Finally reaching her booth, I summoned up my best Russian and said, ‘Dobriye vecher.’

She glared at me, glared at my passport, glared at her video monitor and punched my details into her computer terminal, then shoved my documents back across the shelf without a word. It was definitely the wrong time of the month for her.

‘Friendly lot,’ Whinger observed as he came through behind me. ‘Roll on the fucking Customs!’

To our surprise, they gave us no trouble. We took the green channel and nobody even looked in our direction. On the far side of the screen a swarm of taxi-drivers engulfed us, all shouting and trying to snatch our luggage; but through the middle of them came Sasha, dressed in civvies and smiling as he shouldered the mob aside. I recognised his shirt as one of the pair we’d bought in Hereford.

He greeted us warmly and led us out to a battered grey saloon which he’d parked on the pavement. We put our hold-alls into the boot and climbed aboard, myself in the front, the other guys in the back. Because the hinges had worked loose, it took three slams to make my door shut securely.

‘I am sorry,’ Sasha said as he drove off. ‘You are in Intourist Hotel.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

He let go of the wheel to spread his hands. ‘Not nice. We wanted the Moskva, but no rooms.’

‘Oh, well. It’s only two nights.’ To change the subject I asked, ‘What sort of a car is this?’

‘It is Volga. Old, old. I would like to buy new one, something good. But that would be too dangerous. And why? Because the Mafia would take it. One day, in a traffic jam, my mother is driving it, she sees two gun-machines in her ears, this side and that side. “Give me the keys.” Finish.’

‘Can’t the police do anything?’

‘Police!’ He shot me a hopeless look. ‘They are worst. They are cowards. And anyway, half of them are paid by Mafia.’

The highway into town was wide but rough: four lanes in each direction, treacherously pitted with dips and potholes. I realised that when Sasha had described the Russian roads as diabolical he hadn’t been exaggerating. We were really getting thrown around – and this on one of the main thoroughfares. We were also being overtaken on both sides simultaneously: anybody with a reasonably fast foreign car was weaving in and out of the traffic like a lunatic.

Set back on either side of the road were terrible, drab tower-blocks of flats, nine or ten storeys tall. Closer to the road, old-fashioned hoardings carried advertisements, many for Western products. When I spotted some familiar red and yellow colours and slowly picked out the Cyrillic letters for McDonald’s I couldn’t help grinning at my own linguistic prowess.