On September 5th, the British police named two suspects in the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal, a former colonel in Russian military intelligence who later spied for the United Kingdom. Skripal was poisoned with a nerve agent in the cathedral city of Salisbury, earlier this year. According to security officials, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov—most likely aliases of agents of the G.R.U., Russia’s military-intelligence service—landed at Gatwick Airport on the afternoon of Friday, March 2nd, on an Aeroflot flight from Moscow. They then travelled to Bow, in East London, and checked in to the forty-nine-pound-per-night City Stay Hotel, a drab, four-story house with black grills on the windows and fifty ratings of “terrible” on TripAdvisor. That weekend, Britain’s extensive network of CCTV cameras recorded the men making two visits to Salisbury from London—one for a couple of hours on Saturday, and another, longer trip on Sunday, when images showed them not far from where Skripal lived, in a quiet cul-de-sac away from the city center. The two men, at around noon that day, are believed to have applied Novichok, a Soviet-era chemical weapon, which they had carried inside a bottle of Premier Jour perfume by Nina Ricci, to Skripal’s door handle.

The assassination attempt failed. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were exposed to Novichok that afternoon but survived. A police officer who touched the door handle was also poisoned but recovered. But the release of a nerve agent in a British provincial city on a Sunday afternoon triggered a deep crisis in relations between London and Moscow and has led to the expulsion of hundreds of Russian diplomatic staff from embassies and consulates around the world. For weeks, security officials scoured Salisbury for traces of the poison, in order to prevent a public-health emergency. In June, three months after the attack, the discarded perfume bottle turned up among donations to a charity shop in the city. A local man named Charlie Rowley bought it to give to his partner, Dawn Sturgess, who dashed the chemical across her wrists and died. By that time, Petrov and Boshirov were long gone. They went straight to the airport from Salisbury on March 4th. They were in Britain for a total of fifty-four hours.

On Thursday morning—a little more than a week after they were named as suspects and a day after Vladimir Putin identified them as “civilians”—two men answering to the names of Petrov and Boshirov were interviewed on RT, the state-sponsored Russian news channel. Sitting in a beige room at a large table, they wanted to make clear that there had been a big misunderstanding. “This whole situation is just a fantastic, fatal coincidence,” Petrov said, in Russian, swivelling slightly in his chair. The truth was that they were ordinary guys. Petrov and Boshirov were their real names. They were fitness instructors—they didn’t want to say more—who advised their clients on which vitamins and “micro-elements” to take. A friend had been telling them for a long time that they should really try to check out Salisbury Cathedral. “It’s a touristic city,” Boshirov explained. “There’s a famous cathedral there, the Salisbury Cathedral. It’s famous not just in all of Europe—it’s famous all over the world, I think. It’s famous for its hundred-and-twenty-three-metre spire. It’s famous for its clock, the first clock made in the world that still runs.”

The problem, which, weirdly, no one was talking about, had been the weather. Petrov and Boshirov had wanted to go to Salisbury for the day and then have fun in London. But, when the Russians got to Salisbury on that Saturday, it was damp and cold. “We got wet up to our knees,” Boshirov complained. (In Moscow the day before, the temperature had been ten degrees colder.) The cathedral, which is a twelve-minute walk from the train station, was too far to reach, and Stonehenge and Old Sarum, Salisbury’s other exceptional tourist attractions, were out of the question. The two men gave up and returned to London to buy shoes and jackets on Oxford Street. Undeterred, they had gone back to Salisbury on Sunday, where they might have gone near Skripal’s house, more than a mile out of their way—“Maybe we passed it, maybe we didn’t”—and had a much better time, all around. The sun shone; the cathedral was beautiful. “We were walking around and enjoying this English Gothic, this beauty,” Boshirov said. Sadly, the weather turned again. There was heavy sleet, so they headed to the airport in the early afternoon. In other words, it had been a totally normal weekend trip from Moscow to Salisbury (twice) via a shitty hotel in East London.

In London, officials have reacted to Petrov and Boshirov’s appearance with disbelief. A Downing Street spokesman described the RT interview as “deeply offensive” to the victims of the attack. A government source told the Daily Telegraph that the suspects’ account was “nuts” and “straight from the pages of Wikipedia.” The bishop of Salisbury, Nicholas Holtam, was unaware of any evidence that two men had visited the cathedral. “It doesn’t really add up, does it?” the bishop told the BBC.

The full twenty-seven-minute interview, which is available on YouTube, has the quality of a meandering back-and-forth in the comments section under an otherwise serious story. At one point, RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, asks Petrov and Boshirov if they work for the G.R.U. “Do you?” Boshirov shoots back. Some of the men’s answers sound as if they must be code, because they are so baffling. “It’s perfectly normal to go to Geneva,” Boshirov says, of a recent trip to Switzerland. “It is the shortest route to Mont Blanc.” In this sense, the broadcast is in keeping with the rest of the Skripal episode: an odd, macabre incident that is hard to explain, impossible not to talk about, and which you sense, deep down, may be a dangerous distraction. “I understand we probably won’t return to normal life as soon as we’d like,” Petrov says, near the end of the tape. “We’re sick of it now,” Boshirov agrees.