‘Three-card brag.’ He glanced back at the guards. They were ignoring us. ‘I think you need to lie down. You’ll feel better.’

‘I’ve never seen a real-life poker game. Could you show me?’

‘I think –’

‘After that, I’ll have a lie-down. I’m so tired.’ I yawned.

‘Well –’

‘Please?’ I gazed up at him.

‘All right. Normally I wouldn’t but, well, just this once. I’m Piers, by the way.’

‘I’m Catherine.’

‘Nice to meet you.’ His hand was clammy as it held mine. ‘But when we’re in there, we’ll have to sit in the background. And we must be very quiet.’

‘Like little mice.’

‘Just like little mice.’ Cautiously, he led me back to the card room. The guards opened it without reaction and we were inside. All the players at the table had the silver hammer-and-compass lapel badges worn by those who had been Party members when the Soviets arrived and a few glanced up, but paid us little attention. There were leather chairs at the side occupied by more young women, and Piers led me past them to a studded sofa. As I passed the table, I counted seven players and surreptitiously looked again at the dealer.

In his dull grey suit, vague in that cigar smoke, Comrade Assistant Secretary Ian Fellowman looked like nothing so much as a third-tier Party apparatchik. I hadn’t seen him since the terrible night of the Comintern party at the hotel, when Nick had been so desperate to be introduced to him. The stark sight of him now brought back a sudden feeling of drowning in freezing water and I had to lean on Piers to stop myself from falling. Piers smirked, presuming the drink was doing its part.

Could Fellowman really be the one who had made a deal with Lorelei for contraband medicine? He had come over from the West in ’47, an idealist among idealists. She would probably have known him, though, because of his control of our national broadcasting and her affair with Cairncross. And she had also warned Nick to stay away from him, saying that Fellowman was ‘toxic’ – which could have been her way of keeping Nick in the dark about her arrangement with him.

In the background, a record player was whining out an old speech of Blunt’s. ‘… there is art too in the simple message of the Manifesto. This soaring first line …’

‘I think we’ve heard enough from Anthony for a while,’ Fellowman said, with a wry smile to the others. It was the first time I had heard him speak, and it was almost a surprise to know that he could. His voice was very deep, befitting his size, and he had an upper-class Scottish accent. They all chuckled, and a man I couldn’t see in the darkness at the side of the room lifted the needle from the disc. ‘Dealer has a flush,’ Fellowman said.