A delicate first interview overlooking St James’s Park two weeks later, training at Fort Monckton eight weeks after that. All spies have these stories: being chosen, steered. No one wants to believe they sought this profession out.

The car’s interior still smelled of Aliya’s perfume. I sat in the back seat, opened my laptop, brought up a control board that replicated the home screen of her phone. I opened contacts and address book, recent messages, check-ins. I went in to her emails, deleted the first one from me with the infected link, then closed the laptop and drove back into town.

I was in a shop attached to a petrol station, buying soap and a new toothbrush, when I heard a sound like popcorn. It came from the phone held by a man beside me. He stared at the screen. The crackling sound was semi-automatic gunfire. The man looked around, put the phone away, embarrassed.

Someone moved past, at the end of the aisle, talking on a mobile, an urgency in their voice. I walked back to my car.

Footage had been uploaded to YouTube showing protesters in the central square. It was hard to tell what was going on. The crowd became ragged, individuals running, turning; some people had fallen. There were voices close to the camera, a man and a woman. Where are they? Get out of here … Where is she? Go up Baiseitov Street. Then a ripple of tinny gunfire joined, after a second, by three sharp cracks from a rifle. Then a woman wailing some distance from the camera: hoarse, repeated cries of ‘No’.

The woman close to the camera spoke again: Oh my God, look. Look. They shot him. Oh my God.

There was no way anyone could bury this. It was going to be a question of how it was used.

He’s hit – they shot him.

The clearest footage came from a window overlooking Semey’s floodlit square. The voices were in the room where it was being filmed. They shot. They’re shooting. The camera phone remained steady. Two or three hundred protesters were trapped in the square. They began running away, found themselves blocked. More shots.

Eventually most scattered, leaving the human debris: the dead and the injured, dark forms against the snow, then those trying to move them. The person filming focused on one man, shot in the leg, dragging himself across the ground. You could see he was young – just the exertion suggested he was young, wearing glasses and a black baseball cap. Then he shook as if electrocuted as someone fired another round into his body.

It didn’t sound like the standard AK-74s. A more modern assault rifle. At least three individuals firing, one from a height. You could see the crowd running right to left of the screen, then a louder report, closer to the camera, and they moved in collective panic towards the back.