Death on the Nevskii Prospekt Read online

  The stranger left early next morning, looking refreshed rather than exhausted by his exertions the night before.

  ‘Are you going back home now?’ asked the Pilot.

  ‘No, I am continuing my journey,’ the stranger replied.

  ‘May I ask where are you going to?’ the Pilot continued.

  ‘I am going to St Petersburg,’ said the stranger.

  ‘Will you tell me your name, in case we meet again?’ said the Pilot, holding out his hand for a farewell handshake.

  ‘One day,’ said the stranger, ‘everybody in Russia will know my name. I am a priest. I am called Rasputin, Father Grigory Rasputin.’

  Powerscourt wondered if Lucy would come to meet him at Victoria station as his train arrived in the middle of the morning. As he strode down the long platform, packed with porters and passengers, he peered at the crowd of welcomers at the far end. There was the usual collection of especially tall people only found at the great railway termini who blocked the view for everybody else. And Lucy was not particularly tall. Then he saw the head of a small figure raised aloft on shoulders he could not see. There was a shout of Papa! three times and two tiny people hurtled towards him as fast as their legs would carry them. Powerscourt was amazed at how effectively they dodged in and out of the surrounding traffic, navigating their way past porters with vast trolleys and elderly ladies of uncertain gait. He waved vigorously from time to time even when he couldn’t see them to give the twins something to steer for. Then, laughing with excitement, Juliet and Christopher were upon him, demanding to be lifted up at once for a better view of the station. They were both uncontrollably happy, peering into Powerscourt’s face from time to time to make sure he was really home and giggling cheerfully when their inspection was proved right. So it was a heavily laden husband, with a twin on each shoulder and a porter carrying a suitcase and a large shopping bag in each hand, who was reunited with his wife at the bottom of Platform 14, Ashford, the Dover Boat, Calais and Paris.

  ‘Francis, my love,’ Lady Lucy said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see you home.’ She squeezed whatever bits of her husband she could find. ‘They’ve been frantic, these two,’ she nodded at the twins, ‘ever since they heard you were coming back. They promised to be good if they were brought to the station to meet you, and they were, staying ever so still, not fighting, not running round at all. I was quite taken in! I relaxed my guard, you see, so when I lifted Juliet up I didn’t have a firm hold on Christopher and then they were off!’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Powerscourt, taking hold of a section of his wife’s shoulder and holding it tight. ‘We’re all here and we’re all fine.’

  Forty-five minutes later the twins were still coiled round their father as he tried to have a conversation with Lucy over tea in the drawing room in Markham Square. She asked him about his investigation. He remembered that these were perilous waters.

  ‘It’s been very sedate stuff really, Lucy. Lots of meetings with Interior Ministry people, diplomats from the Foreign Office, long conversations with a very clever Englishman in the Embassy, a Russian princess, a very beautiful Russian princess who works as a lady-in-waiting to the Tsar’s family and discovered that our friend Mr Martin appears to have met the Tsar shortly before he died.’

  Lady Lucy had a vision of Russian sirens, seductive in fur, come to lure her Francis to his doom. ‘How old is this female, Francis?’

  Powerscourt laughed. ‘Natasha? She’s about eighteen, but I think she’s falling in love with my translator. He’s all of twenty-five and works in London most of the time. I don’t think you need to be concerned about the fair Natasha, my love.’

  All this time Powerscourt had been conducting tickling and pushing games with Christopher and Juliet. Then he remembered something. He put the twins on the carpet in front of him and looked at them as severely as he could.

  ‘Juliet! Christopher! I want you to stand still for a moment. Still! Now then. I have brought a present for each of you back from St Petersburg. I want you to go downstairs and bring up that brown shopping bag I had at the station. It’s by the suitcase in the hall.’

  With whoops of Present! Present! the twins shot off down the stairs. Powerscourt grinned. ‘It’s hard to imagine them ever being sort of stationary, isn’t it, you know, reading a newspaper, looking at the wallpaper, anything like that. I’m going to tell you all about the investigation this evening when Johnny’s here, my love. He is coming to dinner this evening, isn’t he?’

  Lady Lucy smiled. No investigation of her husband’s would be complete without Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘He is coming, of course he’s coming. He asked me to give you a message, Francis. He said he’s going to concentrate on the village and leave the house to you. He’ll meet you at the station for the train nearest to seven o’clock this evening.’

  ‘Very good,’ said her husband, thinking how meticulous Johnny had been. There was the customary sound of a minor earthquake, large animal in distress, small football crowd in pain that heralded the arrival of the twins, dragging the bag along the floor.

  ‘Very heavy, Papa,’ said Juliet. ‘Big bag,’ agreed Christopher.

  Powerscourt placed the bag on his knees and began to rummage around inside it. ‘That’s funny,’ he said after a while, ‘I’m sure I packed those things before I left.’

  He continued searching. The twins looked slightly less hopeful than before. ‘They must be down here in this corner, behind their mother’s present,’ he went on. ‘No, they’re not there either. They must be on the other side.’ The twins were beginning to look rather anxious. Maybe their Papa had forgotten to put the presents in the bag. Lady Lucy was trying very hard not to smile.

  ‘They’re not that big, well, they’re not that small either. Could they have slipped out of the bag when I put it on the luggage rack? That carriage must be halfway to Dover now if it goes back the way it came.’

  Visions of new possessions they had not yet seen heading back all the way to St Petersburg appalled the twins. They looked at each other sadly. Their faces fell. If he had been heartless, Powerscourt might have wanted to place a bet on which one would burst into tears first.

  ‘Hold on!’ he said with the air of a man remembering at last where he has buried the treasure. ‘I know what’s happened. They’re stuck between Thomas and Olivia’s presents!’ One final delve into the bag which might, Lady Lucy thought, have indicated to a cynical observer that Powerscourt knew all along where the presents were, and he produced two packages cocooned in thick brown paper.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said, looking at the expectant faces of his children, ‘I’m not quite sure which one is for which child.’ He began feeling the presents. The twins were growing more impatient by the second. Then something seemed to make his mind up. ‘This one is for you, Juliet, and this one is for you, Christopher.’

  There followed the normal rending and tearing sounds as the paper was ripped to shreds and thrown on the floor. Juliet had a wooden doll with four smaller dolls inside. Christopher had a Russian Imperial Guardsman in full battle kit, a defiant moustache emphasizing his superiority. Powerscourt would not have confessed to anybody in the world that he had actually bought the things at Berlin Lichtenberg station. But his present for Lucy had been purchased at a very fashionable shop on the Nevskii Prospekt itself.

  ‘I must go to Kent, my love,’ said Powerscourt, looking at his watch and at the twins who appeared to be arranging an assignation between the smallest of the dolls and the guardsman. ‘I was going to give you this tonight, but with all these presents going round . . .’

  He handed Lucy a rectangular parcel, a book well covered in stout wrapping paper and string. There was a drawing of a very beautiful woman on the cover. The writing was in Russian. Lucy looked at him.

  ‘I know it’s in Russian, my love,’ said Powerscourt gently, ‘but I don’t think it will matter when you know what it is. That,’ he nodded reverentially at the book, ‘is a first edition of Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina. Do you remember you used to have that coat I called your Anna Karenina coat when we first met? I remember meeting you wearing it one day in St James’s Square. ’

  Lucy flicked through the pages, pausing now and then to look at the illustrations. ‘Oh, Francis!’ was all she could say. ‘Oh, Francis!’

  The road down to Tibenham Grange was steep, twisting and turning its way through the woods. Powerscourt noticed two other dwellings on the way down. At the bottom of the hill was a large lawn, big enough for croquet or tennis, with a lake on a raised level behind it. To the left was the house itself, a near perfect medieval moated manor house, described by some historians, Powerscourt recalled, as one of the finest of its sort in England. As he paid off his cab, arranging for a pick-up at six thirty to return to the station, he saw a tubby police constable of middling years eyeing him suspiciously.

  ‘This house is closed to visitors at present,’ the constable said, ‘even to architects. Especially to architects.’

  ‘I’m not one of those,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully, drawing on long years of experience with the various layers of the police force. ‘My name is Powerscourt. I’m an investigator. I believe the Foreign Office will have told Inspector Clayton I’m coming.’

  ‘My apologies, sir, forgive me, please. Constable Watchett at your service, sir. I’ll bring you to the Inspector now, sir.’ Watchett led Powerscourt over a stone footbridge that crossed the moat. ‘I don’t hold with these houses with water all around them myself,’ said the constable, glancing down into the depths. ‘Damp must come in something rotten and everyone knows damp can be bad for houses, very bad.’

  Constable Watchett shook his head as he showed Powerscourt into an elegant library, divided into sections by bays of bookshelves set at right angles to the windows. The Inspector was at the far end. He was a tall, thin Inspector with a slight limp as he made his way down the library to greet his visitor. His hair was a light brown and his cheerful blue eyes showed that his calling had not yet completely destroyed his faith in human nature. ‘Andrew Clayton, Lord Powerscourt,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘What a pleasure to meet you at last! I trust you have recovered from your journey.’

  ‘Well recovered, thank you,’ said Powerscourt, staring intently at the young man. ‘Delighted to make your acquaintance. Have we met somewhere before?’

  ‘Only by reputation, my lord,’ said the Inspector, ‘in South Africa. I was wounded rather badly in a skirmish during your time there. Our colonel said that if it hadn’t been for the intelligence provided by your department, we would have all been killed. I joined the police force after that.’

  ‘I’m sure it was nothing,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Quite soon we must have a long talk about South Africa, but for the moment, as you know at least as well as I do, we have urgent business.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Clayton, leading the way back to his end of the library. He pointed out a comfortable armchair next to his own. ‘Could I make a suggestion, Lord Powerscourt? My first inspector, when I was a humble sergeant, used to lay enormous stress on organizing the evidence, such as it was, in chronological order. D follows C which follows B which follows A, he used to say. It got rather monotonous after a couple of cases, but still. I know the Foreign Office have an interest in this death here, my lord, and I know you have been in St Petersburg looking into the passing of this poor lady’s husband. So perhaps you could tell me first about the Russian end, as it were, and then I can take it up from here.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Powerscourt and paused momentarily to organize his thoughts. He left nothing out: the despatch of Martin on his ultra secret mission to St Petersburg with only the Prime Minister knowing the purpose of his visit; Martin’s late night meeting with the Tsar shortly before his death; the discovery of his body by a police station which later denied all knowledge of him or his corpse; the Foreign Ministry’s conviction that he had never been in St Petersburg at all; the Interior Ministry’s knowledge not only of his current but of his previous visits in earlier years; the sinister presence of the Okhrana with its torture chambers in the basement of the Fontanka Quai and its master’s collection of sadistic paintings in the Hermitage; Martin’s mistress in exile out in the country who remembered her dancing days with Mr Martin in years gone by and whose husband told her he was coming to the city yet again. He threw in, almost as an afterthought, the telegraph messages decoded by the Okhrana and his own possession of a secret channel outside their knowledge. He spoke of his inability to decide if Martin was killed because of what he knew, or because he wouldn’t say what he knew and therefore had to die in case that information passed into the wrong hands; of his uncertainty over whether Martin had sent any telegrams, and if so, to whom; of the complete absence of the body of the dead Martin.

  ‘I don’t envy you that lot, my lord,’ said Clayton. ‘May I ask one very silly question from a country policeman in Kent not used to the ways of the big cities?’

  ‘Please do,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘It’s this, my lord,’ said Inspector Clayton earnestly. ‘We’re always reading how unstable these Russian places are. Only last month, I read in the paper the other day, there were hundreds of Russians killed by their own soldiers and that in the centre of St Petersburg itself. Mightn’t Mr Martin just have met a load of ruffians who robbed him and killed him because he was a foreigner?’

  ‘Nothing is impossible, Inspector,’ said Powerscourt, reluctant to say he thought they were playing for higher stakes than robbery and casual killing.

  ‘Anyway, my lord, that’s as may be. Now it’s my turn.’ Clayton looked down briefly at the papers on the little side table beside him, as if he had written out what he was going to say. ‘Mrs Martin died from a fall from the tower of this house into the moat below. She hit her head on the stone wall of the footbridge on the way. That, according to the doctors, was probably what killed her. As far as we know, on the day of her death Mrs Letitia Martin was alone in this house. There is a housekeeper cum cook, married to a butler cum handyman cum coachman, who live in one of the little cottages opposite the tower you’ll probably have seen on your way in, my lord. Kennedy, they’re called. Their daughter in Tonbridge has just given birth to their first grandchild so Mrs Martin gave permission for them to go and spend two days and nights with the new arrival. We can find no record of anybody else coming to visit her. Constable Watchett, who is an expert woodsman, is checking through all the surrounding area to see if he can find any traces of any intruder. So far, not a thing.’

  Inspector Clayton paused for a moment. ‘We know,’ he went on, ‘that she was in the habit of reading, or writing letters or working on the household accounts in the next library bay to this one, the one with the rope across it, my lord. We can have a look in there in a moment. We know from the doctors that she probably died somewhere between three and six in the afternoon. We have no idea if she went up to the tower on her own, or if some unknown visitor came with her. The unfortunate thing is that Mr and Mrs Kennedy went away on the Tuesday. Poor Mrs Martin died on the same day. The Kennedys did not come back until early evening on the Thursday. As they were the last people to see her alive, so they were the first to find her dead. They thought she had slipped. They said she sometimes went up there to look at the view or watch the birds. She could have slipped. But after his contact with the Foreign Office, my lord, our Chief Constable quickly discarded that theory. Or she could, of course, have jumped, the despatch of the Kennedys to the new granddaughter a perfect pretext for an uninterrupted suicide. But come, enough of this speculation. Let me take you up to the tower before the light goes, my lord.’

  Inspector Clayton led the way up one flight of stairs at the end of the library. ‘Constable Watchett probably told you he doesn’t approve of houses on water, my lord,’ he said, continuing along a corridor that led into a bedroom and then a small chapel, perfectly equipped with pews and altar and crucifixes. ‘He doesn’t approve of higgledy piggledy houses either, as he
puts it, houses where all the stairs aren’t in the one place.’

  They had now entered a long elegant drawing room with French tapestries on the walls and one or two expensive-looking pictures. Looking out of the window Powerscourt saw the moat again, from a different angle this time, beguiling, seductive, mysterious. Inspector Clayton had stopped at the bottom of another staircase, this one in stone.

  ‘We don’t know, my lord,’ he said, ‘if she came the way we have just come, or if she came in from the other direction with the big bedroom, but she must have gone up this stone staircase.’

  He made his way up the steps, pausing to push open the wooden square at the top.

  ‘Was this locked normally?’ Powerscourt asked.

  ‘No, it wasn’t, my lord. There seemed little point, really. Nobody could reach the tower without going through the house and if anybody came with a young family Mr Kennedy would always lock the door before they arrived.’

  Now they were out on top of the little tower, on a platform not more than twelve feet square. To the west lay the cottages and other outbuildings that came with the estate. To the north, the large lawn and the lake behind. To the east and the west, the woods that formed part of the Weald of Kent. Clayton tiptoed across to the point where the West Bridge lay almost directly beneath them. ‘The doctors think this is where she must have gone from, my lord,’ said the Inspector, peering down at the water. ‘The parapet is dangerously low, as you can see. I expect the coroner will say something about it at the inquest. They’re always very good at trying to close stable doors after the horses have bolted.’