‘… incorrect. It wouldn’t be an unknown if you knew it, would it? Total contradiction in terms. You said all that stuff – the photos, the passports – are stored online, at the passport office?’

‘Yes, but …’

‘Yes but, no but. If it’s online, some tricky bugger will find it somehow. Trust me,’ he said, smiling, ‘I know.’

‘OK, let’s leave that one, shall we? What next?’

‘Arkhangel. Totally crucial.’

‘We agree on that, at least.’

‘So, tell me …’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘Would you have kept the note if it hadn’t had that word written on it?’

‘No, I guess not.’

‘Not “guess not”. Of course not. It was completely crazy. There you are in this random cottage, and then shabash! You find something totally personal. It’s like Benjamin Franklin bloody speaks to you. Directly.’

‘Yeah, well that’s how it felt. But … it’s the wrong Arkhangel, isn’t it? An actual angel, not the village. That’s what Moshe was telling us.’

In truth I’d been trying not to think about some of what Moshe had told us, or what to make of it. Looking upon the Destroying Angel was not where I’d been expecting the interrogation to go. No matter which way I cut it, the most likely of all conclusions – and the worst – was that Moshe was right and Rachel had gone insane. The closer I got to her, the further she slipped away. I tried hard to block the image as it assembled in my head, but to no avail. There she was, lying in a crimson pool of her own blood. She’d been on the edge of madness then, as her arteries pumped the life out of her. I’d been crazy, too – running, only running. Stupid, scared Max, losing his lover and then his mother. And here I was, losing Rachel all over again.

But the word meant something. Azrael. I could see it, hear it, in an endless loop of almost-familiarity. The sound, the feeling of it, danced on the edge of my consciousness: a face in the crowd, a childhood memory – real but unreachable.

‘Max?’

‘Uh, sorry. What was that?’

‘Cyrillic. It’s written in Russian. In Cyrillic.’ He paused, as if summoning up the courage to say something.

‘Go on. Spit it out. What is it?’

‘Does Rachel speak Russian?’

‘No, at least not when I knew her. Her father couldn’t speak it, either. His parents refused to teach him.’

‘Exactly!’ he said, triumphant. ‘You see, it doesn’t have to mean one thing or the other. It can mean both at the same time. Totally quantum. Tell me,’ he said, ‘your mother and this Doctor Levy, Rachel’s father …’

‘Easy, sunshine.’ I fixed him with a stern look.

‘No! No … It’s just, well … Would it …’ he chose his words more carefully, ‘have meant anything to him? The place where your mother was born, that is.’