Kate smiled. For the first time since they’d left London, she thought of Callum and Julie in a car together making their own journey across to Moscow. She had to suppress an unwelcome pang of sexual jealousy. ‘You don’t look enamoured with the idea,’ Grove said.

‘I wouldn’t say that. I’ve heard worse.’

Grove smiled back at her. ‘That’s what I call enthusiasm. Think about it. It might work well for all of us. A couple of the richer Party donors are interested in backing us, so we could be up and running quickly.’

Kate did think about it, but not for long. Her mind drifted back to Incisor and the job that awaited them in Moscow. After dinner, she drove on through the pitch-black night, the moon barely ever visible behind thick banks of cloud that rolled across the Russian hinterland.

They were still several hours short of dawn when they reached the capital’s almost deserted streets, the Stalinist Gothic splendour of the Seven Sisters buildings and other Moscow landmarks ghoulish in the first slivers of moon-light since they’d left Smolensk.

Kate was relieved to find the key, as promised, in a lock in the porch of the tiny Airbnb apartment she had rented in Arbatskaya. They walked up the stairs and said a brisk goodnight before Kate flopped face down on the bed in the room closest to the front door. She was asleep before she’d summoned the energy to undress.

31

GROVE WAS ALREADY awake and sitting by the window when Kate got up, so she showered and changed quickly and they walked out to a nearby café called Brusnika for breakfast. It was a Scandinavian-style bakery of pine, glass and exposed red brick. It was bright and cheerful, with colourful abstract paintings on the walls and brightly painted pipes on the ceiling.

They both had coffee, toast and jam as Kate explained the purpose of the day, which was to ensure that they were not being watched. ‘If anyone spotted us on the way in, I’m hoping I’ll catch them on our tail today. We won’t have time to carry out more than a cursory check tomorrow morning, so we’ll be locked in the apartment after this. Buy whatever you need to keep you going here.’

They returned to the flat with sourdough bread, cheese, water and ham from a neighbouring supermarket. Then Kate led Grove on a tour of central Moscow that she’d planned meticulously and committed to memory before they’d left London. She began by Kropotkinskaya Metro station, weaving through gardens that surrounded the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. ‘It looks suspiciously new for an ancient cathedral,’ Grove said.

‘It is. Stalin blew up the original in the nineteen thirties. It’s a replica.’

They paused by a statue of Tsar Alexander II, as any tourists might. ‘Then why didn’t he blow up this?’ Grove asked.

‘He wasn’t so averse to the traditions of autocratic rule.’

They turned left on to the Moskva river embankment and walked up to the Borovitskaya Tower, one of the entrances to the Kremlin. ‘That’s where the president goes in when he’s in Moscow,’ Kate said.