‘They are as deadly as each other. Not men to cross, but how can a man avoid that when they turn on everyone?’ He laughed darkly. ‘No one gets out of the NKVD or SMERSH alive.’

‘Except you, perhaps, Mr Borisov.’

‘Indeed, that is my hope. But it means I must live out my days in exile. At least your country is beautiful. It has always felt like a second home to me.’

‘And where in Russia do you call home?’

‘Moscow.’

‘You have a family there?’

‘A wife, two children.’

‘What will happen to them?’

He shrugged. ‘Olga will be questioned about what she knows. But she has nothing to tell them. I protected her by keeping everything to myself. I hope they will not torture her, but I know she will be sent to the Gulag. The children will go into the care of the state. That is life in Soviet Russia.’

‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘You think I have done wrong – abandoning them to such a fate. But what you don’t understand, my dear Mrs Wilde, is that the same fate would have awaited them if I had gone back to Moscow for the last bullet. The Soviet state does not leave the families of the accused untouched. This is the system backed by all your idealistic communist friends in Cambridge.’

‘What makes you think I have communist friends?’

He laughed out loud. ‘How do you think, my dear? I know their names because they work for Mother Russia, that is how I know. Some call them fellow travellers; the NKVD calls them useful idiots. They are dangerous to the West.’

‘Then I had better be more careful who I confide in. Don’t want to give away any state secrets, do I.’

‘Ah, Mrs Wilde, now you make fun of me. You are too clever.’

Yes, she thought, perhaps I am too clever. Which might be why I don’t swallow this story about Sergei Borisov fleeing a death sentence. Tom might like to think he was the intelligence officer in this household, but that didn’t prevent her having ideas of her own. And she was certain of one thing: Borisov and Eaton were up to something.

*

Paula Jaeger saw the house disintegrate through Wilde’s CIC-issue binoculars. The blinding flash came first, then the splintering of a house – great beams, furniture, roofing, a mass of glass – fragmented and thrown across a wide area and, last of all, the thunderous roar, echoing around the mountains.

In the split second before the explosion, she saw something else. A figure crashing through a window, shattering the glass. Her first thought was that someone had thrown out a large object or animal, but then came the blast and her cognitive powers went numb.