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was a decent-sized second bedroom. But even if it had had one, an apartment wasn’t the right place to bring up a child. Anna was right about that, as she was about most things. We had to do what city-based parents did all over the planet – move out to the suburbs.
    I helped her to her feet. Strange to think it was only two years since I’d first gripped her hand. Even then – standing among the wreckage of an aircraft full of dead men and drug dollars I’d shot down – I’d felt I’d known her all my life.
    I’d been working undercover for the Firm; she’d been investigating a corrupt Russian industrialist’s links with the Iranian ayatollahs. She said she wouldn’t have touched me with a ten-foot pole if she could have sorted it on her own. Then she gave me the kind of smile that makes your knees go funny.
    She was a dead ringer for the girl from Abba with blonde hair and high cheekbones. I fancied her big-time. As a sixteen-year-old boy soldier I’d sat in the NAAFI with my pint of Vimto and steak-and-kidney pie, waiting for Top of the Pops . ‘Dancing Queen’ had already been number one for about five years, and I took my seat in front of the TV every week hoping her reign would be extended.
    I smiled as I draped her black raincoat around her shoulders. ‘OK, let’s get this little soldier on the road.’
    She didn’t smile back.

2
    We drove out towards the ring road to the east of the city, scanning the various neighbourhoods that had spawned since the collapse of Communism.
    Suburbia was beginning to take shape on the Moscow margins. The media were full of it – all the usual moaning about forests having huge holes ripped out of them to make way for gated communities with names like ‘Navaho’ and ‘Chelsea’.
    At first glance, the area she wanted us to concentrate on – wide boulevards, criss-crossed with electricity and phone cables and jammed with four-wheel-drives and people-carriers – reminded me of an American Midwestern sprawl. But the planning department must have been sick the day they’d dreamed this place up, or at a resort on the Black Sea spending the contents of the brown envelopes the developers had slipped them. Huge apartment blocks reared haphazardly between small houses with a bit of yard and big ones with gardens.
    Alongside the biggest collection of billionaires on earth, the massive migrant population, as well as the poor, old, dying, drunk and drugged, scraped a living in these old Soviet concrete blocks. They were all fucked big-time. In winter, portable paraffin heaters provided their only warmth, but gave off so much moisture that their windows still froze solid on the inside – unless they’d already sold the glass and shoved up plywood in its place. In Putin’s Russia, everyone was an entrepreneur.
    Anna was determined to find somewhere our baby could grow up safe from predators – somewhere with gates; big ones. Gates to her were things that kept people out. She was right, of course, but to me they had always been things that locked people in.
    We had no idea of the kid’s sex – Anna didn’t want to know, and I wasn’t bothered as long as all its arms and legs were in the right places. We hadn’t even talked about names. But she wasn’t the only one whose switch had been thrown. I felt stuff the moment I saw the first scan, even though it looked like nothing more than a grey peanut, and those feelings got a whole lot stronger when I felt the first kick.
    I hadn’t expected ever to have kids of my own; I could only just look after myself. And I certainly hadn’t expected to feel this way if I did. I already knew I’d go to the ends of the earth to protect it.
    The rest of the package I still wasn’t sure about: the nuclear family. I’d seen it, at least from a distance, but never needed it. I’d been a best man once; that was as close as I ever wanted to get to a wedding.
    ‘Nicholas?’
    ‘Hey, I’ve been thinking, maybe we could keep two