‘I have,’ she said under her breath, throwing open the windows the moment he left, closing her eyes, focusing on the night air stinging her skin, the distant car horns blaring, the sounds of millions of other lives across the city crushing against one another. In that moment she felt so alive that it was as though, if she jumped right now, she would fly.

It was part of her role with the embassy to help foster good relations at ground level, to befriend local officials with a view not so much to working together as to keeping an eye on who was doing what. The ramifications of the South Ossetia war with Georgia, the closure of two British Council buildings in Moscow, all in the context of the fallout of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the UK’s refusal to extradite the wanted businessman Boris Berezovsky, were contributing factors to a climate of relations between Russia and Britain that was, at the least, cool. To be here now, for her first ever placement, was both terrifying and fortifying and seemed to offer definitive proof that she was trusted in a way that she could barely have dreamed of – a way that perhaps might have made her ask more questions than she did.

When her accommodation was finally sorted a few days later, Oleg returned to move her across town to a more befitting flat above a neon-lit bar a few streets behind Red Square. It was hardly the Art-Nouveau glamour to which she was fast becoming accustomed, but she didn’t care.

People said that everywhere you stepped in New York was like being in the movies, but for her, Moscow, with its austere grandiosity, and its buildings and the sky both steeped in a sense of sorrow-tinged romance, was the perfect backdrop for the film onto which she projected her own life.

It wasn’t easy assimilating herself into a diplomatic sphere still tainted by the suspicion of the Soviet era, and now freshly challenged by Putin, who had come to power a decade earlier. It was a world where strangers avoided eye contact in the street and you learned not to bother asking for directions. A world where you had to treat everyone as an enemy until they were proved to be a friend. And once they had, be warier still …

It was daunting at first, but after a few months she loved it. Day to day, she was notionally based at the embassy, but in reality she spent most of her time attending events on its behalf, shaking hands and smiling until her cheeks ached.

She had just returned from a week in St Petersburg with local business representatives, her legs aching from the walking tours of the palace, the endless meetings and the nightcaps. Walking through the door, she noticed the red light blinking on the answer machine. Six new messages.