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³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ World Service's headquarters, Bush House, keeps many secrets.

In the early 1970s, there was a woman who used to work on the sixth floor for the Talks Unit.

On the seventh floor there was a man who worked one of the World Service's Language Services.

She was a beautiful, well-educated young English lady. He was a grey-haired Bulgarian writer who had defected from his totalitarian country to the West.

She used to write "central talks" - old ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ speak for news essays written in English for use in any of the World Service's many languages - he used to translate them and fly from his desk to the studio to broadcast them.

Once he asked her boss to introduce them and her boss invited both of them for lunch. For the next two years they met in different places around Bush House, keeping their relationship secret from their colleagues.

In 1975 they secretly went to Italy, where she broke her leg, and later that year when they married, she came to the wedding party with her foot in plaster.

When they broke the news of their marriage, everybody in Bush House was extremely surprised, some even sighed.

She says that all women were in love with him. I believe that the hearts of many well-educated, young single men were broken, too.

The next year she gave birth to their daughter Sasha.

Three years later, in September 1978, he was on his way to work at Bush House, when at the bus stop on the Waterloo Bridge he felt a stinging pain in his thigh. A heavily built man in the queue momentarily dropped an umbrella, mumbled "sorry" in a mild Mediterranean accent, and quickly crossed the road to catch a taxi.

The rest belongs to worldwide history: books have been written, films shot, articles published about the so-called 'Umbrella Killing", when the dissident Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov was murdered with a poison-tipped umbrella, a weapon developed by KGB.

Annabel Dilke - his young widowed wife, now a famous writer herself - says that the death threats and even attempts at killing him, that came from Bulgaria, had been "clouding the skies" for months.

So what made the Bulgarian communist regime kill a journalist from the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ World Service, whom they code-named in their secret files as "Vagabond"?

The following extract from his radio programmes, which have been published as the book Reports in Absentia may point to the core of that stand-off between the authoritarian regime and the free-spirited writer.

Unlike many, who also were aware of what was happening to them, but believed that it was temporary, that things would get better, I had no illusions that my case was correctable. Maybe my senses were more selfish; maybe I was too busy with my own irreparable split. So this is not a matter of your civil courage or honesty, but only of your sense of intolerance. If I had a real sense of honesty and civic virtues, I would be staying in Bulgaria and trying to fight there, as far more courageous, more honest people do.

Earlier in his life he refused to play the role of a communist hero, as later he refused to play the role of an anti-communist hero.

In that quote he doesn't claim any heroic civic virtues, but isn't it a paradox that his normal human sense of intolerance to lies and deceit gave him such honesty and civil courage that the whole communist machine, including the KGB, couldn't find better a response than kill him?

"No man, no problem!" - as Stalin used to say.

There was a man in Bush House, flying over the stairs with his free thoughts and late love...