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Luke Harding

A VERY EXPENSIVE POISON

^{The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia’s War with the West}

Dioxin: Any of three unsaturated heterocyclic compounds, two having the formula C₄H₆O₂ and the third C₄H₄O₂

Gelsemium: A colourless, inodorous, bitter alkaloidal substance obtained from the root of G. sempervirens

Polonium: A highly radioactive metallic element, discovered in 1898 by Professor and Marie Curie in pitchblende

Ricin: An extremely toxic lectin present in the seeds of the castor oil plant, Ricinus communis.

Thallium: The chemical element of atomic number 81, a soft silvery-white metal which occurs naturally in small amounts in iron pyrites, sphalerite and other ores. Its compounds are very poisonous (symbol: Tl)

Source: Oxford English Dictionary

Prologue:

The Men from Moscow

^{Passport control, Gatwick Airport, Sussex 16 October 2006}

Two of the Russians arriving that morning stood out. What precisely made them suspicious was hard to identify. But in the mind of Spencer Scott – the detective constable on duty at London’s Gatwick Airport – there was a curious sense of doubt. It was 16 October 2006. Passengers were disembarking from a Transaero flight from Moscow. They were collecting luggage. A stream of new arrivals queued up at passport control, and then proceeded for customs and excise checks.

The first Russian was of medium height, thirty-something, with blond Slavic hair. He was wearing a casual jacket and carrying an expensive-looking leather laptop case. He appeared prosperous. The second, with dark hair, receding slightly, and a yellowish complexion, was clearly his companion. They weren’t behaving oddly as such. And yet there was something – a furtiveness that pricked Detective Constable Scott’s attention.

‘I though they were of interest and basically as they came through immigration controls I stopped them and questioned them,’ he recalled. Scott hadn’t been told to look out for them; he was acting on a hunch. He asked them their names. One man spoke English and identified himself as Andrei Lugovoi. His friend, he said, was Dmitry Kovtun. Kovtun said nothing.

It appeared he spoke only Russian. Scott took a grainy low-res photo of them. Lugovoi was on the right. In it they look like dark ghostly smudges. It was 11. 34 a. m.

Lugovoi and Kovtun’s story seemed convincing enough: they had flown into London for a business meeting. Lugovoi said he owned a company called Global Project. Moreover, his friend was a member of the finance department at a respectable Moscow bank. Their travel agent had booked them in for two nights at the Best Western Hotel in Shaftesbury Avenue. The hotel wasn’t cheap: £300 a night. Lugovoi handed over his reservation. It was genuine.

Still, there was something unsettling about their answers, Scott felt: ‘They were very evasive as to why they were coming to the UK. ’ Normally, those subjected to a random stop would open up – about families, holiday plans, the lousy English weather. The two Russians, by contrast, were elusive. ‘As I asked them questions, they weren’t coming out with the answers that I wanted to hear or expected to hear. They were giving me very, very short answers,’ Scott said. Their replies offered ‘no information’.