McFaul shoots me a look, says nothing. He’s into a long list of files now, some of which I recognize. These are scripts from way back, stepping stones that finally took Pavel to fame and fortune.

‘Scapa Flow?’ McFaul’s peering at one of them. ‘What’s that about?’

‘He wrote a movie for the Germans. They scuttled their fleet at the end of the First World War. It’s about a grandson revisiting his grandfather’s death aboard a battleship called the Hindenburg. It was the last one to sink and it took our hero’s grandad with it. They flew Pavel up to the Orkney Islands and had him dive on the wreck. They kitted him up and took him down there. He told me he mapped that battleship by touch alone, and I believed him. He was blind, couldn’t see a thing. Trying to imagine a whole battleship through your fingertips? Can you get your head around that?’

The question earns another look from McFaul. He’s scrolling down through the endless list of files.

‘You’ve got a title?’ he says at last.

‘No.’

‘A date?’

‘I’m guessing it’ll be the last one.’

‘And he died when? Exactly?’

‘This year,’ I say. ‘Sunday, twenty-eighth of April. He had a huge stroke. By the time I made it to the hospital, he’d gone.’

McFaul makes a note of the date and returns to the screen. He reconfigures the files in chronological order, then frowns.

‘Something’s not right,’ he says. ‘Look …’

I join him in front of the laptop. He’s pointing to a file that carries an asterisk but no name. A series of commands fail to open it.

‘February the fourteenth?’ He’s peering at the screen. ‘Does that ring any bells?’

‘Valentine’s Day,’ I say automatically. ‘I remember phoning him.’

‘And?’

‘We talked. Like we always talked. Blew kisses on the phone. Laughed a lot.’

‘Did he mention a file? Something he’d written? Finished? Saved?’

‘No. But that means nothing. Pavel always told me he was born in darkness and that’s where he ended up. He was an underground creature. He squirrelled everything away. Maybe that file was meant to get him through the next winter. Nourishment for the soul. Sadly, it failed.’

This moment of reverie is wasted on McFaul. He eases his chair back from the desk and tells me he’ll have to start from scratch.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means I’ll need to go into the code, untangle one or two things, understand how it all hangs together. Nothing’s impossible. I’ll crack it in the end, but it might take a while.’

‘You don’t mind?’

‘Not at all.’ He nods at the screen. ‘What else is on here?’

‘Most of his life, I imagine.’ I do my best to summon a smile. ‘And bits of mine, too.’