questions about officers' identities, postings and superiors.

I remembered moving through a crowded marquee, making brief introductions and spending my one substantial conversation discussing Catholic Christmas traditions with Admiral Delgado.

The discrepancy was not a minor difference of perspective.

It was a difference between two fundamentally different accounts of what I had done.

I cannot know every conversation that took place about me that evening. I cannot know precisely when the nickname emerged or who first used it.

Nor does a newspaper's report establish that every person in the Spanish delegation accepted the story.

But I know what I did.

And I know that the description published almost two years later was not a description of the evening I remembered.

It was a description of a character.

A character into which ordinary details of my life could be fitted.

Born in the Soviet Union.

Speaks with an accent.

Knows how to shoot.

Has a relationship with a naval officer.

Asks questions.

And there she is.

The spy.

There is something particularly revealing about the sexual nature of that character.

It was not enough for the imagined woman to be Russian.

She had to be seductive.

Not enough for her to be curious.

She had to be manipulative.

Not enough for her to love a naval officer.

She had to be using him.

This was the aspect of the story that eventually changed the way I understood my own experience.

For a long time, I had thought that the hostility surrounding our relationship was primarily a matter of national origin.

I was born in Leningrad. I had British and Polish citizenship. I am not a Russian citizen.

Nevertheless, my birthplace appeared repeatedly in the explanations and suspicions surrounding me as an excuse about clandestine decision made about me.

That was troubling enough.

But the reported Red Sparrow nickname revealed another possible dimension.

My sex was not incidental to the story being told.

It was essential to the character.

A woman who loves a man in uniform could be transformed into a woman who exploits him.

A woman who contributes to a household could be represented as a woman who uses its owner.

A woman who attends a Christmas party could be recast as a woman who infiltrates a military establishment.

The facts need not change.

Only the interpretation.

And once the interpretation has been selected, even ordinary behaviour can begin to look like confirmation.

A smile becomes calculated.

A question becomes reconnaissance.

A relationship becomes a method.

This is how a human being can disappear behind a label without physically going anywhere.

I think now about the joint bank account.

It is such a small detail in the larger story.

Not dramatic enough for a newspaper headline.

Certainly not cinematic.

Two adults deciding to share household expenses. Buying flights tickets and booking a flat in Kraków to spend New Year holidays with their children.

Yet it remains important to me because it illustrates how completely different the reality of my life was from the character later attributed to me.

I had not arrived seeking a financial protector.

I had offered to pay my share.

I had not asked Laureano to abandon his responsibilities to his children.

I had recognised those responsibilities and made room for them.

I had not demanded that he take me into a secret world.

I had asked whether we could develop an ordinary social life.

And when I attended the Christmas event, I did so through the ordinary visitor procedure, with my British passport.

None of these facts proves that everyone liked me.

Nor should it.

People were entitled to disapprove of our relationship.

His wife was entitled to be angry.

Colleagues were entitled to have opinions about the wisdom of introducing a new partner into an established military community.

Those are human reactions, and human reactions are not always generous.

But disapproval is one thing.

Constructing a sexualised espionage identity around a woman is another.

And allowing such a narrative to influence official treatment, if that is what occurred, would be something more serious still.

That is the distinction I would spend the following years trying to establish.

The British Ministry of Defence would later acknowledge that my attendance at Northwood on 12 December 2024 had been lawful.

It would also state that no UK decision-maker had determined that I was a threat to national security.

Yet its subsequent legal position identified my place of birth as a relevant factor in decisions concerning access, with no underlying policy present at the MoD.

A later police complaints review recorded that a British RAF Police officer had been aware of rumours that I was believed to be a Russian spy.

Those facts do not, by themselves, establish that the Red Sparrow nickname caused any particular British decision.

The route by which information travelled between Spanish, NATO and British personnel remains one of the questions I am pursuing.

But they explain why I can no longer treat the Christmas vocabulary as merely an unpleasant domestic joke. Because that joke had real life serious effects on the object (not the subject) of that joke.

The question is not simply who called me what.

It is what happened to the story afterwards.

Who repeated it?
Who believed it?
Who recorded it?
Who relied on it?
And at what point, if any, did a description invented around a woman become a reason for an institution to act?

Those are questions of evidence, procedure and accountability.

They are not questions that can be answered by deciding whether the woman was likeable.

I have often returned, in memory, to the strange empty space around Delgado and me.

For a long time, it was simply an odd detail from a crowded Christmas party.

Now it is tempting to turn it into a symbol.

The crowd withdrawing watching the hunt.

The senior officer examining me like a predator.

The woman standing in a space she does not yet understand like a prey.

But memory is not evidence of another person's thoughts.

I cannot prove what that space meant.

Perhaps it meant nothing.

Perhaps I noticed it only because I was nervous about meeting an important person in my partner's professional life.

The temptation to reinterpret every detail in light of what happened later is powerful.

I resist it.

I have learned that a good story and a sound reconstruction are not always the same thing.
The lawyer in me insists on the distinction.

The writer remembers the feeling.

Both have their place.

What I can say is that I went to Northwood on 12 December 2024 believing I was entering a new social world as Laureano's partner.

I left believing that the evening had gone well.

I had no reason to think that, nearly two years later, I would be reading descriptions of myself as a sexually dangerous Russian spy. As a totally dehumanized object of the crowd's pleasure.

I had no reason to imagine that I would be examining official documents, comparing institutional chronologies, challenging the treatment of my birthplace and developing new methods of analysing contradictory evidence with artificial intelligence.

I certainly did not imagine that a Christmas party would eventually become a disputed event in litigation.

At the time, my concerns were much smaller.

Would everyone get along?
Would the children enjoy Kraków?
Would we make friends?
Would we build the life we had begun discussing over lunch?

Those were the questions of a woman looking forward.

The woman writing this chapter is looking backward, with more documents, more information and considerably fewer illusions.

But I do not want to erase the woman who attended that party.

She was not foolish for expecting ordinary courtesy.

She was not naive for believing that professional adults could distinguish an insult from evidence.

She was not wrong to imagine that sharing expenses, meeting children and planning holidays were signs of a real partnership.

She was simply living her life without knowing that other people might be writing a different version of it.

And perhaps that is the most disturbing part.

On the evening of 12 December 2024, I did not feel invisible.

I felt welcomed into the future.

Only later did I begin to understand that being admitted through a gate, introduced to a senior officer and standing in the middle of a crowded room did not necessarily mean that the people around me were seeing the same woman I knew myself to be.

I went home visible that night.

The invisible woman called La puta espía rusa went home with me. The invisible label Gorrión Rojo was stuck on her back like a shooting target.

Both did not know that the hunt has began.

Today's song - WRONG WOMAN.