‘We’re not pawns,’ I told him. ‘I told you at our very first meeting that I didn’t want any more games - I had enough of that with Yuri. If you had told me the truth then, I would have accepted it.’

‘No,’ he said, regaining his composure. ‘You wouldn’t have. That, too, is horseshit.’

I ignored him. He wasn’t answering my questions, and I needed answers to them, now.

‘Why?’ I asked him, my knuckles straining against the steering wheel. ‘Why this way?’

‘It shouldn’t matter how you were recruited.’

A few hours previously I would have agreed with him, if we’d been discussing some other poor fool who had been lured in like this: yes, a clever little honey trap, very nice, the means justify the ends, and all that crap. Very nice - in theory. ‘It matters to me,’ I said, barely able to control my fury. ‘The murder of my father matters to me, Sasha.’

‘I am sorry,’ he said after a moment. ‘But you must understand that he would have been seen as a dangerous enemy.’

Yes, I understood, all right: eliminate a prime anti-Communist, and recruit his own son off the back of it. My code-name even gloated over the fact.

‘How did it work?’ I asked. ‘How many people were involved? I want to know the details.’

‘I don’t have them,’ he said. ‘I was shown your file before I left Moscow, but the matter of your recruitment had only a very brief description.’

‘Indulge me,’ I said. ‘I suspect it was fuller than the one I got.’ He turned to me, the shadows on his face shifting shape as we passed in and out of the fields of each streetlamp. ‘You were admitted to a Red Cross hospital, where the agent you knew as Anna cared for you. Investigations established that you were the son of a leading British intelligence officer with links to fascist groups before the war.’

I kept glancing over at him, because I needed to match the meaning of his words with the way he said them. If he sounded a false note - if he was lying - I needed to know. I couldn’t yet tell.

‘So a plan was drawn up.’

‘Yes. Anna was to persuade you of the rightness of our cause using her particular talents—’

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ I said. ‘Who killed my father?’ I asked. ‘Who pulled the trigger?’

‘That I do not know, Paul.’

Narrow Street. I veered into it and Sasha lurched into the dashboard as we flattened a few cobblestones. Was this the truth - or more omission?

‘And Anna disappeared.’

He shrugged. ‘There was nothing else about her in the file. Perhaps you can tell me what you have learned?’