I took my seat next to Natasha so that Finn would now look at both of us, and the conversation continued in a relaxed and businesslike way.

And then, at the appointed moment, Natasha looked up the table towards Finn. It was all rehearsed. In her lazy seducer’s voice which she and I would practise to our increasing amusement in her apartment over a bottle of wine, she came out with the line we’d told her to say.

‘Tell me, Finn, are you a spy?’

This was the signal for the whole table to stop talking and look directly at Finn. I was supposed to read his face.

There was dead silence. It was a foolish, old-fashioned Cold War moment.

But all I saw in Finn’s eyes was his continued relaxed amusement. And then, startlingly, he put up his hands like a pickpocket caught in the act.

‘How did you guess?’ he said.

It was brilliantly done.

It was certainly not what anyone had expected. It threw the business officials at the party into barely concealed consternation. One or two of Drachevsky’s managers looked around, breaking the injunction to stay staring at Finn, as if they were personal witnesses to a great diplomatic scandal. ‘The Second Secretary of Trade and Investment at the British embassy in Moscow admits to being a spy.’ These managers were almost there, at the interview with ORT News, telling the story of the headline with knitted brows and the melodramatic seriousness beloved by TV interviewees.

But I saw immediately that to look at Finn was not to look at a man who appeared to have confessed to anything at all.

At least silence was maintained in the confusion and the rest of us stayed staring at Finn, hoping, I suppose, to unsettle him. Finn, however, treated us like an audience he had spent hours trying to win. This was his moment of triumph, not defeat, he seemed to say.