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

6 A Bit of a Puzzle ^{Critical care unit, University College Hospital, London, November 2006}

That evening Alexander Litvinenko began to feel violently unwell. Earlier, Marina had cooked him a light dinner.

The meal was something of a celebration. Six years previously, on 1 November 2000, the Litvinenkos had escaped Russia and arrived in the UK. The years had been good ones. Litvinenko had found work. He was a self-employed writer and a part-time British spy. Marina had made friends, learned English. Anatoly, now twelve, was studying at an elite London boys’ school.

Russia wasn’t forgotten, of course: Anatoly remembered the fierce winters, sledging in the snow, the Moscow metro with its grandiose ceilings and art deco lamps. There was no prospect of going back there, and in the meantime Britain had become home. Litvinenko viewed his newly acquired British citizenship – it came through three weeks previously – as a kind of marvellous protective shield. In the past his enemies had hounded him in London: there had been menacing phone calls, firebombs tossed outside his Muswell Hill home. But surely these ghosts were gone?

After dinner, Litvinenko sorted out his files, sat at his computer and watched the news. A journalist contact called him from the US. At about 11 p.m. he and Marina turned in.

Then, ten minutes later, Litvinenko was retching and vomiting. ‘I started to feel nauseous,’ he told police. ‘Gradually, Marina said: “Maybe it will pass,” and I said: “No, I don’t think it will pass.” And then I started vomiting. I managed to run as far as the toilet bowl in our room and that’s it. About twenty minutes later I vomited again.’

Marina said: ‘Suddenly, he started to feel unwell. He said he felt sick. It was very sudden. Of course, he couldn’t say anything. He just vomited.’ When it stopped, Litvinenko said that the feeling was similar to that he’d had on 16 October, after his meeting with Lugovoi and Kovtun. Later that evening he’d thrown up once and afterwards recovered.

Marina assumed that this new episode would also pass. First, Litvinenko threw up his dinner. He vomited again. This time his sick looked like water, Marina noticed, and was ‘a very strange colour’. Marina prepared a common Russian remedy for stomach problems: a little magnesia added into water. Her husband drank it. Still he didn’t feel any better.

After an hour, Litvinenko moved into the study, so as not to disturb his wife and son, who had school the next day. He passed a wretched night. ‘Every twenty or thirty minutes I had to run to the toilet and I was vomiting, vomiting, vomiting,’ he said. The manganese hadn’t worked – the foam was coming out of his mouth.

At 6 a.m. Marina woke and peered inside. Litvinenko was awake, looked terrible, and told her: ‘I can’t stop vomiting.’ He said that the stomach contractions kept coming, even though there was nothing to throw up. Additionally, Litvinenko complained he couldn’t breathe properly. He said: ‘I need more oxygen.’ It was a cold day outside; she threw open the windows. Something was very wrong. Litvinenko said later: ‘I was feeling really bad.’ The strong pains in his stomach grew. He said to his wife: ‘Marina, I think I have been poisoned.’

That morning Marina dropped Anatoly off at East Finchley tube station as usual, and called a Russian doctor, Yuri Prikazchikov, who advised her to buy mineral salts. She visited the chemist’s. Litvinenko drank the salts. He threw them up immediately. He was increasingly exhausted, unable to eat or drink.

Litvinenko was forty-three years old, and in extremely good physical shape. Every week while Anatoly was at a taekwondo class, Litvinenko would run 10 miles (15 km). Afterwards, he swam vigorously up and down the East Finchley leisure centre pool. In central London he walked everywhere. He was never ill. Except now he was.

Marina suggested calling an ambulance. ‘It was a very strange feeling. We didn’t know what to do,’ she said. Her husband said no. Then, in the early hours of 3 November, at 2 a.m., Litvinenko relented, and said: ‘Please Marina, we should call.’ She dialled 999 and the ambulance arrived within five minutes; two women paramedics checked his blood pressure and pulse; they concluded he probably had some kind of bacterial infection. They advised water and painkillers and departed.

The pain got worse. Litvinenko was also suffering from diarrhoea; he noticed he was passing blood. Marina rang Dr Prikazchikov again. At 2 p.m. he arrived at the Litvinenkos’ home in Osier Crescent; the doctor took one look at Litvinenko and, without examining him further, took a step backwards, wide-eyed. The doctor told him: ‘I don’t know what illness it is, but it looks very much like typhoid fever but it is not typhoid fever.’ Prikazchikov said he needed immediate hospitalisation. An ambulance came and took him to Barnet and Chase Farm Hospital in north London.

For doctors at Barnet Hospital, Litvinenko was one of numerous admissions – another patient tossed their way during a hectic winter season, punctuated by flus, superbugs and a spike in elderly visitors.

That Litvinenko was in poor shape was obvious. His symptoms were abdominal pain, diarrhoea and vomiting. Medical staff diagnosed gastro-enteritis with mild dehydration. They prescribed ciprofloxacin, a broad-spectrum antibiotic. As a precaution, to prevent possible infection spreading, they put him in a side-room. He was admitted as Edwin Redwald Carter, his British pseudonym. The hospital’s assumption was that Mr Carter would start to recover in a few days.

At first, this seemed to happen. ‘He did feel a little bit better when he was hospitalised,’ Marina said. The antibiotics stopped the vomiting; Litvinenko felt less exhausted.

Nevertheless, there were two issues of concern. One was medical: tests showed that Litvinenko’s white blood-cell count was unusually low. In fact his white blood-cell and platelet count was steadily sinking. This didn’t really fit with a diagnosis of gastro-enteritis. It might be a side effect of the fairly powerful antibiotics he was taking, doctors thought.

The other was scarcely believable, from the realm of spy thrillers and John le Carré rather than real life. On 7 November, Mrs Carter – as medical notes reference her – first raised the possibility that her husband may have been poisoned. He had, she said, worked for the Soviet KGB. And knew ‘dangerous people’. Was it possible that someone might have put something in his food or drink?

The story made little sense. Doctors reassured her that this was ‘unlikely’, though they did record on Edwin Carter’s file: ‘Patient and wife concerned about intentional infection of patient, query poison?’

Litvinenko and his wife were increasingly convinced that his ever more painful symptoms were not the result of contaminated food or bad sushi. They suspected foul play. Was this some kind of reckoning? Litvinenko gave an interview to the BBC Russian Service, explaining that he’d narrowly survived a poisoning attempt and was now recovering in a London hospital. He mentioned his lunch with the Italian Mario Scaramella, but kept quiet about his meeting with Lugovoi and Kovtun.

The poisoning claim was sensational indeed. But was it true? Chechenpress, the Chechen website for which Litvinenko worked, picked up the story, as did the independent opposition radio station Echo of Moscow.

Alex Goldfarb got a call from one of its journalists. Goldfarb was in Paris. He perused the internet – where the story was starting to bubble – but was disinclined to take it terribly seriously. He rang his friend Alexander, who confirmed he thought he’d been poisoned. An incredulous Goldfarb told him: ‘But come on, who would poison you? It’s too much. Probably you have some sort of stomach ailment.’

Others were similarly sceptical. From his hospital bed, Litvinenko called his friend and fellow exile Viktor Suvorov and told him: ‘I’m poisoned.’ (Suvorov had previously advised Litvinenko to be careful, and suggested he might do well to move out of London, as he had, to a quieter part of the country.)

Suvorov replied: ‘Sash, come on! It’s rubbish.’

Litvinenko persisted: ‘No, really. I’m poisoned. I’m calling you from hospital.’

It was proving equally difficult to persuade hospital staff to take his theory seriously.

Then on 11 November, a week after he was admitted, something terrible and strange happened.

Litvinenko’s hair began to fall out. At first, in small clumps. Marina was visiting her husband in hospital every day; sometimes Anatoly went too. She saw him on Sunday, 12 November; he complained of pain in his throat. When she returned the next morning Litvinenko looked much worse: a spectral figure, weak, pathetic and ‘completely different’. Marina stroked her husband’s head, a calming gesture. She looked at her hand in horror: his hair was on her glove. It was on his shoulder and pillow too – everywhere. Marina was distraught. And, uncharacteristically, angry. She railed at medical staff: ‘What’s this? Can anyone tell me what’s happened to my husband?’

With Marina was Valentina Michena, a Russian ex-nurse in her late fifties whom Marina had befriended. Michena had arrived in the UK from Russia in 2000. She knew nobody, was lonely, and began chatting to Marina in a shop. ‘Marina is a lovely, lovely person,’ she said. Michena became a surrogate granny to Anatoly. When Litvinenko fell ill she moved into the family’s Muswell Hill home. She offered to cut Litvinenko’s hair, what was left of it. The doctors agreed. They asked Michena to collect the hair in a plastic bag, so they could test it.

Litvinenko was unperturbed by his dramatic hair loss. He was a good-looking man but had never been vain or preening. Michena tugged at the hair from the front; the hair at the back yielded less readily. ‘My appearance does not bother me at the moment,’ he told her. She finished the job with clippers. He was bald.

‘During those five days while I was visiting, his hair was falling down easily,’ Michena said. ‘It was like you would blow a dandelion.’

By this point Litvinenko was convinced he’d been the victim of a serious poisoning. He even knew who he thought had done it. In his BBC interview, he’d pointed to Scaramella, his Italian contact. In fact, he was certain that it was the two Russians – the known Lugovoi and the unknown Kovtun – who were to blame. Litvinenko was by nature an optimist, and remained confident he would beat his illness. By concealing Lugovoi and Kovtun’s role, he was hoping to draw them back from Moscow to the UK, where the authorities might then arrest them.

Meanwhile, his physicians were becoming concerned. On 13 November, Dr Andres Virchis, a haematologist at Barnet Hospital, reviewed his case. It was, he admitted, a ‘bit of a puzzle’. A diagnosis of gastro-enteritis now seemed less likely. Litvinenko was exhibiting a whole set of different, troubling symptoms; his platelet count had fallen through the floor and then there was the alopecia – abrupt, alarming hair loss. Nothing really fitted together.

‘It just struck me that he looked like one of my patients who had had chemotherapy,’ Virchis said. ‘If you look at cancer treatment, there’s various levels of intensity. There’s outpatient treatment, but there are patients with acute leukaemia, a serious form of blood cancer, given very intensive chemotherapy. He looked just like a patient of mine that had had treatment.’

The senior team managing Litvinenko started to explore other possibilities. The idea that he had been poisoned was beginning to look less fanciful. The next day, 14 November, Virchis began discussions with a toxicologist at Guy’s Hospital in London; they agreed to test for heavy metals and to carry out a biopsy. Litvinenko was extremely unwell. Virchis thought he looked like someone with acute radiation sickness. He wrote in the medical file: ‘Ask radiology re. check radioactive sources of poisoning.’

The doctors were groping slowly towards an answer. On 15 November they brought a Geiger counter over Litvinenko for the first time. It looked like a chunky pocket calculator; if it found beta or gamma emissions the instrument would emit a loud whine. There was nothing. The notes record: ‘Geiger Counter – No Emission.’ The hospital didn’t have equipment to measure much rarer alpha radiation; the only institution capable of doing that was the British nuclear weapons centre at Aldermaston.

As news of Litvinenko’s condition spread, visitors arrived. That evening, Goldfarb dropped by. He was worried by what he discovered. Litvinenko was neutropenic. Goldfarb was a microbiologist by training and perfectly understood what this meant: Litvinenko’s immune system was in ruinous shape, and collapsing.

Litvinenko told him about his suspicion that Lugovoi was the culprit. Goldfarb felt it was imperative the police get involved. The next day Goldfarb returned to Barnet Hospital with George Menzies, Litvinenko’s long-time lawyer. They spent two hours at his bedside. Though weak, Litvinenko was in no doubt who was behind the plot, croaking to Menzies: ‘You see, they have poisoned me’ – ‘they’ being Russia’s secret services.

Litvinenko continued to ring his friends. But he was fading. During one conversation with Suvorov his voice slowed up ‘like a gramophone’; his voice faltered; the mobile tumbled from his grasp. Suvorov promised to come and see him in ‘three or four days’ when he was better.

Later that day, Guy’s poisons unit came back with news. The biopsy pointed to a provisional diagnosis of poisoning by thallium, a deadly metal. But the levels of thallium were weirdly faint and not much above environmental levels – 30 nanomoles per litre. The data were confusing. Further verification was needed.

The diagnosis sounded an alarm. Medical staff contacted Scotland Yard and said they suspected a malicious poisoning. Virchis talked to Litvinenko. Litvinenko confirmed that the Russian intelligence service uses radioactive thallium. Doctors began treating him with Prussian blue, an antidote and counter-poison.

Plans were drawn up, meanwhile, to shift Litvinenko from Barnet to a specialist ward at University College Hospital in Bloomsbury, round the corner from the London university of the same name, and a short walk through a green square of veteran plane trees to the British Museum.

Litvinenko arrived at University College Hospital on 17 November. Just before midnight, two detectives appeared at his bedside.

To begin with, the British police had a confusing picture – a poisoned Russian who spoke poor English; a baffling plot involving visitors from Moscow; and a swirl of potential crime scenes. Two detectives, DI Brent Hyatt and Chris Hoar, from the Met’s specialist crime unit, interviewed Litvinenko in the critical-care unit on the sixteenth floor of University College Hospital. They address him rather quaintly as Edwin. He is a ‘significant witness’. There are eighteen interviews, lasting eight hours and fifty-seven minutes in total. These conversations stretch out over three days, from the early hours of 18 November until shortly before 9 p.m. on 20 November.

The interview transcripts were kept secret for eight and a half years, hidden in Scotland Yard’s case file, and stamped with the word ‘Restricted’, white capitals on a stark black rectangular background. Revealed in 2015, they are remarkable documents. They are, in effect, unique witness statements taken from a ghost. But Litvinenko is no ordinary ghost: he’s a ghost who uses his final reserves of energy to solve a chilling murder mystery – his own.

Litvinenko was a highly experienced detective. He knew how investigations worked. He was fastidious too: neatly collating case materials in a file, always employing a hole punch. In the interviews he sets out before the police in dispassionate terms the evidence of who might have poisoned him. He acknowledges: ‘I cannot blame these people directly because I have no proof.’

He’s an ideal witness – good with descriptions, heights, details. He draws up a list of suspects. There are three of them: the Italian Mario Scaramella; his business partner Andrei Lugovoi; and Lugovoi’s unpleasant Russian companion, whose name Litvinenko struggles to remember, and to whom he refers wrongly as ‘Volodia’ or ‘Vadim’.

DI Hyatt begins recording at eight minutes after midnight on 18 November. He introduces himself and his colleague Detective Sergeant Hoar, from the Met’s specialist crime directorate. Edwin gives his own name and address.

Hoar then says: ‘Thank you very much for that, Edwin. Edwin, we’re here investigating an allegation that somebody has poisoned you in an attempt to kill you.’ Hoar says that doctors have told him Edwin is suffering from ‘extremely high levels of thallium’ and ‘that is the cause of this illness’.

He continues: ‘Can I ask you to tell us what you think has happened to you and why?’

Medical staff had pre-briefed Hoar that Litvinenko spoke good English. In fact, Hoar discovered, this wasn’t the case. Litvinenko’s answers were sometimes spotty and confusing; after this first nocturnal session they took a police interpreter, Nina Tupper.

Despite these hurdles, Litvinenko is able to give a full account of his career in the FSB, his deepening conflict with the agency, and his unhappy encounter in 1998 with Putin. The case file records his words: ‘I have meeting with PUTIN, face to face. About forty minutes. I bring to PUTIN material about criminal inside FSB. PUTIN invite me to his team. I refuse. I know who is PUTIN. I have operation material against PUTIN in some … PUTIN have contract with one criminal group.’

Litvinenko talks of his ‘good relationship’ with the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, another Putin enemy, and her fear she was in danger. In spring 2006, they met in a branch of Caffè Nero in London. Litvinenko asked her what was wrong. She told him, ‘Alexander, I’m very afraid,’ and said that every time she said goodbye to her daughter and son she had the feeling she was looking at them ‘for the last time’. He urged her to leave Russia. She said she couldn’t, citing her ‘old parents’ and kids. In October 2006, the journalist was shot dead in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment. Previously, in 2004, Politkovskaya was herself poisoned after drinking tea served on a plane to the North Caucasus. She had been on her way to mediate with Chechen terrorists who seized a school in Beslan in North Ossetia. The poisoning was the work of the FSB, she wrote.

Politkovskaya’s murder in October left Litvinenko ‘very very shocked’, he says, adding: ‘I lost a lot of my friends’ and that human life in Russia is cheap. He tells detectives about a speech he made in the Frontline Club the previous month in which he accused Putin directly of having Politkovskaya killed.

From time to time, the interviews stop: the tape runs out; nurses come in to administer drugs; Litvinenko, suffering from diarrhoea, has to go to the bathroom. Mostly, though, he battles on. He tells Hyatt: ‘Meeting you is very important for my case.’ Litvinenko describes his encounter with Scaramella and gives a pocketbook description of the Italian: smart, grey suit, ‘crooked hair’, dark complexion, 1 m 72 cm – a typical man from Naples, with a light beard, and a ‘little bit fat’ round the middle.

The meeting, Litvinenko explains, was exasperating. Litvinenko says he was unimpressed by Scaramella’s fondness for cloak and dagger – they had agreed to meet at Piccadilly Circus next to the statue of Eros. Litvinenko got there first and found himself wondering about the ‘irony’ of the situation. ‘Why play the spies? To my mind, all these James Bonds verge on madness,’ he tells Hyatt.

In the Itsu restaurant, Scaramella delivers a list. It includes both their names. Supposedly, those who feature are targets for assassination by the Russian state. Litvinenko says he isn’t terrified by this development (which, in hindsight, appears to be a bizarre coincidence).

Rather, he’s offended by the grubbiness of the A4 sheet Scaramella handed him. ‘It was all dirty. I’ve worked a lot in my life with documents … When I am given papers like this I feel squeamish taking them into my hands,’ he says. He shows the two detectives his own working notebook. It’s immaculate, without any stains, even after two years. ‘Look how I make notes,’ he tells them.

But it is the two Russians who are at the centre of his suspicions. Litvinenko recounts his meeting with them at the Millennium Hotel. He says that he hadn’t been to the hotel before and had to find it on a map. He insists this ‘special’ information remain secret – not to be made public or shared with his wife Marina. ‘These people, it’s interesting. Most interesting,’ he muses. Litvinenko’s logic is that if Scaramella is the culprit he can easily be arrested in Italy. But if it’s the Russians they will be trickier to catch: ‘If this Andrei and Vadim from KGB poison me, if I speak it, KGB cover it [up].’

With time running out, Litvinenko is working furiously to solve the conundrum. The transcript reads:

After four or five hours of interviews, the case begins to cohere. There are moments when it appears that there are three officers hard at work: Hyatt, Hoar and Litvinenko, the punctilious ex-cop. By this point Litvinenko is speaking Russian. The investigation gains new momentum. Information is passed back to SO15, the counter-terrorist command at Scotland Yard, headed by Detective Superintendent Clive Timmons.

Litvinenko explains that his most important papers are kept at home, in the lower shelf of a large cupboard. The papers include critical information on Putin, and the people around him, from newspapers and other sources, as well as background on Russian criminal gangs. He gives the police his email password and bank account. He tells them where they can find receipts for two Orange SIM cards, bought for £20 from a store in Bond Street – in a black leather wallet on his bedside table. Litvinenko explains that he gave one of the SIMs to Lugovoi; they used these secret numbers to communicate. He hands over his diary.

It was, Litvinenko says, Lugovoi who insisted the pair of them meet at the Millennium Hotel on 1 November. They were originally scheduled to meet the following day, at the offices of security company Global Risk. Litvinenko shows Hyatt his note of the appointment. He uses a code for ‘Lugovoi’ – tragic in hindsight – calling him ‘Friend 2’.

‘We were to meet on the second. But he called me in the morning and said he had already arrived and he would like to meet me for a short time on the first,’ Litvinenko says.

DI Hyatt produces a map of central London. With a little difficulty, Litvinenko retraces his probable route to Grosvenor Square – north along Old Bond Street, along Grafton Street, and then Berkeley Square.

He describes meeting Lugovoi in the Millennium lobby and going with him to the Pine Bar. Lugovoi was dressed, Litvinenko says, in clothes he had bought three months earlier on a shopping trip to Harrods, London’s most famous department store – ‘a kind of cardigan’, dark blue and orange. Litvinenko said he didn’t think much of Lugovoi’s expensive, flashy style. ‘We were in Harrods … I said to him then, “Why do you need this Harrods?”’ There were further details – Lugovoi was wearing greyish jeans, ‘fashionable’ shoes, ‘but not English make’, and a big gold watch with a black face. ‘It was very visible. Before he [Lugovoi] had told me that this watch cost $50,000.’

Ever helpful, Litvinenko phones his wife and asks her to locate a photo of Lugovoi at their home. Hyatt suspends the interview to secure the photograph. Lugovoi is now a prime suspect. Litvinenko describes him like this: ‘Andrei is a pure European, and even he looks a little bit like me, sort of. The same type as like me … I am 1 m 77 cm, 1 m 78 cm, so he is probably 1 m 76 cm. He is two years younger than me, light hair.’ He has a small, ‘almost invisible’ bald patch.

The transcript says:

At the end of his second day of interviews, on 19 November, Litvinenko describes getting a lift back home with his Chechen friend Zakayev: ‘Now the paradoxical thing is that I was still feeling very well but then somehow I had some kind of feeling that something might happen to me in the nearest future. Maybe subconsciously.’ The detectives turn off the tape.

It’s a full and frank account of events leading up to his poisoning – with one exception. During these two days Litvinenko doesn’t mention his secret life and his job working for British intelligence. It’s only the next day that he speaks of his meeting on 31 October with his MI6 handler ‘Martin’, in the basement café of the Waterstone’s bookshop on Piccadilly. Litvinenko is chary, evidently reluctant to discuss his undercover MI6 role.

The conversation runs:

The interview abruptly stops. It’s 5.16 p.m. Hyatt dials the long telephone number, reaches ‘Martin’, and tells him that Litvinenko is gravely ill in hospital, the victim of an apparent poisoning by two mysterious Russians.

It appears to be the first time that MI6 – an organisation famed for its professionalism – learns of Litvinenko’s plight. Litvinenko, of course, wasn’t a full-time employee. But he was a salaried informant, with his own encrypted cell phone, and MI6-provided passport. The agency appears not to have classified Litvinenko as being at risk, despite numerous threatening phone calls from Moscow and the firebomb attack on his north London home.

MI6’s reaction is unclear. The British government has still refused to release the relevant files. One can imagine panic and embarrassment. And the agency shifting into full-blown crisis mode. The transcripts show that after speaking to DI Hyatt, ‘Martin’ scrambled to Litvinenko’s hospital bedside. He talked to his poisoned agent, and left around 7.15 p.m. The police interview then resumes; Litvinenko continues his account of his Waterstone’s meeting with ‘Martin’ in coy terms:

The final exchanges deal with earlier threats against Litvinenko from the Kremlin and its emissaries. The detectives ask if there is anything Litvinenko would like to add.

Litvinenko returns to the theme of Putin’s culpability in his last two interviews, at 8.06 p.m. and 8.39 p.m. respectively. He is moving and lucid. And perceptive: Litvinenko is aware that his case raises a major dilemma for western governments. How should they deal with the head of a powerful, energy-rich state who, apparently, has his enemies murdered?

Litvinenko says western politicians are to blame for treating Putin as a respectable international leader:

The buzzer sounds, signalling the tape is finishing. Litvinenko tells Hyatt:

Litvinenko’s remarks would turn out to be prescient. The Scotland Yard detectives seem touched by his faith in them. DI Hyatt promises to ‘do absolutely everything within my power to ensure that this case is properly investigated’. He adds: ‘I know that this process has been extremely difficult because of your medical condition, and I just want to thank you for your time, your patience and your help with getting as much information to us as possible in the way that you have done.’

Litvinenko’s condition was rapidly deteriorating. On 20 November, the same day as his last police interview, doctors moved him to intensive care. Here it was easier to monitor the patient and, if necessary, to intervene. His heart rate was becoming abnormal; his major organs failing.

The medics treating him were in unchartered territory. Litvinenko’s case was problematic: he wasn’t behaving like a patient who had ingested thallium. He had severe bone marrow failure and gut damage, which fitted. But he lacked one key symptom of thallium poisoning – peripheral neuropathy, pain or numbness in his fingers and feet. ‘It was still a bit of a mystery,’ one doctor said. Professor John Henry – an expert on poisoning – examined Litvinenko twice. He found that his handshake was still extremely firm. Henry had previously told Sky TV that Litvinenko was a victim of radioactive thallium. Now he had doubts.

Meanwhile, those close to Litvinenko were reluctantly concluding he was unlikely to survive.

The Kremlin would subsequently accuse Berezovsky and Goldfarb of cynically exploiting Litvinenko as part of their long-running public-relations campaign against Putin. In fact, Litvinenko made it abundantly clear – as the Scotland Yard transcripts show – that he held Putin personally responsible for his poisoning. And he wanted to send this message to the world.

Litvinenko’s lawyer, George Menzies, began drafting a statement on his behalf. Menzies later said that the ideas in it were wholly Litvinenko’s. ‘I was doing my best, in personal terms, to represent what I truly believed to be Sasha’s state of mind and sentiment,’ he said. Its themes – Litvinenko’s pride in being British, his love of his wife, his belief as to the source of his illness – mirrored what his client thought, Menzies said.

Goldfarb and Menzies took the draft to the hospital. They showed it to Marina. Her reaction was negative. She believed her husband would pull through and that writing a last testament was tantamount to giving up on him. Pragmatically, they told her: ‘Better to do it now than later.’

Menzies consulted with Tim Bell, chairman of the London PR firm Bell Pottinger. Bell’s company had worked for Boris Berezovsky since 2002, helping the exiled oligarch through various legal scrapes, and had assisted the Litvinenkos as well. Bell said he thought the text was too gloomy and read like a ‘deathbed statement’. ‘I didn’t think it was the right thing to do because I still hoped and believed Sasha would live,’ Bell said.

Goldfarb read out the A4 sheet to Litvinenko in intensive care, translating it from English to Russian. At one point Goldfarb made a movement with his arms, mimicking the flight of an angel flapping its wings. Litvinenko endorsed the statement in its entirety, confirming: ‘This is exactly what I want to say.’ Litvinenko then signed and dated it – 21 November 2006, his signature trailing off into a raised black swirl.

The statement read:

TV cameras and media had gathered outside the hospital’s main gate, waiting for news. They’d been there since Monday morning, 20 November, in the wake of an interview given by Litvinenko to the journalist David Leppard and published the previous day by the Sunday Times.

Sixteen floors above them, Litvinenko asked Goldfarb if he was a big story. He was – but not much was known about Litvinenko, other than that he was a prominent critic of Putin’s, and desperately ill. Goldfarb said: ‘Sasha, if you really want the message to be seriously put across, we need a photo.’ Marina was against the idea, and saw it as an invasion of privacy. But Litvinenko agreed, and said: ‘Yes, if you think it’s needed, let’s do it.’

Goldfarb rang Bell Pottinger and spoke to Jennifer Morgan, Bell’s liaison. Morgan in turn called a photographer she knew, Natasja Weitsz. Weitsz arrived at the hospital and was escorted upstairs past a police guard. She was with Litvinenko for mere minutes. He pushed his green hospital gown to one side so as to reveal the electro-cardiagram sensors attached to his heart. Weitsz shot a couple of frames of Litvinenko: bald, gaunt and defiant, staring with cornflower-blue eyes directly at the camera lens. The image was cropped around its haunting subject. It went round the world.

Litvinenko was aware his time was running out. His friend Zakayev had been visiting him in hospital every day; they had talked of Chechnya, religion and Zakayev’s Muslim faith.

Litvinenko told Zakayev: ‘One day when I die, will you promise to put my body in Chechen ground?’ Zakayev agreed – given the circumstances, it would have been impossible to refuse. A precondition of burial was that Litvinenko convert to Islam. Zakayev asked Marina if he could bring an imam. She assented; the imam visited intensive care and performed the ceremony at speed.

Litvinenko’s father Walter flew in from Moscow and arrived at his son’s bedside. Litvinenko informed him: ‘Dad, what do you think? I’ve converted. I’m now a Muslim.’

Walter was an Orthodox Christian. In his later years he’d become more of a believer. He took this development in his stride. And replied: ‘It doesn’t matter, at least you’re not a communist.’

By the next day, Wednesday, 22 November, doctors treating Litvinenko had scrapped their diagnosis. Their notes read: ‘We DO NOT feel this gentleman has or had inorganic thallium poisoning.’

At midday, a top-level meeting was convened at the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism command. It involved SO15 detectives, led by Detective Superintendent Timmons, medical staff, a scientist from the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment, the Forensic Science Service and Dr Nick Gent from Porton Down, the UK’s military science facility. The latest urine test had revealed the presence of a new radioactive isotope – polonium-210. But this was marked down as an anomaly, caused by the plastic container used to carry Litvinenko’s urine.

According to Timmons, the specialists discussed five theories which might explain Litvinenko’s baffling poisoning. Most were esoteric. They included Stevens– Johnson syndrome, an idiosyncratic reaction to drugs; an intake of cytotoxins, cancer-fighting medicines; and exposure to an external radiation source, such as cobalt-30. Another possibility was natural causes. Or an internal radiation source, such as polonium. This last theory was seen as unlikely. The experts decided to investigate further and to send a litre of urine to Aldermaston.

Back in the intensive care ward, Litvinenko was drifting in and out of consciousness. The Russian-German filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov visited him. Nekrasov had previously conducted several interviews with Litvinenko; he shot the video on condition that it would be released only with Marina’s approval. It’s the last photograph. Litvinenko lies on his bed, a vanquished soul, around whom the world is closing and darkening. A drip is attached to his nose; his cheeks are hollow; his eyes are open – just. There is pale afternoon light.

‘He was conscious, but was very, very weak,’ Marina said. ‘I spent almost all day sitting close to him, [to] make him just be calm and more relaxed.’ At 8 p.m. Marina got up to leave, and told her husband: ‘Sasha, unfortunately I have to go.’

She said: ‘He smiled so sadly, and I started to feel I’m guilty because I’m leaving him, and I just said, “Don’t worry, tomorrow morning I will come and everything will be fine.”’

Litvinenko whispered back to her: ‘I love you so much.’ Marina wanted to exit on an optimistic note; she joked that she hadn’t heard those words for a long time.

At midnight the hospital called to say that Litvinenko had gone into cardiac arrest, not once but twice. They managed to resuscitate him. She returned to University College Hospital, getting a lift with Zakayev, and found her husband unconscious and on a life-support machine. She spent the following day, 23 November, at his side; Litvinenko was in an induced coma. That evening she went back to Muswell Hill. An hour after arriving home the phone rang. It was the hospital telling her urgently to return.

Litvinenko suffered a third cardiac arrest at 8.51 p.m. The consultant on duty, Dr James Down, tried to revive him but at 9.21 p.m. pronounced life extinct. When Marina and Anatoly arrived at the hospital they were taken not to the ward but to a side-room. Ten or fifteen minutes later, the doctor told them that Litvinenko was dead. He added: ‘Would you like to see Sasha?’, to which Marina replied: ‘Of course.’

For the first time in several days, she said, she was allowed to touch and kiss him; Anatoly ran from the room after half a minute.

Six hours before Litvinenko’s death, at about 3 p.m., Timmons received a phone call from the Atomic Weapons Establishment. It had the results from the latest tests. They confirmed that Litvinenko was ‘terribly contaminated’, as Timmons put it, with radioactive polonium.