One hot day in June – it’s Monday the 13th, 1887 – Nicolas takes the afternoon off, telling his secretary to cancel his appointment with a firm of milliners from Nantes. He’s been complaining of toothache since he got in. It’s a day of pressing heat and intermittent clouds. At a fishmonger’s, he pauses to fan the cool atmosphere surrounding the beds of crushed ice onto his face, then hails a cab on the corner, which he directs to Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, the Cimetière de Liers: Paris’s Russian Orthodox cemetery.

As a favour to Nicolas, Father David has interceded with the bishop to allow the burial of a suicide. The ecclesiastical hierarchy is disposed to look kindly on his wish. Bessie and her daughter will be interred together in the communal plot. But there will be no stone. Celeste the maid and Nicolas are the only mourners. They have to avert their eyes from the child’s tiny coffin as Father David sings Dushe moya: Spirit arise.

It has occurred to Nicolas before, but this time more forcibly, that he could be the father of Marianne. The timing of the birth makes her paternity ambiguous. He knows Bessie wouldn’t have told him if he was. As the coffins are lowered, he has a sense that an important part of himself is being consigned to oblivion.

A caretaker’s lodge guards the entrance to the cemetery. During the service, Nicolas becomes aware of a stranger standing there, keeping a respectful distance. It is Rachkovsky, wearing a pale linen suit and a pair of spectacles with purple lenses. He has a bouquet of gerberas in one hand, which he places beside the grave at the conclusion of the burial, and a walking stick in the other. ‘I came to apologise,’ he says. ‘Shall we walk?’ Nicolas falls into step, and the two men tour the avenues of the dead.

Nicolas knows that Rachkovsky has swallowed his pride to be here, and suspects there will be a compensatory attack somewhere down the line. It comes almost immediately.