Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

23

‘What do I know of Goring?’ mused Lord Powerscourt. ‘Absolutely nothing, my love. I shall return to the diary.

‘“Saturday June the eighth. I think the rehearsals have gone very well. This morning I had to take on the role of the Prince in Thamar in case Bolm should be indisposed or is too busy chasing the corps de ballet. I have watched Bolm perform this role so many times and I know, heaven knows I have been told often enough, that my role is to perform it in exactly the same way as he does. I am not to add any little touches of my own. The audience, Monsieur Fokine says, have come to see Bolm, not me, and the least I can do is to replicate down to the smallest movement what he would have done.”

‘There’s a break here, Lucy, as if he added this last bit later in the day. Here we go:

‘“Some of the girls are thinking of complaining about the way Bolm treats them all. They ask me for my advice! I agree that his antics, his endless approaches, sometimes physical, would be quite disgusting if you were a girl. Perhaps I am lucky in that I have sisters and I know how I would feel if anybody behaved like that with them. But I tell them that the Ballets Russes is more important than any individual. One of the girls told me that I sounded like Diaghilev when I said that. I told her I didn’t care. One complaint of that nature could split the company apart, half for Bolm and half against Bolm. The performances would never recover. The unity of the company must come first. And I tell them that Fokine, for one, must know what is going on. If he knows, Diaghilev knows. Maybe somebody high up will have a word with Bolm. That, I tell them, would be for the best.”’

Sergeant Jenkins was having another cigarette. He wondered if the smoke got into your hair. He could always say that he was surrounded by people smoking inside and outside the building. People were always smoking on the bus. He thought he could mount a reasonable defence against that charge. He was on the Rs now. He hoped for a moment that the entry might be for a Mrs Richard Gilbert rather than a Mrs Sophie Gilbert, née Shore. Ahead of them was another long line of Raphaels, Richards, Roberts and Ruperts. He consoled himself with the thought that the place closed in forty minutes’ time.

‘“Saturday June the eighth. The girls are still going on about Bolm. Don’t they realize that if they go on and on about something it can get more than a little boring. I am in my room at the Premier Hotel now. The traffic is always very thick down our side of the square. I am feeling unsettled. There hasn’t been time for a reply from Mama yet. I wonder how Papa is coping now Ivan is away on manoeuvres for a fortnight. Papa always says he finds it difficult being in a house full of women with no other man to talk to apart from the servants. That is why he always runs up those enormous bills at the yacht club when the men of the family are away. I wonder how he’s coping now.

‘“I have to say that I have not felt homesick since I have been here, not once. Just now I wish I was back home in St Petersburg, having family supper with some lively conversation going on.”’

‘Poor boy,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘He could have come round here if we’d known he wanted a bit of family life, couldn’t he Francis?’

‘He could have played a bit of chess with Thomas, though I wouldn’t recommend it. We haven’t heard anything like what we want, Lucy. Not yet anyway.’

Sergeant Rufus Jenkins was feeling like a lone fisherman who has taken his rods and his fishing basket and his rug to a remote riverbank and cast away all day. He finds nothing. Just when he thinks he might as well pack up and go home, he finally catches a fish. There it was! At last! He made a careful note in his notebook, including the entries on either side of it, and hurried off at full speed to Markham Square where he expected to find his Inspector. As he wished his bus would go faster, Sergeant Jenkins thought that the Powerscourt residence was turning into a sort of extra police station.

Rhys showed the panting young man, one or two buttons undone, hair dishevelled, gasping heavily, into the drawing room.

‘Lord Powerscourt, Lady Powerscourt, apologies for bursting in on you like this, but I’ve got it! I’m sorry it’s taken so long!’

‘You are most welcome, Sergeant. We’ll get you a cup of tea — or a bottle of beer, if you’d prefer. You’ve obviously come in a great hurry with your news. Tell us, pray, what sends you hurtling round the streets of London.’

‘Sorry, my lord, I’ve come from Somerset House where I’ve been looking at the death certificates! Reverend Fortescue down in Blexham brought us the fist part of the story of the marital life of Richard Wagstaff Gilbert. Here comes the second.’

The Sergeant drew out his notebook. ‘Mrs Sophie Gilbert, née Shore, Bermondsey, October the tenth, died in childbirth. The infant also died.’

‘Was it a boy or a girl?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘It was a girl.’

‘Pardon me, my lord, my lady, a terrible thought occurred to me as I was walking upstairs here just now.’

‘And what was that?’ said Powerscourt.

‘Why, my lord. Do you think he married again? And maybe he had another family we don’t know anything about? No reason why he couldn’t have had. There’s plenty of time for him to have done that.’

‘There are an awful lot of years,’ said Powerscourt, ‘waiting for you in Somerset House if I am wrong, but I don’t think he did.’

‘How can you be so sure, Francis?’

‘Well, think of it like this. If you had a wife alive, you’d be leaving all your money to her first and then onto the children when she died. That would be the natural thing. But think of it. If you had a wife or children living, you wouldn’t be able to torment your family with the question of who you were going to leave your money to. You’d feel you were betraying your own every time you mentioned it. It’s only if you don’t have any direct descendants that you could play these terrible games. And consider this as well. If you had a wife and children of your own, your sisters would know about it. They wouldn’t take it seriously, all this talk of leaving the money to their children. I think you’re clear of another thirty-year session down there in the archives, Sergeant. What do you think Lucy?’

‘Well, he sounds a pretty odd sort of character, our friend Gilbert, with the dodgy money and the cheating at cards. You don’t think he could have a wife tucked away somewhere in secret?’

‘Oh ye of little faith,’ said Powerscourt. ‘As long as I have Thomas and Olivia and the twins I couldn’t contemplate giving any serious money to any nephews or nieces. It would be impossible. I think that idea — of the second wife and family tucked away — can be removed from the investigation. It still leaves the three nephews with perfectly adequate motives for killing each other and increasing their chances of inheriting.’

Powerscourt and Lady Lucy returned to the diary of Alexander Taneyev, now at the National Gallery.

‘“I went to Trafalgar Square this morning to the National Gallery. They certainly have a lot of wonderful paintings, but I don’t think they are a finer collection than we have in St Petersburg. But the Claudes and the Turners are sublime. I so wish that either of them could have come to our city and painted the sunsets over the Neva. That would have been beyond anything here. It would have been so beautiful.

‘“I had a long talk with my uncle over supper at his house last night. He says that he is going to leave me all his money. He’s not going to leave a penny to Mark or Peter or Nicholas, which I think is jolly unfair. He kept going about it as if he were really enjoying tormenting my cousins. I think it’s monstrous. If I ever do get that money I shall make sure I give it to Papa and get him to divide it all up between the four of us.”’

Another telegram had arrived at the Savoy addressed to M. Diaghilev. ‘Dear M. Diaghilev, It is my unfortunate duty,’ wrote the General Manager of the Grand Hotel Monte Carlo, ‘that the bill for your stay here earlier this summer has still not been paid. I enclose a copy for your convenience. Unless this is paid forthwith, the hotel will be unable to offer you or your associates any further accommodation in future.’

Colonel Olivier Brouzet spent the morning reading diplomatic telegrams in his office in the Place des Vosges in Paris. He wasn’t only reading the telegrams sent from his own Foreign Office at the Quai d’Orsay in his part of the city, but the messages sent in and out of Paris by all the Great Powers: the Germans, the Austrians, the English and the Russians. He called it taking the temperature of the diplomatic circuit, and it enabled him to tell his masters which issues between the principal powers on the Continent were especially important. These, he would point out in his accompanying memorandum, might need a touch or two of diplomatic massage in the weeks ahead.

Earlier that summer, the French cryptographers had succeeded in cracking the codes of the Okhrana, the Russian secret police in St Petersburg, used in messages to and from their office in Paris. There was one particular phrase that caused him great concern. He telephoned his wife to say he would be out of town for a few days. He sent word to his masters that he could be found at the local Embassy. Then he went through to his inner office and demanded details of the train and boat services to London, departing immediately.

‘I say, Lucy, we may be about to meet the Crown Jewels at last. There’s a page here that the boy has tried to cross out, but he hasn’t quite succeeded. I can still just about read it. Thank God for the vanity of diarists. He could have ripped out the page but he didn’t.’

Powerscourt leant forward to get as close as he could to the diary. ‘“I found a strange document on Bolm’s desk this afternoon when I popped in to ask him about his performance. On the middle of the page, it said in English: This paper must not be shared with any third parties, none whatsoever. At the top of the first page of the document — the crossing out starts here — it says in English: Most Immediate and Top Secret. Not for Circulation. The next page was a report on some experiment or other; at least, I presume it was an experiment, full of equations and mathematical expressions, none of which I understand. It’s like that all the way until the last page, where it said still in English: Next Experiment. Kingfisher. Goring June 28th. 0600 hours. There were so many equations and mathematical symbols I couldn’t make any sense of it. I left Bolm’s dressing room as fast as I could and came back here to the Premier Hotel. I think I shall go for a walk to clear my head. What am I to do? Who am I to tell? All that stuff about top secret and so on. I wish Mama or Papa were here to tell me what to do.”’

‘The date, Francis, the date at the end — that’s three days from the opening night and Thamar, when the boy was killed. What do you think it means?’

‘Well,’ said her husband, rubbing his eyes, ‘it’s certainly not a recipe for making tea in a samovar, that’s for sure. But all those equations and things, I’m at a loss. I wonder if it has to with guns and their alignment, some means for more accurate shelling of the enemy. Or it could have to do with the navigation of submarines, that’s always tricky, apparently. Perhaps we’d better see what our diarist has to say when he comes back from his walk.

‘Here we go. “There may be some spy ring centred on our ballet. I wonder if I shouldn’t go to the English authorities at once. I think I should confront Monsieur Bolm this afternoon. I can’t go round accusing him of things without hearing what he has to say.”’

Powerscourt turned the page. It was blank. So was the rest of the diary. Alexander Taneyev had written his last entry.

‘Look here, Lucy, I didn’t put the date in when I was reading it out. As you said, this last page was written three days before he was killed.’

‘So we don’t know whether he talked to Bolm, we don’t know whether he walked into a police station and asked to speak to somebody — we know nothing at all. He, in his turn, could also have done nothing at all, merely got so agitated that he forgot to put an entry in his diary that evening,’ observed Lucy.

‘The rest is certainly silence,’ said Powerscourt, riffling through the empty pages. ‘I know almost nothing of the secret world and the armaments race, though it is costing us all a great deal of money. I shall have to go and call on Rosebery at once. He knows even less about military equations than I do, but he knows people who do. And what of this entry at the end in three days’ time. Kingfisher? Goring? Six a.m.? What on earth is all that about?’

Inspector Dutfield was told the secrets of the diary.

‘Looks like that young lady made her journey all the way to St Petersburg in vain, my lord, my lady. I know nothing of the secret world, nothing at all. There’s a whole department that checks out all the foreigners for coronations and royal funerals and that sort of major ceremonial event with lots of foreign leaders, but I don’t know anything about that other world. I tell you what, my lord. I shall find out what I can about Kingfisher at Goring from the local force. I’ll find out if the young man did go and call on any English authorities, police stations and so on. That should just take five minutes on the phone. With your track record as the chap in charge of Military Intelligence in the Boer War, my lord — well, at least that gives you a head start on the rest of us.’

‘Inspector,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘do you think this knowledge is dangerous? For whoever comes across it, I mean.’

‘I should say it’s very dangerous, my lady. Two people have been murdered. We don’t know whether this caused it or not, but it’s the strongest lead we have got so far and that’s a fact.’

Rosebery was reading the reports from his racing trainer when Powerscourt arrived in Berkeley Square.

‘Bloody depressing news, Powerscourt. The one wretched animal I possess with a chance of winning the St Leger has gone lame. Unlikely to improve in time for the big race. Another year without a major winner.’

Powerscourt wondered if Rosebery had made the acquaintance of William Burke’s head porter who carried racing results round in his head the way other people do football scores.

Rosebery looked very grave when Powerscourt told him about Alexander’s diary entry and the secret papers.

‘Equations?’ he said. ‘Pages and pages of them? God help us all. I was a History man, at Oxford, as you know. I know nothing at all about mathematics and all that stuff. Perhaps it has something to do with gunnery, naval gunnery maybe. They’re always asking boffins who can’t speak properly and never learnt how to hold a fork to produce different ways of firing guns. Accuracy, that’s what they’re on about, particularly when the ship may be going up and down in the swell and you can’t actually see the enemy. And you say the poor boy might have been killed for his pains? Worse and worse. You’ve got the police working with you, I presume? They should be able to find out what Kingfisher Goring means. I suppose you want me to see if I can manage an invitation for you, would that be right?’

‘Do you know, I hadn’t thought of that, Rosebery, but that would be kind. Naval gunnery at dawn, what a prospect.’

‘Let me go and knock on a few doors that a former Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister is allowed to visit, my friend. I can’t promise you any kind of response in that time, but I’ll try my best. Let’s meet again tomorrow afternoon and I’ll see how many doors I’ve been able to open. That is, if I’ve been able to open any at all.’

‘Thank you so much. That’s most kind.’

‘Just one thing, Powerscourt. These people in this secret world are not to be trusted. They will tell me whatever it suits them to tell me. They will leave out whatever does not suit them. They will want to use you for their own purposes. They will not be concerned with your safety or your health, only what they can get out of you. It’s important that you understand that right from the start. You probably remember it anyway from your time with the bloody Boer in South Africa and all those devious princelings you dealt with in India. Don’t, for God’s sake, forget it now.’

‘Kingfisher Goring, my lord,’ he began, ‘is more usually known as the Kingfisher Hotel; it lies between Goring and the adjacent village of Streatley.’ Inspector Dutfield was the first caller of the day at the Powerscourt residence.

‘It is a handsome establishment with a number of the principal rooms, like the dining room and the drawing room, right on the riverside. The Thames flows right past the back door. You can, Inspector Huntley of the local force told me, watch one fish go past while you eat another. It is not cheap, my lord. It appeals to customers with high-quality food. But, just at the moment, the Kingfisher Hotel is closed to visitors. They are not allowed to return for a month. In the meantime the place has been taken over by some people holding a conference with a lot of important visitors from abroad. They’ve brought all their own staff. The locals have all been sent home on full pay. That’s pretty suspicious for a start, if you ask me. That could mean anything: European criminals, money men planning their next raid on the financial markets; God only knows what’s going on up there. But there are signs all the way from the railway station to the hotel that it is closed.’

‘And the young man, Alexander Taneyev? Is there any evidence that he might have walked into a police station and told them the contents of his diary?’

‘None at all. We have checked all the central stations and the two closest to where his uncle lives, but no such call was made. No young man hurried away to the War Office or the Navy to tell his secrets.’

‘Do you think he might have told somebody in the Ballets Russes; somebody like Fokine, for example?’

‘You’d have to ask him, my lord. If it were me, I’d be too worried about who else might be involved in this business at the ballet. You could have been jumping right out of the frying pan into the fire.’

Colonel Olivier Brouzet of the French Secret Service was the next visitor to Markham Square that day. A note had arrived the previous evening. They spoke in Brouzet’s immaculate English.

‘Forgive me for taking up your time at this difficult point in your investigation. I felt bound to come, as I have some information which may be of some assistance to you.’

‘Thank you so much for coming all this way.’ Powerscourt told him about the diary and the strange symbols and the mysterious meeting at the Kingfisher Hotel at Goring. ‘I suspect that these are state secrets; I just don’t know exactly what Alexander Taneyev saw.’

‘I too have some state secrets for you, my lord, ones that are more or less home-grown. Let me begin with the immediate reason for my visit. I recently had good reason to speak to a man who was suspected of sending secret military information to the enemy. We thought the fellow was giving it to the Germans, but this was not the case — it was the Russians who were to be the beneficiaries of his knowledge of French military tactics. When he was asked how he was supposed to send his knowledge to Russia, he was told to take it to the Ballets Russes.’

‘Bolm perhaps, Monsieur Brouzet? Alfred Bolm?’

‘We did not have a name. It appears that the ballet may be a clearing house for secret information of one sort or another. If you think of it, it’s a very neat solution to an old problem. It has always been very difficult for a spy to get his message home. He may be watched. The boats and the trains may all have people looking out for him. But, my lord, if he has a clearing house — a post office, if you will, he can present his information there. There it is given to a different courier, or it is simply carried on to France or Germany or whichever country the ballet is going to next. They carry mountains of luggage of every shape and size: clothes, costumes, make-up. Maybe the agent just carries it in his head if it is a simple message. The information is then passed on, not in Britain where the authorities may be watching, but in another country where the authorities are looking for somebody completely different. It would all depend on the urgency of the information. If speed is of the essence, then a different courier might take it on. If it was very secret it may be carried on when the ballet moves on, the information, like your top-secret document, safely hidden in the luggage, described as a new part of a new script for the ballet perhaps, a ballet of spies and secrecy, who knows?’

‘That is fascinating, Colonel Brouzet. So somebody like Alfred Bolm in the Ballets Russes might have been the spy carrying information on to France, or he could have been the intermediary who met the courier in his dressing room, or at his chess club, where he was a regular visitor.’

‘Chess club? What is this chess club? You have chess clubs for spies here in London?’

Powerscourt laughed. ‘It is near our British Museum, a place where historians and scholars go to write their books; it has an enormous collection of ancient statues and sacred figures from all over the world. That’s where the Elgin Marbles are kept. A number of the people who work there — some Russians, a number of Eastern Europeans — go to this chess club and test their wits against the locals. Bolm was a regular customer in his time in London.’

‘That is not all, my friend. What I am going to tell you now is much more serious. We have reason to believe that the Okhrana in St Petersburg recently sent a top man to London with the code name Andrei Rublev, who was — as you know — a famous painter of Russian icons back in the fifteenth century. Whether his namesake is going to carry out any religious artwork here in London, I rather doubt. He has been sent to secure the position of Alfred Bolm, if it is indeed Bolm who is responsible, and to make sure that none of those bothering him at present continue to do so. This is how they would do things in Russia, secure in the knowledge that nobody is going to ask questions about the doings of the Okhrana.’

‘Do I understand that you think I would be regarded as one of those bothering Monsieur Bolm at present? And what would be my fate, do you suppose?’

‘That I do not know. Beaten up, broken leg, face smashed in? Worse? Murder?’

‘That’s cheering news, Colonel Brouzet. But do you think this Andrei Rublev actually wants to kill me?’

‘Without knowing how valuable the information hidden in those equations actually is, I cannot be definite. But I should definitely watch your step. I should watch your step very carefully indeed.’

‘Thank you very much indeed. I was going to ask you a question about your source for this information and it seems to me that there is one route that is most likely. But it also seems to me that I should not ask you if you have been reading the Okhrana telegrams over there in the Place des Vosges.’

‘You would be quite right not to ask the question. And I would be quite right in telling you that I could not possibly be expected to give you an honest answer.’

Natasha Shaporova arrived at the same time as a note from Rosebery saying he would be delighted to see Powerscourt at tea time in Berkeley Square.

‘I am so sorry, Lord Powerscourt, I feel I have let you down over those letters and the diary.’

‘Never mind, Natasha, I am sure nobody else could have done half so well. You did discover that there was something suspicious going on after all.’

He filled her in on all the details of what had happened since: the discovery of the diary and the secret meeting at the Kingfisher Hotel at dawn. He mentioned nothing of the warnings from Colonel Brouzet of the French Secret Service.

‘Do you suppose you will solve the mystery as dawn comes up over the Thames, Lord Powerscourt? That would be an exciting way to put an end to our enquiries.’

‘Who knows,’ said Powerscourt, feeling that if the case went on much longer, he would have to apply to train as a Delphic oracle.

‘But I am so glad you are back. I have an urgent task for you.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Let me put it like this. When you discover a secret, or somebody tells you a secret, what is the first thing you want to do?’

‘Tell somebody else about it,’ said Natasha. ‘It’s quite hard to resist the need to share a secret so that you’re not carrying it alone.’

‘And who would you be most likely to tell the secret to?’

‘To somebody you trusted,’ said Natasha. ‘That’s what I would do, anyway.’

‘Well, we have no way of knowing who, if anybody, Alexander talked to. He may have told his parents, but it’s not the same as telling somebody in London. They were so far away. He would have been most likely to have told somebody in his immediate circle. Isn’t that so?’

‘It is. I think I see what you want me to do, Lord Powerscourt. You want me to go back to all those girls in the corps de ballet and ask if Alexander told them he had a great secret. People always get excited if they think they are about to be told something special. Am I right?’

‘You are absolutely right, Natasha. But be careful not to give anything away. Not a word about mathematical equations or secret formulae, just general questions.’

‘I was never any good at mathematics, Lord Powerscourt. Even the simple things they tried to teach us. Two — no, three — governesses gave up on me completely about the nine times tables.’

Rosebery, it seemed to Powerscourt, had already been on a Delphic oracle course before Powerscourt called at his house in Berkeley Square.

‘These matters around the Ballets Russes are difficult and dangerous, my friend. I have been able to discover a little more about the meeting at the Kingfisher. I presume you have discovered that is a hotel for the middle classes on the banks of the Thames. I have not, so far, been able to secure you an invitation, if that is the right word.’

‘Come on, Rosebery, surely you can tell me something of what it is about?’

‘That is precisely what I cannot do. I am told to warn you to be very careful. The whole thing could become very dangerous, especially for you.’

‘Will you be able to obtain an invitation of sorts before the thing starts? There is only a day and a bit left, for heaven’s sake. A man would want to get there the evening before, if possible. Or am I just to present myself at the gate and ask where the equations are kept?’

‘Whatever you do, my friend, do not, I repeat, do not turn up at this place without an invitation.’

‘And will my host be one person or am I going to meet a committee of some sort, advanced mathematicians all?’

‘Powerscourt, I have known and respected you for a number of years. I value our friendship very greatly. It would cause me considerable pain to have to call for Leith the butler and ask him to show you the door.’

‘You’re throwing me out?’

‘It’s only for your own good, I promise you.’

Natasha Shaporova went to the Royal Opera House early the following morning and took the first three members of the corps de ballet across to the Fielding Hotel. But she found that a change had taken place in the girls. They simply refused to speak about the murder at all. They changed the subject or they talked about that evening’s performance. They complained about the English weather. Or they talked about how sorry they would be to have to leave London. But of diaries or letters or assignations or secrets, they would speak not a word. Even when Natasha tried another tack, asking who had spoken to them, emphasizing the virtues of silence, they would not break their silence.

‘They’re just not going to speak to me,’ she told Powerscourt later.

‘Can you guess who might have put the fear of God into them?’

‘I think there’s only one person who could have put the fear of God into them like this, Lord Powerscourt.’

‘And who would that be?’

‘Why, it’s the person who controls their careers and their livelihoods, the person who can decree that they will never dance for him again.’

‘I think I could make a guess, Natasha, but tell me who you think it must have been.’

‘There’s only person who could do it, and that is Sergei Diaghilev himself. He must have sensed that some strange things were happening in his ballet and he has sworn them all to silence.’

Rosebery came to Markham Square at eleven o’clock the next morning, looking grave.

‘It’s going to be all right,’ he said to Powerscourt and Lady Lucy. ‘I’ve spent a great deal of political capital getting the result you wanted. You are to present yourself early this evening at the Kingfisher Hotel which, strictly speaking, is in Streatley, not Goring. There’s something about a bridge dividing them.

‘Believe me when I tell you that I do not know anything at all about what you may find there. If you hadn’t served as Head of Military Intelligence in South Africa, I doubt that these doors would have opened an inch. I told them that you were conducting an investigation into a recent murder and were not a contracted spy in the service of the German government. That much they did believe. That is all I have to say. May I wish you God speed and good luck.’

‘You can’t just slip away without answering a question or two, Rosebery,’ Lady Lucy remarked as the former Prime Minister was picking up his hat and heading for the door. ‘Is it dangerous? For Francis, I mean.’

‘I would be failing in my duty if I did not say it might be dangerous. But it might not, Lucy. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific than that.’