If you twist the Russian Cyrillic letters into the Roman alphabet – like my mother taught me to do when I was a child – it becomes Arkhangel, and means the same in Russian as it sounds in English: Archangel. But in a country whose culture is rooted in the traditions of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the word also refers to something other than the angels themselves: the places named after them – or, more accurately, named after the Archangel Michael.

But although there is a city and parks and streets – and even an entire oblast – that borrow from the title of the divine warrior, in all of Russia there are only two places simply called ‘Arkhangel’ and they are both as ignorable as they are unknown to the outside world.

One of them is so small it barely registers on maps: a tiny hamlet two hundred and twenty klicks north-east of Moscow, buried deep in the countryside of the Komsomolsk district of the Ivanovo oblast. A clutch of houses dotted around St Michael’s church and surrounded by miles of fields and forests, it’s neither on the way to anywhere, nor a destination anyone who didn’t live there would seek out.

Anyone but me.

I’d never been, but every stone of the road that ran through it; every bough that bore blossom at the back of the churchyard; every face framed by the windows of the wooden shacks dotted between stands of birch trees – they were scored into my mind as if I’d lived and breathed the experience of it all for myself.

Arkhangel was not a ragged corner of an unread map. For me it was home.

A home.

My grandmother had been born there. She had died there, too – after pushing my mother into the world cloaked in the thick slick of blood that haemorrhaged freely from between her thighs. She had survived Stalingrad. But there were no miracles in 1950s Russia – not even in Arkhangel. My mother’s first screams had filled the room as the last light guttered out of my grandmother’s eyes. And she a nurse, too. So it goes.

I examined the note in the glow of the lamplight. My father had told me once that there were no coincidences. He believed in synchronicity – the idea that things, events, could be connected across time and space without cause. I believed that I made my own luck. The paper was a bit dog-eared, and still slightly damp, but a defaced hundred-dollar bill was all it was. If it was a message, it had been delivered all right. If it wasn’t, then I’d lied for no good reason about stealing the only piece of evidence that might unlock Frank’s mystery for him.