A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia's War with the West

9 Death of an Oligarch ^{Commercial court, Rolls building, Fetter Lane, London, October 2011}

Eight months later, that October, I found myself inside London’s Rolls building. I was no longer reporting from Moscow. But, as with Litvinenko’s dramatic murder, it seemed that Russian feuds had a habit of spilling over into London. The building was Britain’s new commercial court. There was something in the air: the unmistakeable whiff of very large amounts of cash.

Up on the third floor I found two rival entourages. There were supporters in shiny suits, relatives, friends, PR consultants, journalists and a glamorous Russian woman dressed in black, her blonde hair piled into a chignon. There were lawyers, dozens of them. And there were bodyguards, outsize figures with earpieces.

At the centre of all this were two Russians. Once they were friends and business partners. Now they were bitter enemies. They walked separately into courtroom 26 and sat on opposite sides. One of them was a short, balding man in his mid-sixties, the possessor of an immense and restless energy, which compelled him to speak, move, fidget and gesture. His mind was said to be like a powerful computer. His mood – at this point sunny – was written all over his face.

The other was two decades younger, in his mid-forties. This second man seemed quiet, shy, calm and politely aloof. He appeared oblivious to the teeming drama around him. And sympathetic, too: with a boyish face, light beard turning grey, and a clear, open-eyed expression. His suit was smart yet understated. He sat placidly in one corner, listening to the proceedings via headphones, a reluctant participant with a bemused smile.

The first Russian was Boris Berezovsky. Berezovsky may have caused my departure from Russia, but this was the first time I had seen him. The second man was Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea football club in west London. Both were billionaires and among the richest people on the planet.

The dispute between the two of them was the biggest private litigation battle in UK history. At stake was an awful lot of cash. Berezovsky claimed that Abramovich had cheated him out of over $5 billion (£3.2bn). He said that he and Abramovich were partners back in the 1990s in the oil firm, Sibneft, and that he had been forced later to sell his share at a considerable loss. Abramovich denied the claim.

The case was more than a feud over billions. It was the latest instalment in the bitter decade-long public war between Berezovsky and Putin, Abramovich’s friend and political boss. Putin wasn’t in court but scowled above the hearings, which would go on for twelve weeks, like a malevolent ghost. The dispute was also about what exactly happened in the 1990s when President Yeltsin, in effect, gave away state assets to a handful of insiders, the oligarchs.

Both litigants had submitted witness statements to the judge, Mrs Justice Gloster. They made fascinating reading. Berezvosky’s gave an account of his relations with Putin, a tale of friendship and – as both men saw it – betrayal. The two were once close. They first met in late 1991 when Putin was head of St Petersburg’s external-relations committee and Berezovsky was trying to expand his LogoVAZ car franchise. ‘During this time we became friends,’ Berezovsky wrote. They went on holiday together in Russia and abroad, he said. In the early 1990s, Putin stayed with Berezovsky at his chalet in Gstaad in Switzerland for several days.

In his statement, Berezovsky took credit for Putin’s rapid rise in politics. He said that he introduced Putin to Yeltsin’s team, and supported his appointment as FSB chief. When Litvinenko revealed the plot to kill Berezovsky, the oligarch was ‘disappointed’ by Putin’s cool reaction. Nevertheless, they remained friends. In February 1999, Putin turned up to the birthday party of Berezovsky’s partner Elena Gorbunova. Later the same year, Berezovsky backed Putin as prime minister. He even flew to Biarritz that summer to persuade him to take the job – shades here of a reluctant Julius Caesar refusing to take the crown.

Like many others, Berezovsky appears to have found in the inscrutable Putin what he wanted to see. There were warning signs but he chose to ignore them. During one meeting, he spotted that Putin had a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka, Lenin’s murderous secret police, in his office. Berezovsky was astonished but said: ‘He [Putin] had never before seemed to be a chekist – someone who believed that the security organisations were entitled to do as they pleased.’

Once Putin was in the Kremlin, these tensions escalated into full-blown conflict. ‘I am not the kind of person who can remain silent when someone, even the president, is acting politically in a way with which I disagree,’ he told the court, truthfully.

The end came when Berezovsky’s ORT TV station criticised Putin for his apparent indifference over the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk. The navy vessel suffered an explosion in the Barents Sea; everybody on board drowned. Putin, meanwhile, was on holiday near the resort of Sochi, riding around on a jet ski. Berezovsky said he rang Putin and told him he had to get back to Moscow, otherwise the criticism would get worse. Putin was furious.

During their last meeting in August 2000, Putin told Berezovsky to sell ORT or go to jail. The president accused Berezovsky of ‘hiring prostitutes to pose as the widows and sisters of sailors killed aboard the Kursk to attack him verbally’. The allegation was crazy, probably invented by the FSB, and Berezovsky said so. Putin’s parting words were stiff: ‘Goodbye, Boris Abramovich,’ he said, using the formal patronymic. Berezovsky’s sorrowful reply, addressing Putin’s informally, was: ‘Goodbye, Volodya.’

In October 2000, and under criminal investigation, the oligarch left for France and then Britain, never to go back.

Berezovsky’s fall coincided with Roman Abramovich’s rise. By the late 1990s, Abramovich was a Kremlin insider in his own right. (In 1999, he allegedly approached Berezovsky and suggested they buy Putin a $50 million yacht as a present. Berezovsky declined; Abramovich bought the yacht anyway.) By 2000 – according to Berezovsky – Abramovich ‘played a central role in the selection of members of President Putin’s cabinet’, and had the power to open and shut criminal cases.

Abramovich took advantage of his position, Berezovsky said. In exile he was compelled to sell his interest in Sibneft at a ‘gross undervalue’. His stake was worth at least $7 billion, Berezovsky claimed. Abramovich paid him a measly $1.5 billion. Berezovsky didn’t think much of Abramovich’s intellectual gifts either. But, he said, his former friend had one magical talent: everyone liked him. Berezovsky wrote: ‘He is good at psychology in this way. He is good at appearing to be humble. He is happy to spend days socialising with important or powerful people if that is what is needed so that he can get closer to them.’

By the time of Litvinenko’s poisoning, Abramovich was a Kremlin insider and loyal functionary, serving as governor of Chukotka, a barren and backward federal district on Russia’s remote north east Pacific coast. He ploughed many of his millions into the territory – apparently at Putin’s request. Unlike Berezovsky, Abramovich obeyed the rule laid down by Putin at a meeting with Russia’s plutocrats in summer 2000. It said, in essence: keep your mouth shut and obey the state.

Abramovich’s witness statement was a chunky white booklet. He disputed practically everything Berezovsky said. His main claim was that he’d hired Berezovsky as a top-level Kremlin fixer because of Berezovsky’s connections with Yeltsin. A Russian word defined this arrangement – krysha, or roof. In return for his political services, Abramovich paid Berezovsky ‘more than $2.5 billion’ and funded the latter’s lavish lifestyle. This meant yachts, planes, a villa in France and jewellery for his girlfriend. Abramovich said he didn’t owe Berezovsky anything. He rejected his financial demands as ‘fantastic’.

As Abramovich told it, Berezovsky was someone who came to believe he was invincible – intellectually brilliant, but inconsistent, easily distracted, and obsessed with grandiose and ultimately pointless schemes. He was uninterested, Abramovich said, in the quotidian detail of running a company. Moreover, Berezovsky behaved like a child. Often he said the first thing that came into his head, Abramovich claimed in his statement, adding: ‘He would quite often convince himself that something was true, only later to convince himself of the opposite.’

The Chelsea FC owner was certainly right about one thing – that this was, as he put it, ‘a uniquely Russian story’. It hinged on what kind of agreement had been struck between the two participants many years previously. Berezovsky said the Sibneft deal had been made orally – a typical arrangement in Russia at the time, he argued, where business was done on the basis of personal trust and a handshake. Abramovich maintained that Berezovsky was never his partner.

This, then, was the story of two oligarchs – one loyal to the Putin regime, another actively plotting its overthrow.

The case began on a blue-skied October day. It was an alluring spectacle. Here were two figures who had played a key role in shaping the history of modern Russia – robber barons or respectable entrepreneurs, depending on your point of view – facing off against each other in the rule-bound setting of an English courtroom.

The question was: which of them would Mrs Justice Gloster believe?

Over the years, the Kremlin had tried various strategies to destroy Berezovsky. It had sought unsuccessfully to extradite him from Britain. There had been criminal prosecutions in Russia, trials in absentia, guilty verdicts. And of course the exemplary murder of Litvinenko, Berezovsky’s friend and lieutenant.

At some stage, his enemies noticed that he had a fondness for going to law. Berezovsky had served his writ against Abramovich after spotting him out shopping in the London branch of Hermès. Berezovsky was confident that Abramovich would settle, never believing he would turn up in a British court.

Now the case was about to start. According to Berezovsky’s friend Yuli Dubov – they had known each other since 1972 – the oligarch hadn’t actually read his own witness statement. Nor had he bothered to wade through 1,500 pages of court documents. What was going on?

‘He was a genius gambler,’ Dubov told me later. ‘It wasn’t fascinating for him to win. He had to win against the odds. If there is something that has to be done by midnight he would start doing it at 11.55 p.m.’ Berezovsky had always done impossible things – getting a PhD in the 1970s Soviet Union at a time of prejudice against Jews, winning elections for Yeltsin, bringing Putin into the Kremlin. Why should this time be different?

Berezovsky’s preparations, then, had been woefully inadequate. ‘He thought that he could go into court and after five minutes everybody would be charmed by his personality,’ Dubov said. Further, he had misjudged Abramovich in the same way he misread Putin. Berezovsky had known Abramovich as a callow young man. In the intervening years Abramovich had grown up, got serious.

‘Boris had a very high estimate of himself and a low estimate of his opponents,’ Dubov said. He added: ‘It’s the surest way of losing when you go into a fight.’

Abramovich had spent months preparing for the case. He hired a top legal team. Representing him was Jonathan Sumption, a stellar QC and now a UK Supreme Court justice. Often described as one of the cleverest men in Britain, Sumption is a scholar of medieval history. He is also the owner of a handsome French chateau, complete with dreamy towers, turrets and ramparts, in the Dordogne.

Sumption’s fee was rumoured to be more than £5 million. Berezovsky’s lead barrister was the South African-born Laurence Rabinowitz QC. Both took up positions in front of their respective clients. The judge, Mrs Justice Gloster, came in. She sat beneath the royal coat of arms: a lion and unicorn, a heraldic shield, and the motto in old French: ‘Evil be to him that evil thinks’.

Rabinowitz told the judge that the two Russians had worked together to acquire a shared asset, Sibneft, which made both of them wildly rich. After Berezovsky fled to London, Abramovich could remain loyal to his old friend or ‘profit from his difficulties’. He took the second option, the QC said. He conceded that the case was ‘incredibly complex’.

It wasn’t helped by the fact that several of its participants were dead. Berezovsky’s Georgian business partner Patarkatsishvili died of a heart attack in 2008; the British lawyer Stephen Curtis, who took notes at a crucial business meeting, perished in a helicopter crash in 2004 in Dorset. Rabinowitz added: ‘The case is rather lacking in contemporaneous documents. But some shine out like a beacon.’

At the end of day one, Berezovsky was in good cheer. The case seemed to be going his way. Marina Litvinenko had turned up to support him. We had met over lunch that summer, introduced by a former lecturer in Russian, Martin Dewhirst. I liked her immediately.

The next day, Berezovsky took to the witness box. He looked relaxed, in charcoal jacket and open shirt, and declared himself ready to answer everything and anything. Berezovsky opted to speak in English. After over a decade in the UK, Berezovsky’s English was fluent. It didn’t always make sense, though: his sentences were often ungrammatical, with muddled tenses, articles that tended to go awol, and errant prepositions. He had a strong Russian accent.

He began by sketching his relations with Yeltsin – good, he said, after he got friendly with the president’s daughter Tatiana.

Sumption, Abramovich’s star lawyer, got to his feet. The barrister pointed out that in 2001 Berezovsky had sued Forbes magazine after it said that he had influenced Yeltsin through his daughter. Now Berezovsky had just admitted this was true. Sumption read from Berezovsky’s earlier witness statement. ‘Why did you deny it and then sign a statement of truth in support of your denial?’ he asked. Visibly flustered, Berezovsky gave a smile. He replied: ‘It’s a good question.’

The court laughed. Mrs Justice Gloster was unimpressed. She chipped in: ‘Well, could you answer it, please?’ Berezovsky said his lawyers had prepared the document, and he hadn’t paid too much attention to it.

The rest of the day was less painful. Berezovsky agreed with Sumption’s description of 1990s Russia as the ‘wild east’. (The barrister further likened the lawless post-communist era to ‘fourteenth-century England’, his expert period.) The oligarch admitted that corruption was widespread, but said that he personally ‘wasn’t corrupt’. He said that, under Yeltsin, Russia was significantly less corrupt than today under Putin’s authoritarian leadership, which scored ten out of ten for corruption compared with Yeltsin’s ‘three or four’ out of ten.

The hearings settled into a routine. Berezovsky attended every day. Outside the courtroom he chatted to journalists, many of them Russian; he shook hands, greeted well-wishers. I introduced myself. Berezovsky muttered something; a bodyguard gave me his business card; the great man moved on. At lunch he ate sushi with his legal team in a third-floor consultation room.

Abramovich, by contrast, didn’t mingle. It was as if an invisible bubble protected him. The two men politely ignored each other. In the corridors and the lift they kept apart, their teams occupying different parts of the wavy glass court complex.

For onlookers, the case was the best free show in town, not least because it offered a glimpse into the weird world of the super-rich. Forbes estimated Abramovich’s then fortune at $13.4 billion. Giving evidence, he admitted to owning a string of properties. They included a multimillion-pound chateau in France, once belonging to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; a 420-acre estate in West Sussex, Fyning Hill; and a ‘large and expensive central London’ home in Lowndes Square, Knightsbridge.

Asked if he had an extravagant lifestyle, Abramovich said: ‘Well, yes, possibly. I agree, yes, one could put it that way.’

According to Abramovich, he and Berezovsky had been friends, but not close friends. Instead their relationship was one of ‘protectee’ and ‘protector’. Once Berezovsky fell out with Putin, Abramovich considered their krysha arrangement defunct. He said he continued to hand over large sums to a greedy Berezovsky because he felt some loyalty to him.

The reality, though, was Berezovsky’s epoch was over. ‘Russia had moved on. I had moved on,’ he said. Meanwhile, Abramovich said he’d never aspired to be a public person. He said he was taken aback that buying Chelsea FC in 2003 had made him a figure of global interest. In 2005, Abramovich said he sold his share in Sibneft to Gazprom, an arm of the Russian government. He got $13 billion for it.

Rabinowitz did his best to pull Abramovich’s story apart. But the oligarch was well prepared. He gave his evidence in Russian. Mostly, Abramovich replied to the QC’s questions with a single word: ‘Da’. His style was minimalist. (At one point, having failed to receive an answer, Rabinowitz prodded him with the words: ‘Could you say “Da”, please.’) The court adjourned in January 2012 while Mrs Justice Gloster went away to write her judgment.

Eight months later, on the last day of August, the judge came back. Berezovsky strolled into the Rolls building, as ebullient and upbeat as ever. I asked him if he was about to win his battle against his ex-friend? He told me: ‘I’m confident. I believe in the system,’ then we went through the metal detector together to the lift. We travelled up to the fourth floor.

At 10.30 a.m., Gloster walked into court. Everyone rose. There was a hush. The first three rows were packed with lawyers – the true winners in this multi-billion-pound struggle. Berezovsky sat in his old spot on the left near the door, two bodyguards behind him. Abramovich wasn’t there. ‘He’s probably on his yacht in Corfu or Marbella,’ someone whispered.

Berezovsky had always believed in British justice – which, after all, had granted his 2003 application for political asylum. It had handed him handsome libel victories, too. But on this occasion, the same system delivered him an almighty and humiliating kick. First, the judge dismissed his case and his claim that he was ever a partner with Abramovich in Sibneft. Then she gave her reasons.

They were withering, in the kind of remorseless language rarely heard in the High Court. Berezovsky, we learned, had destroyed himself early on in the witness box. ‘On my analysis of the entirety of the evidence, I found Mr Berezovsky an unimpressive and inherently unreliable witness, who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be moulded to suit his current purposes,’ the judge said.

Berezovsky clutched his face. She continued: ‘At times the evidence which he gave was deliberately dishonest; sometimes he was clearly making his evidence up as he went along in response to the perceived difficulty in answering the questions in a manner consistent with his case.

‘At other times, I gained the impression that he was not necessarily being deliberately dishonest, but had deluded himself into believing his own version of events. On occasions he tried to avoid answering questions by making long and irrelevant speeches, or by professing to have forgotten facts which he had been happy to record in his pleadings or witness statements.’

Berezovsky had been right about one thing. Abramovich had charmed the judge. She concluded that Abramovich was a ‘truthful and on the whole reliable witness’ – one who gave ‘careful and thoughtful answers, which were focused on the specific issues about which he was questioned’.

The judge even absolved Putin of wrongdoing. She said that there was no evidence that Putin had bullied Berezovsky into selling his TV station, a remark that prompted laughter and incredulity from Russians sitting in the back row. Putin had held a grudge against the British judicial system ever since it granted Berezovsky asylum. Now it had delivered Putin a glorious victory.

A stunned Berezovsky appeared on the pavement in front of the cameras. The judge had tried to rewrite Russian history, he said, adding that his faith in the system had been badly shaken. Had he expected to win? ‘Absolutely.’ Berezovsky said he hadn’t yet decided whether to appeal – a tricky step, given the judge’s devastating comments. ‘I’m absolutely amazed what happened today. I’m surprised completely,’ he said.

He quoted Winston Churchill, who said that democracy was bad but that nobody had devised a better alternative. He said: ‘English court is bad but there is nothing better.’ The oligarch said he didn’t regret bringing the case. He even attempted a note of stoicism, observing: ‘Life is life.’ He left in a black Mercedes.

Berezovsky had suffered a grievous blow. But friends pointed to his enormous appetite for life, politics and intrigue. They mentioned his love of women, and his wealth. His fortune was now much diminished. But he was still rich. They thought he would recover.

Gloster’s verdict was peculiar. Juridically it was perhaps unanswerable. Berezovsky had contradicted himself in the witness box; any court would take a dim view of lying. For those who knew Russia in the 1990s, though, it seemed strange. There were no bad guys and good guys at that time; the privatisations that benefited a small group of oligarchs were surely all dubious and done at the expense of ordinary Russians; the absence of documentation from this period was unsurprising.

Berezovsky’s friends felt an injustice had taken place. They considered appealing. Nikolai Glushkov, who gave evidence for Berezovsky, thought the judgment was deeply one-sided. He complained to the court authorities, without success. Frustrated, he showed me the letter he’d got by way of brush-off. Dubov took a slightly different view. He felt Berezovky had told the truth, broadly, but that much of the detail was wrong or invented retrospectively.

It was ironic. An English court had achieved something the Kremlin had been trying to do for a decade – shut down Berezovsky’s anti-Putin London operation. As a result of his diminished wealth, Goldfarb closed down the International Foundation for Civil Liberties. Over twelve years it had disbursed $75 million on various causes – grants to the Sakharov museum in Moscow; full-page newspaper adverts depicting Putin as Groucho Marx during the 2006 G8 summit; Litvinenko’s London rent.

The immediate casualty was Marina Litvinenko, whose legal costs Berezovsky had underwritten. She was faced with a problem. Where to find £300,000 so she could be represented at a forthcoming inquest into her husband’s death? I agreed to help; we shot a video at the Guardian’s office. Marina told me she wanted to hang on to her legal counsel so she might uncover the truth behind the murder. ‘I’m very grateful for all these things Berezovsky did for us. For six years he supported us,’ she said.

By end of the year there was no word from Berezovsky himself as to whether he would appeal. In the past, Berezovsky had been happy to give interviews. As a result of his loss to Abramovich he’d ceased to be a public and political figure. He was uncharacteristically dormant. Sometimes he answered his mobile; more often he didn’t. (I reached him once and he agreed to meet, but we never fixed a date.) He sold his home in Wentworth, Surrey – he faced £100 million in legal bills – and moved into his ex-wife Galina Besharova’s place near Ascot in Berkshire.

Previously, Berezovsky had slept just four hours a night. He had thrown himself into multiple projects, exhausting all those around him. He travelled regularly to Israel and South Africa. In the wake of defeat, his world shrank. He would come down from his bedroom for breakfast, return to his room, and not emerge again until mid-afternoon. Friends suspected the verdict had sent him into a psychological decline; his normal energy and joie de vivre gone.

By early 2013, Berezovsky’s family – two ex-wives, one ex-partner and six children – felt he was in better shape. He had, they thought, thrown off his depression. In February, Glushkov emailed me to say that he had quarrelled with Boris, but added that he was ‘most positive’ his friend would be ‘back in public life’ later that year.

In late March, his bodyguard, Avi Navama, went off to do some shopping, leaving Berezovsky alone in the Surrey house. It was a Saturday afternoon. Navama is an Israeli former special forces soldier. He’d spent six years living with Berezovsky and was at his side during the High Court hearings. Navama returned at 3 p.m. There was no sign of his boss. He saw Berezovsky’s mobile phone lying on the table. There were missed calls. This was unusual. He went upstairs to the bathroom. No sound. The door was locked from the inside.

Navama kicked open the door. Inside, he found Berezovsky lying on the floor, his favourite black scarf twisted around his neck. The neck showed bruising. Next to Berezovsky was a broken shower rail. Navama touched Berezovsky’s hand. It was cold. He retreated from the bathroom, shut the door behind him and rang the police.

By the time Berezovsky’s ex-wife Galina arrived at the house, officers from Thames Valley Police were already there; they kept her, her two children and Navama downstairs in the kitchen. Berezovsky’s friend Dubov arrived at 5 p.m. The police wouldn’t allow him inside, so he sat on the road in a police car for the next twelve hours, awaiting news.

Berezovsky’s death, in a secluded estate in south-east England, prompted a full-scale investigation. After Litvinenko’s murder, the police were taking no chances. A paramedic, John Pocock, examined Berezovsky’s body on the bathroom floor. Pocock was carrying a radiation detection device. It gave off a ‘warning tone’. Detectives later said the device had a battery fault.

Government atomic energy scientists tested samples taken from Berezovsky for radioactivity. They were sent to the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston. They found no traces.

Nor were there any signs of a break-in.

Instead, the police moved quickly to the theory that Berezovsky had killed himself. Chief Inspector Kevin Brown, the detective in charge, released a statement saying he was ruling out ‘third party involvement at this stage’. His conclusions were apparently drawn from the medical evidence – there was no obvious sign of foul play – and from interviews with Berezovsky’s associates.

The picture was of a depressed and broken man who in his final months had talked frequently of taking his own life. Navama told police that on one occasion Berezovsky had picked up a steak knife, and demanded: ‘Where should I cut?’ On another he asked his bodyguard: ‘What is the best way to die?’ Berezovsky had also inquired how he might choke himself.

Marina Litvinenko was distraught. She emailed:

Those in Berezovsky’s grieving circle were unconvinced by this official version of events. After several attempts to kill him, including by the FSB in the 1990s, they suspect he too was murdered, like Litvinenko. ‘I don’t believe in suicide. He could not do it psychologically. He wasn’t this kind of person,’ Dubov told me.

Dubov likened Berezovsky’s death to the locked-room mysteries he used to read as a child growing up in the Soviet Union. He was a fan of the crime novels of the American writer John Dickson Carr, also known as Carter Dickson. Carr specialised in impossible situations, in which murderers would kill their victims from inside a sealed room and vanish without trace. There would be no sign of an exit from windows or a chimney; no footprints in the snowy yard below or roof above.

‘Maybe I’m just influenced by reading too many stories all those years ago,’ Dubov said. ‘I think that given a certain kind of fantasy I could come up with a vision of how it was done.’

Glushkov, who had known the oligarch since 1989, said: ‘I will never believe in the natural death of Berezovsky. The idea that he would have taken his own life is bullshit. You have the deaths of Boris and [his business partner] Badri [Patarkatsishvili] over a short period of time. Too many bodies are happening. I would say this is a little bit too much.’

Litvinenko’s friend Viktor Suvorov agreed: ‘That guy loved life so much. He loved women so much. For me it isn’t possible to imagine he could kill himself.’ Suvorov said he’d hated Berezovsky before he knew him, viewing him as a crook who had destroyed Russia and its chances of turning into a normal democratic country. ‘When I met him I immediately melted. He was such a charming man. A negative genius.’

Some interpreted the circumstances of his death as a coded message from the Kremlin. Berezovsky had disagreed with Putin’s war in Chechnya. In 1999, Putin said of the Chechen rebels: ‘If we catch them on the toilet, we will wipe them out in the outhouse.’ Did Berezovsky’s death in a bathroom, not far from the loo, hark back to Putin’s remark? Others believed Berezovsky may have been helped to commit suicide. They pointed to inconsistencies at the scene: what was Berezovsky’s body doing on the floor?

Meanwhile, Yuri Felshtinsky said he’d spoken to Berezovsky on the phone a few months before his death. ‘He didn’t appear to be suicidal. He had been looking for private schools in the US for his daughter. Boris understood that the Kremlin aimed to destroy him,’ Felshtinsky said.

The late French writer Gérard de Villiers – who specialised in turning real events into lightly fictionalised thrillers – devoted his last novel to Berezovsky. Called Revenge of the Kremlin, it postulates that Berezovsky was indeed murdered. A five-man squad neutralises the estate’s security system, goes into the house, and immobilises Berezovsky before he can reach for his gun. They inject him with an undetectable poison that renders him unconscious, tie his prone body to the shower rail and escape.

These suspicions, of course, proved nothing. But they spoke volumes about the expectations of Kremlin behaviour. After Litvinenko’s murder, the idea that the Russian government might assassinate a well-known political critic living in exile, in a country with which Russia was not at war, was all too believable.

In 2007, Scotland Yard had intercepted yet another plot to kill him. The alleged assassin was a Paris-based Chechen, Ruslan Atlangeriev. Police advised Berezovsky to leave the country for a few days; he flew to Israel. Atlangeriev was caught trying to break into Berezovsky’s Mayfair office. He was deported back to Russia, where he disappeared.

There was also the strange matter of the T-shirt.

In July 2010, Berezovsky met with a business associate from his Moscow days, Rafael Filinov, in London. Filinov also knew Andrei Lugovoi. Filinov delivered a present from Lugovoi for Berezovksy – a black custom-made T-shirt printed on the front and back.

The T-shirt didn’t win any prizes for subtlety. On the front were the words ‘Polonium-210, CSKA, London, Hamburg, to be continued’, around a red star logo of the CSKA football team. On the back: ‘CSKA Moscow, nuclear death is knocking your door’.

Was this a sick joke? Or a warning that Berezovsky was next? The oligarch’s assistant, Michael Cotlick, said Berezovsky held the T-shirt up and exclaimed: ‘Look what Lugovoi has sent me.’ They came to the conclusion that it wasn’t a threat, though what it portended was unclear. Cotlick gave the T-shirt to Scotland Yard. It joined the mountain of evidence against Lugovoi.

The Kremlin had put enormous pressure on Berezovsky over a period of many years – though his courtroom defeat was surely self-inflicted. In Moscow, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman, claimed that Berezovsky had written a letter to Russia’s president shortly before his death requesting forgiveness. Berezovsky begged to come home to Russia, Peskov said. The letter was never published.

Meanwhile, a Russian reporter from Forbes claimed to have interviewed Berezovsky in London’s Four Seasons Hotel the evening before his death. Berezovsky allegedly told the reporter, Ilya Zhegulev, he yearned for Moscow and had ‘over-estimated’ the west. Berezovsky drank a cup of tea with honey.

These Moscow-inspired media reports looked and sounded self-serving. Deconstructed, they amounted to a Kremlin morality tale: if you oppose legitimate Russian power, you end up in exile, broke, friendless and ultimately dead. Nikolai Kovalyov, the former head of the FSB, probably best summed up the Kremlin’s real feelings towards the late oligarch. Kovalyov told Russian TV that Berezovsky had got what he and other traitors deserved – an unpleasant end.

Berezovsky’s funeral took place in May 2013. Six weeks had passed since his death. Around thirty mourners – family, friends and lawyers – attended. There was tight security. The ceremony was in Brookwood Cemetery near Woking in Surrey. The service took place in a small brick chapel, overlooked by suitably Russian pines and silver birches, and under a dull, pearl-grey sky.

One guest arrived in a Bentley. There were several Mercedes. I travelled by rail, reporting on the event for the Guardian. Others dressed in black and bearing white lilies came on the same modest suburban train to Brook-wood Station. Zakayev turned up with his son Shamil; we chatted briefly. Berezovsky’s daughter Yelizaveta brought flowers. It was a strikingly understated send-off for a man who had lived and blazed in the public eye, in Russia and the UK.

‘He was a friend. I miss him. I’m very grateful to Boris. Through him I felt the touch of history,’ Goldfarb said. For better or worse, he added, Berezovsky had played a major role in the 1990s: advising Yeltsin, bringing peace to Chechnya and promoting Putin – his biggest error. One of the mourners was Rabinowitz, his QC. What did he make of Berezovsky? Rabinowitz, walking along a path lined with rhododendrons, and in meditative mood, told me: ‘He was very Russian, like something from the pages of a Dostoyevsky novel.’

In March 2014, an inquest opened into Berezovsky’s death. The two-day hearing in Windsor heard evidence that confirmed suicide. Dr Simon Poole, a forensic scientist, said that microscopic tests of the tissues on Berezovsky’s neck revealed no sign of any restraint or defence injuries. Toxicology tests didn’t turn up any poisons. Another scientist, Dr Raymond Fysh, said he saw no evidence that Berezovsky had been strangled.

A German forensic pathologist, Professor Bernd Brinkmann, disagreed. Brinkmann didn’t examine Berezovsky’s corpse but he did review autopsy photographs. He concluded that the businessman didn’t kill himself. His report, commissioned by Berezovsky’s family, said that a number of assailants may have murdered Berezovsky, suspending him by his scarf from the shower rail. ‘The strangulation mark is completely different from the strangulation mark in hanging,’ Brinkmann said. An assailant could have throttled him in a bedroom, he posited.

Brinkmann was an interesting witness. It was Brinkmann who had proved that the Italian banker Roberto Calvi – found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in 1982 – had been murdered. Calvi’s family had never believed the official version of suicide; Brinkmann’s report two decades later led police to reopen the case as a murder inquiry. The killers appeared to be the Sicilian mafia. In 2005, five Italians were tried for Calvi’s murder but acquitted.

This time, however, the coroner Peter Bedford was sceptical of Brinkmann’s conclusions. Bedford said it was unlikely anyone could have attacked Berezovsky ‘without any reaction’ from him. Rather, Bedford said that there was convincing evidence that Berezovsky – depressed, and under financial pressure – was capable of suicide. However, Bedford acknowledged that Brinkmann was an eminent witness. He entered an open verdict.

This meant the cause of death was impossible to determine. It could be either murder or suicide. Thames Valley Police were privately irritated with the verdict and Brinkmann’s evidence.

The family still believe Berezovsky was murdered. Yelizaveta Berezovskaya, daughter by his first marriage, pointed a finger at the Russian government. She told the inquest a number of people would be interested in having him killed. The motive, she suggested, was obvious: for more than a decade Berezovsky had warned that Putin wasn’t merely a danger to Russia but was capable of menacing other countries too.

Recent events had proved him right. ‘I don’t think they liked what my father was saying. He was saying that Putin was a danger to the whole world. And you can see that now,’ she said.

It was hard to disagree with that. Days earlier, Putin had annexed a large chunk of someone else’s territory.

Putin seemed unstoppable. But just a few months before Berezovsky’s demise, another mysterious death of a Russian émigré on British soil was to raise still further questions that were to resonate at the very top of international politics.