I ran towards him then and hit him, smashing my fist into his mouth. He barely even flinched, just dipped his head a little, and I slouched to my knees, my hands falling uselessly into my stomach, where I clutched myself as though I were the one who had been hit.

I tried to stand up, failed, tried again. ‘Finish the story,’ I said, steadying myself by leaning against the wall.

Pritchard wiped the blood from his lip and smiled at me mock-affectionately. ‘You always were too emotional,’ he said. ‘But the problem was you were stubborn, too - you refused to be swayed. You had your precious principles. So we came up with the idea of Anna’s death, and that did the trick, finally, didn’t it? You ran into our arms. Anna was taken out of the country. Larry . . . well, Larry didn’t take it well. He could never really handle the hard decisions. He was weak.’

So well-spoken, this Scottish aristocrat. It was hard to believe that monsters dwelt inside him.

‘So you killed him.’

He looked genuinely surprised. ‘No, no. When he received your note about Anna, he immediately ran to his old friend Colin Templeton in Lübeck and asked him to take her away from the scene. But Chief and his men were too slow. When the soldiers brought Anna back to the safe house in her comatose state, Larry saw that he had failed and went, quite literally, mad. Said he couldn’t live with the choice between betraying you or Moscow, so he was going to take the only way out he knew. He already had the gun - there was nothing I could do.’

He could have been lying - I was pointing a gun at him, after all, and confessing to killing Father might make me pull the trigger more readily. But somehow I knew he was telling the truth.

‘And Churchill authorizing the mission personally - all a complete hoax.’ I laughed at my own naivety.

‘Yes - we were working to Beria’s orders, in fact. All those men were traitors to the Soviet Union.’

‘It’s 1969,’ I said. ‘Tell me you don’t still believe in all this.’

‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘I’ve always been a believer, ever since I read Marx at school. I’m still a believer, even with all this.’

‘All what?’

‘After the war, the foreign intelligence arms of the GRU and the Ministry for State Security merged. The new organization was called Komitet Informatsii - the Committee of Information.’

I nodded dumbly. KI. I knew it from a hundred dossiers: Molotov had been appointed chairman. ‘It didn’t last long,’ I said.

‘Indeed not. A couple of years later it was wound up and the GRU was once again an independent intelligence agency. So, what can we deduce?’

‘That while the two organizations were merged, someone found out about you.’