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

3 First Deployment ^{25 Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, London, Summer–Autumn 2006}

There is something surreal about Mayfair. It is London’s wealthiest district, a dark-blue square on the Monopoly board and home to successive influxes of the international super-rich. Arabs rich from oil, Greek shipping tycoons, African dictators – all find a home here, washed in by a global tide of credit crises, coups and recessions.

In Mayfair’s Hanover Square, boys and girls in red uniforms play games at the end of the school day, among plane trees and an exotic palm from the Canary Islands. It’s all rather English pastoral. The girls sport straw boaters. Around the square are boutiques, florists, a library and pigeons; nannies chatting in Russian sit on park benches.

North of the square you find Grosvenor Street and a row of fashionable eighteenth-century Georgian townhouses. This was once the abode of earls, lords, admirals and the odd poet. Now there are the understated brass plaques of commerce. It’s not entirely clear what many of the businesses based here do. Hedge funds? Corporate PR? Wealth management? The location radiates prestige, reliability, trustworthiness.

And a little mystery. If London is the spy capital of the world, Mayfair is its centre. It is the traditional home of private intelligence companies. There are casinos, luxury car showrooms and exclusive nightclubs. Nearby is Pall Mall. Here, in gentlemen’s clubs, the establishment comes together. Defence officials, spooks and ministers meet to do deals and exchange gossip. The Houses of Parliament are down the road.

Most of those who work in private intelligence have at some point been on the other side. They include exspies, army officers and former Scotland Yard detectives – sometimes ones prepared to bend the law.

Their work includes providing business intelligence, investigating employee fraud and supplying personal protection. Another lucrative market is due diligence. Companies looking to expand internationally need information on prospective partners, especially in jurisdictions with lousy records of governance, like Africa, the Middle East and the ex-Soviet Union.

Litvinenko visited Grosvenor Street often. He would arrive here on foot, walking past the Bentleys, Porsches and Ferraris, before disappearing into an entrance with an ornate classical portico and heavy oak front door. This was 25 Grosvenor Street. On the fourth floor were two companies, Titon and Erinys. Both were bespoke intelligence firms. They operated in the commercial market but also had links – never quite defined – with the world of British spying.

When Litvinenko first fled to Britain, Berezovsky was paying him a salary of $6,000 a month. The money came from Berezovsky’s New York-based International Civil Liberties Foundation. It was reduced in 2003 and again in 2006. Berezovsky told police there was nothing malicious about these cuts. They were done by mutual agreement, he said, as Litvinenko became more ‘independent’, and started working for British and Spanish intelligence.

Litvinenko was understandably upset as his income fell. And, according to Goldfarb, ‘a little bit worried’ about his financial future. He was forced to seek other sources of income. He’d hoped that MI6 might give him a full-time job. It didn’t.

The agency did, though, introduce Litvinenko to Dean Attew, Titon’s director. It asked Attew if he might help Litvinenko to develop a commercial footprint. Litvinenko would conduct investigations into Russians who were of interest to clients. In return he’d get a fee.

Litvinenko knew about the Russian mafia and therefore had something to offer Titon. He also had one good source in Moscow. This was the investigative journalist and prominent Putin critic Anna Politkovskaya. Politkovskaya visited the UK often – her sister lives in London. She would bring Litvinenko news of the latest Kremlin intrigues. Some of Litvinenko’s other contacts were in jail (like former FSB-officer-turned-lawyer Trepashkin) or out of date.

What he needed was a Russian partner. In 2005, Litvinenko had what appeared to be a piece of luck. Andrei Lugovoi – at that time a successful Moscow-based businessman – rang him up. They had first met in 1995, when both had loosely been members of Berezovsky’s circle.

On 21 October 2005, Litvinenko had dinner with Lugovoi in a Chinese restaurant in Soho. Lugovoi said he had flown in for a match between Chelsea and Spartak Moscow. He brought someone with him: a pensioned-off Russian intelligence officer. The officer was a technical expert whose job was to place special microphones in foreign embassies and official buildings. His name remains unknown.

Recalling their conversation, Litvinenko said that forty minutes into the meal Lugovoi made him an interesting offer: ‘Alexander, if you like to work with me we can earn money together.’

Litvinenko could take orders from London-based companies seeking to do business in Russia, Lugovoi said. Back in Moscow, Lugovoi would collect sensitive information. They would be a team, a sort of mini-version of the New York-based corporate investigations and risk consultancy firm Kroll. They would make money. Litvinenko said: ‘Thank you, thank you.’

Litvinenko’s first foray into this industry with his new partner was with a company called RISC Management, run by a former Scotland Yard detective called Keith Hunter. It offered ‘security investigations and services’. Hunter specialised in Russian clients, one of them Berezovsky. Litvinenko was asked to investigate Russia’s deputy agriculture minister on behalf of a vodka company. Was the minister corrupt?

The money wasn’t huge, but Litvinenko found these corporate assignments interesting; his new colleagues good people. Increasingly, Lugovoi flew to London. The intelligence product he brought with him, as his part of the arrangement, was uninspiring. His work on the vodka assignment appeared to have been culled from the Russian internet.

Still, RISC paid $7,500 to Lugovoi’s Cyprus bank account. Lugovoi was ex-KGB, which meant a lot in Putin’s Russia. Maybe Lugovoi was the key that would prise open the door to Gazprom and other state giants.

In January 2006, Litvinenko, his Chechen friend and neighbour Zakayev, and their wives, were guests at Berezovsky’s sixtieth birthday party. It was a lavish black-tie affair held at Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of the Duke of Marlborough near Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Lugovoi flew in from Moscow. They shared a table and posed together for a photo in front of the palace’s entrance of classical columns. Lugovoi, standing on the left of the picture, is an ingenuous presence, his smile as ever disarming. It was the only time that Marina Litvinenko met Lugovoi.

Lugovoi flew back to the UK in March, April (twice) and May (twice) and June. He was a man of means who stayed in the best hotels – in Knightsbridge, Mayfair, Piccadilly. The trips were so frequent they aroused mild suspicion. A British consular official in Moscow noted on his visa application: ‘Speak to applicant and ask why he has used his last visa eight times and why he was in the UK and what he was doing?’

Another embassy official noted Lugovoi’s reply: ‘The applicant says he has travelled to the UK purely for holidays because he has friends there (Alexander Litvinenko) and he likes the UK. He travelled either alone or with his wife.’ Lugovoi’s passport is a galaxy of Russian exit and UK entry stamps – Stansted Airport, 22 January 2006, Gatwick, 5 April 2006.

Meanwhile, Litvinenko’s dealings with Berezovsky were cooling. The dispute was over money. There was no terminal quarrel. Berezovsky continued to pay Anatoly’s private school fees, and said of Litvinenko: ‘We continued good relations.’

Litvinenko’s relationship with Lugovoi, however, continued to grow – what had started as a business alliance apparently developing into friendship. Over the summer, Lugovoi and his wife Svetlana visited Litvinenko at his home in Muswell Hill. On the walls Lugovoi saw photos of Litvinenko with Bukovsky and Oleg Gordievsky, the former KGB colonel and station chief in London who famously defected to Britain in 1985. All three were prominent Putin enemies.

Litvinenko introduced Lugovoi to his circle of contacts, including Titon’s director Attew. The meeting took place at Heathrow Airport’s terminal one, while Lugovoi was on his way back from Canada to Moscow. Attew disliked him intensely: ‘Seven years of watching people around gaming tables and reading body language left me feeling extremely uncomfortable when I sat with Lugovoi. I didn’t enjoy the experience and was very pleased to be leaving there.’

Attew’s own status was a matter of sensitivity. Lugovoi would later claim that Attew was Litvinenko’s handler and an MI6 agent. And that Attew had tried – unsuccessfully – to recruit him as an asset for British intelligence. MI6 have not, of course, confirmed or denied this but it would not be unlikely that Attew was a former spook and he was certainly well connected in that world.

Soon after the Heathrow meeting, something very odd happened at 25 Grosvenor Street. In the early hours of the morning intruders broke down the black oak front door. They ignored the immediate offices and went to the fourth floor, taking out the entire door-frame to the Titon vestibule. They spent four or five minutes inside. Seemingly they stole nothing.

The next day Attew made a thorough search. No clues. ‘In my business, that’s a reconnaissance,’ he said. ‘That’s a recce.’ At the time Attew didn’t connect it with Litvinenko. Later the break-in made gruesome sense.

The job was done by professional agents. This was the FSB, almost certainly, scoping the ground for a future operation. Litvinenko had always warned Berezovsky that he was most at risk from people who’d featured in his past. In his keenness to make money, and to provide for his family, Litvinenko had forgotten his own rule.

It was a warm autumn day when the two Russian visitors arrived in Grosvenor Street. That morning, 16 October 2006, their undercover mission had almost met with failure when DC Scott, the customs officer, stopped them at Gatwick Airport. But their cover story had held up. Most importantly, the costly poison they had been given back in Russia was intact. This was polonium, a rare and highly radioactive substance. It is probably the most toxic substance known to man when swallowed or inhaled – more than 100 billion times more deadly than hydrogen cyanide.

The next task was to deploy it. They had come to poison Litvinenko.

Scotland Yard would never establish how Lugovoi and Kovtun carried the polonium into Britain. The amounts involved were very small and easy to disguise. There were several possibilities: a container with the poison administered by a pipette-style dropper. Or an aerosol-like spray. Even a modified fountain pen would do the trick. Within its container the polonium was safe. Out of it it was highly dangerous. Ingested, you were dead.

Lugovoi and Kovtun, it would become apparent, had no idea what they were carrying. Their behaviour in Britain was idiotic verging on suicidal. Nobody in Moscow appears to have told them Po-210 had intensely radioactive properties. Or that it left a trace – placing them in specific locations and indicating, via telltale alpha radiation markings, who sat where. It was possible to identify anything and everything they touched: door handles, telephones, wash basins.

These clueless assassins left numerous trails. The most vivid was radiation: subsequently tested by forensic experts, and turned by experts from the Metropolitan Police into colourful three-dimensional graphics. Another was financial: a series of clues whenever Lugovoi paid a bill with his Bank Metropol Mastercard. One other was cellular. Phone records, retrieved by detectives, showed who called whom, for how long, and when.

And of course there were witnesses. They told a remarkable story: of two killers who, in addition to the business of murder, indulged in sight-seeing, shopping, boozing, fine dining – and flirting. During their trips to London they tried to pick up women. Without success. Surely, the KGB was better at seduction in its heyday?

Earlier that morning – at 11.49 – Lugovoi had called Litvinenko from Gatwick Airport. He confirmed they were meeting that afternoon at the intelligence firm Erinys, Titon’s sister company at 25 Grosvenor Street. They would be discussing a potentially lucrative new line of business regarding the energy giant Gazprom. Lugovoi and Kovtun travelled by train to central London. They checked into the Best Western Hotel on Shaftesbury Avenue, in the heart of Soho.

The first rule of spycraft is not to draw attention to yourself. In Lugovoi and Kovtun’s case the reality was comically, even ludicrously, different. From the moment they stepped onto UK soil, Lugovoi and Kovtun attracted attention wherever they went. It wasn’t just that they were assassins: the problem was they looked like assassins, a pair of stage villains from FSB Casting.

The two Russians walked through the main entrance of the Best Western Hotel. Its Yugoslav-born manager, Goran Krgo, was on duty. Lugovoi did the talking, he recalled. Their rooms weren’t ready until 2 p.m, so he suggested they go and have lunch in a café nearby. The two guests didn’t have much luggage, which was unusual, he said.

When they came back, Lugovoi’s room – 107 – was ready. Lugovoi and Kovtun went upstairs. They emerged twenty minutes later, having swapped their casual clothes for ‘business’ attire. Their appearance prompted hotel staff to chuckle. Kovtun was wearing a silvery metallic polyester-type suit and Lugovoi was kitted out in checks. They had matched their shiny outfits with colourful shirts and ties. They wore chunky jewellery.

According to Krgo, the two men resembled stereotypical Eastern European gangsters. ‘I remember these guests quite vividly. We were laughing. The girl who worked behind the desk was amused by the dress code … and making general comments.’ Krgo added: ‘The colours didn’t match, the suits were either too big or too small, they just didn’t look like people who are used to wearing suits. They looked like – I think the expression is like a donkey with a saddle.’

At 3 p.m. Litvinenko met Lugovoi and Kovtun in Grosvenor Street. It was the first time Litvinenko had ever met Kovtun. Lugovoi introduced him as an old childhood friend with whom he was now in business. Kovtun said little. Litvinenko didn’t warm to him particularly, but nonetheless Kovtun must have seemed as if he might be another useful Russian contact he could tap for information. After all, if he was Lugovoi’s friend, he could trust him, surely?

The three Russians entered number 25 together – through its grand entrance with two white Doric columns – and took the lift to the fourth floor. Waiting for them there was Tim Reilly, the Russian-speaking head of Erinys; he shook their hands and led them inside.

Erinys and Titon International shared a boardroom. It wasn’t exactly sumptuous but had a few old-school establishment touches: an oak dining table covered in a green baize cloth; leather-upholstered chairs; a map of the world (nodding to Erinys’s ambitions). Tea and coffee sat on the sideboard. A bay window looked out onto the street.

Attew had previously introduced Litvinenko to Reilly as someone who might be useful to Russian-facing clients. Reilly warmed to Litvinenko. He thought him gregarious, dynamic and full of energy, but also prone to flash off in too many different directions. (Reilly attributed Litvinenko’s ‘lack of mental discipline’ to his background in the Soviet Union, where contacts were everything and analytical detail irrelevant. He said also that Litvinenko was learning and adapting to life in the west.)

For Reilly, the meeting was about a possible security contract with Gazprom. He shook hands with the Russians and showed them into the boardroom. Lugovoi arrived with shopping bags. The meeting began in typically English style, with talk of the sunny weather. Then Lugovoi steered the conversation round to tea. He suggested they all drink some, joking that the English had cups of tea all the time. Reilly declined and told them he’d just drunk water from the cooler. Lugovoi was weirdly persistent.

‘They kept on saying to me – don’t you want any [tea], won’t you have any?’ Reilly recalled.

Reilly served cups of tea to his three guests. He sat to the right of Litvinenko, who was at the head of the table with his back facing the bay window; immediately across the table from Reilly was Lugovoi. Kovtun sat to Lugovoi’s left. He said nothing. Lugovoi had visited Erinys two or three times before. ‘He was professional enough, smartly dressed, quite keen to impress, quite self-assured,’ Reilly said – a classic Novy Russky, or new Russian on the make, in his view.

‘We would call it nouveau riche, so they would have all the accoutrements of the western world and then there would be an odd, you know, shiny tie or something like that,’ he added. ‘It was quite funny. It sounds awful, but you could spot this straightaway. He was capable, he was reasonably intelligent.’

After making tea, Reilly – fortuitously for the would-be assassins – disappeared off to the loo.

We don’t know how the polonium was deployed. The forensic evidence suggests that either Lugovoi or Kovtun slipped it into Litvinenko’s cup of tea or water. Litvinenko failed to notice, or was otherwise distracted. For the next thirty minutes, the tea or glass of water sat in front of him, a little to his left – an invisible nuclear murder weapon.

The conversation was of Gazprom. Lugovoi and Kovtun must have been barely listening: for them, the only question was, would Litvinenko drink?

Litvinenko didn’t drink. The plan – pre-mediated, for sure, but possibly improvised in its execution – failed. One can only imagine what must have been going through Lugovoi’s and Kovtun’s minds when the meeting broke up, his drink untouched.

When nuclear scientists examined the Erinys table they found it was ‘heaving’ with radioactive contamination, in Reilly’s damning words. It appeared there had been substantial spillage. Reilly wondered whether he too had been an intended target. One spot in front of where Litvinenko had been sitting showed ‘full-scale deflection’. This meant an off-the-scale reading of more than 10,000 counts per second. Other parts of the baize had readings of 2,300 counts per second. One chair – where either Lugovoi or Kovtun had been sitting – registered at 7,000 counts per second.

The Russians would later claim that it was Litvinenko who had got hold of the radioactive polonium. They claimed that he had poisoned them, during this, their first significant encounter in Mayfair. All subsequent traces, they said, could be explained by this initial radioactive contact. It was a version they would repeat to Russian state media, which transmitted it as true.

This was a whopping lie, and easily disproved. Scotland Yard reconstructed Litvinenko’s journey from his home to Green Park using his Oyster Card. He had travelled on the number 43 bus, getting on at Friern Barnet, then taking the tube into central London from Highgate Station. The bus – vehicle registration LRO2 BCX – was found and tested for contamination. There wasn’t any.

Lugovoi and Kovtun, by contrast, left a lurid nuclear stain wherever they went, including in their hotel rooms, well before their first meeting with Litvinenko. After leaving Erinys, Litvinenko took the pair to his favourite branch of Itsu in Piccadilly Circus, close to the Ritz Hotel. They sat downstairs. Polonium was found here too. The visitors farewelled Litvinenko and returned to the Best Western Hotel.

Phone records show that at 19.55 Lugovoi made a phone call. He rang a woman identified only as ‘female A’. Lugovoi’s intentions were amorous. He had met female A on a previous visit, detectives established, and was keen to meet her again. Despite his best efforts, she turned him down.

Rebuffed, Lugovoi went out for dinner with Kovtun. At 8.30 p.m. they met Alexander Shadrin, the boss of Continental Petroleum Limited, which had formally invited them to London. CPL had won exploration licences to two oil fields in western Siberia. The firm had sought Lugovoi’s help after a gang tried to grab the oilfields – a ubiquitous criminal practice in Russia involving corrupt judges and bureaucrats, and known as ‘raiding’.

Improbably, Lugovoi had helped to secure rulings from provincial Siberian courts in CPL’s favour. For a far-away foreign investor to win victory over local crooks was a miracle. Apparently, Lugovoi had powerful friends. The judgment appeared to have more to do with Lugovoi’s elaborate cover story than with justice. The FSB may have arranged the ruling in order to help Lugovoi and Kovtun secure British visas for their many trips to London.

CPL’s office was at 58 Grosvenor Street, immediately across the road from Erinys and Titon, in a Georgian townhouse. The company was respectable. It even had aristocratic connections. Chairman of the board was the Honourable Charles Balfour, an old Etonian. It was Balfour who had written a letter to the British embassy in Moscow supporting Kovtun’s visa application.

Viewed with hindsight, this was not Balfour’s finest moment. He listed his interests in Debrett’s, the British toffs’ handbook, as ‘gardening, shooting, fishing, and bee-keeping’. He is descended from the Conservative prime minister and foreign secretary Arthur Balfour; his brother is the current earl.

The Russians had dinner with Shadrin at Pescatori, a family-run Italian fish restaurant in Dover Street. Lugovoi enjoyed the finer things in life. The bill shows the party ordered oysters, a grilled lobster, two tuna steaks (very rare), with grappa and espresso to finish. According to Shadrin, Lugovoi talked of his bottling plant in Russia. He insisted on picking up the £214.20 bill. He told Shadrin that since he was ‘pitching for business’, he would get the tab. Radiation was found here too: at their table, on cushions, in the gents’.

Afterwards, Lugovoi claimed that he and Kovtun strolled around Soho for one and a half hours. They dropped into a bar, Dar Marrakesh in the Trocadero Centre, where Lugovoi smoked a £9 shisa pipe on the terrace. It was 11 p.m., a balmy night. Scotland Yard later retrieved Lugovoi’s pipe. It was easy to spot: the handle gave off a ghostly alpha radiation glow.

Back at home in Muswell Hill, Litvinenko felt mildly unwell. He threw up, just once. His vomiting spasm was due to exposure to radiation – just from being near the poison. Litvinenko thought little of this episode. He had unwittingly survived his first encounter with polonium and an attempt to kill him.

At 1 a.m. the would-be killers returned to the Best Western Hotel. At some point that day or the next Lugovoi handled polonium in the privacy of his room, 107. He appears to have transferred it here from one container to another. And to have disposed of it down the bathroom sink.

We know this because Lugovoi’s plughole showed exceptionally high alpha radiation readings of 1,500 counts per second. There are lower readings elsewhere in the bathroom, and in the bedroom next door. Kovtun’s room, 306, is also heavily contaminated. There are 1,500 cps on a chair and coat-hanger, with lower readings from a radiator and phone directory.

The two Russians had booked into the Best Western for two nights, with Lugovoi paying in advance. The next day, 17 October, they abruptly checked out and took a taxi to the Parkes Hotel in Beaufort Gardens, Knightsbridge. Lugovoi explained the switch by saying he ‘didn’t like the condition of the rooms’. The real reason, most probably, was to distance himself from the poison, which he had efficiently tipped down the bathroom u-bend.

The Parkes Hotel was the scene of two encounters, both blackly comic. Front office manager Giuliana Rondini was on duty that afternoon. At 2 p.m. two guests walked in: Lugovoi, wearing a beige or brown casual-type jacket with a zip at the front, and Kovtun, in a grey jacket and black round-necked T-shirt. They told her they had moved hotels because their previous one was ‘overbooked’. Rondini checked them into the hotel’s last available rooms, 23 and 25.

The Russians returned to the lobby ten minutes later. Lugovoi asked Rondini where she was from. When she replied Sardinia he said he’d been there, to the capital Cagliari. They chatted. She asked if they needed a restaurant for the evening. Lugovoi then made a request. Was there was somewhere fun for later where he and Kovtun ‘might meet some girls’?

Rondini was used to dealing tactfully with these kinds of delicate enquiries from lonesome international travellers. She recommended a place just across the street – 1 Beaufort Gardens. ‘It was well known with girls. It was a brothel,’ Rondini said.

Failing that, she suggested an Italian restaurant, Pizza Pomodoro, in Beauchamp Place. Rondini said: ‘It was a place where you could go and have a pizza but also have fun and pick up girls. Pizza with extras, I would say.’

Meanwhile, a regular Australian guest staying at the hotel spotted Kovtun and Lugovoi in the lift. She told Andrea Furlani, who worked at reception, that they had struck her as strange.

She asked them: ‘Where are you from?’

Lugovoi replied in English: ‘Russia.’

She then said in tones of ice-breaking amusement: ‘Are you guys from the KGB?’

The two Russians started backwards. They looked horror-struck. Neither of them responded. The lift continued its descent in awkward silence. Later that day the Australian saw Kovtun and Lugovoi again in the hotel lobby and said a friendly hello. They ignored her. The pair must have been confused. Was this an uncomfortable coincidence? Was the Australian a spy? A British agent? Fuck!

At 6 p.m. Lugovoi and Kovtun met Litvinenko again outside the Oxford Street branch of Nike. They visited the offices of RISC Management. Daniel Quirke, one of RISC’s investigators, took them into the fifth-floor boardroom.

According to Litvinenko, Kovtun produced a small minidisc. Quirke fetched his laptop. There was a beep. Kovtun inserted the disc and typed in a four-digit access code. This program, apparently, enabled Kovtun to pick a telephone number in Russia and to listen in. He played two audio files. The room was filled with the sound of Russian voices; the quality was crisp and clean.

Quirke was surprised. It appeared Lugovoi and Kovtun were keen to monetise information collected by eavesdropping, by selling it potentially to British clients. The legal dimension didn’t feature. ‘When he [Quirke] saw it, his eyes started out of his head,’ Litvinenko said. Kovtun, it appeared, had good technical skills.’ He took out his own computer and demonstrated it himself. Andrei [Lugovoi] doesn’t know how to use this kind of stuff,’ Litvinenko added.

Afterwards, the three Russians took a taxi to Chinatown and went for dinner. Nothing happened to Litvinenko’s tea. Lugovoi paid the bill on his card and they went on to a pub.

Recollecting their conversation, Litvinenko said: ‘They found a place in a corner, ordered some beer and started to order for me. But I said, no, guys, I can’t stay in such dirty places like that.’ Litvinenko told the police he didn’t like the noise or ‘the prostitutes’. He took the 134 bus home.

About 11.30 p.m. Lugovoi rang Litvinenko to say that he was missing out on fun times. He said that he and Kovtun had hired a rickshaw and that they were going on an hour-long joyride through central London – two off-duty assassins enjoying themselves amid the bright lights of Soho. They trundled past red double-decker buses, crowded bars, West End theatreland. Their rickshaw driver was Polish. He spoke ‘not bad’ Russian. It appears they asked again about girls. The driver recommended a private members’ place in Jermyn Street popular with big-spending Russians.

This was Hey Jo’s, an erotic club founded in 2005 by a former fruit-and-veg stall owner from Essex called Dave West. It featured mirrored walls, frilly pink cubicles, waitresses dressed as naughty nurses, and a bronze phallus. There was a dance-floor and a Russian-themed restaurant, Abracadabra, with silver tables. The bordello theme extended to the bathrooms, where water spouted from penis-shaped gold taps.

Lugovoi and Kovtun spent two hours at Hey Jo’s, leaving at 3 a.m. Detectives were able to piece together where they’d been. They found traces of radiation in cubicle nine – on the backrest and cushions. There were low levels on a bench, a table in the restaurant, and on a door in the gents’. No polonium was found on the phallus, also tested. The floor was clean. Apparently the men from the KGB didn’t dance.

Even in these promising surroundings, their side-mission to pick up women was unfruitful. The next morning, checking out of the Parkes Hotel for the flight back to Moscow, Rondini asked Lugovoi how they had got on.

His reply was uncharacteristically honest. ‘We were not lucky that night,’ he told her.

Lugovoi’s conversations back in Moscow following his first unsuccessful attempt to poison Litvinenko can only be imagined. In short, he had failed. ‘Probably the chief yelled at them and said they weren’t good enough. It meant they had to go back and get another vial [of polonium],’ Goldfarb suggested.

The upshot was that within days Lugovoi returned to the UK, this time alone, taking with him another container of radioactive poison. He flew on 25 October from Moscow to London, on British Airways flight 875. He sat in business class, seat 6K. He arrived shortly after midnight at the Sheraton Park Lane, a grandly positioned hotel overlooking Piccadilly, with a frontage of black classical pillars. Inside, the hotel was rather worn. Lugovoi stayed in room 848, on the eighth floor.

After six years in Britain, Litvinenko was careful about security. He was akkuratny – a Russian word meaning neat, careful, punctual, exact, thorough. As a former FSB officer he practised good operational security. He didn’t discuss sensitive matters on the telephone. He told Quirke that he was concerned about London, describing it as such an open city and a place where people from Russia can come and do anything they want.

Despite these precautions and the litany of death threats in the past, Litvinenko trusted Lugovoi, who had now returned for a second time to kill him. Why?

For one thing, there was a sense of shared history. Both were ex-KGB. Both, seemingly, had spent time in Russian jails on false charges, victims of state injustice. In 2001, Lugovoi served eighteen months behind bars after apparently trying to free Berezovsky’s friend Nikolai Glushkov from jail. Glushkov was later released and fled to the UK in 2005. The Russian authorities had accused him and Berezovsky of embezzling funds from Aeroflot.

Glushkov was never convinced that Lugovoi actually went to prison. It’s an open question when precisely he began cooperating with the FSB. Some believe it was as early as 2001 at the time of his dubious ‘jailing’, and that the spy agency gave him a long-term mission to penetrate enemy circles in London. Others think that Lugovoi was forced to turn assassin after the Kremlin got hold of Litvinenko’s Ivanov report in the autumn of 2006.

Certainly other compatriots trusted Lugovoi. The morning after his return to London, Lugovoi set off in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes to an estate near Leatherhead, Surrey. His driver, Bruno Bonnetti, remembers him sitting on the back seat, talking in Russian on his mobile. They pulled up outside a palatial home; an iron security gate swung open. A tall man with a white moustache wearing a jogging suit, and in his early fifties, appeared. The man embraced Lugovoi. This was Badri Patarkatsishvili, the Georgian billionaire and associate of Berezovsky who had assisted in Litvinenko’s escape. Nearby, another chauffeur was washing the oligarch’s Maybach car.

Patarkatsishvili had hired Lugovoi in the 1990s to be head of security at his ORT TV channel. According to his friend Yuli Dubov, the Georgian later loaned Lugovoi $7 million. Generally speaking, the tycoon thought that ex-FSB officers made bad businessmen. Nonetheless, Patarkatsishvili told police that Lugovoi was a nice bloke, hard-working, a good employee. Lugovoi and Patarkatsishvili talked for some hours, sitting at the bottom of the garden in the gazebo. Lugovoi tried to persuade Patarkatsishvili to come in as an investor in a new water business. He declined.

‘Badri never liked slaves,’ Dubov said, reflecting on Lugovoi’s charm. ‘Lugovoi was a very good guy, nicelooking and nice-talking. He gave the impression of being absolutely on the level, straightforward, one of us.’

Undoubtedly, Patarkatsishvili thought more favourably of Lugovoi than he did of Litvinenko – someone, in his view, ‘who had crazy ideas about Russian politics’ and who was ‘obsessed by the FSB’, as a result of his unhappy career. The police later impounded Lugovoi’s radioactive Mercedes.

On his return from Surrey, Lugovoi met Litvinenko in his hotel. They sat in the ground-floor Palm Court, an afternoon tea room furnished in high art deco style, with Chinese screen paintings, vases and lamps. Litvinenko produced two Orange SIM cards so that he and Lugovoi had a secure way of communicating. As ever, Litvinenko drank tea, from a silver teapot. Lugovoi ordered three glasses of red wine and a Cuban cigar.

According to Lugovoi, Litvinenko revealed here that he worked for Spanish intelligence. He suggested that Lugovoi accompany him the next month on a joint trip to Spain. In Madrid they’d meet Litvinenko’s Russian-speaking Spanish handler, Jorge. It’s unclear if Litvinenko was acting under MI6’s direction here or simply wanted to present Lugovoi to his Spanish contacts as a useful Moscow-based source.

Litvinenko also had another important appointment. He was due on 8 November to meet Grinda, the Spanish public prosecutor. It would be their first encounter. All Litvinenko’s previous dealings had been with the Spanish secret service, which fed evidence to his prosecutors.

For Litvinenko, this was a serious escalation in his war with the Kremlin. It meant he was willing to testify in open court about the activities of the Russian mafia – and its friends in government. It’s unclear when Lugovoi learned of the planned meeting. According to Goldfarb, it may have triggered Moscow’s frantic efforts to kill Litvinenko, and to silence him as a witness. ‘That gives you a motive,’ Goldfarb said. Grinda was more circumspect, later saying he didn’t believe it was the cause.

Either way, this was the moment for Lugovoi to poison Litvinenko again. For unknown reasons, Lugovoi failed to deploy the latest vial of polonium he had brought. One possible explanation is that the Palm Court bar had video cameras, which Lugovoi would have seen. Or perhaps he suspected he was being watched. Did the British have him under counter-surveillance? (The answer – no.) It’s possible he had got fresh orders from Moscow. Either way, Lugovoi decided to abort the operation.

This left him with a problem: what to do with the poison?

Lugovoi’s solution was simple. In his hotel room he tipped the polonium away down the bathroom sink again, this time mopping it up with a couple of towels. He left the towels for the cleaner. And he appeared to have dumped the container in the white pedal bin next to the lavatory.

When scientists later tested Lugovoi’s hotel room on the eighth floor they walked into a scene from an atomic horror story. The door to Lugovoi’s room was highly contaminated. It showed full-scale deflection and a reading of more than 30,000 counts per second. Inside, there was further contamination – on the carpet, guest directory, and telephone book in a cupboard.

The situation in the bathroom, white-painted and with a tiled floor, was even worse. The inside of the pedal bin registered another full-scale deflection, with 30,000-plus. There was radiation everywhere: on the wall under the sink, the floor and bath, plus another massive reading from the bathroom door.

The two scientists wearing protective gear gazed at their instruments incredulously. They asked to be withdrawn from the room. The team was stood down on safety grounds.

Amazingly, two months later, detectives located the towels that Lugovoi had chucked away. They had ended up stuck in a laundry chute in the hotel’s basement. A three-foot-by-three-foot metal service tube ran the full height of the building. At its bottom was a mountain of unwashed sheets and towels.

Lugovoi’s bath towel was found in a green laundry bag on a shelf. His hand towel was discovered at the base of the chute.

The levels of radiation were so alarming that the towels were sent to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, the UK government nuclear facility. The contamination was massive. The bath towel gave a reading of 6,000 counts per second, or 130,000 becquerels per square centimetre. (The unit of radioactivity is named after Henri Becquerel, the French physicist who shared a Nobel prize with Marie and Pierre Curie.)

The most extreme object, though, was Lugovoi’s white hand towel. The initial reading came in as full-scale deflection, greater than 10,000 counts per second. Retested at Aldermaston, it yielded an astonishing result: in excess of 17 million becquerels per square centimetre. To give an idea of context, the equivalent of 10–30 million becquerels absorbed into an adult male’s blood would be likely to be fatal within one month.

The towel was the single most radioactive object recovered by Scotland Yard during its decade-long inquiry. Probably the most radioactive towel in history.