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So Bilanina doesn't know what Kuchumov was doing in 1949, we ask again? She shoots out of her seat and begins tearing through boxes. Finally, she retrieves four letters from a pile. 'Kuchumov received many letters and cards from this man, a German. He was connected to what happened in 1949.' She looks triumphant. 'There are things we were not meant to know and Kuchumov knew how to keep a secret, but as he became older he was careless.'

She thrusts into our hands four envelopes that are now pockmarked with grease spots. 'How can you Angliyski understand? Even Kuchumov did not understand everything. I should know, I wrote his obituary.' She is quivering again. 'You see the kind of woman you're dealing with now? And all this trouble the day before I go under the knife.'

Four empty envelopes. We lay them on the pine table at our apartment in Sovetskaya 7. They bear the postmark of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) and are addressed to 'Pawlowsk, Leningrad Schloss Museum, A. Kugumow'. They are all dated after 1949 and we wonder if Valeria Bilanina misunderstood our questions. One is from 3 January 1951, another from 1 January 1970, the third from 4 January 1973 and the last from 25 December 1976. Quite possibly they contained seasonal greetings. Each one bears the stamp of the Soviet censor.

But we notice that the envelope dated 4 January 1973 is slightly plumper than the others. We hold it up to the light. An opaque, oblong shadow runs across the envelope like a tumour on an X-ray. We slice the lining of the envelope open with a razor blade and a piece of tracing paper falls out. We open up the fragile square. It is a letter written in German with an extremely light hand in pencil, so that no discernible indentations could be felt if the envelope was patted down.

The writing is formal and outmoded. The author of this letter had so much to say that, having filled the paper his words then run vertically up one side of the page:

Dear Mr Kugumow, a long time has passed, in my opinion almost twenty-four years, since we worked together on the mystery of the Amber Room. I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart for the New Year and I wish you all the best and great successes in this year's work. You will probably not remember me after so long. On 3 October 1970 I visited Leningrad with a tour party. I wanted to very much meet you again but I couldn't remember your surname correctly and nobody could help me when I asked about the great art historian who searched for the Amber Room.

The writer was forgetful and possibly old. He also had a confession:

Very often I blame myself that I did not insist in Kaliningrad on systematic searching. This feeling was especially alive when I saw a Soviet movie last year about the Amber Room when my name was mentioned and again recently when Mr Seydervitz, the former general director of the Dresden Gallery, wrote about the destiny of the Amber Room. Not everything he wrote is quite right, but he shows well how cruelly and without responsibility the Nazis behaved towards your great monuments of art.

Then there was a request: I would very much like to come to Leningrad again. Could you give me in Pavlovsk somewhere to stay, since without it I am not allowed to go to the Soviet Union?' He envisaged an exchange of favours. 'Maybe you would like to visit our Republic too? I invite you as my guest and you can stay at my home. The wife of my son is a student of Slavonic studies and she can translate for us.'

Since it remained concealed until we sliced it free from the envelope's lining, Kuchumov never read this secret letter. We can only presume that what the great curator took out of the envelope and what the Soviet censor also saw was an innocuous New Year's greetings card. The tracing paper square with its mention of the Amber Room and a secret trip to Kaliningrad was presumably concealed to keep the subject matter private. And yet from what we have learned so far it is clear that every detail of the operation to find the Amber Room was planned,