The taxi deposited them almost next to a stark memorial to the victims of Nazi wartime deportations, its grim grey concrete lines framing the plaque that spoke of the horrors of the Holocaust some eight decades earlier. Luke regretted not reading up more about the history of this little-visited country on the eastern edge of Europe, but his head was already overflowing with a bewildering array of facts and figures on chemical weapons and how the world was trying to stop them falling into the wrong hands.

They walked the last few yards to the gates of Matulis ChemExport. A chill wind from across the Belarus border to the east blew swirls of dead leaves around their feet and flurries of dust and grit into their faces. He looked across at Jenny and they exchanged grins; this was not pleasant. She was wearing a dark blue Puffa jacket, which she now zipped up to her throat as they trudged past grey stone Soviet-era apartment blocks and bare winter trees.

The entrance to Matulis ChemExport had seen better days. Someone had clearly collided with the wrought-iron railings at some stage, denting and buckling them out of shape. A drunk driver? A disgruntled employee? Who knew? Luke pressed the buzzer while Jenny stood next to him, hunched against the wind in her Puffa, shoulders raised. The first time he buzzed nobody answered. And the second. But then he heard a click and the gate began sliding uncertainly to one side, opened by an unseen hand somewhere inside the building that now stood in front of them. Dingy red-brick walls, trucks in the courtyard, some with their engines idling, belching clouds of blue exhaust. But then, somewhat incongruously, a large turquoise hoarding depicted a sunlit beach somewhere, captioned with some words in Lithuanian he couldn’t decipher, all ending with an exclamation mark.

An unsmiling man in a suit met them in the courtyard and took them up a flight of stairs to a waiting room, where he introduced them to a middle-aged woman sitting behind a bulky computer. The sales director’s PA eyed them suspiciously, her cat eye spectacles reminded Luke of the bossy clerk in the cartoon film Monsters Inc. For ten minutes, Luke and Jenny sat waiting in silence, still bleary-eyed from their early start, waiting for their hastily arranged appointment with a Mr Sergei Kadunov, the sales director. Luke glanced around him at the swirly patterned carpet, the sundial clock on the wall and the half-filled ashtray on the cracked Formica-top table. He felt like he had just stepped back into the 1970s.