German and British investigators were agreed: the forensic evidence against Kovtun and Lugovoi was plentiful and damning. Butcher quoted Gerhard Schindler, deputy director general for counter-terrorism at the German interior ministry:
‘Kovtun left polonium traces on everything he touched – vehicles, objects, clothes, and furniture. German investigators concluded Kovtun did not have polonium traces on his skin or clothes; Schindler said that polonium was coming out of his body.’
As the investigation made progress, D3 found himself in a terrifying nightmare. After Kovtun flew to London he devoted no further thought to his friend’s wild story of traitors and poisons. Two days later, he called Kovtun to see how he was getting on. Kovtun didn’t pick up. A little later, and apparently back in Moscow, Kovtun called back, and said everything was fine.
Two weeks after that, D3 picked up a copy of either the Hamburger Morgenpost or Bild Zeitung – he can’t remember which. Splashed across it was the story of Litvinenko’s poisoning and death. Kovtun’s name was mentioned; he appeared to be the prime suspect. D3 read the story and, as he put it, felt the ground give way beneath his feet.
What he’d dismissed as another of Dmitry’s quixotic idiocies had materialised into a cold-blooded international killing. D3 was afraid and confused. He thought about going to the police. But what if this situation somehow rebounded upon him? He decided to do nothing. Perhaps detectives might solve the case on their own.
Then, Kovtun called from Moscow as D3 was out on his bike. The line was poor; they agreed Kovtun would ring again in the evening, which he did. Kovtun asked if D3 had read the newspapers. D3 asked him: ‘Was that you?’ Kovtun said the story was rubbish, adding that the English police were going to question him. ‘If that wasn’t you, you don’t need to worry,’ D3 replied.
Try as he might, D3 could not banish the poison conversation with Kovtun from his mind. In December, German police interviewed him for the first time. They searched his flat and took away his contaminated mattress. He gave them an account of his meeting with Kovtun. But he said nothing about Kovtun’s confession as they had walked together towards Steindamm.
As D3’s torment grew, Kovtun’s seemingly lessened. On 11 December, Kovtun phoned from Moscow. ‘He was quite jolly. He was in a good mood,’ D3 said. Kovtun said he was fine, apologised for causing inconvenience, insisted he was innocent, ‘marked’ by someone else and the victim of a media smear. D3: ‘I asked him what kind of arsehole he is to do this with Marina and the children? I was very angry but tried to remain calm.’ Upbeat, Kovtun was again talking of the Moscow flat he soon expected to receive.
They didn’t speak again.
D3 wasn’t afraid of Kovtun as such. But he understood that he was now a witness, an important one. And therefore – the logic had a dark certainty to it – a vulnerable one as well. It was a frightening position. Even if Dmitry were not capable of murder, perhaps others around him were? Twelve days passed. Unable to bear it any more, D3 told a lawyer what had happened. The lawyer contacted the police. ‘This awful feeling became so great that I had to get it off my chest. I had to say it, I could not go on,’ D3 said.
He told detectives the affair had left him uncertain and edgy. And added: ‘I curse him [Kovtun] every day, because of the conversation, because of the whole story, and because of other persons whom he has presumably also contaminated. And perhaps because of the mattress.’ His fear that something might happen to him or his family came and went, he said, adding: ‘I am frightened quite suddenly for no reason.’
Asked what might befall him, D3 gave a simple answer. ‘I may also be killed. I heard something,’ he said, adding that he felt guilty ‘because it then actually happened’. It never occurred to him to go to police immediately after the conversation, he explained, because he didn’t consider what Kovtun told him was actually possible.
German detectives were reluctant to believe D3’s account. They were sceptical for several reasons. First, they thought it unlikely that assassins sent by Moscow on a complex mission would be scrambling around at the last moment looking for a cook. Second, what kind of killer would suggest in the same breath that he and his ex-wife might strip off for a porno mag? It was … well, illogical. And improbable. And therefore dubious.
It wasn’t until 2010 that Scotland Yard – using cellular data and interviews with D3’s colleagues – established he was telling the truth.
In conversations with his friends and ex-in-laws in Germany, Kovtun stuck to the script: he was blameless. He called Eleanora Wall, his former mother-in-law, and said: ‘Please do not think that I did this.’ She believed him. ‘Dmitry is not a brutal person who kills people. No member of the KGB would have put poison in Dmitry’s hands,’ she told Hamburg detectives. ‘I do not believe when he visited us he knew he was giving off radioactivity.’
Only once did Kovtun let his guard slip – and then in ambiguous terms. Back in Moscow he was receiving regular infusions, he told Wall, as well as other medicines whose names he couldn’t reveal. Kovtun said he’d been exposed to some of the poison that did for Litvinenko. And told her: ‘These arseholes have probably poisoned us all.’ He didn’t explain who the arseholes were.
While Kovtun was calling Germany, the Russian authorities were busy covering up their role in the murder. Similar to the Metropolitan Police, Menzel tried to test the Aeroflot plane Kovtun had taken from Moscow to Hamburg. A team was got ready to ground it as soon as it arrived. Somehow, Russia’s spy agencies learned of the plan and at the last minute Aeroflot swapped planes. Kovtun’s plane never came back.
In Hamburg and London, the threads were coming together. The Met has been the focus of much public criticism but its investigation into Litvinenko’s murder was painstaking and exemplary. Around 100 detectives were involved, together with 100 uniformed officers.
Teams were sent out across the capital. Their job was to collect CCTV, identify potential witnesses and to find members of the public who may have been contaminated.
The public-health picture was a horrifying one. Forensic tests showed the murderers left radioactive traces at every location they visited: offices, restaurants, hotel rooms, toilets and aeroplanes. Scientists revisited each location with specialist detection equipment. They scanned every inch – leaving stickers with radiation readings in different locations.
This information was fed back to Scotland Yard’s computer-aided modelling bureau. It reproduced the findings in graphic form. Scientists also tested hair samples from Litvinenko. The results were revealing: they gave a window of dates for the two occasions on which he was poisoned. These coincided exactly with the dates of his meetings with Lugovoi and Kovtun.
The polonium appears on the hair as an area of darkness – first as a constellation of light dots and then as an intense, banded black region. The hair of a dead man.
I arrived in Moscow in January 2007, as the Guardian’s new Moscow bureau chief. My wife Phoebe and our two small children, Tilly and Ruskin, came too. We moved into a cramped temporary apartment in a tower block in the suburb of Voikovskaya. The kids’ new British international school was within walking distance; in the frozen courtyard youths were drinking from tins of beer. The cold felt sharp; it hit you in the face; you breathed it.