Death on the Nevskii Prospekt Read online

  A light snow was falling over the Alexander Park at the Tsar’s Village, Tsarskoe Selo. Natasha Bobrinsky and the four Grand Duchesses, daughters of the Tsar, each pulling a toboggan, were by the west side of the Toboggan Hill. The girls never tired of pulling their vehicles up this hill and hurtling down it as fast as they could go. The most daring, the most reckless was the third daughter of the Tsar and the Tsarina, Marie Nicolaievna. She persuaded her elder sister to push her as fast as she could on the top of the hill before she began her descent. This meant she travelled even faster going down. The light was beginning to ebb. The soldier on duty to their right seemed to have drifted off. Marie was embarking on what must, surely, be her last or her second last run of the day. Then it happened. Natasha said afterwards that it must have been because of the fading light. She had total faith in the girl’s ability to control herself and her machine. As the toboggan and the girl hurtled down towards the bottom of the hill Marie swerved suddenly to avoid a stone or some other obstacle in her way. The angle was too sharp. The toboggan turned over and Grand Duchess Marie was flung out, hitting her head on a tree trunk hidden in the snow and rolling over several times before she finally stopped.

  ‘She’s dead!’ shrieked Anastasia, the youngest.

  ‘She’s bleeding,’ shouted Olga, the eldest, wailing piteously, hunting in her pockets for a handkerchief to staunch the blood.

  ‘They’ll blame us for what happened!’ yelled Tatiana. ‘They’ll never forgive us if she dies!’ And she proceeded to cry and sob as though her heart would break.

  ‘Marie’s not going to die,’ said Natasha, trying to take control of the situation.

  ‘Girl! You!’ A young soldier rushed out of the bushes in front of the Krasnoselskie Gates. ‘Mind my place till I get back!’ He pointed to a small shed just inside the palace grounds. ‘I have been trained in first aid. I will take the girl to the Palace.’ With that he bent down and picked up Marie and held her tight. He began running towards the palace in great strides, shepherding the other girls beside him, telling them to be calm and not to cry.

  Natasha reached the shed and went inside. There was a rough desk facing visitors and a large book sitting on it. Outside the gates, by the great wall that ran right round Tsarskoe Selo, was a security station. Here, visitors to the palace had to show their papers and were searched if the guard thought it necessary. The Captain of the Guard came for a brief word with Natasha.

  ‘I saw what happened, miss. You’ll have to wait here till he comes back or he’ll be dismissed the service for dereliction of duty. And you must enter the name and purpose of visit of anybody we send through in that big book.’ With that the captain returned to his post, aware that he too could be dismissed for dereliction of duty. Quite soon the Tsarskoe Selo piano tuner came through. Natasha smiled cheerfully at him and put his name in the book.

  Then she looked out into the gloom that stretched towards the Alexander Palace. She checked that the captain and his men were all in their positions. Then she began turning back the pages of the visitors’ book. Faster and faster she went, in case the soldier returned. Her hand began to shake. Now she was back to the beginning of January, now back to the last days of December. Natasha thought her knees were knocking against each other. The light was really bad and she didn’t know where the lamps were kept and she didn’t think she had time to look for them. The handwriting changed with the year and the old 1904 script was much more difficult to read. Natasha wished she was one of those sensible people who go around with matches in a side pocket. December 31st, nothing there. December 30th, no. Is there anybody coming? Not yet. Her hands were really shaking now. Yes! At last! Here it was! December 22nd, British diplomat, Roderick Martin, time of arrival nine thirty in the evening, time of leaving, not there, purpose of visit, meeting with the Tsar. Meeting with the Tsar! The Tsar on his own! Nobody else! No diplomats, no heads of protocol, no members of the Imperial Security Service, no Foreign Minister. Natasha knew by now just how rare that was. She felt her heart was going to come right out of her chest as she turned the pages back to the present day. Hadn’t Lord Powerscourt said how important her role here was? And hadn’t she proved him right? Mikhail might swan about the city interpreting senior government officials, but she had found the pearl without price. She didn’t think she could bear the wait to pass on her news. As Natasha made her way back to the palace, having handed the sentry post back to the soldier, one further thought struck her.

  Mr Martin hadn’t gone out through the Krasnoselskie Gates. Or if he did, they had taken care not to write it down. Had he left by some other route? Or had he never left at all? Had he been killed here and his body carried back to the frozen waters of the Neva?

  ‘You must be Lord Powerscourt! And you must be Mikhail Shaporov! You both must be cold and hungry after all that travelling. Come in and we’ll have some tea.’

  Tamara Kerenkova greeted them on the porch of her house, bowing slightly as she addressed her visitors. The house was old, many of its external features hidden by the snow. She showed them into a long room with tall windows looking out into a garden. Powerscourt thought he saw rows and rows of cherry trees in the distance, their boughs laden with snow. There was a great fire blazing in the grate and a young borzoi asleep on one side. A liveried servant came to take their coats. Mrs Kerenkova disappeared briefly to organize tea and refreshments. Powerscourt knew there was something unusual but he couldn’t put his finger on it. It was Mikhail Shaporov, laughing, who filled him in.

  ‘You’ll get it any second now, my lord,’ he said.

  ‘Get what?’ Powerscourt replied.

  ‘Now then.’ Tamara Kerenkova had come back. ‘Please tell me how I can help you. Thank you for telling me about the death of Mr Martin in your letter, Lord Powerscourt. I am so glad you saw fit not to wait for personal contact.’

  Powerscourt wanted to laugh but felt the circumstances were inappropriate. She was speaking perfect English, this Russian lady, she could have been conversing in a Mayfair drawing room. He didn’t need an interpreter. But then, remembering previous encounters of this sort in previous cases, perhaps he did. But he needed an interpreter of the female heart rather than of the Russian language.

  ‘May I compliment you on your English, Mrs Kerenkova?’ said Powerscourt. ‘Here I am with my excellent interpreter Mikhail and he’s not needed at all.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said the lady with a smile, ‘that a young man of such wide education and such an excellent family will always be useful to you, Lord Powerscourt.’

  She must have been about thirty, Tamara Kerenkova, of average height with very delicate features, a small nose and pale blue eyes that held you in their gaze. Her hair was blonde, falling in ringlets down the sides of her face, and every now and again she would toss her head to clear her face. Powerscourt couldn’t work out whether the gesture was natural, affectation or flirtation. Did she shake her locks like that when she was on her own? he asked himself. He didn’t know the answer.

  ‘We had an English nanny, Lord Powerscourt,’ she went on, ‘Mrs Harris, all the time we were growing up. Part of her job was to teach my sister and me English. She came from Brighton, our Mrs Harris. If you wanted to distract her from a boring spelling lesson, you could always ask her about the pier. For some reason she was mad about piers. If you were lucky she would draw the sea front and the chain pier for you in your art book. It might take up all the time allotted to the spelling! Mrs Harris always laughed when she realized what had been going on. Maybe she didn’t like spelling either.’

  Powerscourt had a strange vision of two little Russian girls in a vast schoolroom up in a draughty St Petersburg attic learning English with a woman from Brighton who liked piers.

  ‘I’m afraid, Mrs Kerenkova, that some of the questions I may have to put to you may seem rather distasteful. May I offer my apologies in advance for any queries that may seem prurient or inappropriate.’

  The young woman laughed. ‘Don’t worry, Lord
Powerscourt, you don’t have to sound like the family solicitor. I’m sure we’ll get along very well.’

  ‘Could you tell us first of all how you met your husband?’ Powerscourt had decided in the train that it would be easier to start with Mr Kerenkov rather than Mr Martin.

  ‘My husband?’ Tamara sounded surprised but she carried on. ‘I met him nine years ago at a ball just before Easter. He was in the navy. He still is, as a matter of fact. We were married the following year.’

  ‘May I ask if you have any children?’

  ‘You may. We do not. Not yet anyway. There is still time.’ The slightly pained look with which Mrs Kerenkova began her reply was replaced with one of defiance at the end. Powerscourt wondered how much hurt lay behind the words. He wondered too if Roderick Martin had seemed to offer some sort of solution.

  ‘Ah, tea,’ said Mrs Kerenkova, as a footman entered with a tray, glad perhaps of the break in the interview. ‘Some cake for you, Lord Powerscourt? And a hefty slice for you, Mikhail – growing boys need plenty of food.’ She gave the interpreter a gargantuan piece of cake, spilling out over the edge of the plate, which he proceeded to demolish with amazing speed.

  ‘And Mr Martin?’ Powerscourt took a small sip of his tea. ‘Might I ask when and where you met him, Mrs Kerenkova?’

  Tamara did not hesitate. It was as if, Powerscourt was to reflect later, she had been rehearsing her answers before they came. ‘We met in Berlin in 1901. In the autumn. My husband was on the staff of the naval attaché there at the time.’

  Powerscourt thought that in certain countries naval attaché meant little more than spy. Regular visits to naval dockyards, earnest interest in the latest techniques of propulsion or navigation or armaments – all could be displayed as examples of naive enthusiasm when in fact they were merely cover for espionage.

  ‘Did you meet him at some diplomatic function? Some grand occasion at the Wilhelmstrasse, the Imperial German Foreign Office perhaps?’

  ‘We met at a ball, Lord Powerscourt, a ball given by the Austrian Ambassador.’ Tamara Kerenkova’s eyes drifted away. ‘It was fitting really. You see, my husband hated dancing. He didn’t really like parties of any sort, come to that. Roderick and I were dancing less than a minute after we were introduced. We got to know each other on the dance floor. He was such a beautiful dancer, Roderick, very formal one minute, then breaking all the rules and sweeping you right across the floor the next. It was so exhilarating. I think we fell in love on the dance floor, Lord Powerscourt, dancing a waltz or a two-step or a polonaise, it doesn’t matter now. One of the reasons he came when he did, at the beginning of all those years, was that January was the season for the great balls in St Petersburg. They were the grandest of their kind in Europe. Roderick and I were never happier than when we were dancing. The sprung floors beneath your feet, the beautiful women with their jewellery sweeping past, the men in their finest clothes, the officers in their gaudiest uniforms, and the arms of the man you love holding you tight as you whirl around the floor – time is simply annihilated as your lover guides you through the steps. Inside the form and the rhythm of the dance your mind and your heart can float away to a different world. Do you believe that, Lord Powerscourt?’

  It was then that a truly terrible thought struck Powerscourt, one that was never to wholly leave him for his entire time in Russia. Suppose you were the espionage chief of the Okhrana, he said to himself, the spying equivalent of the terrible Derzhenov who was in charge of counter-terrorism. Suppose you had a spy in your employ, a really useful spy who could bring you the secrets of one of the Great Powers of Europe. So often with spies the problem lay with the sending of messages, the transmission of information. Powerscourt remembered the story in Herodotus of Histiaeus who wanted to send a message from the Persian court to his son-in-law Aristagoras, the tyrant of Miletus, urging him to revolt. But Histiaeus suspected that any message might be intercepted with fatal results. So he shaved the head of his most trusted slave and tattoed the message on to his scalp. When the hair had grown back he sent the slave to Aristagoras with a message that he needed a haircut. In modern times there might not be enough room on a single scalp for the message. Elaborate systems of deception were often set up for the spy to meet and to debrief his handler. But suppose the handler was a woman and that she met her lover at the great balls of Berlin or Vienna or St Petersburg. Secrets could be whispered as they twirled round the room in the Viennese Waltz. Pages of information could be popped into a handbag or slipped down a décolletage during a two-step. The next rendezvous for the next exchange of information would be an innocent-sounding conversation towards the end of the evening about the next ball where they would see each other again. As a system, as cover, it was perfect. And, looking at Tamara Kerenkova, he thought she was cool enough to carry it off.

  ‘I am sure you are right about the appeal of the dance, Mrs Kerenkova, the poets have been enthusing about it for centuries.’ Powerscourt felt annoyed again at the contrast between Russian passion and English reserve. ‘Forgive me for asking a personal question, but where did Mr Martin stay when he was here?’

  The young woman laughed. The borzoi awoke and shuffled over to the tea trolley. ‘Why, he stayed with me. My husband was away with his ship, most of those years. He would be away now, in Japan, fighting that terrible war, but he had to come back with a badly damaged ship that needed repairs.’ She broke a piece of cake into small pieces and gave the dog his tea. He seemed to like the cake. Mikhail Shaporov stroked his white coat as he listened to the conversation. He sensed that some dramatic thought had gripped Powerscourt a few minutes before but he had no idea what it was.

  Powerscourt gave no sign at all of excitement now. ‘Do you mean that Mr Kerenkov is in St Petersburg right now, attending to the repairs?’

  ‘Why, yes, Lord Powerscourt, he has been here since the middle of December.’ She smiled at him. Powerscourt thought that naval officers must be pretty good shots with a revolver. Not a problem to shoot a foreigner in the heart and dump his body on the Nevskii Prospekt. He thought the young woman was daring him to ask the next question. He asked it.

  ‘Might I ask, Mrs Kerenkova, why you are here at the family estate when your husband is in St Petersburg?’

  She laughed again and now she too began to stroke the borzoi. ‘See what questions they ask us, Potemkin,’ she began by addressing the dog. ‘I could say,’ there was another of those tosses of the head to clear the face of that blonde hair, ‘that I came here to prepare things for his coming a little later. But that is not the truth. Things are not very good between us just now. I am sure, Lord Powerscourt, that even in England the aristocratic husbands and their wives sometimes do not get on as they should. Is that so?’ Powerscourt nodded, betraying an entire class in an afternoon. ‘At first Vladimir did not care about me and Roderick. He thought it was just an infatuation, that it wouldn’t last. Even when we met up for all those Januarys he didn’t seem to mind.’

  ‘So what happened?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘How did he come to change his mind? I presume he sent you out here because of some family disagreement?’

  Tamara laughed bitterly. ‘Disagreement? I suppose you could call it that. You see, Lord Powerscourt, I’d always told Vladimir when Roderick was coming. Always, so it wouldn’t be a surprise. Then,’ she stopped as if trying to fix a date in her mind, ‘round about the middle of last month he heard Mr Martin was coming, coming to St Petersburg. He didn’t believe me when I said I didn’t know. And I didn’t, you’ve got to believe me, Lord Powerscourt. Of course I’d have told him if I’d known, I’d have told all of St Petersburg that he was coming to take me dancing once again, I’d have been so happy.’

  Powerscourt was growing used to the shocks now. ‘I believe you, of course I believe you, Mrs Kerenkova,’ he said quickly, and he did, ‘but could I confirm something you just said? You said your husband knew Mr Martin was coming to St Petersburg round about the middle of last month? Is that right?’

 
The young woman nodded. ‘That’s right. I might be a couple of days out, I can’t remember exactly. Is that important?’

  ‘It might be,’ Powerscourt replied, ‘but could I just get one thing clear in my mind? Did your husband send you out here because he felt you deceived him about Mr Martin’s visit? Or was there another reason as well?’

  Potemkin growled as if he didn’t like the question or the tone. Mikhail scratched his head once again.

  ‘There was another reason, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Tamara Kerenkova. ‘Vladimir said it wouldn’t have mattered if Mr Martin hadn’t been English. Russian naval people are very annoyed with the English at present. I think our ships sunk a couple of British fishing boats on their way to Japan and the Russians thought the British were making too much fuss. Who cares about a couple of bloody fishermen anyway, was what Vladimir said. He said my affair with Mr Martin could make him very unpopular so he wanted me out of the way for a while.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Did your husband give any idea how he learnt Mr Martin was coming to St Petersburg?’

  ‘I’m afraid he did not. Could I ask you a question, Lord Powerscourt? Do you know what Mr Martin was doing here, why he came to St Petersburg?’

  Now it was Powerscourt’s turn to smile. Potemkin padded off to inspect the snow falling in the garden. ‘If I knew the answer to that question, my dear lady, I would be well on my way to solving the mystery. At the moment, I have no idea.’

  ‘Can I give you my theory? I believe he must have been sent here on government business. I’m sure your Foreign Office told him he was not to breathe a word to a single soul. Otherwise he would have told me.’

  ‘How did he usually let you know he was coming?’ asked Powerscourt. Visions of messages in a bottle, of coded signals hidden in the advertisement pages of The Times, of slaves with shaven heads, flashed through his mind. He had visions too of a mythical elderly relative living in a distant part of Britain perhaps, a sort of Scottish Bunbury in Martin’s life, who had to be visited every year in early January.