Welcome to the document, gentlemen, and to the 16th new episode of our 2020 season. In a previous podcast, we brought you part one of Polonium and the piano player. And so it's part two of that story. As one of the biggest police investigations in British history gets underway, Derek Conlon is astonished to learn that he, too, has been poisoned. But that's just the beginning of his problems. Produced by Robert Mulheron for Sky News Story, cast and narrated by Diana Magnay, this is part two of polonium and the piano player.

And a quick note before listening.

The former KGB agent, Andrei Lugovoy and Dmitri Kovtun deny any involvement in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, as does the Russian state. It's even worse than the person, and it isn't about drunk, drunken shouting and screaming, and the winners are steamy from the rain and the hot dogs. That is a drag. And I haven't seen snow feel there. It's a strange time of night. And obviously at 2:00 in the morning, you know, this is episode two of Polonium and the piano player.

I'm Diana Magnay. At the end of Episode one, we left Derek Holland as he was making his way home on the night of the poisoning, eight hours after he unknowingly drank from the same radioactive cup as ex Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko. But we're now going to fast forward two and a half weeks.

It's the stuff of a Cold War thriller to the evening of November the 19th, 2006, documents passed under the table. Derek is at home.

He's not at work tonight and is half watching the news. Alexander Litvinenko, a few days ago when he got the bus to the Millennium Hotel, he found the piano bar boarded up. And there's a very tall policeman.

And it was a yellow and blue sticky tape across the two doors. I said, hi. I said, I work here. I got to play piano. And he said, well, you don't work here tonight. And I said, oh, what's happened is there's been an incident. I so I wasn't told. And he kind of looked at me as if I was able to tell you anyway. So I had a bad arm and I called my agent and I said, I'm not working.

Tonight, the bar is closed. And he said, Why? I said, I don't know. And let me find out about. So he's sitting here waiting for his agent to call Skya when a news report on TV catches his attention by half past four.

Litvinenko is at the Millennium Hotel on Grosvenor Square for a business meeting that came up that a man had been involved in. I don't know what was an instant, but I am at the Millennium Hotel and in the bar at the Millennium Hotel.

On the 17th of November, he was transferred to University College Hospital and placed under armed guard.

Derrick listens as the report describes how a man named Alexander Litvinenko was in critical condition in University, College, Hospital or U.S. H.

In King's Cross, just down the road from Derek's flat on November the 2nd, 2006, this man had been taken to a hospital in north London, suffering from severe stomach pains and vomiting. At first, the doctors had thought it was food poisoning, then leukemia. I came across that nobody seemed to know what was going on, basically.

But when the man's condition worsened, he was transferred to UCLA, where he was admitted under the name Edwin Carter was Mr. Litvinenko.

They were saying different things. Russian spy, dissident, double agent. Who was this guy?

Someone didn't want Mr. Litvinenko to obtain them.

It was reported that the man worked for MI6, the UK's Secret Service agency, and that Alexander Litvinenko had checked into a hospital under his UK pseudonym Edwin Carter to disguise his identity.

Whatever he'd done, he clearly stepped on some pretty big toes and someone wanted him dead.

Alexander Litvinenko made a lot of enemies in Russia. He was an outspoken critic of the Putin regime and he was also an outspoken critic of the FSB, former KGB, where he worked for many years. So in a sense, any group inside the former KGB could have decided to have a go at him for more than two weeks.

Alexander Litvinenko illness had baffled the UK's leading medical experts and scientists who now believe the ex Russian agent was poisoned.

He was a fit, strong, handsome man just when I saw him last a month ago. And now he is like an old man.

Needless to say, the British government and Prime Minister Tony Blair, I'm about to treat treated claims that one of their spies had been poisoned very seriously.

Alex Rossi, the other thing that's irrefutable is that he was on in some shape or form the payroll of MI6, advising them about links between organised corruption and the security services in Russia, I think would make him, in the Kremlin's eyes, an active combatants. Scotland Yard sent a specialist unit to Alexander Litvinenko hospital bedside using a translator. Detectives recorded everything the former Russian agent could remember before he'd fallen ill.

Who had he met and where and why? He believed that the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, was personally responsible for his poisoning to try and create some leads. A photograph of Litvinenko lying stricken in his hospital bed was released to the press. He looks terrible.

Looks like a ghost. Is all of the image shocked the world and it shocked Derek. It's over.

A bald head of man, John, just looking yellow skin, staring into the abyss.

By now, it appeared inevitable that Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian secret agent, husband and father of three children who'd grown up in the closed world of Soviet communism, was going to die a very public death. Three weeks after the attack in the Millennium Hotel's piano bar, his heart failed. We're sorry to announce that Alexander Litvinenko died at University College Hospital in 921 on the 21st of November 2006. Like millions watching around the world.

Derek was disturbed by the death and by the suggestion of Russian state involvement is now an ongoing investigation.

But what happened next propelled the UK government into full blown crisis mode.

Our thoughts are with Mr Litvinenko family.

Because just hours after Alexander Litvinenko died of a heart attack, the poison that had killed him was finally identified to get into the body, the polonium would have had to be eaten or inhaled polonium 210, a uranium enriched radioactive substance before spreading around the body through the bloodstream.

One of the most lethal substances on Earth. It is a sophisticated poison which is only in the possession of the KGB.

Speaking with the country on high alert, Prime Minister Tony Blair called a crisis meeting where scientists in the mold of Professor of Physics Philip Walker gave further alarming insight into the nuclear poisons. Immense power.

It's been used essentially as a fuse for a atomic bomb. I consider it to be, in some sense, the ideal poison. If you managed to poison someone after a few years, if it's all decayed away and you can't exhume the body and find the poison that's left behind as you could with any chemical poison. So it's very clever.

Disappearing poison and polonium 210, the agents, Lugovoy and Kovtun, had been given the perfect weapon. The problem was in the execution.

But I don't think for one moment they knew what they were handling because had they, they wouldn't have handled it in such a lack Taseko manner. I have to assume that the reason behind using it was that they thought that perhaps they'd have got away with it and it wouldn't have been detected, but it would have told the people who needed to be told, you know, the Kremlin has an extremely long arm.

Specialist crime units are now combing the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair. And back in his flat in north London, Derek is continuing to follow the case of the I worked there so and I wasn't working, so I took an interest.

It's been nearly a month since Derek unknowingly drank from the same radioactive cup as Alexander Litvinenko, but he still has no idea he's being slowly poisoned.

And again, it just they're just words got into my head and I'm not taken on board, you know, think, well, this has nothing to do with me anyway. But then Derek travels to Lincolnshire to stay with friends and he gets the first indication that he may actually have a role to play in this story, bigger than anything he could ever have imagined contact.

What would you say to members of the public who may have come into contact with this podium to one or they made the announcement that anybody was at the hotel to report to the U.S. AIDS hospital just to be tested, that while I was there. So I better go back down to London.

Gevisser checked out as Derek sets off for London, one of the biggest police investigations ever conducted in the U.K. involving hundreds of officers was getting underway.

The authorities have revealed that more than 300 people have contacted a special National Health Service helpline.

The attack was now being treated like a public health emergency.

Against this backdrop, Derek Conlon strolls into the reception of University College Hospital in London, the same hospital Alexander Litvinenko went into and never left.

I saw a lady sitting behind the desk in the middle of it and told him my name and why I was here. And she took my name and she went away for a while.

And when she came back, she told me to go on upstairs and I'll just wait to be called. And then this lady came out from behind a door and said, come on through. We will do some testing procedures or whatever you call it. So it's OK. They took some blood, obviously, and you test your reflexes like a little hammer and then breathing.

But then they asked me if I had stomach cramps or leg pain and muscle pains, and then we did an eye test, just like an artist looking at a wall and can you see them? That was that.

You know, after his examination, Derek gets ready to return to Lincolnshire, but less than two hours later, his mobile rings and he's told to come and get his results, but not from the hospital, but for some reason from the Millennium Hotel.

I don't think about worry about fear, nothing for these results. I'm just going for basically it's just a general make sure that you're fine.

And then an incision is made from round about here and right down the length of the front of the body.

It's around this time that a team of experts conduct an autopsy on Alexander Litvinenko, his body.

They'll be looking for evidence of polonium 210, the radioactive substance Mr Litvinenko, his family, described as a tiny nuclear bomb.

A post-mortem billed as the most dangerous of its kind ever to be attempted in the Western world.

Pathologists were forced to wear not one, but two layers of protective clothing and supplied with a constant stream of filtered air.

When the results came back, they confirmed that the former Russian spy was indeed the victim of acute radiation poisoning that have resulted in massive organ failure, knowing what they knew.

It's little wonder, then, that the three medical experts who greeted Derek in the lobby of the hotel were so on edge they asked who I was, but I thought it was OK.

You come up first. The four of us get into the elevator and I have a little band to say, Hey, you guys doing OK? You know, and they're very serious and there's no kind of happy people. So I'm OK. I was still you know, I wonder what really what all this is about when they leave the elevator.

Derek is brought to a meeting room.

So we went into the room, they sat and they had three chairs at a desk and a chair fell for me, said so I went, OK. And they said, well, we've been through your tests and we've we've discovered that you have levels of radiation poisoning are are pretty high. You don't know what you're talking about.

The doctors can't answer Derek's questions, only that he's ingested one of the most dangerous substances known to man.

And they said, well, you're up in the top. Five people have been poisoned, so I don't understand why, because I wasn't there when that happened to Derek barely has time to process what he's being told when he's brought back downstairs where the police are waiting to question him.

So this is what I do not tell. What will get their way from just a general background on who you are and what time you play, when you play, what days, what hours, that type of stuff, you know? And I just said.

I turned up in. I had a cup of coffee and I sat down displaced by the piano and sang all night. Considering Derek had just learned he'd been poisoned by something once used to detonate an atomic bomb. This line of questioning does not feel right.

But this is a murder investigation in all.

But name and detectives from Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism command are working relentlessly to retrace what's now an international radioactive trail.

But the U.K. intelligence community and Scotland Yard are now working around the clock to try and find clues related to the attack.

When he returns to his flat in north London, Derek tries to come to terms with the fact that he's been poisoned and if he has any part to play in this deepening international crisis, this real life spy thriller is now a 24 hour news story.

Alexander Litvinenko was granted political asylum in Britain six years ago. He claims to know some of the darkest secrets of Russia's past and had been prepared to speak out.

And the details of Alexander Litvinenko secret life in the U.K. have now taken on new meaning. How Litvinenko enjoyed a close relationship with the Russian dissident Boris Berezovsky.

There have been suggestions that Litvinenko may have been in the offices owned by his friend and sponsor, the billionaire Boris Berezovsky, on Downing Street and how both men were trying to undermine the Russian government.

I started kind of believing that what I had been poisoned, you know, I've got whatever's happened to me and there's more to this than meets the eye. So you have the the not knowing side and you have the actual physical damage side as well.

But it was the emergence of an Italian security consultant called Mario Scaramella that really unnerved Derek. According to Scaramella, Litvinenko had in the days before his death been preparing to leak highly sensitive information about the Russian government.

Well, it was a four pages, two emails mentioning some names, some circumstances.

Professor Mario Scaramella described how he met Mr Litvinenko in this London sushi bar.

Mario Scaramella had even warned Alexander Litvinenko that his life was in danger just before the former Russian spy met with Lugovoy and Kovtun in the Millennium Hotel.

He was included in the list of names under danger. Derek wasn't much bothered with any of that, just that Scaramella was now considered a suspect in Alexander Litvinenko murder. Why? Because the nuclear poison, polonium 210, have been discovered not only in the sushi bar where the men had met on the day of the attack, but also in Scaramella, Zurin. It was now clear to Derek why police asked him the questions that they did if Scaramella was a suspect because polonium had been found in his urine.

And where did that leave him?

Yeah, you are, I guess, in a way, I suspect as well, you know, these and these cases, which is a kind of a.

A kind of turning point for me in the whole thing, you know, it was just a matter of time before detectives came to question Derrick again, so they came around and two detectives and invited them in and I made some tea.

Nearly a week on from Litvinenko death and a month after the attack, polonium 210 was turning up in more and more London locations.

So far, 12 locations have tested positive for radiation. At least the home secretary's warned will grow.

The government was coming under increasing pressure to find the assassins. Understandably, Scotland Yard wasn't going to send a couple of trainees to question a key witness.

They would send special agents debriefed by Alexander Litvinenko just before he died. The questions were basically the same as the lady at the millennium asked me, what did you do time wise and what were your habits when you went there? That's everything I asked of a couple of questions about how I got it, you know, and one of them was kind of that I'll worry about it. So I've been sitting with the man. So if he's going to get out, I'm going to get you know, I don't know whether that was the kind of allay my worries or whatever.

I just. I know Postup. I was given a name and a number and told to speak to nobody anyway because it's an investigation gone ahead, so I thought of anything to let them know. The detectives left.

On December the 7th, 2006, two weeks after his death, Alexander Litvinenko, who had converted to Islam after moving to the U.K., was buried with Muslim rights in Highgate Cemetery in London, a law to protect mourners.

He was buried in a coffin lined with lead, beating out the Russian agents and childhood friends, Andrei Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun when now persons of interest in the investigation.

The. The story had become an international news sensation everywhere, it seems, but Russia, where Moscow correspondent Alex Rossi listened to a very different narrative.

Now, what do you think? President Putin has repeatedly denied any involvement in the death of Mr. Litvinenko.

Today, a member of Russia, as the general mechanism that would be would be that this is a kind of black ops operation by the Brits to try and sully the name of Russia, to try and sully the name of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. And that's what it was about. And the Russian public shouldn't be deceived by by any of this.

He knows the. By CBO on budget and in the middle of all this, Derek has yet to develop any physical symptoms, goes back to work when the Millennium Hotel opens a new piano bar outside.

Obviously, the world's media camped out, you know, across the road at the memorial park and on the pavement outside as well.

It's now an open secret that Millennium Hotel staff and their resident piano player were exposed to the nuclear poison.

Polonium 210 people started looking for space in the back of the hotel on the stands, waiting for the chefs to come out. You know, it's kind of under siege, so to speak.

You know, once inside, specialists from the Health Protection Agency or EPA met Derek and other staff members, they were told they would have to submit daily urine samples.

The advice was to feel like a leader and a half bottle of urine because with polonium 210, it secretes from your body through that and through the perspiration over a period of between six and 12 months. So you actually lose your body physically. But the damage that it does to your body obviously is done initially.

From just a few weeks ago, people were lining up to listen to Derek play the piano. Now people are turning up night after night just so they can stand and stare. It was strange when that kind of focus is on you, you know, and it's it was only certain people who used to go to the hotel, but they would go to the hotel to see it, not to listen to any more.

There's more kind of stay away. No shaking hands. And, you know, you're contagious. It was out of curiosity, really is glowing in the dark, that type of stuff, you know?

So I remember Derek still has no idea how he ingested the radioactive poison until one afternoon in mid-December 2006, nearly six weeks on from the attack when he arrives to the hotel to find the police waiting for him.

I had two big sessions with some policewoman, maybe, I don't know, the anti-terrorist or whatever they would be. You know, you don't ask.

It is during this meeting that Derek discovers for the first time how both he and Alexander Litvinenko came to be poisoned. And how his life would forever be intertwined with that of the Russian spy. I said, how did I get it? You know, I wasn't here at half past four. And and I wasn't I didn't do it. I just had a cappuccino. And she said the dishwasher was broken and you drank from that cup that was poison it, you know, alone in his flat.

Late at night, Derek now finds himself haunted by that press image of Alexander Litvinenko dying on his hospital bed.

Friends said in the end, he looked like a concentration camp survivor, but said he did.

I'm not a mathematician, but you're trying to figure out what happened to him 23 days on that dose and you're walking out of the coma. If I divide that by my dosage, then combine that with a picture. I think is that can happen to me.

He was brutally murdered by.

But then something really peculiar happens. Strange noises start coming from Derek's TV set. Understandably, Derek is freaked out.

They came with a kind of crackling noise and then it went over and over and done and stopped.

I do have a vivid imagination writing songs and stuff, but this is a kind of no, this is actually happening.

Derek knows that every security resource has been brought in to try and catch the killers.

Detectives are using the most advanced technology that you can imagine, Europe wide manhunt. When you take all of that into account, it would be unusual for Derek who tested positive for polonium 210, not to be under some kind of police surveillance, the phone ring. Then you'd pick it up and just little clicks and there'd be no answer. And then either watching me as well. You know, I could be anybody, you know. And I believe that they would obviously tell you that we're looking into you or whatever.

But everybody is a suspect, you know, in any situation. And everybody has to be investigated and either eliminated or prosecuted.

Then Derek has a more sinister thought. He knows he's one of a group of people who are in the piano bar of the Millennium Hotel on the day of the attack.

That makes him a person of interest in the eyes of not just the British police, but also the people who wanted Litvinenko dead.

He was fighting against the evil forces in Russia, against the KGB, and he became a victim of radicalism and revenge. He was brutally murdered by these people. I think, you know, you read the newspapers, anybody talks about bad, about the government, the Russian government. You know, we will get you to everything. And I know I'm nobody. But, you know, it's part of the story have been publicized and it happened out there, you know, and I think a culmination of that.

The police, the slight paranoia about the TV, the poisoning and people calling you and asking questions and and you're suddenly in this kind of won't say a word you don't want to be in, but you are in the middle of something as well, you know. In just a matter of weeks, the poisoning of an ex Russian spy in a London hotel was now breathing new life into serious international tensions.

And there's lots of things have been happening in Russia which actually cast a cloud over President Putin's success in finding the place together.

At the same time, UK counter-terrorism experts had received a tip off that the source of the radioactive polonium was a nuclear facility in the Russian town of sort of a town which required authorisation just to travel to and where Russia produced its first nuclear bomb during the reign of Joseph Stalin. Meanwhile, back in north London, Derek received a call telling him that two government scientists were on their way to his flat.

They told me they were coming to check what I was wearing and the sea was the place contaminated or whatever as well.

But when the scientists turned up, then whipped out the kind of equipment more in a science fiction movie than in Derek's one bedroom flat.

They fired up almost like a like a big remote control with a counter. They went from second floor left to right. Each room sort of gone through everything. There was nothing happening. I thought, OK, this is fine. What were you wearing that night? And so I'm a suit was hanging up. I said just my suit.

They checked it out and then crackled in a.. OK, what was I mean. OK. And they wouldn't tell me anything as well to have with you that day. And that's just my case and case crackled. OK. And the drum machine, the microphone and some papers. You have a phone at the time. So I said, so what are they going to do? They took away the case and they took away the old drum machine. And I said to myself, you know, this is to put a dry cleaners on really this year just to wash off.

And that was it.

It was a.. Well, thanks for your time and OK. Is that it? And they were off.

You know, Derek did what he was told. He brought his suit to the dry cleaners. This would be the last he would hear from these government scientists.

The only thing they recommended me to do was go to the dry cleaners with a suit.

It was now Christmas 2006, almost two months on from the release of the nuclear poison. Derek continued handing his urine samples over to the Health Protection Agency and playing the piano in the Millennium Hotel, the scene of the attack, I believe.

By January 2007, the Russian agents, Lugovoy and Kovtun, were no longer just persons of interest in the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. They were the prime suspects.

Lugovoy, the bodyguard and businessman, was identified as the lead assassin. But as long as he was in Russia, the UK authorities couldn't touch him just to question him, they needed the cooperation of the Kremlin and that was something they'd so far been denied.

But one person who didn't need that kind of authorisation was Alex Rossi. In January 2007, he traveled through the winter snow to meet the UK's most wanted man at his gated residence outside of Moscow.

He'd been named by some sources as a prime suspect. Did you kill Alexander Litvinenko?

You can use a bullet or you catch your breath.

Demona to using a translator. Lugovoy denies any part in the attack.

In fact, he would go on to say that he himself was targeted with a nuclear substance, polonium 210, and that it had actually been planted by his enemies at locations that he'd visited in London, like Arsenal's football stadium, Britain's Scotland Yard, the Dubrow's and Ashley Qassemi.

Lugovoy said Alexander Litvinenko had tried to recruit him as a British spy and that, along with Dmitri Kovtun now out of hospital in Hamburg, having tested positive himself for polonium 210, the two former KGB agents were being scapegoated by British authorities.

There does seem to be circumstantial evidence. It is now well over two months since Derek was poisoned with the polonium 210 that killed Alexander Litvinenko. But despite ingesting a deadly dose of this nuclear poison, he had yet to suffer any ill effects. Then all of a sudden, his eyesight begins to fade.

For some reason, it felt as though my eyebrows were covering half my eyesight in either Wilko I could see, obviously, but heaven was like suddenly half, you know, haven't seen before, dark on the top and light and the bottom, you know. So I thought, this is not right.

Derek's journey into the twilight world of espionage now feels complete. And he was slowly beginning to realise that in this world, suspicion trumped concern.

According to the organisation, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Russia is the third deadliest country in the world to operate in.

In the greater scheme of things, his health didn't compare with an international crisis. The killing of the editor of the Russian Forbes magazine stressed and having been told to speak to no one.

Derek makes an appointment to see the one person in the world he knows he can trust. His GP, so I went in and I know how to start this conversation, you know, it was kind of a bit kind of weird. So I sat down and said, I'm. I think it looks like my exact words were, I don't know where to begin with this, and then I just burst out crying and I couldn't stop, you know, and I thought, I don't ever show up there.

So anyway, he gave me a couple of minutes and then put us out together. So I said, I've had it kind of weird last couple of months, you know, and explained what had happened. And he was kind of a wow. And obviously he knew about Alexander Litvinenko, the poisoning. I said I'm I'm dealing with HPI and they have all the records.

A small back street doctor's surgery in north London is the last place you'd expect the victim of a Russian radioactive hit to go to for treatment. Radioactive poisonings are pretty uncommon in the U.K. And because the Health Protection Agency had Derek's confidential test results, his doctor had very little to go on.

So he did a blood tests and blood pressure stuff the first time. I've always been perfectly healthy all my life. He put me on blood pressure tablets. The C, would that do anything, you know, help me out. And three or four days later, after storms like these bang, there was daylight again, you know. His doctor guessed that a spike in blood pressure had impacted Derek's eyesight, brought on by what he couldn't say, Derek.

He took it as a sign he didn't have long to live and increasingly paranoid that he was being watched not only by the UK authorities, but by the Russians, too. Derek decided to try and leave the country.

I got a phone call to go to do a job in Barbados and I got to that stage. Not that I was going to die out there and then on the spot, but the way I was thinking at the time was I discovered the last job I ever do. Derek accepted the job and jumped on the next flight to Barbados. He didn't tell the UK authorities anyway. They were now trying to extradite the Russian agents, Lugovoy and Kovtun, back to the UK for questioning CCTV images from the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair.

It emerged images that would confirm how on the day of the poisoning, both agents used a toilet in the hotel, heavily contaminated with polonium 210. It had also been discovered that the nuclear poison had been poured down a sink in Dmitri Kovtun hotel room.

Even though none of this, however, made any difference to Andrei Lugovoy. In fact, his popularity was on the rise in Russia, where the former military man was now dreaming of a career in politics.

To use the razor, get Dmitri Kovtun and the crisis between the UK and Russia that had grown out of the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko deepened in May 2007.

Russia refused that request from the UK to extradite the agents, Lugovoy and Kovtun, on charges of murdering the ex KGB spy.

The aftermath of Litvinenko poisoning saw four Russian diplomats expelled from London.

Then, in July, nine months on from the nuclear poisoning, four British ones were then expelled from Moscow.

The UK and Russia engaged in the tit for tat expulsion of diplomats. David Miliband said Russia's behaviour was completely unacceptable by this stage. Derek didn't know if anyone in the UK, which, by the way, was now being led by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, noticed that he was missing or did they even care? There were bigger concerns, like shoring up their multi-billion pound trading relationship with Russia.

Trade ties between the two countries are worth a hundred billion pounds.

At the same time, Marina Litvinenko, Alexander's wife, said about securing a public inquiry into the murder of her husband.

I know my husband was killed and somebody has to be at this point for this. I want people to see these facts about this, to bring people truth about what happened to my husband.

How must Marina Litvinenko have felt then when in late 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed Andrei Lugovoy to Parliament? Far from being outcast, the prime suspect in Alexander Litvinenko death appeared to have been rewarded. And one of the fringe benefits of him becoming an MP was that he could never be tried for Litvinenko murder in Russia. Not long after this, in 2008, Russia went to war with Georgia over a land dispute. It was around now that Derek started to hear from old colleagues from the Millennium Hotel colleagues who spoke about near-death experiences brought about by polonium 210.

She lost her Senate seat, you know, and we had stuff, you know, he drove home, you know, and was honesty. And that chap had a heart attack. And he is 35.

You know, in one such conversation, Derek was shocked when he learned what had happened to his music from the night of the attack, the microphone and drum machine taken from his home by the two government scientists.

Yeah, my case was buried in copper microphone and. The old drum machine was probably in there as well, just that they took that that was gone. Like I said, the only thing I was left was the the sue. The piano was destroyed. Piano still P.A. system was taken away.

I don't know about you, but if the microphone that you'd sung into on the night you'd unwittingly been poisoned was made so radioactive by your own breath that it had to be buried in protective casing. Well, what Toll must have been taking on Derek's body? Derek was now left to wonder how it was that others exposed to the poison had fallen ill, but that he hadn't, despite the fact that his radiation readings were among the highest.

Not so long ago, Derek believed he only had a short time to live. But now the months were turning into years. Derek was trying not to look too far ahead while he was developing some minor health complaints. He was at least still alive.

It is the weirdest thing. I was a funny shape, you know, and I still to buy clothes that were kind of big sizes, you know, and I kind of cramps and like I say, I have a glass of water.

Or if I drank a can of coke, probably would have exploded, you know, by 2016.

Derek had found his way back to the Caribbean, this time to the tiny tropical island of Anguilla, where just like 10 years before he got a job playing in a hotel.

And they took me over to Anguilla in this posh speedboat because I still way to get in there, you know.

But for Derek, the legacy of the attack at the Millennium Hotel have been burning a slow fuse. It is a hallmark of the nuclear poison, polonium 210, that it can stalk you every step long after it's been ingested. And now on the Caribbean island of Anguilla, the effect finally kicked in.

One even had a night off on a Sunday. And I microwaved a spaghetti sauce.

And as soon as I'd eaten it, the stomach starts bloating and bloating and bloating and bloating and bloating other my colors, like someone's pumped me up, you know, but I made it to the bathroom and just the bottom was destroyed.

I collapsed and smashed my head in the ground. I was out cold for God knows how long. The doctor came in, took one look at me, put out a blood pressure gauge and said, oh, my God, get in the hospital quickly. And this state, I was in and out of consciousness, and that was the last thing I remember for three days, I was out cold. Derek is rushed to hospital and only three days later does he come round.

Jesus Christ, the beginning of the world. You know, I came through and as a priest, standing beside me with a rosary beads is a very good thing. So welcome back.

And I said, Who are you? I didn't know what was going on. And I looked down at these kind of compression tights on and there's blood on my hands, but I couldn't move. And they said, you can't go anywhere. You need a blood transplant, transfusions. So it turns out there is a massive ulcer. My stomach erupts basically, and it's been in there for so long.

Derek knows that polonium 210 attacks your vital organs, sowing the seeds for future illness and death.

But the cause, it's a disappearing poison. By 2016, any trace of it would have left his body there, not necessarily the effects of the polonium itself. So I Seimas ever took a cab back to the resort and it was just nice to sit in the shower, that was a really big shower, just get cleaned, first of all. But when I went to put on a pair of pants, they fell off me on what?

And I lost almost three stone. You know, it was just whatever that stuff was inside me was just I don't know. It was horrible stuff. You know, I equate it to the poison and, you know, to the fact that it's always been a bother. Keen not to be given the last rites again and believing he was in need of the kind of medical care he couldn't get on a tiny tropical island, Derek returned to the U.K. and the first thing he did was make an appointment to see his GP in north London, the doctor he went to for help more than 10 years earlier.

I told you exactly what happened. I got all the medical information, gave it to him.

When he ran some tests, Derek was taken aback by the findings.

I perfect blood pressure, didn't need tablets, perfect eyesight. You know, that's kind of what it just everything haven't changed. I didn't change so much, you know. It's March 2020, and Derek Connellan walks into a music studio in south London. He's here to work on a new album after his health check in 2016. Derek decided to settle in the UK because of the poisoning. He now undergoes rigorous medicals every six months. But right now, he's in good health.

Once Derek left the UK in 2007, he never did hear again from the British authorities and he never did get to the bottom of whether he was under surveillance or not. In the years since the attack, Derek has mostly chosen to avoid Alexander Litvinenko story. Some people are probably different than me. And so I want to find out what's going on, you know, but it's it was a case of just get on with it, you know? Today, he lives in the small town of Boston, in Lincolnshire, on the east coast of England.

It's quiet off the beaten track, you might say, a good place to escape all things Russian and poisoning related. By 2016, Alexander's wife, Marina, did finally get her public inquiry. I mean, this news today is rather unexpected.

Of course, it was expected, which concluded that the Russian agents, Lugovoy and Kovtun, almost certainly poisoned her husband and that the assassination was, in all likelihood carried out with a knowledge of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A little bit nervous, but they knew one day this news will come in quiet moments.

Derek has tried to make sense of his place in all of this, just an ordinary person caught up in an extraordinary crisis. Lately, however, he's been struck by another remarkable coincidence in his life and the life of Alexander Litvinenko. That makes him believe their lives were destined to intertwine, to collide, really not only in the bar of the Millennium Hotel, but here, too, in the quiet seaside town of Boston, Lincolnshire. It's where Derek lives and where his fate would have it.

Alexander Litvinenko had once lived to and where he'd written two books, a place where both men had looked for a bit of peace and quiet, a sanctuary from the strange worlds.

They found themselves in Boston in such a small little place in the middle of Lincolnshire, in the middle of nowhere, to be quite honest with you and to find out that. He actually stayed here and, you know, wrote these books, that seems to be a I don't know, it's a my life seems to have intertwined with his life and all over because of a a cup of coffee in the hotel. And it's almost like fate. Hopefully there won't be any more little shocks coming up with the.

You've been listening to the documentary in one and two part two of Polonium and the piano player narrated by Diana Magnay. It was a Sky News story cast production by Robert Mulhern. Until next time. Thanks for listening.