The flights to Moscow are full of ox-pecker businessmen. They’re all bright-eyed and bouncy with anticipation, keen to ride the rhino of Russia’s oil-and-gas boom by drip- feeding it with a selection of boutiquey Euro luxuries: shotguns, powerboats and fusion- restaurant concepts.

On the way back, however, they don’t look quite so good. Bankrupted financially by Russian business practices, and morally by a Klondikesque nightlife, they are nursing empty wallets. But every single one will whisper, in a conspiratorial, blokes-only sort of way: “You can forget Amsterdam and Reykjavik. For a really good night out, you have to get yourself to Moscow.”

So that’s what Adrian and I did.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. I wanted a good night out. I wanted to eat my supper from the toned belly of a Ukrainian hooker while snorting pink cocaine from the back of a golden swan. Adrian, on the other hand, wanted to queue for bread, and beat himself with twigs while sampling the workers’ struggle for control of the factories.

Before leaving, therefore, he fixed a translator who was an artist and would show him some of the struggle, while I called the people from Russia’s Top Gear magazine, who knew some people who might be able to help with the swan and the naked Ukrainian.

So, at the airport Adrian was met by his rather dreamy translator in a smashed-up taxi, and I was met by a Maybach. Also, there was a Cadillac Escalade full of policemen in paramilitary uniforms, sub-machineguns and a selection of potato-faced meat machines who talked into their cuffs a lot.

Adrian looked at the taxi and the dreamy translator. And he had a struggle for, oooh, about one second, deciding whether to go with them or get in the creamy Maybach with me.

It, and the sub-machineguns, all belonged to a businessman we shall call Matthew, and at first I thought it might be a bit of an ego trip. I mean, he publishes magazines and makes fountain pens.

But this meat-’n’-metal protection was not for show. Three years ago, Matthew was kidnapped by Chechen terrorists. He was beaten, handcuffed to a former special-forces soldier, blindfolded and taken to a flat somewhere in the uniformly grey, monolithic, high-rise outskirts of Moscow.

The Chechens called his father, who lives in Spain, saying that unless they received $50m within five days, the boy would be killed. His father roared back: “$50m? F*** off!” And with that he turned off his mobile. For two days.

Matthew waited five days for his kidnappers to drop their guard and then leapt out of a fifth-floor window. It’s hard to say what shattered his legs – the impact, or the bullets fired by the guards as he fell. But whatever, he crawled to a nearby road, flagged down a passing motorist, and over the next seven months watched the entire gang being sent to prison, where, he says quietly, all of them met with accidents and died.

I liked Matthew enormously. And here’s something truly amazing. Adrian, who dislikes people until he gets to know them – and then dislikes them even more – liked him enormously too. Partly, I suspect, because Matthew could get us into restaurants.

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