Now I had to find Anna. The Service knew she had recruited Radnya, so would almost certainly investigate her next. I knew she was somewhere in this city - probably even somewhere in this neighbourhood. Perhaps that house, there, with the jacaranda trees swaying in the wind. Perhaps she was in that villa, wrapped up in pleasant dreams, while I sat here with my shirt dripping and my fingers caked in blood as the minutes wound down until Pritchard’s plane landed.

I took the torch from the glove compartment and ran it over the assassin’s effects. I wasn’t expecting to find anything that would identify him: he’d been a professional. But there were clues. There were always clues.

The most obvious one was the word scrawled on the matchbox: ‘AEROFLOT’. My first thought was that it was a reminder to book his ticket back to Moscow: after all, even hitmen need to organize their travel arrangements. But why would he write that down? It wasn’t as if he would forget the name of the national airline.

Next thought: perhaps he had a contact at Aeroflot’s office here. That made more sense - it was a common KGB cover. But again, why make a note of it? Bad form and, again, it wouldn’t be too hard to remember.

I was missing something. I hadn’t been in the field in over five years, and it was taking me time to get back into the old ways of thinking. Too much time.

I picked up the Russian’s gun. It was a Tokarev TT. I had always thought it a brutish-looking weapon: unpainted and almost devoid of markings, it looked more like a cast of a pistol than the real thing. This one had been worn smooth with years of use, so that only one of the Cs in ‘CCCP’ arranged around the grip was still legible.

I emptied the chamber, because it had no manual safety and I didn’t want to blow my knees off, and asked myself why a KGB assassin would be carrying this gun. The TT hadn’t been produced in years - most KGB now used the Makarov. The army had continued to use it for a while, but I’d read a report just a few months ago saying that they had also abandoned it. Perhaps he had been in the army many years ago, and had kept the gun? I tried to remember his face, before its features had been contorted by pain. Late twenties - no older than that. So too young to have been issued with a TT even if he had been in the army. Perhaps someone he knew had been in the army, and had given it to him. Or he had it for other reasons - like I had my Luger.