“I suppose he wanted to keep things just as they were for when he found Maria,” Val guessed.

Bill nodded. “Does Father Methodius think he started working for the secret police straightaway?”

Val shook her head. “He didn’t work for them. He stole a uniform and pretended to be a Cheka officer while he spent the next few years of his life looking for Maria and Vasnetsov.”

Bill raised an eyebrow. “One day he’s just a factory worker turned guard, and the next he’s doling out money all over the place to bribe officials? Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

Val blushed. “There’s part of the story I didn’t tell you before, something I learned from my mom.” She was embarrassed to tell him her dad had been a criminal, but that was silly; she wasn’t responsible for his actions. “During the civil war and right through the early 1920s, he made a living breaking into the houses of the aristocracy and stealing their treasures, then selling them to White Russians living in exile in Harbin. He made a vast amount of money.”

Bill laughed. “Good on him! A bit of venture capitalism in the midst of Communist takeover. Times were tough, so no doubt those government officials were happy to cooperate in return for a few extra rubles.”

“But then Father Methodius told me he was arrested in Ekaterinburg, charged with impersonating a police officer, and sentenced to death. Aged twenty-six, he sat in a cell waiting to die.” Val paused for a moment, trying to imagine what that must have felt like. “By chance, he was able to escape while being led out to a van, and he ran for his life, eventually making it back to Harbin. After that, he didn’t dare return to Russia. He had to accept that he would never find the woman he loved. He married my mother because she took good care of him, but she never stood a chance of winning his heart because he had already given it to another.”

“It must make you look on him quite differently,” Bill said.

“The one thing I can’t forgive him for is sending Mom back to Harbin when I was thirteen.” Val remembered the heartbroken months after her mother left, when the house was silent and she sobbed herself to sleep every night; then she thought of the terrible suffering her mother endured, which the Chinese doctor believed was the cause of her premature death. “Father Methodius says he was very depressed at the time, but that’s no excuse.”

Bill put his arms around her. “What’s done is done. I think it’s great you understand more now so you can think of him as a sad, troubled man rather than a monster.”