Death on the Nevskii Prospekt Page 13

  ‘Colonel Kolchak, my assistant, Lord Powerscourt. He will be helping us in our interview.’

  The Colonel growled at Powerscourt who folded his hands neatly on his lap and tried not to look alarmed. The combination of what he had seen in the basement and the presence of the human gorilla across the desk was unsettling, to say the least. It was the General with his intelligence and his obsession with the refinements of torture who frightened him most. He wondered what role the Okhrana might have played in the death of Roderick Martin.

  ‘Perhaps, Lord Powerscourt, you might be able to help us with our inquiries, as your London policemen say.’ The General was smiling at his victim, like a headmaster welcoming a miscreant schoolboy to his study for another beating.

  ‘Of course, General,’ said Powerscourt, whose brain was beginning to move very fast indeed. ‘I am here to inquire into the death of Mr Roderick Martin of the British Foreign Office, who died in this city some days ago.’

  ‘The unfortunate Mr Martin . . .’ The General was almost purring. Powerscourt wondered if Martin had been a guest of the Okhrana in one of their bloodstained cells down in the basement. ‘Tell us if you can, Lord Powerscourt, we are all friends here after all, do you know what Mr Martin was doing in St Petersburg? He must have come for a reason, such a distinguished diplomat, such a clever man.’

  The remains of a scream that had travelled up four floors from an opened grille window in the basement to the General’s office temporarily stopped the conversation. Derzhenov grabbed a black telephone and dialled furiously. When answer came he shouted very loudly and very violently in Russian. He began to turn red, so great was his fury. ‘My apologies, Lord Powerscourt. I’ve told the fool down there that if he can’t put the bloody tape on properly, he’ll be the next victim himself.’ Powerscourt wondered if the man had been an older recruit, not one of the recent peasant intake who showed such aptitude for the work.

  ‘I come back to Mr Martin, my friend,’ the General went on. ‘What did you say he was doing in St Petersburg?’

  ‘I know it must sound strange, General,’ Powerscourt was conscious of a continual scowl directed at him from Colonel Kolchak, ‘but I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.’

  ‘Does that mean,’ the General said, doodling on a large piece of paper he had taken from one of his drawers, ‘that his mission was so secret that only the Ambassador was cleared for it perhaps? I am not sure I would put great faith in your Ambassador myself, Lord Powerscourt, but did he know?’

  ‘No, he did not,’ said Powerscourt, realizing suddenly how improbable it all sounded.

  ‘The clever Secretary, Mr de Chassiron, did he know?’

  ‘I know it sounds unlikely, General, but he didn’t know either.’

  ‘Let me just get this straight, Lord Powerscourt.’ Derzhenov smiled a truly evil smile. ‘You expect us to believe that you did not know why Martin was here, Mr Secretary de Chassiron did not know, the Ambassador did not know. Do you have an Embassy cat, Lord Powerscourt? Did the four-legged one know what the two-legged ones did not? This is hard to believe, surely.’

  ‘Sometimes, General, the most unlikely explanation turns out to be the truth.’

  ‘Let me take him downstairs, General.’ Colonel Kolchak broke his silence. ‘I’ll soon get some sense out of him.’ The English came very slowly. Powerscourt was astonished by the voice. A man like Kolchak should come with a deep powerful bass. Instead his voice was very high-pitched, almost like a girl’s. It made him, Powerscourt felt, more frightening, the thought of those tones shrieking at you for your confession.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt is a most distinguished man, Colonel Kolchak. It is not for us to treat him at this time as if he were a common revolutionary, distributing pamphlets in the university perhaps, or learning to make bombs in some slum on the Petrograd side.’

  Powerscourt smiled nervously as the words ‘at this time’ sank in.

  ‘Let me put a hypothesis before you, Lord Powerscourt, if I may.’ The General completed one of his doodles with a great flourish. ‘Mr Martin is sent on a mission here. Let us pretend it is a secret mission, as you say.’ Powerscourt realized suddenly that the Okhrana might not know any more about Martin’s death than he did. In this scenario, he was there to enlighten them. If true, that might work to his advantage. But then, champion chess players are moving pieces in their brains ten or fifteen moves ahead. Maybe he should ask the General how good he was with the rooks and the knights and the bishops.

  ‘Unfortunately for all of us,’ Derzhenov shook his head slightly at this point, ‘Mr Martin dies. Alas! Poor Mr Martin! Let us not speculate at this moment on how he died or who might have killed him. Let us concentrate on his replacement. Step forward, Lord Francis Powerscourt of Markham Square in Chelsea, sent by the British Foreign Office to fulfil the mission of Mr Martin. Consider, if you would, the visitors attendant on the Lord Powerscourt before he left.’

  The General picked a piece of paper out of his desk drawer. ‘The Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office, Sir Jeremiah Reddaway, calls. A junior minister from the same ministry calls two days later. A former Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, the famous Lord Rosebery himself, also pays a visit from his great mansion in Berkeley Square. And then, orchestrated and organized by Sir Jeremiah himself, the widow Martin in her widow’s weeds comes to meet Lady Powerscourt at Markham Square. The purpose of all those visits and all those visitors? Surely, Lord Powerscourt, there can be only one explanation. The Lord Powerscourt is being briefed to carry on the work of the dead man, to take the place of Mr Martin and do whatever he came to St Petersburg to do. So all that remains for you, Lord Powerscourt, is to let us know the outline of what your colleagues told you in Markham Square. The fiction that you do not know what Mr Martin was here for cannot possibly be true.’

  It all sounded very definite but Powerscourt thought it might be a fishing expedition, no more. He was astonished that the Okhrana had been watching his house in Markham Square. He remembered de Chassiron telling him, in one of his great tours de force of contemporary Russia, that the Okhrana were the best organized and most sinister secret police in the world. Other states might catch up, he had said, but the Okhrana had a great start. Before Powerscourt could reply there was a knock at the door. A thick-set man wearing a deep blue butcher’s apron with dark stains on it spoke briefly in Russian to General Derzhenov. He barked a few words and waved the minion away.

  ‘Fool in the last cell on the right has died on us. Natural causes, the usual thing. Gives us room to welcome another guest.’ He looked meaningfully at Powerscourt.

  ‘General Derzhenov.’ Powerscourt was aware that there was now less than an hour before his appointment at the Interior Ministry, and that his position might truly be described as precarious. ‘You are obviously very well informed about what goes on in London. Now I am going to tell you a story. You are a man accustomed to listening to stories. I leave it up to you to judge whether this one is true or not.

  ‘I have been working as a full-time investigator for over fifteen years. I was involved with Lord Rosebery in one very difficult case concerning the royal family some years back in 1892. We have been very close ever since. Three years ago in 1902 I was asked to investigate some deaths at a London Inn of Court, a legal establishment where barristers have their offices and train up newcomers to their profession. It was a difficult case. At the end I was shot and severely wounded. I very nearly died. I was saved, I believe, by the expertise of the doctors and the love of my family. After that my wife Lucy and I went on holiday to Italy. She made me promise to give up investigating as I had been nearly killed too many times. I agreed, but with some reluctance, I must say. As you gentlemen will know, it is no light matter to abandon one’s profession. The procession of visitors your people observed going into Markham Square were not coming to brief me on the nature of Martin’s mission to St Petersburg. They were coming to try to persuade me to come out of retirement to investigate his death. Final
ly, they succeeded. That is why I am here today. But I do not know anything about Martin’s mission, any more,’ he drew a bow at a venture here, ‘than you do. Look.’ Powerscourt brought his notebook out of his pocket and began writing names and addresses at great speed. ‘Here is Lord Rosebery’s address in Berkeley Square, and the barrister Maxwell Kirk’s chambers in Queen’s Inn. Sir Jeremiah Reddaway, as you know, is at the Foreign Office in King Charles Street. If your agents speak to these people, you will discover very quickly that I am telling the truth.’ He handed over the piece of paper.

  General Derzhenov looked at him very slowly. He began serious work on another doodle. Peering at the page upside down Powerscourt thought he was drawing people who had lost a limb, in war, or perhaps in his basement. There were spidery figures with only one arm or one leg, or with hands that had disappeared. Two had no heads, perhaps pulled off by Colonel Kolchak in person.

  ‘That is very interesting, Lord Powerscourt. I do believe your story.’ The General smiled his wolflike smile once more. ‘But I will have our people check it out all the same. I would make just one comment. There is no reason why events could not have taken place as you describe, but with the following exception. That you were also briefed on Mr Martin’s visit to Russia.’

  Powerscourt laughed. ‘You don’t give up,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you ask Lord Rosebery about Martin? He doesn’t know what the mission was either.’

  ‘But if you were Lord Rosebery, Lord Powerscourt, and a curious Russian person asked you about it, you would say that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘The trouble with you, General, is that you have a very suspicious mind. You see plots and conspiracies where they don’t exist.’

  Derzhenov laughed bitterly. ‘If I did not have a suspicious mind, where do you think Russia would be now? If I did not suspect plots and conspiracies, this Emperor would have gone the way of his grandfather and his Interior Minister and his Education Minister and his Governor of Finland, blown into smithereens by the bombs of the revolutionaries. This is necessary in our country, the whips downstairs, the iron bars to break a man’s arms, the water torture, the racks, the burnings, all of it. This is not a safe country for its rulers, Lord Powerscourt. All we can do is try to make it a little safer for them. Russia today is a place where the students learn to make bombs in their science classes, not one where they drift up and down the Backs in punts in your Cambridge drinking champagne and reciting the doubtful verses of A.E. Housman.’

  The General shrugged his shoulders. ‘You make me grow philosophical, Lord Powerscourt. I need some exercise in the basement to bring me back to reality. Off you go to your meeting. Your young man should be waiting outside. I shall be in touch after I have heard about our discoveries in London. Good day to you.’

  The General picked up another of those dark blue aprons from a peg on the back of his door and hurried down his stairs. As Powerscourt left Number 16 Fontanka Quai, he noticed again the disagreeable smell coming from the basement. Very faintly he could hear the swish of the whips and a noise that sounded like a human head being smashed against a wall. He wondered if the General had rejoined his fellow torturers in his own private underworld of pain and suffering.

  Shortly before four o’clock that afternoon Powerscourt and Mikhail were back in the Shaporov Palace. Mikhail had brought his friend to the Great Drawing Room on the second floor, a vast chamber with a sprung floor and spectacular candelabra that had originally been intended to serve as a ballroom for the Shaporovs and their guests. Their meeting at the Interior Ministry had been cancelled. The man at the decrepit reception desk had told them in his surliest tones that Mr Bazhenov was not at home. Only when pressed hard by Mikhail had he divulged that there was a message for them. Only when Powerscourt produced a wide variety of papers testifying to his name and existence did the wretch with one arm hand over the envelope. They waited till they were outside the building before they opened it. Mikhail translated fast:

  ‘Interior Ministry, January , et cetera et cetera . . . Dear Lord Powerscourt, Please forgive me for not attending our meeting as we arranged. I apologize most sincerely. Something else of great importance to my Ministry has taken me to very urgent meetings elsewhere. More apology, Lord Powerscourt, a paragraph and a half of it. Can you survive without it?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I think I could manage very well.’

  ‘We talked,’ Mikhail peered down at some indecipherable piece of Bazhenov handwriting, ‘about Mr Martin’s visits. I promised to give you some dates of the earlier occasions when he was a visitor to our city. Here they are. 1904, January 5th to 11th, March 21st to 29th, October 15th to 22nd. 1903, January 4th to 12th, March 23rd to 30th, October 1st to 9th. 1902, January 6th to 14th, October 5th to 12th. We have been unable to find information on previous years. I hope this is useful.

  ‘There’s another paragraph of apology, Lord Powerscourt. Translate or not translate?’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Powerscourt, who had filled one sheet of his notebook with the dates in English. ‘I think I can manage with what we’ve got, thanks.’

  Now Powerscourt was perched on a sixteenth-century French chair in the Great Drawing Room, thinking his hair should be powdered and his shoes buckled and his legs in tights with a ceremonial sword, perhaps, hanging by his side. Mikhail was opposite him, frowning at the dates.

  ‘Can you attach any significance to the timings of these earlier visits, Lord Powerscourt?’

  ‘Easter perhaps, with your different calendar, Mikhail? Would the man come for Easter?’

  ‘God knows. I think it is more important here than in England. It is the most important religious festival in the Orthodox calendar. Somewhere there’s going to be some prayer book or other in this place which will tell us.’

  ‘I think,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that I should fill you in on what happened in my happy visit to the Okhrana. Then, perhaps, it would be time to review what little we know, Mikhail, and see if we can deduce anything useful for our investigation of the late Mr Martin.’ With that, Lord Francis Powerscourt, in behaviour that would have been instantly recognizable to his wife and children, began walking up and down the room. Except that in London his drawing room was the length of his house in Markham Square, while here in St Petersburg the Great Drawing Room was nearly as long as Markham Square itself. Powerscourt spared Mikhail none of the horrors of the basement, the whips, the screams, the General interfering in fury himself.

  At a quarter past four a young visitor swept into the main entrance of the Shaporov Palace. Mikhail had sent her a note that morning, saying that if she were able to get away, he hoped to be at home by four in the Great Drawing Room. Natasha Bobrinsky had walked all the way from the railway station to the palace, hoping to see some remains of the massacre on the way. She was disappointed, but her cheeks were bright from the walk, her black boots clattered happily over the Shaporov marble and her long fashionable coat kept out the January cold. A dark blue fur hat protected her curls from the freezing air. She resisted all attempts to detain her. The doorman assured her that she could not just march in like this and assume young Mr Shaporov would be able to see her. They had no idea, the servants, what he was doing at this moment. They all had fearful memories of Mikhail’s father swearing viciously at them when he did not want to be disturbed, in one case throwing a junior footman right out of the room until he crashed into the opposite wall. Natasha swept past them, ignoring all their pleas to wait.

  The geography of the vast Shaporov Palace meant she had to walk halfway along the front of the building before turning right. Then she had to progress down a very long corridor, the Mirror Corridor, created by some late eighteenth-century Shaporov, which connected with the Italian Corridor at the back of the palace, lined with Italian paintings, and led directly to the entrance to the Great Drawing Room, halfway along another corridor.

  After her initial escape towards the Mirror Corridor, the butler despatched three groups of footmen to head her
off. One was to pursue Natasha up the corridor, trying to persuade her to pause in one of the libraries or sitting rooms off the main route.

  ‘Please, Miss Bobrinsky, please step in here, it’ll only take a second . . .’

  ‘I’m sure Mr Shaporov will be only too happy to see you, but we must preserve appearances . . .’

  ‘We could all lose our jobs here, Miss Bobrinsky, I’m sure you wouldn’t want that to happen.’

  Natasha swept majestically on. The footmen watched helplessly as she turned into the Mirror Corridor. Her back began to multiply as she progressed up the great passage. Soon there were ten, fifteen Natashas reflected in the huge mirrors sent centuries before from the island of Murano near Venice and the St Gobain glass factories in France. Occasional glimpses of black boot, multiplied ten or twenty fold, reduced the footmen to a moonstruck combination of admiration and lust. At the top of the corridor the underbutler watched the marching army approaching his position at the turn of the two corridors. All the Natashas he could see wore expressions of great determination. Every now and then there was a defiant toss of twenty beautiful heads as she approached the corner. The underbutler withdrew his two colleagues and himself to the opening of the rear corridor just before she reached it. He formed his little band up, arms linked, across the corridor, stretching almost to the opposite wall. Behind them a dazzling array of Raphaels and Botticellis and Andrea del Sartos guarded the entrance into the Great Drawing Room. But not a single Natasha arrived. She dived through a side door, hurried down three flights of stairs, found the lift that connected with the side door into the room three floors up and presented herself in the Great Drawing Room where her young man was deep in conversation with the man from London they called Lord Francis Powerscourt.