Years surviving on a subsistence diet had taken its toll on Valera. She was thin, and her skin was pale. The almond eyes that her mother had told her were so beautiful when she was young now looked like they belonged to someone far older. And her hair, which had never been thick but one upon a time had shone with life, hung dull and limp around her shoulders.

Other women in Povenets B tried to disguise their deterioration, tying their brittle hair into elaborate plaits or squirrelling away their meagre supplies of butter and oil to give their faces an unnatural sheen. Valera did neither. She had no interest in pretending life in the naukograd was any better than it was.

She also didn’t want anyone paying attention to her—especially Zukolev. But, as she took a blunt knife to half an old beetroot she’d been saving to make a thin borscht, she realised it was ten days since she’d last had to face the commandant of this prison she was locked away in, and she was overdue a visit.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

After Manning had left Bianchi and Moretti’s flat with Peterson at his heel, several MI5 officers arrived to pack up the scene and arrange transport of the bodies to a secure morgue.

Knox made his own way back into town. There were no black cabs on Deptford High Street, so he caught a train into London Bridge, then walked over the river to Bank and took the Central Line to Oxford Circus.

The Central Line in July was one of the least pleasant places to be in the whole of London. It was hot, pungent with the smell of stale bodies and cigarette smoke, and, somehow, always crowded. But it was also the fastest way across the city.

Less than an hour after leaving Deptford, he was walking the short distance from Oxford Circus to Berwick Street and Kemp House, the eighteen-storey high-rise block that towered over the centre of Soho.

The building had only been complete for a few months and Knox had been its first resident. When he’d seen the announcement by Westminster Council about the block in the Evening Standard over a year ago he knew he had to live there, and he’d used some contacts to pull a few strings and cut a deal with the council to buy a flat on the top floor off the architect’s plans.