In the valise is the pamphlet that Rachkovsky gave him during his panicky midnight visit to 79 Rue de Grenelle. It seems so long ago, but can’t be more than six weeks. The title struck him as promising at the time: A Dialogue in Hell by Maurice Joly, an author he hadn’t heard of.

It’s strange, he thinks, how his brain seems to have a special late-night file for things he reads in bed. He’ll struggle to remember any detail of them during the day, but open the book again at bedtime, and it all comes back: it’s a political satire in the form of a dialogue. The set-up is this: Machiavelli and the liberal philosopher Montesquieu have met in hell and are having an argument about the best form of government. Montesquieu puts the moral case for liberalism; Machiavelli the pragmatic case for tyranny. At first Nicolas was reluctant to read it, because of the title: he thought it might be horror, and he doesn’t like reading anything too stimulating at bedtime, but this book presents the opposite problem: two more paragraphs and he’s out like a light.

‘We spent our honeymoon in Normandy.’

The water of the Atlantic is grey and the beaches are stony. Nicolas knows he’s done a bad thing. Out of cupidity, spinelessness and a craving for respectability, he’s married a woman he doesn’t love. He sits alone after dinner drinking Calvados and then joins Anya in the bedroom, where he perches on the bed in his morning suit, rigid with dread. Anya brushes out her long brown hair in the mirror, a hundred strokes each side, chatting happily about the day.

Nicolas is relieved when there’s a knock at the door. A bellboy brings in champagne and an ice bucket with a note. ‘Compliments of the Third Section’, it reads in French, and then, in Russian, ‘Ne pozor’ natsiyu!’, meaning ‘Don’t disgrace the nation!’ Whether he means the Jewish or Russian one, Rachkovsky hasn’t specified.

The alcohol, the long day, the fake telegrams concocted by Rachkovsky conveying the regrets of Nicolas’s family from Kiev, the memory of Marianne’s swollen, ostrich-egg skull with its downcast eyes like a meditating Buddha: all of it swirls through Nicolas’s mind in an unresolvable circuit of images. It’s like a problem in algebra he’s not clever enough to solve. He steps out onto the balcony to clear his head. The sky is dark and starless, but he can hear the song of the surf on the beach. This water is the last unbroken link with his old life. It flows from here through the Pillars of Hercules, through the Mediterranean, the Dardanelles and into the Black Sea. Somewhere, in the not-so-distant past, a boy stood at a barrel, hearing a version of the same song, but now its tune is irretrievably altered: no Bessie; no redemption; no hope. More salt water spills from his eyes.