Death on the Nevskii Pros Read online

  Even Natasha’s four elder brothers, who had teased and tormented their only sister from earliest times, would have said she was pretty. She was taller than average, without being liable to stand out in a crowd, slim, with very dark eyes and thick brown hair. For her trip to the station Natasha was clad from head to foot in fur and reminded more than one of the passengers on the platform of Tolstoy’s eponymous heroine. She had come to see a young man off on a journey of adventure. Natasha had known Mikhail Shaporov since she was a child. Just when she thought their friendship might turn into something different, something altogether more exciting, he had to leave Russia to go and live in the fogs of London. And where was he? she thought, looking up at the clock and seeing that the train would leave in nine minutes’ time. If you were a Shaporov, she reflected with a smile, you probably wouldn’t mind missing a train. You could probably buy yourself another one on the spot. For the Shaporovs had not been content with the great estates they had received on government service. They had branched out into banking and insurance and all kinds of other things to do with money that Natasha didn’t understand. People said they were now much richer than the Romanovs.

  Then she saw him, running at full speed towards her, his eyes filled with happiness.

  ‘Natasha!’ he panted. ‘I’m at the other end of the train! This way!’

  With that he grabbed her hand and pulled her at breakneck speed down the platform, dodging a considerable amount of luggage and annoying a great many other travellers who had to get out of their way.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said, still out of breath. ‘This compartment is mine.’

  Natasha saw that he had a sleeping compartment and a well-furnished living room at his disposal. Shaporovs didn’t travel third class.

  ‘Do you think you’ll have enough room in there, Mikhail? You don’t think you should have ordered a dining suite and a chef for yourself as well?’

  The young man laughed. ‘I didn’t book it, Natasha. I’d have been perfectly happy with first class. My father booked it for me.’

  Natasha still remembered the first time she had met Mikhail’s father at a children’s party. He had given rides on his back to every single small guest, some of them up the marble staircase accompanied by wolf noises. Now the man was booking luxury train suites for his children.

  ‘You’ve been to London a lot, haven’t you?’ asked Natasha, anxious perhaps lest her young man, or one who might become her young man, be going to an alien world.

  ‘I have been there a lot. They sent me to school there, you may remember, for two years before I went to Oxford. London’s splendid. It’s not as beautiful as St Petersburg and the English are more reserved than we are, but it’s a fine city. And,’ he went on, noticing that Natasha was looking sad all of a sudden, ‘my father says I can come home after three months if I do well.’

  Natasha wondered where he might be sent then, New York, or Siberia perhaps. Maybe she should find herself a more stationary sort of young man.

  ‘I haven’t told you,’ she said, ‘I’ve been offered a job as a lady-in-waiting.’

  ‘Waiting for whom or for what?’ said Mikhail gravely.

  ‘The Empress and her children out at Tsarskoe Selo,’ said Natasha proudly. ‘They want to have a sensible young girl to talk to the daughters and so forth. The only thing they checked about me was whether I was fluent in French or not. I am, as you know. So I got the position.’

  Mikhail looked at her carefully. Sensible? Would he have called Natasha sensible? It wasn’t the first word that would have come to mind. Beautiful, certainly. Attractive, yes. Desirable, undoubtedly. Maybe Natasha was sensible too. It seemed such a mundane, a prosaic adjective to describe such a gorgeous creature.

  ‘Congratulations, Natasha! What an honour to be picked for that post!’

  ‘I may not like it, Mikhail,’ she said. ‘My mother says they’re all mad out at the Alexander Palace and my father says to keep an eye out for the bombs and the terrorists.’

  ‘Not sure it’s bombs you need to keep an eye out for. Beware faith healers, ouija boards, necromancers, fakes and phoneys of the spiritual world. One of these fiends convinced the Empress she was pregnant a couple of years back.’

  There was a sudden burst of whistles from the front of the train. Natasha thought she saw something like a flag waving. Mikhail hopped on to the step at the door of his compartment. He thought he would still be able to kiss her from there if the opportunity presented itself.

  ‘You be careful in London, Mikhail Shaporov,’ said Natasha firmly. ‘There are all kinds of bounty hunters and wicked people over there. I read about them in a book by Henry James.’

  ‘Not females, surely, Natasha? Not members of your own sex, trying to trap a man for his money? Impossible, surely.’ The young man laughed.

  The train began to move very slowly. The engine was giving out great gasps as if it were in labour. The white-grey smoke billowed back down the platform. Natasha began walking alongside Mikhail’s carriage. Very suddenly he reached down and pulled her up on to the same step. He kissed her firmly and then returned her to the platform.

  ‘Take care, Natasha,’ he said, ‘take great care out there in your palace.’

  Natasha’s head was spinning. Why did this have to happen now when he was going away? Was that the kiss of a friend or a lover? Lover, she thought, every memory on her lips said lover. She was nearly running now.

  ‘Take care in your wicked city, Mikhail! Come back safely! Will you write to me?’

  There was an enormous roar, almost an explosion, as the train gathered speed and began to move clear of the station.

  ‘Of course I’ll write,’ Natasha thought she heard him say. The train was disappearing now. Natasha made her way home slowly. She was not going to tell anybody about the kiss. It would be a secret between them. Natasha rather liked secrets. And London? Well, she remembered a governess in her youth who had tried in vain to teach them about distances. London, she thought, was only about two thousand, one hundred and fifty miles away. Not really that far when you considered how far it was to Siberia.

  PART ONE

  THE WINTER PALACE

  The Intelligentsia only talk about what is significant, they talk philosophy but meanwhile in front of their eyes the workers eat disgusting food, sleep without pillows, thirty or forty to a room, everywhere fleas, damp, stench, immorality…

  Trofimov, Act Two,

  The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov

  1

  London, December 1904

  Lord Francis Powerscourt looked carefully at the number at the top of the page. One hundred and twenty-three did indeed follow on from one hundred and twenty-two. Earlier on in his perusal of this work he had discovered page two hundred and four coming directly after page twenty-three and page eighteen coming immediately after page ninety-one. His eye moved on down the first couple of paragraphs. There may be a place called Salusbury somewhere, he said to himself, there probably is, but it doesn’t have a cathedral and this one should be spelt Salisbury. Sissors should be scissors. Sacistry should be sacristy.

  Powerscourt himself was the author of this forthcoming volume. These were the proofs of the first in a three-part series on the cathedrals of England. He had completed all his research, travelling to every cathedral in the country, often with Lady Lucy as his companion. Powerscourt remembered Johnny Fitzgerald telling him, very shyly, of the extraordinary pride he felt in becoming a published author, of seeing a physical book with your own name on the cover. Powerscourt now felt the same and his elder children were growing incredibly excited, demanding regular bulletins on the book’s progress and asking when they could go and see it on display at Hatchard’s in Piccadilly.

  Page one hundred and seventy-one, Wrocester did not have a cathedral, Worcester did. People did not reseive the sacriment, they received the sacrament. Powerscourt thought he might finish these proofs before lunch when there was an apologetic knock at the door and the sound of a s
light cough on the far side. Rhys, the Powerscourt butler, another veteran from Indian Army days, always coughed before entering a room.

  ‘Excuse me, my lord, forgive me for interrupting you, but there is a gentleman down below who wishes to speak to you. He says his business is most urgent, my lord.’

  Powerscourt glanced down at the name on the card. Sir Jeremiah Reddaway, Permanent Under Secretary, HM Foreign Office. Did he know this Reddaway? Had he had dealings with him in his earlier life as an investigator? Was he, much more likely, one of Lady Lucy’s relations? But, in that case, why not ask for his wife?

  ‘Is he in the hall now, Rhys, the Reddaway fellow?’

  ‘He is, my lord.’

  ‘Show him into the drawing room and say I will join him shortly. And ask him if he would like some coffee.’

  As he tidied up his proofs, Powerscourt wondered if his past had come back to haunt him, if some fragment of an earlier case had resurfaced and needed tidying up. Maybe it would blow up instead, the past returning to explode in the face of the present. Sir Jeremiah, Powerscourt saw as they shook hands in the middle of the drawing room, was extraordinarily tall and equally extraordinarily thin. Sir Jeremiah leant forward when he walked as if some bureaucratic truth or disobedient memorandum had escaped his clutches and he was pursuing it down a recalcitrant Foreign Office corridor. He had a long thin nose and a small tight mouth. There was a very slight air of menace about him this morning, as if he might despatch a destroyer or a squadron of horse against you if you crossed his path.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt,’ he began, sitting beside the fireplace and stretching out those long legs till they almost reached the far side, ‘please forgive me for calling at such short notice and without warning. I am here on the instructions of the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister.’

  Powerscourt bowed slightly. The previous Prime Minister Lord Salisbury he had known quite well. The current one he did not know at all.

  ‘I have come, Lord Powerscourt, on a most delicate and most urgent mission.’

  ‘Forgive me, Sir Jeremiah, I do not know if you are fully acquainted with my current position. As of over two years ago I have given up investigations. I attend to no more murder inquiries in society or anywhere else. My detecting days are over.’ Powerscourt smiled at the man from the Foreign Office. ‘I write books now, Sir Jeremiah, books about cathedrals.’

  Sir Jeremiah did not give up easily. ‘I look forward to reading your work as soon as it is published. But we are talking here of a matter of the utmost importance. In the Prime Minister’s words it is crucial to the well-being of the nation and the Empire. It is our wish that you should take one final bow on the world stage, Lord Powerscourt, in the service of your country.’

  ‘I do not think you have understood me,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I do not do investigations any more. I am a retired investigator. I am a Chelsea Pensioner of an investigator, or, if you prefer a parliamentary to a military analogy, I have taken the Chiltern Hundreds and resigned from the House. I do not mean to be rude but I don’t intend to change my mind for you or the Foreign Secretary or even the Prime Minister.’ With that Powerscourt smiled politely at his visitor.

  Sir Jeremiah remembered the advice from a Foreign Office official who had seen Powerscourt in action during his time as Head of Military Intelligence in the Boer War. ‘You’ve got to tempt him, Sir Jeremiah. I know you can’t tell him much until he agrees to take on the job, but make it sound as dangerous and difficult as you can. That might pull him in. The man likes a challenge.’

  ‘Lord Powerscourt, please, permit me to give the briefest outline of our difficulties. Surely you will give your country the right to enlighten you?’

  Sir Jeremiah was rubbing the tips of his fingers together as he spoke. Powerscourt suddenly saw what he must be like in Foreign Office meetings. Polite. Polished. Lethal. He was not going to fall out of step in this gavotte of la politesse as if his drawing room had been magically transported back to the court of the Sun King in the vast and draughty salons of Versailles.

  ‘Of course, Sir Jeremiah, you must carry out your instructions.’ Powerscourt saw that Sir Jeremiah did not like being referred to as a bearer of instructions, as if he were a messenger boy or a deliverer of telegrams. A brief frown shot across his long thin face before the customary bureaucratic mask reappeared. ‘But, as you say, the briefest of outlines, for my mind is already made up.’

  Sir Jeremiah pulled another card from his department’s investigations into Powerscourt’s past. Somebody remembered sitting next to somebody at a dinner party at Powerscourt’s sister’s house, and the second somebody recalled Powerscourt speaking very eloquently about the glory and the grandeur of St Petersburg which he had just visited in the company of Lady Lucy.

  ‘Do you know St Petersburg, Lord Powerscourt?’ Sir Jeremiah was now purring slightly. Looking at his incredibly long legs Powerscourt thought he looked like one of those Spy cartoons that appeared in Vanity Fair. Perhaps he had already appeared there. Perhaps he should ask him. Perhaps not.

  ‘I do,’ said Powerscourt, in the most neutral tone he could think of. He was not going to give Beanpole, as he was sure his children would describe the man from King Charles Street, any hint of advantage.

  ‘Did you care for the city? Did you find the architecture and so on agreeable?’

  Here was an opening, surely. Powerscourt slipped through it like a rugby three-quarter making a break for the try line.

  ‘Forgive me, Sir Jeremiah,’ he said, ‘I thought you came here to discuss a matter crucial to the well-being of the nation and the Empire, not to debate the architectural merits of northern Russian cities as if we were compiling a guidebook or an updated edition of Baedeker.’

  The sally made no impact whatever. Sir Jeremiah seemed to be carrying steel armour many inches thick as if he were some sort of human battleship.

  ‘As I said, Lord Powerscourt, St Petersburg is at the heart of our difficulties. Four or five days ago a man was found dead early in the morning by one of the bridges on the Nevskii Prospekt. He had been murdered. That man was a distinguished member of the Foreign Office, in Russia on a secret mission. We need to know who killed him. We need to know why they killed him. We need desperately to know if he was killed by a hostile power and how much he may have told them, under torture perhaps, who knows, before he died. That is the essence of this task. Will you do it, Lord Powerscourt?’

  There was not a fraction of a second of hesitation. ‘No, I will not,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘I cannot take that answer as definitive, Lord Powerscourt.’ Sir Jeremiah, Powerscourt thought, was now moving into the ‘let’s persuade the Minister to change his mind routine’, a technique honed and perfected by the Foreign Office over many governments and many ministers and many centuries.

  ‘I would remind you, Lord Powerscourt, of the shifting sands of contemporary European politics. For many decades Europe was at peace after the Congress of Vienna. There were occasional interruptions, the Crimea, the Franco-Prussian War, Russo-Turkish and so on. But now we are in uncharted waters. Germany wants an empire and recognition of her power for her unstable Emperor. France is frightened of Germany and seeks alliances against her. A new naval arms race threatens the peace of the high seas. The Great Powers are fighting over the division of Africa like rabid dogs over a corpse. The Russian Empire itself is racked with unrest, its politicians decimated by assassinations, its Tsar weak and indecisive, liberals and revolutionaries of every shape and size conspiring for democratic change. The death on the Nevskii Prospekt is surely a part of this mosaic, this cauldron of uncertainty and doubt that has spread over Europe like dark clouds massing before a tempest.’

  Powerscourt could barely restrain himself from smiling happily at the mixed metaphors pouring from the Foreign Office mandarin.

  ‘This is the task your country asks of you, Lord Powerscourt. Go to St Petersburg. Solve the mystery of the murdered man. Find out who killed him and come back
to London. I need not tell you that your services would be exceedingly well rewarded. Will you do it? Will you answer your country’s call?’

  Powerscourt was furious. ‘No, Sir Jeremiah, I will not. And how dare you come into my house and try to bribe me to work in the service of my country! I have served Queen Victoria for many years as an officer in her army. I have served her in dangerous places, more dangerous even than the corridors of the Foreign Office. I have risked my life in battle while you and your colleagues compose memoranda on future policy and fill the passing hours with meetings about the changing map of Africa or the tribal troubles on the North West Frontier. If I wanted to serve my King and carry out this mission I would never have asked for money. You demean yourself and your office by offering it, you demean me by making me listen to it. I have said No to your offer twice already. Now I say it again.’

  Powerscourt rang the bell for Rhys. ‘And now, Sir Jeremiah, if you will forgive me, I have work to do. Rhys will show you out. Thank you for considering me for this task. The answer will always be No.’

  Two hours later there was an emergency meeting in the Powerscourt drawing room. Johnny Fitzgerald had been summoned from sorting out his notes on the birds of East Anglia. Lady Lucy had returned from a shopping mission with the twins to Sloane Square. Powerscourt had spent most of those two hours pacing up and down his drawing room in a state of total uncontrolled fury.