Her superiors may have stopped caring about the Italians, but she was still very interested in them. And so, apparently, was MI5. Bennett didn’t know where Knox had gone after he’d given her the slip in Soho the night before, but she was willing to bet he’d gone to Deptford and Bianchi and Moretti’s flat. Now she wanted to know what connected Kaspar, Horne, and the Italians. Unfortunately, the CIA didn’t have any records on Horne or the Calder Hall Ring, and Bennett had already exhausted the information held on Kaspar in London. She could have put in a request to the central records store in Virginia for whatever they held on him, but that would take too much time and probably earn her a reprimand.

Before she gave up completely on the archive, she stopped by the large pile of new files waiting to be carried off into the stacks and quickly scanned through them. The fourth folder just held a single photo. It was of a woman, her hair caught mid-turn as she walked into a building. The image was slightly blurry, taken with a long lens. The woman’s narrow eyes looked more like sunken slits, and wisps of loose hair hung over her cheeks. But the expression on her face was clear enough. She looked long past the point of exhaustion. But more than that, Bennett thought she looked haunted, like something unspeakably awful had happened to her. She turned the photo over, reading the location and timestamp: Swedish embassy, Helsinki, 16:47, 16 July. Yesterday afternoon. It must have been sent to London almost as soon as it had been taken.

The woman’s name was written underneath in different-coloured ink, added by someone once a source inside the Swedish embassy had confirmed her identity: Irina Valera. Bennett recognised the name, but she had no idea how she’d ended up in Helsinki. She turned the photograph over and looked at it again, trying to work out what had happened to her.

Bennett had a choice: put the photo back in its folder or do something else, something that could end up with her facing much more than a reprimand. She stood still for a moment, deciding if she was ready to cross a very big line. Then she took the photograph to the unattended Xerox machine next to the chief clerk’s desk and made a copy of it before slipping the original back onto the pile of filing.

Chapter 30

Chapter 30

An hour after the bus left Ilomantsi, it had deposited Valera in the city of Joensuu. Joensuu was the biggest place she had been since she’d left Leningrad, and it was well away from the border with Russia. It felt like a metropolis compared to Povenets B. Well-fed people walked along its streets and riverbanks, cars drove on its roads, and a never-ending stream of boats sailed beneath its bridges.