‘Who are you?’ I screamed into his face in Russian, but he was incapable of answering, so I loosened my hold and concentrated on his left arm instead.

‘Who? Tell me!’

He didn’t answer, and after I’d asked him a few more times, I broke the arm in one movement. But there was no scream from the Russian, and I wondered what was wrong. His face suddenly looked pale; I realized what he was doing and frantically tried to prise open his jaw to get to the pill.

Too late.

I searched him. There were no identifying papers, of course, but there were some Nigerian shillings and a box of matches. The matchbox had something scribbled on it in pencil. I held it up to the moonlight. It was one very familiar Cyrillic word: “АЭРОФΛОТ”.

I shunted it to one side of my brain, to deal with later, picked up the rake and started shovelling the mud over his body, as the rain kept coming down around us. Then I trudged back up to the eighteenth to look for Slavin and do the same thing.

VIII

VIII

In the front seat of Manning’s car, away from the rain hammering into my back and drowning out my thoughts, I considered the implications of what had just happened. They were, all told, pretty bleak. The death of a KGB officer on the eve of his defection would trigger the order for an immediate investigation from London. I could have handled that if it had been run by Manning, but Pritchard would be in the city in a matter of days, possibly even hours, and he would be much harder to fob off. Especially as I had disobeyed orders to come out here, had then insisted on meeting Slavin ahead of the scheduled time - and had been the only witness to his murder.

There was nothing I could do about any of that now. If I went underground - moved hotels, cut all contact with Manning - I might as well paint a cross on my back. Pritchard would have a pack of hounds sent over on Concorde. No, my only option was to carry on the pretence I was searching for the traitor, even if that meant Pritchard breathing down my neck and giving me even less room for manoeuvre. It was precisely the situation I’d wanted to avoid - and precisely what I’d warned Sasha would happen if he got Moscow to send a hitman into Lagos.