I found what I was searching for in the cubbyhole off the kitchen where he kept his bureau, adrift with press cuttings and other memorabilia. There was a laptop and a wad of manuscript, inexpertly typed and entitled: Travels Through a Life by Sergei Popov. I felt sure that title had been used before. But then, there is no copyright in titles just as there is no copyright in plots, which is just as well when half the books that come out these days seem to be either based on someone else’s or Shakespeare, who is a bottomless mine of gold as far as most writers are concerned, as is Jane Austen.

But certainly no one else had lived Sergei’s life, so that would be entirely novel, and also full marks to him for effort, because at least it looked like he had written the whole damned thing himself – no ghosts required.

I sat at his desk, took the elastic band off and began to flick through the pages, but there was an awful lot of it and I quickly realized there wasn’t time to go through the whole thing. So instead I concentrated on trying to find ‘T’, whom he touchingly referred to as his ‘great love’ when I did track myself down, although you couldn’t fail to notice that all the other letters of the alphabet seemed to be randomly scattered throughout as well.

I couldn’t see anything explicit, and so far as I could tell, his full and frank disclosures seemed to be more in the nature of, ‘I have had many, many lovers in my life …’ rather than a blow-by-blow account of what he got up to with them, so that was all right, I think. I mean, ‘T’ could have been anyone, couldn’t it? And if people drew conclusions – well, I didn’t have to admit it; I could still carry on with the enigmatic stuff.

I was just trying to find the more recent parts to see what he’d said about being faithful to me – or not – when the grating of a key in the front-door lock turned the blood in my veins to ice.

There is something lithe and fast about the way a dancer moves on stage – and generally something languid and slow off it. Even so, he was there in the doorway while I was still standing clutching pages of manuscript to my frozen heart.

‘Tina?’

‘Grigor?’

‘What are you doing here?’ we exclaimed in unison.

He looked just as guilty and startled as I probably did. Then his eye fell on the pages of manuscript I was still holding and he stepped into the room saying, ‘I think I came on the same mission you did, Tina. I want to see just what Sergei has said about me in his memoirs.’