Nicolas’s jaw grows slack with disbelief. His suitcase slips from his grasp and lands upon the pavement with a thud. He leaves it where it is as he skirts the gathering to get a better look at the face of the speaker.

‘Let us be in no doubt about the immensity of the struggle that faces us,’ Nevin continues, his frosty breath swirling around the megaphone. ‘We are assailed on all sides by the forces of bourgeois reaction.’

His face has been shaved clean, but there’s no mistaking those green eyes, that catlike look of self-content. It is Rachkovsky, sleekly triumphant in a seal-fur coat. Nicolas watches, not hearing the words, as his old nemesis whips the troops into a froth of revolutionary enthusiasm and then tops it with three lung-bursting cheers.

The brigadier marches his men double-quick to the troop train as Rachkovsky waves them on from the running board.

Nicolas walks towards the Daimler at a speed that arouses the concern of Rachkovsky’s bodyguards. One grabs his lapels while the other puts him in a headlock. ‘Where are you going, citizen?’

‘I’m a friend of the commissar.’

‘Sure you are. You look like a reactionary parasite to me.’

‘Peter! Rachkovsky, it’s me.’

Rachkovsky steps off the running board. ‘Do I know you?’

He approaches Nicolas, who’s been hauled off balance by the bodyguards, who’s using all his strength to stand upright and not to tumble to the ground at Rachkovsky’s feet.

Rachkovsky looks at him for a long time. ‘Do you presume to know me, citizen?’

Nicolas is seized by a frantic hatred, by a desire to immolate them both. Like Samson, he will pull down the world on both their heads. ‘I know you from Paris,’ he shouts, with a demented yell, ‘where you were the head of the Tsar’s secret police, where you murdered revolutionaries, fornicated, and undermined the working people.’ The last words are interrupted by a flash of light. The front of his face goes numb. One of the bodyguards has broken Nicolas’s nose with the palm of his gloved hand. Blood spatters the pavement. He’s lying on the ground. He sees the bodyguard’s felt boot an inch from his eyes. He hears the sound of a revolver being unholstered.

‘Shall I finish him, chief?’

‘No need. I’d know him anywhere. It’s the well-known Menshevik sympathiser Max Schneiderman. Stay here and see he gets on the train to Paris.’

‘I have to salute his resourcefulness.’

After decades ruthlessly defending the Tsar’s interests, Rachkovsky ought to have been undone by the revolution. The Tsar’s abdication left him with neither a protector nor a raison d’être. If there were any justice in this world, he’d be skulking around a labour camp with a spoon in his boot, running demeaning errands for the terrifying Thieves Guild who control everything inside the prison walls.

But a man who knows everybody’s secrets is never as weak as he appears.