The anger welled in my stomach. Did she think I was a bloody child? My legs started to spasm, and I fought back the dizziness. Please don’t let me lose my hearing now! I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to find some stillness and regulate my breathing, but all I could see were dozens of tiny bursts of light, darting here and there, trying to make connections with each other. I placed a hand behind me and let myself slump slowly to the floor, leaning my head against the jamb. It was more comfortable here and, after all, it was where I belonged. How did the next line run? The wheel is turned, that was it: ‘The wheel is turn’d; I hold the lowest place’.

‘I have paid a price, too,’ Anna was saying, and I woke from my dreams of poetry in a distant classroom and strained my ears to make sure I heard her right. I wanted to catch every word of this extraordinary confession, wanted very much to know how she had paid a price for betraying me. ‘I have sacrificed my career and a good part of my life to protect you,’ she said. ‘Because if anyone ever found out I was alive, that might have exposed you.’

Ah, well: that wasn’t bad. One had to admit that that wasn’t bad. So that was why she hadn’t shot me yet - because of my value as an agent?

‘But Slavin found out,’ I said.

‘Yes, that was unfortunate. Vladimir Mikhailovich had been out here too long - he was lonely. He became obsessed with me. I told him there was someone else. That was a mistake. I have spent much of my time away from Lagos in recent weeks, and on one occasion he must have broken into my quarters and found some letters I had never sent Henry. I had kept them - a weakness. I suppose he sent photographs of them to Moscow and someone in the KGB realized who I was. But he’s gone now.’ She smiled tersely. ‘Nobody knows.’

‘You’re still a believer, then?’ I said. A phrase she had often used in Germany came back to me. ‘In the brotherhood of man?’

Her mouth tightened. ‘Of course. Why not?’

I clawed my way up to a sitting position, but she heard me and lifted the rifle an inch so I stopped and she replaced it again.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, as though nothing had happened. ‘The gulags, the mock trials, the tanks in the streets? The use of assassination to sustain a civil war in Africa until you can install a puppet leader to further your own aims?’