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She had been caught selling ’phets and weed down by the Murmansk railway station. Her boy had been with her but had run faster and there was snow on the ground and the trooper had slipped, then regained his feet and she had tripped him, and her guy had legged it away. She had not named Timofey. Not a love-match, but a relationship of convenience and comfort, and they would have had to beat her one step short of unconscious for her to give his name. The days were ticked, and now Natacha talked about the dilemma of her hair, and they laughed fit to burst. Should her hair, a scrubber’s blonde, go purple or larch-green at the end of the week when she went free. It would be a big decision, green or purple – but might depend only on which was easier to lift off the shelf in the Magnets store on Poliarnye Zori, and Timofey would be waiting outside and they would be gone – and she would not be back, not to the gaol. They challenged her. She was adamant, would colour her hair and would sell wraps and skunk and smack, and might hitch up her skirt in a police car for cash, but nothing serious.

“Better believe it.… You don’t see me again, none of you, not ever. Nothing serious, nothing that rocks them, so I do not come back.” She flashed her smile. “Counting the hours till I am free and able to enjoy again the wonder and beauty of the streets of Murmansk.”

Murmansk’s winter has six weeks of no sun, just a mix of total darkness and charcoal-grey gloom. Murmansk’s summer has six weeks when the sun never sets and the city is bathed in perpetual light. Far to the north of the Arctic Circle, Murmansk can also experience rain in January and snow in July: a contrary city.

Murmansk has a population, sinking, of almost 300,000, and is big on sexually transmitted disease, ferocious seasonal mosquitoes, drug abuse, and the architecture of Stalin, Kruschev and Brezhnev. The Putin legacy is a couple of modern hotels, low rates of occupancy and high rates.

Murmansk, one day but not tomorrow, could have a glittering financial future as the hub of oil and gas exploration, except that the Fatherland, as represented by the ruling class in Moscow’s Kremlin, cannot filch the necessary infrastructure technology – even with its army of expert hackers – from the West’s engineers. Not for want of trying. While that is on hold, the purpose of the city is to be home to the navy’s Northern Fleet.

Murmansk was founded as a naval base in 1916, in the final throes of the Czar’s rule, because the deep inlet on which the city was built never froze, even in the depths of winter. Government resources are rich when it comes to the fleets of hunter-killer and long-range missile-firing submarines. In strategic terms, Murmansk is a big player in international military games, and nuclear missiles are stacked in bunkers dug out of the perma-frost ground. When the Soviet Union seemed destined for defeat in World War II, and the German war machine pressed closer to the valued nickel and iron ore mines of the region, British, American and Canadian convoys fought their way through bomb and torpedo attacks to bring military supplies to Murmansk and to stabilise a front line to the south during the 900-day siege of Leningrad. The life and atmosphere of the city is supposedly dominated by the experience, and on a bluff above the drab living blocks the Alyosha monument was built in memory of those killed in defence of the port and its resources.

Murmansk’s main street of Lenin Prospekt, designed on the grand scale of public buildings when Josef Stalin ruled, is where the new palace of the FSB is located with 15,000 square metres of offices and holding cells built over eight floors. The vast size of the building is justified, the FSB spokesman has said, because of security dangers in the region. A reported toxic dump for nuclear waste and bristling with modern warfare, it is natural that the security police would send their best and their brightest to Murmansk.

“Murmansk?” Knacker murmured into the phone.

In a building halfway between the pub where he had attended that day’s Round Table lunch and the headquarters of SIS, a member of his staff had taken a call from the British Consulate in Hamburg, the northern port city of Germany. It would have been filtered fast through several of the agency’s arms: the triggers would have been the war in Syria; the village of Deir al-Siyarqi, with its call sign of Delta Alpha Sierra; the massacre; the date; the accusation; the photograph from a Norwegian-based amateur commentary in both Russian and English, sent from a harbour town near the border shared with Russia – a photograph, and a denunciation. Knacker had been in deep and fruitful conversation at lunch with the man who had run a penetration into the political élite of DPRK and with a woman who had compromised a senior official on the treasury side of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Quds crowd, and basked in justifiable pride at the achievement. Both assets faced, in Knacker’s opinion, an ‘uncertain future’ and both should be kept in their place. The Coldstreamer had discreetly summoned him from the table. A phone had rung with a sharp request to extract him. Knacker had taken the call, had slipped the phone into secure mode, and was relayed the guts of what a Syrian-born waitress had come to the consulate and said. He remembered her, would have been hard not to.

“She is definite in the identification?”

He was told that the girl was adamant.

“Forget the photograph of this Russian officer. Have we been sent an image of her?”

They had. The photo of the girl, as supplied by the consular officer, was on the screen in front of Alice, and Fee had good sight of it.

“Does she carry a scar on her chin? Size of a fifty pence piece?”

She had. It had healed but not well.

Knacker slipped back inside. He whispered apologies to Arthur Jennings and was gently quizzed. Something of interest? He said that it might be. Was it those bastards, the usual ones, he was asked. It was, always them, always the same bastards, always the Lubyanka boys. Arthur Jennings was holding a cheese knife and stabbed it into the table, tearing the plastic covering, watched it quiver.

He was gone and left a slack grin at the mouth of the Round Table’s founder… He was Knacker because of his reputation to recruit damaged personnel, get one last mission from the wretch. Like a man who went round farms or gypsy camps and took away lame horses and would get them one last time between the shafts of a carriage, tighten the harness, crack the whip. Cat food if it failed, or, if it went well perhaps another season grazing in a paddock. And who would his new bedfellows be? The usual point of concern when a mission was at the embryonic stage: who would help it along and who would stand in its way, who was an ally and who was the enemy? Strangers would lurch out of any imagined mist. Might help, might hinder. Always the way with his work. He turned the word over in his mind as he stamped off down the pavement: Murmansk. He had just the man for it.