But Morland also remembered the ever-cynical Mr. Midgeley and his thought-provoking lessons at school. “Listen, lad,” he would say in his broad Rochdale accent. “What does history continually teach us? That when everyone is convinced one thing is going to happen, you can bet your house and dog that the exact opposite is going to happen. Oh, and never listen to a politician. Not enough of them are historians.”

An hour later he was sitting in an anonymous government office in Riga. Bērziņš, in his early sixties, craggy faced and with a shock of white hair, leaned forward. “Very good of you to drop in, old boy; do have a brew . . . I get Twinings to keep me supplied with English Breakfast tea.” Bērziņš, the son of Latvian refugees and UK born and raised, spoke perfect English with a crisp Sandhurst accent, the product of his time as a senior officer in the British Army. He had moved to Latvia following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He was now Director of the Constitution Protection Bureau, Latvia’s counter-espionage and internal security service, and Morland could see he was measuring him as he spoke.

“We’ve got a puzzling case here and I need some help from the Brits. I know you’re here to advise our Special Tasks Unit, but you have access to other agencies in the UK, and time is short. The police found the bodies of the two leaders of the Latvian Russian Union, Petrov and Zadonov, by the Monument of Freedom in the early hours this morning. It seemed that there’d been in a drunken fight; there were smashed beer and vodka bottles lying around and their throats had been slashed. But on closer inspection, both their necks had been broken. And, I have to say, most professionally. But what is really interesting is that when they were examined properly in the mortuary, they found the insignia of the Latvian Legion—those were the two SS divisions recruited in Latvia by the Nazis to fight the Russians during the last war—cut into their chests above their hearts.”

“OK . . .” said Morland, not yet sure what was required from him. For an infantry recce platoon commander, he was way out of his comfort zone.