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padded with burgundy-coloured leather brass-tacked against the frame.
    Apart from Stalin’s desk, and a table covered with a green cloth, the space was sparsely furnished. With the exception of a large eighteenth-century grandfather clock, made by the English clockmaker John Ellicott, which had been allowed to wind down and was silent now, the full yellow moon of its pendulum at rest behind the rippled glass window of its case.
    The red curtains were drawn and the light in the room came from a three-bulbed fixture fitted to the ceiling. A thread of smoke rose from a cigarette which Stalin had recently stubbed out in a brass ashtray on his desk.
    Stalin himself stood in the centre of the room, his back to Pekkala, staring at the wall.
    It took Pekkala a moment to realise what Stalin was looking at.
    Between the portraits of Lenin and Engels hung another painting, much smaller than the ones on either side of it.
    ‘Perhaps it would look better over there, Comrade Stalin.’
    Stalin turned and squinted at Pekkala, his eyes red-rimmed with fatigue. ‘What did you say?’
    ‘Over there,’ repeated Pekkala, gesturing towards the blank wall behind Stalin’s desk.
    ‘Do you know what this is?’ demanded Stalin, aiming a finger at the painting.
    Pekkala stepped forward and peered at the painting.  ‘A cecropia moth.’
    Stalin shook his head in amazement. ‘How is it, Inspector,’ he began, ‘that you can neither feed nor barely dress yourself except in clothing so long out of fashion that people regularly mistake you for a ghost, and yet you can tell me the name of that insect?’
    ‘I used to see them around the house where I grew up,’ explained Pekkala. He remembered the long path through the woods to the place where his father, an undertaker in the town of Lappeenranta in eastern Finland, had built a crematory oven. Pekkala’s mother had once given him a sandwich and a thermos of hot milk to take to his father, who was working all night at the oven. Four bodies were to be cremated that night, which meant eight hours of tending the fire. Carrying a lantern, Pekkala had set out along the path, staring straight ahead, convinced that the pine trees on either side were closing in on him. Arriving at the oven, he found his father stripped to the waist and sitting on the stump of a log. At first, Pekkala had thought the man was reading a book, but then he realised that his father was just staring at his hands. Behind him, the crematory oven roared like distant thunder. The iron door to the oven was so hot it had begun to glow a poppy-red. Reaching up into the darkness, the tall chimney belched black smoke, which spread across the sky as if the smoke itself had spawned the night. Fluttering around his father’s head, Pekkala saw three moths, each one larger than a man’s palm. His father took no notice of them, even when one landed on his naked shoulder, which glistened with sweat from the heat of the oven. At last his father looked up from studying the wrinkles in his palm.
    ‘I see you’re not alone,’ said Pekkala.
    His father smiled. Gently he slid his fingers beneath the moth which had landed on his shoulder and lifted it into the air. Then he blew on the insect, as if blowing out the flame on a candle, and set the insect fluttering once more about his head. ‘ Hyalophora cecropia ,’ he told Pekkala. ‘They are an ancient breed, unchanged for thousands of years.’
    ‘Why have they not changed?’ asked Pekkala.
    ‘Because they are already perfectly adapted to the world in which they live. These moths keep me company out here, and remind me of the many imperfections of the human race.’ 
    Although it had been many years since then, Pekkala had never forgotten the distinctive pattern on their wings; the two eyes at each wing tip and the four reddish-white splashes and the scalloped line which trailed along the edges, its colours fading from reddish-brown to white like ink which had bled through soft paper.