He had come to Russia for his own mundane reasons. After working a year at a scruffy school in Luton, he’d been told that his next contract would not start until autumn. He was known for being fair, even-tempered, unflappable. Mild-mannered Mr Cullen. A geography teacher three years out, he knew how to settle a class, although one or two boys thought they could tell him to fuck off, sir, and the girls could switch quickly from flirtation to insolence. The idea of going to work in Moscow came from his college friend Julius. He was working there as a private tutor, making the faintly obscene amount of forty pounds an hour. He said he’d send Paul’s CV to the agency he used. ‘Come for the summer,’ he said. ‘This place is literally insane.’

Russia appealed as something bold, a wide impressive country. Paul imagined Moscow to be a place of machinations and intrigue, of old state power giving way to new liberties and glitz. Even though it was May, he pictured a snowdome city of images from the news: Red Square, St Basil’s confectionary colours, the bridge over the Moskva River, flag-waving protesters in Bolotnaya Square.

Initially the reality was something of a let-down. His first job, through the long and cloyingly humid summer, saw him living in an outlying gated community, working for a family who had made it big in fertiliser. He was tasked with tutoring their twins, an identically sullen pair of boys. He was supposed to be grooming them for an English boarding school – the prospectus had been sent for and was shown to him when it came – but he couldn’t have cared less about polish and etiquette. Julius had decamped, which was a Julius thing to do; he had followed his girlfriend to live in St Petersburg.