I walked to the front door and tried the handle, but it was locked. Then I skirted around the house, past the library, and under the shadow of the clock tower. The formal gardens fell away and there, landscaped into the edge of the woodland that rolled on for miles towards Croghan Mountain, was the lake that had taken my mother’s life.

I sat down on the bench my father had carved for her before his last trip to Africa, and unfolded the old photograph that Polina had given to me.

Rock-a-bye baby, don’t lie on the edge, or the little grey wolf will bite your side …

I couldn’t say she hadn’t warned me.

Frank would never admit it, because he didn’t need to: there was only one person who could have released my passport photograph, and only one person who could have called me at Doc’s – the same person who tipped off the Gardaí: him. Almost the only thing I’d got right was that we’d been equally suspicious of each other. The moment I’d hung on to the hundred-dollar bill had been the moment he’d cut me loose – not to discard me, but to force me towards the conclusion he’d gambled I’d reach, propelling me onwards at every turn. He didn’t trust me. But he’d needed me to help him unravel a mission that he didn’t fully understand himself. He knew the only way I would do the job – the only way I could do it – was if I didn’t think I was doing it at all. I would have chased anyone on earth to their death for him.

But not her.

I suspected it as I’d watched her pyre burn, but hadn’t wanted to face it. The lean, wiry man running away from Doc’s; the BMW motorbike rider in Paris; the athletic Mercedes driver escaping the crash in Moscow; maybe even the figure in Aleksandr Denisovich’s front yard: all five-eleven, all the same build. Whoever he was, it was possible he’d dogged me all the way to Arkhangel. And if I was right, he’d saved me in Moscow, too. My father didn’t believe in coincidences. And neither did I. Frank’s operators were as unknown to me as they were to each other. Maybe I’d imagined it, or maybe I’d had a guardian angel after all – or a guardian knight. And maybe, just maybe, his name was Bhavneet Singh.