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Pugachev had no idea whether the envoy sent by the Kremlin to warn him that it had everything stitched up in the UK was telling the truth, or whether he’d been sent merely to frighten him. But at some point – after he found the suspicious-looking devices on his cars, and after he first got wind that Russia was going to seek his extradition from the UK – he decided he didn’t want to risk waiting to find out. Despite his previous closeness to Putin, and his extensive contacts with the Kremlin’s clan of former KGB men known as the siloviki, a meeting set up for him with a top-level official from the British Foreign Office had been cancelled at the last minute. Instead he’d been told by a visiting Kremlin agent that he should meet a man Russian intelligence had cultivated in MI6. Everything was being turned on its head. He feared that the UK government was preparing a deal with the Russians to extradite him. He wondered too about the fate of his friend Boris Berezovsky, the arch Kremlin critic who in March 2013 had been found dead on the floor of his bathroom in his country mansion in Berkshire, his favourite black cashmere scarf round his neck, an unidentified fingerprint left at the scene. For some unknown reason, Scotland Yard didn’t investigate, leaving it to the local Thames Valley Police, which called it a suicide and closed the case.[9] ‘It looks like there is an agreement with Russia not to make a fuss,’ Pugachev worried.[10]

And so one day in June 2015, a few weeks after we’d met in his Chelsea home, Pugachev was suddenly no longer in the UK. His phones had all been switched off, ditched by the wayside as he ran. He’d ignored the court orders forbidding him to leave the country. He hadn’t even told his partner, the mother of his three young children, the London socialite Alexandra Tolstoy, who was left waiting late into the night for him to appear at her father’s eightieth birthday party. He’d last been seen in a meeting with his lawyers, at which they’d warned him he’d need £10 million to secure bail on an imminent Russian extradition request – cash to which Pugachev didn’t have access. A few weeks later he surfaced in France, where he’d gained citizenship in 2009, and where French law protected its citizens from extradition to Russia. He’d fled to the relative safety of his villa high in the hills above the bay of Nice, a fortress surrounded by an impenetrable high iron fence, a team of bodyguards and a battery of security cameras at every turn.