What was it with men? Kate thought. Why were they so obsessed with the act of sexual intercourse? ‘You mean after we’d had sex?’ He didn’t answer. ‘Yes, if you want to torture yourself with the truth, after we’d had sex. I didn’t intend it to happen. I didn’t especially want it to. But I’m lonely, too, and strung out, and bereft and confused. In the maelstrom of all that, I finished what I shouldn’t perhaps have started all those years ago. And, yes, also, the earth did move for me, not better or worse than making love to you, just different.’

She saw the hurt in his eyes and wished instantly she’d held her tongue. ‘Is that what you wanted to hear?’ she asked.

‘Of course not.’

‘Then don’t ask a question if you don’t really want to know the answer.’

There was another long silence. ‘I did want to know,’ he said. ‘Thank you for telling me the truth.’

‘So that you can torture yourself with it?’

‘Perhaps it will release me.’ He turned to her. ‘That picture of you by my bed wasn’t for show, Kate. I’ve never stopped loving you, not for a single second.’

Regret flooded her now: for his betrayal, for their estrangement, for the life they’d had and the future that might have been, for the brutal honesty of her tongue. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘I should have kept all that to myself.’

‘I think I had it coming.’

‘That doesn’t make it any better.’ She thought of the flat they’d just left and the window it had offered into his life here as it was and as it might be. The barren, hopeless bleakness of it chilled her.

‘Won’t they come after you once they’ve found the body?’ he asked. ‘Why haven’t they come already?’

‘It depends who you mean by “they”.’

‘Well . . . I don’t know – the police, the Mafia, the SVR, whoever was involved.’

‘The police certainly, I’d guess.’

‘Does that make me an accessory to murder?’

She didn’t answer that. Sitting there now, Stuart’s crimes, which appeared to amount to a couple of nights of careless sex with Imogen Conrad, didn’t seem to match the punishment Kate was putting him through. Regardless of whether she made it out of the country or not, there was a reasonable chance he might be made to pay a very heavy price.

Bleak as his current life in Moscow might be, it barely held a candle to the prospect of a long stretch in a Russian prison. “I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘I shouldn’t have dragged you into this.’