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I am giving you these notes in the hope that they would be printed for the world to see,' Storozhenko had written to her friend Anatoly Kuchumov. She was relying on the famous curator to publicize her predicament, perhaps in the hope that a new and unfettered investigation into the Amber Room would find it. We wonder if Kuchumov, aged seventy-four when he received this statement, still had the energy to help.

'238340 Svetly, Kaliningrad Region, Ulitsa Sovetskaya, House EL, Apartment Six, tel: 2-22-80': we copied Jelena Storozhenko's details from her letter but her telephone has been disconnected.

Valery the taxi driver volunteers to take us to Svetly via a circuitous route. I want you to see our amber coast and then you can attend to your business,' he says.

The city ends abruptly and Kaliningrad province sprawls across end-less marshy, wind-whipped fields, left lifeless and infertile by spray from the Baltic. Past the military listening station and abandoned fighter-jet hangars is Yantarny, the amber capital of the world. Boys sledge on gunnysacks down the blue-clay hillsides. Listless men in army coats and tracksuit bottoms drink silently on collapsing Prussian-built verandas. Enormous overground pipes carrying seawater, which is used to blast the mud and amber apart at the impoverished Yantarny Mining Combine No. 9, strangle the village.

The amber coastline of the Samland Peninsula

'Beautiful, isn't it?' Valery says.

We follow the coastline of the Samland Peninsula south, towards the closed military city of Baltiysk (where security permits are still required), before turning sharply into Svetly. House 11, Apartment Six is boarded up, but from a neighbouring building that also looks abandoned emerges a babushka.

'Storozhenko?' we ask. 'Jelena.'

'Dead,' she snaps. 'Gone in 1994. Strange. There was a stepson. Zhenik. He's disappeared.' She scuttles back into the ruin.

Valery is anxious to get home before dark and we clatter through yet more mournful villages that are slowly slipping into the Baltic.

The next morning Colonel Avenir Ovsianov, director of the Kaliningrad Centre for Coordinating the Search for Cultural Relics, is waiting for us at the care-worn 193 os-style villa. 'Dobry,' he says, offering us a large, hard hand that feels as if it has spent a lifetime wielding the pick we can see propped behind his desk. 'Kaliningrad welcomes you.' He solemnly pours into our cupped hands lemony grains of amber fished from the beaches of Yantarny and we notice a picture on the wall of him as a younger man, with Red Army comrades in military uniform and armed with metal detectors.

Today, the colonel looks every inch the grand old Soviet commissar: thick waves of silvery hair, gold teeth, unsmiling wintry face, piercing eyes peeping over Politburo glasses.

Why was the Storozhenko inquiry shut down in 1984, we ask?

The colonel draws breath. 'Everything here was secret. This was a secret place. You are only here on the invitation of our government. I report to the FSB [the successor to the KGB].' Surely the colonel isn't threatening us?

Avenir Ovsianov (centre), digging for the Amber Room in Kaliningrad Province, 1970s

'We are here on state salaries. Will you be paying?' the colonel asks, walking over to a cabinet and flashing us a view of hundreds of files, neatly stacked in rows. I managed to get these. From my military sources.'

What are they, we ask?

I have some of Jelena Storozhenko's papers in here.'

We thought everything was locked up in Moscow.

'There are always ways of getting information,' the colonel says. He is as hard to hook as a wily old pike, but when we hand over dollars he begins to open up.

The colonel tells us that, as a military engineer in the Red Army, he had specialist knowledge of the subterranean infrastructure of Kaliningrad and in 1971 was called to assist the search for the Amber Room. 'That was the first time I met Jelena. And at that meeting I contracted an illness, searching