I noted the hesitation and tried not to hate him too much for it. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Was that also part of the endgame?’

Sasha raised his hands in a very Russian gesture. ‘Perhaps. It is possible. I was never in contact with her. It was always Henry.’

It was always Henry. ‘So Pritchard was running you?’ I asked. He nodded. That explained a lot - why he’d had the transmitter, for a start. He had run Anna, he had run Sasha and, although I hadn’t known it, he had run me. That night he’d left Vanessa’s table at Ronnie Scott’s - he hadn’t gone home. He’d gone to meet Sasha and then home, where he had sent a message to Anna in Lagos. She had immediately upped sticks for Udi, telling her back-up man to find Slavin and kill him - and me if I tried to get anywhere near? Yes, that was how it must have been, or something like it.

I shivered inwardly and turned back to Sasha. ‘If Henry was Radnya,’ I said, ‘what was my code-name?’

He pretended not to hear the tense I’d used. ‘You really want to know?’ he said. ‘It’s an ugly one. “Nezavisimyj”.’

‘“Independent” - why that?’

‘Because we had to keep you separate from the rest of the cell, for . . .’ - he looked around for a suitable phrase - ‘personal reasons.’

‘You mean because if I had discovered that Anna was alive, Henry had pimped her to me and Father had shot himself over the whole affair, I might not have been so cooperative.’

He smiled tolerantly. ‘If you prefer. But from the start you were seen as an independent operator. A free agent. Someone who had to be nurtured, but who was his own man.’

‘And now?’

He leaned over and grabbed a handful of peanuts out of a tinted glass bowl I hadn’t noticed on the table between us, and dropped a few into his mouth.

‘Now we need you more than ever,’ he said, and crunched a few of them down noisily.

‘Not interested,’ I said.

‘Paul, listen. I understand you are no longer a Communist. In truth, I sometimes wonder if I am either.’ He caught my look. ‘It is the truth. But times and circumstances change. Look at what you distrust about us. About me, if you wish. Do you really believe I am a worse master than the men now running your country?’

‘The coup failed,’ I said. ‘They’re not running it any more than they were last month.’