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Through tears, Valeria Bilanina.

The box finishes with a gift from Albina Vasiliava, porcelain expert at Pavlovsk, surely the same Bolshoi Albina who gave the lecture at the House of Scientists: a hand-painted silk pennant.

Plaudits, caricatures, tears and a pennant. None of them can help us resolve what became of Anotoly Kuchumov's Amber Room investigation. We wonder if any of Kuchumov's adoring colleagues knew about his other life, the secret investigations into the Amber Room that we have only just begun to uncover in these papers that the literature archive has sat on for so many years. The orders from SovNarKom. The furtive komandirovats business trips to Moscow and Konigsberg. A request to the highest Soviet authorities to be allowed to pursue suspects to Berlin. Kuchumov's growing obsession with the Amber Room.

Our Friend the Professor says that she will speak to the archive director about the Kuchumov file we had actually requested, but in the meantime we contact Bolshoi Albina and tell her we have found her silk pennant. We hope her curiosity will get the better of her shyness.

Bolshoi Albina laughs when we call and agrees to meet. Two weeks later, sitting with her at a dinner table in the new suburbs, warmed by crimson Georgian wine, she is unstoppable, in the way that elastic unravels from a split golf ball.

'We all adored Anatoly Mikhailovich. And I remember painting the pennant for his birthday. How embarrassing it ended up in an archive,' she says, tucking a stray wisp of hair back into her bun. She is blushing. 'He fired us all with his enthusiasm. He said we should never give up the search for Prussian things stolen from us by the fascists.' She takes another sip of wine.. I had heard so much about him even before I started work. I thought that he would be tall and handsome, but actually he was quite small, with a thick neck, like a bullfrog. Quite clumsy.'

Bolshoi Albina pulls some photographs out of the pocket of her tweed skirt. 'Anatoly Mikhailovich was a man of simple origins. He didn't act like a director. He had only one suit and all of us used to dust him down when the high officials came.' In the first picture two young women are dressed up in imperial gowns, one of them sitting crossed-legged, her stilettos peeking out from beneath a long lace petticoat. 'That's me,' she says. 'Wearing the dress of Maria Fedorovna, the wife of Alexander III. In another picture a male curator sits on a throne wearing the gold crown of Paul I, laughing colleagues crowded around him, including a familiar figure, Kuchumov. Albina explains: 'Capusnik, we called it. It means chopping cabbage for winter. But it came to mean a staff party. Letting your hair down. Relieving the tension.'

Anatoly Kuchumov (left) and colleagues at Pavlovsk Palace; the crown was once worn by Tsar Paul I

We try to steer the conversation back to the private Kuchumov. Did he talk about the Amber Room?

'Not publicly. He would go off on komandirovat, certainly. He said he was going to conferences. About restoration work. Or he would tell us he was on holiday and leave us in chaos for a couple of weeks.'

All of the komandirovat forms we have seen so far suggest that when Kuchumov said he was on holiday or a work trip he was actually on Amber Room business.

Albina shrugs. 'When he returned all he wanted to know was what we had been doing. He had important friends with high ranks as party leaders. We were lowly. It was a difficult time. Perhaps the most difficult. He brought us together. You have no idea, I think, about what we had all gone through during the war.'

Albina smooths the creases in her skirt. 'On 2 October 1941 German soldiers running a slave caravan abducted me from my village near Smolensk. I was only five. We were stripped naked, disinfected and loaded into vans.' Her cheeks burn. 'We were bundled into Poland,' she says, fixing her memory on a harrowing journey to an unknown place. 'All the time the convoy was bombed by Soviet planes. Children are so simple. We used to try and hide in the craters as