The burgers were sizzling, and drinks and conversation flowing freely, at Ross and Mo Cassidy’s summer barbecue in the garden of their redbrick semi in Salisbury.
Then, in a baritone Russian accent, their next-door neighbour made a pronouncement that sliced through the frivolity like a Cossack sabre.
‘You know, one day Putin is going to get me,’ the bear-like man with a vodka-lover’s complexion declared. From his resigned tone it must have been clear to the guests that he wasn’t joking.
Salisbury resident Ross Cassidy (pictured) was told by Sergei Skirpal that Vladimir Putin was ‘going to get him’ one day – the 63-year-old knew he wasn’t joking
Certainly, Mr Cassidy believed Sergei Skripal was serious in predicting he would be assassinated on the orders of the Russian president.
For, as the 63-year-old former Royal Navy submariner told me exclusively this week, he had known his neighbour was a Russian double-agent almost from the moment he mysteriously moved into the cul-de-sac; and this was not the first time he had heard the spy next-door utter those portentous words. Nor would it be the last.
Indeed, in a gripping three-part BBC dramatisation of the Salisbury poisoning atrocity beginning tomorrow (which Mr Cassidy says is realistic down to the smallest detail) he tells British anti-terror officers the ex-spy made the grim prediction again — just one week before the murder attempt.
By now the whole world knows the gist of the story. On March 4, 2018, posing as tourists fascinated by Salisbury cathedral, two Russian assassins smeared the door handle of Skripal’s house with Novichok, perhaps the most deadly nerve agent ever concocted.
As we see in the series’s powerful opening scene, within a few hours Skripal, now 68, and his daughter, Yulia, 35, fell into a catatonic stupor as they sat on a public bench after lunching together on that Sunday afternoon.
They spent weeks in hospital yet, miraculously, both survived.
The day before the attack, Mr Cassidy, 63, had driven Skripal to Heathrow Airport to meet Yulia off her flight from Moscow.
Mr Cassidy drove Sergei Skripal (pictured right) to Heathrow Airport to meet his daughter Yulia (left) the day before the pair fell ill on that infamous Sunday afternoon in Salisbury
In the TV series, in which he closely collaborated, he tells two Counter Terrorism Command officers he is sure they were followed back to Salisbury by a man and woman in a BMW.
They then ask him whether he recalls any other suspicious events in the days leading up to the poisoning.
‘I do, yes,’ replies Mr Cassidy, in the guise of actor Mark Addy — who strongly resembles him, with his burly build and beard.
‘Something Sergei said when he was right here last week. Sat exactly where you are, in fact. He said: “Putin’s going to get me.”’
It is a sensational moment. For although Britain has always accused the Russian government of being behind the assassination attempt, there have been suggestions that it could have been orchestrated by others, such as renegade enemies of Skripal in the Russian intelligence service.
Mr Cassidy’s testimony, told to the BBC producers during hours of interviews and revealed here for the first time, offers the strongest evidence yet that the poisoners were sent to Britain on the instructions of Putin himself.
Speaking to me this week, Mr Cassidy said he had agreed to work with the production team only with the proviso that he could vet the script and change anything that wasn’t accurate.
Mr Cassidy added that his two Counter Terrorism Command interrogators — a man and a woman — ‘camped’ in his house for six months after the attack, repeatedly going over every tiny detail of Skripal’s movements.
When, in the TV drama, the male officer suggests Skripal had ‘retired’ from spying, Mr Cassidy gazes at him in disbelief. ‘Where did you pick him up?’ he asks the female officer sardonically.
‘We never discussed it, but he travelled a lot. Weeks at a time,’ he then says, implying Skripal was still operating as a spy. ‘Never told me where he was going. Who knows what he was up to? He must have p***** somebody off.’
Recalling their journey to Heathrow, he says Skripal had changed his mobile phone to ‘an old-fashioned brick’, the suggestion being that he had done so because he felt his calls were being monitored.
Asked about Skripal’s belief that Putin was gunning for him, Mr Cassidy told me: ‘Sergei said that to me. Those were his exact words. Not just to me but to other people: “Putin will get me one day.”
‘Documentary dramas are given licence but I can absolutely tell you, categorically, that’s accurate. He said that over the years . . . several times. I remember we had a summer barbecue down the garden. Sergei was present, and he said it to me and friends of mine.
A new BBC documentary drama ‘The Salisbury Poisonings’ begins tomorrow, depicting the events of the Novichok poisonings in Salisbury (pictured)
‘Actually, there was a lot more (in the series) originally than that, but because of the time constraints it was left on the cutting-room floor.’
Mr Cassidy declined to reveal what other information Mr Skripal divulged, but added: ‘There were a lot of sinister goings-on. It would have made compelling viewing.’
Doubtless so, but viewers will find this series compelling enough. During the days and months that followed the poisonings, we learned much about the netherworld of international espionage.
The new series, however, is quite another story: one you would never find in any James Bond film.
It delves into the lives of everyday people who became embroiled in a saga of such gravity that it plunged Britain and Russia into a new Cold War.
A decade ago, Ross Cassidy was leading a pleasant but unremarkable life in Salisbury, with his kindly wife, Mo.
Having left the Royal Navy, he is now a concrete haulage contractor. But the lives of the couple took an unlikely twist after Skripal moved in next-door.
When they welcomed their new neighbour, he readily told them his real name (it still astounds Mr Cassidy that he wasn’t provided with an alias) and said he and his wife Lyudmila had emigrated from Russia with their children.
Mr and Mrs Cassidy didn’t need to ask why they had pitched up in their everyday suburb. A Google search later told them all they needed to know.
In his younger days Skripal had risen to the rank of colonel in the Russian army’s special airborne force. Then, in the mid-1990s, he was recruited to spy for the foreign intelligence service, the GRU.
In the guise of a military attache, he was posted to several countries, latterly Spain. There he was ‘turned’ by Britain’s overseas intelligence service, MI6, and began operate as a double-agent.
According to Russian prosecutors he betrayed the identities of more than 300 fellow agents before being caught, in 2004. Skripal was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
But after serving just four years, he was released in a Cold War-style spy-swap deal between Russia and the West, and given sanctuary in Britain.
That he and his family settled so comfortably in Salisbury was due in no small measure to the Cassidys’ warm hospitality.
The two families got along so well that in 2012, when Lyudmila died from uterine cancer, aged only 59, Mo says she came to regard Yulia as her daughter.
But after briefly working at the Holiday Inn in Southampton, the young Russian landed a plum sales job in Moscow, and — evidently believing that spy exchange protocol meant she was not at risk — she returned to live there.
The series captures a touching moment when Mr and Mrs Cassidy are allowed briefly to visit Yulia as she fights for life in hospital.
Despite strenuous protests, they were denied permission to see her father, and Mr Cassidy told me they don’t expect to meet their friends again.
This week, they were reported to have started a new life in New Zealand, a claim quashed by that country’s Prime Minister.
Last Christmas, however, the couple — who now live elsewhere in Salisbury — did receive a card from their friendly neighbourhood spy.
Meanwhile, families still living in the cul-de-sac say the fear of contamination has at last receded. Even so, the Skripals’ semi still stands empty.
With the police investigation still active, speculation about the Skripals’ health and whereabouts rife, Putin in his usual state of denial, and conspiracy theories proliferating, the story of the spy next-door has a long way to run.
The Salisbury Poisonings begins tomorrow on BBC One at 9pm.
AND WHAT BECAME OF OTHER KEY PLAYERS?
Mum who saved the day
Tracy Daszkiewicz is a remarkable character depicted in the BBC drama
A colourless, odourless chemical that remains active for 50 years, Novichok cuts off the link between the brain and the vital organs. It is so lethal that a teaspoonful could kill thousands.
As traces were detected in the Skripals’ house and front garden and it was feared that places they had visited might be contaminated, the task of safeguarding the 46,500 residents of Salisbury fell to one woman: Tracy Daszkiewicz . As we find out in the series, she is a remarkable character. At 20 she had three daughters whom she was left to raise alone.
Needing a career but without qualifications, she worked as a receptionist and studied with the Open University, gaining a sociology degree. Within ten years she had become Wiltshire Council’s public health director.
When Russian spies arrived on her patch, she was just months into the job.
Working 18-hour days and often acting on intuition — under the gaze of Whitehall mandarins, spy-masters and police officers — she delivered Salisbury from disaster. In an unforeseen rehearsal for Covid-19, she found tiny spots of poison by plotting the path of the victims and contact-tracing anyone they might have come across.
In the drama, after learning that the Skripals ate lunch at a branch of Zizzi’s restaurant chain, she barks at an assistant: ‘Call everyone who booked a table yesterday and today. See if anyone’s ill. Get on Tripadvisor. Anyone who in the last 24 hours has given a negative review of any establishment in Salisbury — call them up!’
She also persuaded reluctant police to close the contaminated station where poisoned officer Det Sgt Nick Bailey worked.
When Dawn Sturgess died of Novichok poisoning, four months after the Skripal affair, Daszkiewicz was consumed with guilt, feeling she had failed to make Salisbury safe.
She hadn’t, of course: and her heroics have now been recognised. She is now at the forefront of Public Health England’s fight against the coronavirus across the South-West.
The Courageous Detective
Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey looked at the foresincs of the crime scene
Arriving at the bench where the Skripals had collapsed, Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, 39, found a uniformed officer cleaning up after Sergei, who’d been violently ill at the scene. ‘Sooner you than me, mate,’ he quipped breezily.
The theory doing the rounds was that the middle-aged man and young woman had overdosed on fentanyl, a cheap new street drug.
Finding a credit card in Skripal’s pocket, however, he quickly discovered he was a Russian spy — just in time to prevent a colleague entering his house, which would likely have had fatal consequences.
Wearing a mask, goggles, gloves and forensic suit, Bailey, 39, then went into the semi himself. But particles of Novichok touched his skin, and by the time he got home to his wife, Sarah, and two daughters, he felt weird.
In the drama, we get a terrifying insight into his ordeal. Hallucinating, Bailey is convinced his house is ablaze.
The next stage of the poison cycle is paranoia. When his family appear at his bedside he’s convinced he will contaminate them, panics and has to be restrained.
Meanwhile, their house in a Dorset village is sealed off and all their possessions — even the children’s toys — have to be destroyed.
Then, when the detective returns to work, he suffers a relapse and is signed off for several more months.
Happily, life for the Baileys is now looking up. According to neighbours, they have sold the house and moved to another, not far away.
Nick and Sarah Bailey also worked closely with the drama’s writer and executive producer Declan Lawn, confiding information they had told to no one outside their family.
The Unintended Victim
Dawn Sturgess is another member of the public who is depicted in the BBC show
The last ordinary member of the public highlighted in the new drama is Dawn Sturgess.
As the Skripals sit rigidly on the bench in the opening scene, we are taken inside the historic cathedral, where a little girl lights a candle, watched by her loving mother. This may be a clever televisual device, but it portrays Ms Sturgess in an altogether kinder — and her family would say more truthful — way than she was depicted after she was poisoned.
The woman the world read about was a feckless, alcoholic mother of three, who dossed in a hostel and had a heroin-addicted boyfriend, Charlie Rowley.
Rummaging in a bin, he had found what appeared to be a bottle of designer perfume, which he gave to her as they came round after an all-night bender.
After dabbing on the odourless ‘scent’ she suffered a bleed to the brain and died in hospital. She was 44. (Mr Rowley survived.)
However, Mrs Sturgess’s parents, Stan and Caroline, presented programme-makers with a very different character: a woman who was making progress in her battle with the bottle, and cared deeply for her children.
One of the most moving scenes comes when her 11-year-old daughter, Gracie, reads a eulogy at her funeral.
After describing things they liked doing together — such as lighting candles at the cathedral — the girl says: ‘I just want everybody to know she was a really good mum.’