Raisa’s body had been returned to Moscow. L had demanded a second autopsy. To his surprise this had been agreed to, perhaps in the hope that it would allow him to grieve and drop his incessant requests. The Soviet doctors confirmed the American verdict that she’d been shot from a distance of about ten metres: killed by a single bullet from a powerful handgun, a wound to her torso, entering just underneath her rib. Reading the report, he insisted that he be allowed to see her body. His wife had been laid out on a steel table covered with a thin white sheet. He’d taken hold of the sheet, pulling it back to her waist – a reunion of the most awful kind. Her skin, always pale, was now watery white with trace-lines of blue. He ignored instructions not to touch her, opened her eyes. They’d been so full of intelligence, shrewd and playful at the same time, careful and mischievous, yet there was nothing in these eyes staring at the ceiling. He was so startled by the change that he’d momentarily wondered if this could even be the same woman, as if her life and intelligence were forces too powerful to ever be fully extinguished and some residual vestige would surely remain.

He’d recovered his composure, begun a dispassionate examination as a police officer. He’d taken out a small notebook. He’d picked up a pen. When he looked down at first page of the notebook he saw a scribbled line, involuntarily formed as his hand had trembled across the page. He’d steadied himself, ripping the front page off and noting down several observations, checking them with the doctor beside him. She’d died from loss of blood. A former soldier, he knew vividly from the sight of the wound that such a death would not have been instantaneous but painful and slow. He asked the doctor for an estimate of the time it would have taken from the bullet entering her body to her death. She’d been in Manhattan when the shooting occurred, only minutes from some of the best hospitals in the world. The doctor had been unable to fix a time, saying it varied enormously from person to person and there was no formula. Pressed by Leo, he guessed between twenty and thirty minutes – which surely meant the official version of events was a fiction. Raisa could have been saved. With this fact, his desire hardened – he had to reach New York with or without the State’s permission.