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“The accused, Lapin, has failed to appear at this hearing,” Mezhidov quavers. “No explanations have been received. Your submission?”

In his nervousness, the judge forgets the correct judicial procedure and calls upon the plaintiffs’ lawyer rather than the Prosecuting Official. Stanislav Markelov is the first Moscow lawyer in the course of this war to have risked coming to Chechnya to protect the interests of a Grozny family seeking a disappeared son. He is laconic but precise, and demands that Lapin should be arrested and brought under guard before Judge Mezhidov.

“In the past the accused has regularly disrupted the investigative process without providing reasons,” Markelov says. “This is a flagrant contempt of Russian law. The court should take appropriate measures.”

The judge looks horrified. This Moscow lawyer is outspoken in a way unheard of in Grozny. There is, however, no escaping the fact that Lapin’s behaviour is the height of insolence. It was a condition of his bail – granted more than a year ago when the Pyatigorsk Municipal Court ruled that this torturer and abductor “did not pose a threat to society” and promptly released him from prison – that he would immediately surrender himself to the court when summoned.

“And you, Murdalov?” the judge asks.

“I don’t just support the lawyer, I insist on this,” Astemir Murdalov, the father of the disappeared, replies abruptly. He is a hero. By his own titanic efforts he has done most of the investigative work in this case which should have been done by the Prosecutor’s Office.

“I invite the representative of the Prosecutor’s Office to speak,” the judge quavers.

The role of Prosecuting Official has devolved upon Prosecutor Antonina Zhuravlyova:

“I would be inclined to agree with this view, but having familiarised myself with the documents …”

Zhuravlyova has noticed that, surprisingly (or perhaps deliberately), the court itself has been quietly playing into The Cadet’s hands. Judge Mezhidov has simply failed to take the requisite procedural steps to ensure attendance of the accused. Is that credible in such an important case, the outcome of which is awaited by tens of thousands of people whose relatives have been disappeared by the federals in Chechnya? When an opportunity has finally arisen to use the law to establish what happened to one of them at least?

Prosecutor Zhuravlyova insists that the court should follow the letter of the law:

“The court should issue a summons through the court bailiffs. It should issue a warning to lawyer Derda [Lapin’s defence lawyer] through the Stavropol Regional College of Lawyers and raise the matter of disciplining him with the College.”

“The bench will retire to consider,” Judge Mezhidov murmurs and hastily leaves.

We don’t have long to wait. We talk quietly to other people in the courtroom. Shamkhan Khaisumov’s eyes are haunted. He has come here because for three years he has been searching in vain for his brother, Sharip, who was also abducted by the Khanties, from his own home opposite their compound.

“We call their base Buchenwald because we can hear the groaning all round the neighbourhood. I know exactly which Khanties were involved in my brother’s disappearance. Their names are Rauf Baibekov, Andrey Karpenko and Rashid Yagofarov. Several investigators have been replaced in the course of the case. The present one is Konstantin Krivorotov from the Chechen Prosecutor’s Office. I asked him to question a witness who could show him a place where the Khanties bricked in people they had abducted while they were still alive. Perhaps we might find my brother’s bones in there. I asked Krivorotov to inspect that brickwork, but he said they had been forbidden to travel to the scene of the crime because it was too dangerous. How about that? I have written to Putin, Gryzlov, Patrushev …”

Alaudin Sadykov, a 53-year-old former physical education teacher, is also in the courtroom. The Khanties picked him off the street on March 25, 2000, tortured him, and cut off his left ear. Afterwards,