Whinger shook his head. ‘The stupid bastards never got a round off. The two outside were asleep on their chairs, and the others had left their main weapons in the hallway. There.’ He shone the beam on a little stack of sub-machine guns in a corner. ‘Didn’t even have time to draw their pistols.’

I found myself shaking with reaction. ‘Jesus!’ I said. ‘What happens now?’

After a hit of that kind in the UK, the assault teams would be instantly spirited away from the scene in a hostage reception van, and any prisoners would travel with them, to get the whole lot clear before any journalists or TV crew turned up. Then a quick-reaction force would move in and take over. The most important guy in the aftermath would be the SOCO, the scene-of-crimes officer, from the police. Until he arrived, the key rule was that nothing must be touched or moved.

Not so in Moscow. Satisfied that all the villains were dead, Igor got up, walked over and kicked one of the bodies contemptuously, rolling it over.

‘Stop!’ I called, waving my hands about to tell him to lay off. But that was the limit of my Russian, and he probably thought I was crazy.

Somebody found the electricity control panel. A trip switch had been thrown by the blasts, and once it was flipped back up enough of the lights went on for us to survey the wreckage.

It looked as though four of the sitting-room victims had been gunned down where they sat at the table. They were all flabby-looking, middle-aged men with bellies bulging out into their shirts and their sleeves rolled up. Their faces had probably never been pretty, and they certainly weren’t now, because Nikolai had gone round and popped each one with a bullet through the head. One had an eye out on a stalk; another had spewed out half his teeth. Pools of blood were spreading over the pale carpet. Their jackets, still hanging over the backs of their chairs, had been riddled by bullets. The fifth guy, a younger man in a dark-blue polo shirt, had got half-way to the door before being dropped. On the right-hand wall, looking from the windows, water was dripping from the shattered remains of a glass fish-tank, and the wretched occupant was flapping its last in a puddle at the bottom. Another victim was an old tabby cat, which lay in a corner without a mark on it and seemed to have died of fright.

The table was covered with papers, evidently the subject of the meeting, and expensive-looking briefcases sat on the floor beside the chairs. The fire had started in a waste bin containing more paper, and I had no problem stamping it out. But I’d hardly finished when there was a commotion outside the door and in strode Ivan the Bear, with Sasha at his heels.