‘What the hell happened?’

‘I’ll tell you in the warm.’

Kate glanced at Julie’s car. ‘I hired it for cash from a guy I met in a bar in Kotka. It’s quite the place, as it turns out. I have to drop it back so I’ll see you in the café by the quay.’

Kate followed her and, by the time a few rays of sun finally burst through the morning clouds, they were both slipping into a corner table for breakfast. ‘You want caffeine or nicotine first?’ Julie asked.

‘Nicotine.’

They stepped back on to the quay and watched a long line of students walking up the gangplank to the tall ship. The sun shimmered through its rigging. Julie lit up and gave the cigarette to Kate before producing another for herself. Kate sucked the smoke deep into her lungs and exhaled into the sky above. ‘Shit, that feels good.’

Julie watched her. ‘You going to explain, or am I going to have to wheedle it out of you?’

‘What happened in London?’

‘Ian claims to have kept the dogs in MI5 at bay by quoting operational security. But he says he’s going to enjoy firing you when you get back. Now, spill the beans. Did you meet Sergei?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘He was travelling to Moscow, so I went with him on the night train. It was the only way I was going to be able to see him.’

‘And?’

‘We talked. I told him the truth about what we’d been offered and why, and asked him whether he thought what Mikhail had said to us about his father was true.’

‘How did he respond?’

‘That it was.’ Kate took a last drag of her cigarette and stubbed it out beneath her shoe. She’d thought of little else but what she would say to Julie since they’d left St Petersburg, and at no point on the journey had she come to a firm conclusion to tell this exaggerated version of what Sergei had really said, but what purpose would the truth serve?

Either the video and the accompanying financial evidence that Mikhail and Igor offered was real or it was an incredibly convincing fake. They would never know until they got it to London and ran all the appropriate tests.

Sergei had, in truth, offered her nothing conclusive on the political ups and downs of Moscow’s intelligence elite, only that some kind of internal civil war was under way. So why burden Julie, Sir Alan or still less the foreign secretary with further doubts? What they wanted was certainty. So she had resolved, on instinct, in this moment, to give it to them.

‘Christ,’ Julie said. ‘So it’s all on the level. For sure?’

‘Nothing is for sure. I told him what Mikhail had said, and he agreed that it was in line with the rumours he’d heard. That is as good as we’re going to get.’