Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

22

Natasha Shaporova was coming back to London. She sent a very long telegram to carry her news before her as she left.

‘Taneyev household hopeless. They must have had a family meeting and decided to get rid of me. This was after I had talked at length to the father and the brother. Both admitted that they had received the letters I spoke of before. Both had destroyed them. Both had agreed not to speak of the matter again to any living soul. They thanked me for my trouble and assured me that that was their final word. I might not have learnt the secret — if there was a secret — but nobody else would either. Alexander is in his grave, they said, and the content of his letters will stay with him there.

‘Back to War and Peace on the Warsaw train. Precious little peace here.’

Harry Smith, the printer from Camberwell who was printing the Lenin pamphlets, felt rather guilty about charging so much money for the job. He was, however, well schooled in the revolutionary doctrine that emphasized the importance of cell structure, that a comrade in one department should not tell anybody else what he was doing in another part of the organization, in case of capture or interrogation by the agents of the capitalist class. So he had not told Arthur Cooper that he had two very urgent jobs for trade unionists in the docks and the railways and that he had urgent work to be produced for them. And speed in the printing business cost money. As a penance he was bringing a couple of proof copies of the latest ‘Gospel according to Lenin’ round, to show Arthur Cooper that work was indeed in progress.

‘I’ve brought you these,’ he said, when they were closeted in the front room well away from wife and children, ‘a Russian one and an English one. These are just the first proofs. We’ve still got to check the translation and make sure that there aren’t any mistakes.’

‘Thank you very much,’ said Cooper, picking up a page in Russian rather gingerly, as if it might blow up. ‘I can’t do anything with the Russian one. I tried once, you know, to teach myself Russian in the big library round here, but I couldn’t do it.’

He stared rather helplessly at the page. He noticed that it seemed to contain a large number of explanation marks.

‘Try this one,’ said Harry Smith, producing a version written in the King’s English. Looking down, Harry Smith noticed that it seemed to contain a number of old friends: the weak and vacillating bourgeoisie, the primacy of the working class and the importance of the revolutionary vanguard ready to lead and to speak and act in the name of the workers. He noticed too that the days of the capitalist class were numbered, the final crisis was at hand and that it just needed one final heave for the workers to triumph. Like some early Christian reading the Gospel of John some years after reading the Gospels of Luke and Mark, he felt that he had heard the main points before and, quite possibly, more than once. Like the Russian version, the English one contained plenty of exclamation marks. He wondered if there might be too many of them, as if the readers might not get tired of being shouted at all the time.

‘This is very fine, Harry,’ he said, handing back the proof. ‘I presume I won’t see any more of them until they are ready.’

‘That’s correct, if it’s all right with you.’

Arthur Cooper nodded.

‘There is the question of where I should deliver them to,’ said Smith. ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t guarantee their safety or their security for very long. The police and their people are always sniffing around. I could keep them until a week today, if you like. They should be finished in a day or two.’

‘That should be fine, but I might want you to keep them somewhere safe, if you see what I mean,’ said Arthur Cooper, who was feeling slightly lost. You could hide revolutionary money in a capitalist bank, he said to himself. Where could you keep revolutionary literature? The British Museum? London University? The Bank of England? He rather thought not.

‘That’s fine,’ said Harry Smith.

As he departed on his bus for the delights of Camberwell, a figure emerged from the shadows beside Arthur Cooper’s house. The figure followed Harry Smith all the way home to his wife and his printing presses.

Sergeant Jenkins had never imagined there could be as many people with the surname Gilbert in the country. Surely, he thought, there can’t be as many as this, and these were only for the year of 1882. There were another thirty years to go. He gritted his teeth and decided that he just had to carry on. He wondered if he should ask for assistance in this dreary business.

The Sergeant had also decided to abandon his attempts at learning the Russian language. He had only just finished the tricky business of the alphabet with all those extra letters. Even if this case lasted until the end of the year, he didn’t think he’d be able to say any more than ‘Good morning’.

Walter Gilbert, Maidenhead. Walter Gilbert, Gateshead, William Gilbert, Padstow, William Gilbert, Richmond. William Gilbert, Newark. Looking ahead he thought there must be another sixty or seventy Williams to go.

Lord Rosebery, old friend of Powerscourt, former Foreign Secretary, former Prime Minister, had sent a note round to say he proposed to call at three o’clock.

‘How is your investigation into the Ballets Russes murders going, Francis?’

Powerscourt laughed rather bitterly.

‘It’s everywhere and nowhere, Rosebery. I don’t think we even know who the murder victim was meant to be — the understudy, or the man whose name appeared on the programme. Sometimes I think the answer’s to be found in St Petersburg, where we have been reading the understudy’s letters to no avail; sometimes we think it may lie in the internal politics of the ballet. If you’d asked me when I took the case on if I thought I would have made so little progress after all this time, I should have dismissed it as an improbable fantasy. But there we are.’

‘You must have some suspicions, Powerscourt? Surely, after all this time.’

‘They are all like gossamer, my friend, one puff would blow them all away.’

‘I have come with some intelligence that may help you in your cause, but I must tell you that it too is like gossamer waiting for that one puff.’

‘There must be affairs of state involved, Rosebery, if you are coming to me with Delphic warnings like the Oracle.’

‘I’ve always fancied the role of Delphic oracle myself,’ Rosebery smiled. ‘All those potions, all those desperate people coming to you for guidance and then the business of composing the riddle. You and I could have been rather good at riddles, Powerscourt; we could have been sitting there for hours talking nonsense while we worked them out.’

‘We are, alas, in Markham Square, not on the mountainside at Delphi.’

‘We are, that’s true. Let me tell you a secret. Sometimes, if you have held my positions, those in the secret world — the diplomats, the spies, the people opening other people’s mail — keep in touch with you. Sometimes it is for us elders to tell them that they have not gone mad. Sometimes it is for us to tell them they have gone mad. Sometimes it is to tell them that such and such an outcome is almost impossible. They only consult us when they feel the need for an outside eye, a final port of call before the Prime Minister.’

‘This is all rather serious, Rosebery. Are you trying to tell me that the Ballets Russes may be involved in some diplomatic incident?’

‘It could be. All I can tell you today is to watch your step. You may soon be embroiled in deeper waters than you bargained for when you took on this case.’

‘Is that all you can say? I ought to watch my step? There is a killer on the loose out there, Rosebery: I am quite careful with my step already.’

‘I have already said more than I should, my friend. If I have some more definitive news, I shall come straight over. I am staying in town for the present.’

‘So you come to me, if you like, saying that you have received some form of Delphic message that you cannot yet decipher? Is that it?’

‘You could put it like that. When I hear about your need to trust in your wooden walls, or that the bull from the sea is coming at the time of the crescent moon, I shall let you know.’

Inspector Dutfield brought some ballet news to Markham Square later that afternoon.

‘It’s our friend Bolm, my lord. Or maybe he’s not our friend after all. Twice in the last twenty-four hours he has gone up to my men who were following him and swore at them violently in French, or it might have been Russian. Detective Constables do not have to take any exams in foreign languages just yet. Then he spat on the ground. Maybe they’ll get the evil eye next.’

‘Where did this happen? It’s certainly odd, Inspector, is it not?’

‘Once near the front of the opera house, and once on the way out of the chess club. He should have been in a good mood then, for my man asked afterwards about the results of his last match. The manager said he’d beaten a man he usually lost to. And in less than fifteen minutes.’

‘What do you suggest we do about it, Inspector?’

‘I’ve changed the men over, my lord. There’s a whole new detachment looking after Bolm now. It implies he’s jumpy, but about what?’

‘Or about whom? Why should he get jumpy about a couple of English policemen?’

‘The only crimes such people would be interested in are crimes committed here. That would suggest that he’s jumpy about the murder. Of course, you could say he would be quite right to be jumpy about the affair in Covent Garden. He could have been the victim after all. But why now? Why not before?’

Inspector Dutfield was fiddling about in his notebook. ‘I don’t know. We shall just have to keep looking, I suppose.’

‘Well, could you send my thanks and my best wishes to the two officers who received the treatment,’ said Powerscourt.

As Inspector Dutfield departed for his duties, Powerscourt wondered if Alfred Bolm too might have had a message from the Delphic oracle. He wondered if the oracle might be an occasional visitor to the chess club.

Natasha Shaporova was deep into the family thickets of the Rostovs in War and Peace. The idea came to her from out of the blue. She hadn’t gone looking for it. It just popped into her head. They couldn’t all have missed it, the Taneyev family back there in St Petersburg, the Powerscourts in Markham Square, the English police. She thought about it from every angle she knew. Her train was slowing down for a change at Cologne. She checked her timetable. She should have over an hour to spare before the train made its connections and moved off. She shot into the telegraph office and sent a brief message to Powerscourt.

‘Did Alexander Taneyev keep a diary? Regards Natasha. Cologne Station.’

Two senior porters had left their employment at the Premier Hotel, scene of the theft of Anastasia’s jewel money. They had both been there for a number of years. Martin Magee and James Harding were reported to have been looking happy and confident before their departure. They had departed with such of their belongings that they kept on the premises.

This was the news that brought Inspector Dutfield hurrying round to Chelsea. ‘They didn’t bother to give notice,’ he reported. ‘They both seem to have left their lodgings in a hurry too. They paid up, mind you, for the remainder of their time before they left. Their landladies said they were both model guests in their establishments.’

‘How long between their departure and your realizing that they had gone?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘It must have been a couple of days. We were trying to search the hotel to see if the money had been hidden away on the premises. Have you ever tried searching a hotel and its bedrooms, Lord Powerscourt? The guests were not cooperative at all. Two Americans threatened to call the police until we reassured them that we really were the police, if you see what I mean.’

‘Will you call off the search, Inspector?’

‘No, we’ll have to carry on. There’s no proof that they left with the money. Luckily we were able to get very good descriptions of the pair. Every policeman in London will be on the lookout for them soon. If that brings no answers, we’ll circulate them round the country, concentrating on railway stations and ports. They could be on the Continent by now, my lord.’

‘Where they could change the stolen money into foreign currency and nobody would be the wiser.’

‘Absolutely correct. Our friend Killick didn’t take the numbers of the notes, he didn’t have time. I think I shall have to call in Mr George Smythe again, though I’ve always felt he was telling the truth.’

Inspector Dutfield began polishing his glasses with a fresh handkerchief. ‘You’ve never really felt the robbery of the jewel money had anything to do with the murders, my lord, have you?’

‘No, I haven’t. And these revelations don’t make me change my mind. Somebody had obviously stolen the jewels in St Petersburg and found they would be easily traced. So they transferred the deal to London to get the money.’

There was a knock and a cough at the door. It was Rhys, the Powerscourt butler-cum-chauffeur who always coughed before he came into a room.

‘Telegram, my lord,’ he announced. ‘From Cologne Railway Station, my lord. I thought it might be important. For you, my lord.’

Rhys handed it over. Powerscourt read it aloud. ‘Did Alexander Taneyev keep a diary? Regards Natasha. Cologne Station.’

‘Good God!’ said Powerscourt. ‘We’ve never thought of that. Not one of us. Do you know if he kept a diary, Inspector?’

‘Well no, my lord. We’ve concentrated our search on letters rather than diaries.’

‘If it was one of those new ones, it could look like a book cover if it was lined up with other books.’

‘I’ll just have to go and take a look at his things, my lord. All of his stuff is still packed up at the station, as you know. I’ll conduct the search myself. I’ll come straight back if I find it.’

Fifteen minutes later another policeman found his way to the heart of Chelsea. Inspector Jackson made his apologies for arriving without notice. ‘I had another piece of business to transact, my lord, but there is one thing in particular I felt I ought to tell you in person.’

‘You’re more than welcome, Inspector. Some tea?’

‘Thank you, that would be kind. The thing is this. I’ve been reading all the accounts of the witnesses at the murder of Vera the ballerina. Not just the ones from the Ballets Russes, but from the invited guests as well. I tell you this, Lord Powerscourt. It was chaos backstage, as it were, in the other parts of the palace, while the guests were taking drinks and enjoying roast suckling pig and all the rest of it. There were two identified people milling around: one a tall, foreign-looking man with a dark coat and a hat who everybody thought was Russian, and one a middle-aged Englishman in a brown check suit carrying a walking stick — rather in the manner of Mr Diaghilev if you like, my lord, who everybody thought was a local, from Oxford, for he seemed to be able to speak Russian as well. Always assuming our constables are correct in identifying what he was saying as Russian, not French or German or Hottentot or what you will.’

‘And what did your staff think they were doing?’

‘This is the thing, my lord. Most of the domestic staff were in attendance at the dinner, serving out the peas or the parsnips or whatever they do on these occasions. For the rest, it was like a free invitation to wander all over the house. There was the odd footman about, and the occasional door closed to the Ballets Russes people, the dancers and the stage staff and so on, who were all well behaved. I come to my point, my lord.’

‘Perhaps the gentleman with the walking stick was just one of your extra translators brought in from Oxford?’

‘That’s very possible. We did conduct a fairly wide trawl to find those people. He could well have come from some department of the university.’ Inspector Jackson paused to take a sip of his tea.

‘It still must have been chaotic everywhere in the palace. The ballet people behaved as if they were visitors, as if they had been given a chance to look over the house like the other visitors the Duke of Marlborough and his lady let in during the year. One minute you could have been in the hall, another minute you could have been wandering round upstairs. And it’s an enormous place. If we assume, and I grant you this is a pretty big if, that the murderer had come to kill the ballerina, he could have waited for ever in the wrong part of the palace. She could have been on another floor. She might have been out in the gardens looking at the fountains or that sort of stuff. My hunch is that he must have arranged to meet her on the gallery in a few minutes’ time, that sort of thing. He wants to express his admiration in person. It will not do in the crowd. You can never underestimate vanity as a motive for doing things. So, when Vera arrives in the middle of the gallery, that’s the end of her. The other man disappears back into the crowd and out the front door. It was murder by appointment.’

‘God bless my soul, Inspector, that’s a pretty fine piece of work!’

‘I have to say I have no idea if it is true or not. There is one other thing. If a member of the Ballets Russes or anybody connected with the opera wanted to kill her in London, they’d have been liable to bump into a policeman or an investigator like yourself at any point and in any place. Up there in Blenheim Palace, there were only the footmen at that particular time. Not to mention our two strangers who had the great advantage that the Blenheim people thought they were Ballets Russes and the Ballets Russes people thought they were palace people.’

‘And what have you done about the strangers, Inspector?’

Inspector Jackson finished his tea. ‘We have circulated their descriptions all around Oxford and in all the towns and villages where the visitors could have come from.’

‘How do you think the killer knew who his victim was, if you see what I mean?’

‘I did think about that, my lord, but he could have asked any of the ballet people. You could have spotted a member of the Ballets Russes a mile off.’

‘You have done good work, Inspector, well done.’

‘Do you know, Lord Powerscourt, I’ve been an Inspector now for six years and this is the most unusual case I’ve come across in all that time. I think I may be able to tell my grandchildren about it in years to come.’

‘Only “may” be able to tell them, Inspector?’

‘That’s right, my lord. I’m bloody well not going to tell them we’ve all failed to work out who the murderer was.’

‘“London June the fifth. I wonder if it’s extravagant and rather vain to buy another diary every time we move to a fresh city. Certainly there’s still lots of room left in the French one. But I can always go back to that the next time I’m in Paris. I shall have in time a whole volume about Paris.”’

Alexander Taneyev’s diary had arrived by police constable late that afternoon. Inspector Dutfield had said he would come round later. Powerscourt maintained that his policeman colleague was feeling guilty about not having found it before. Lady Lucy told him he was being uncharitable.

‘Do carry on, Francis,’ she said.

‘“Rehearsals start tomorrow with Monsieur Fokine. I have danced in all of these works before, mainly in Paris. My two understudy roles I have also danced before, both in Monte Carlo. I am lucky that I have been allowed to stay with my uncle, though they have told me at the hotel here that there will always be a room ready if I need it. It is two years now since I came to London with Mama and the girls.”

‘I say Lucy, do you think I should skip a few bits and see how long before we get to the relevant parts?’

‘I don’t think you should skip anything just yet, Francis. I think it would be disrespectful.’

‘“We were given half an hour today to walk around Covent Garden and take a full tour of the opera house. It’s certainly grander than the ones in Paris, but nothing like our own place on Theatre Street back home. Maybe the fact that the Imperial Family come to see us in St Petersburg makes a difference. Everything has to be special all the time. I don’t think the King here is very keen on the opera, even though they say he looks exactly like the Tsar. I think Mama told me they are cousins.”

‘And that’s the end of Wednesday June the fifth. What do you think of it so far, Lucy?’

‘Promising start, I should say. It looks as though he puts down whatever comes into his head.’

‘On we go. “Thursday June the sixth. Another rehearsal. Monsieur Fokine spends a lot of time shouting at the girls in the corps de ballet. I think they just find it hard to concentrate when they’re left stuck in some position or other while he concentrates on something else. Mama and the girls always tell me how lucky I am to spend so much time with all these lovely young people. I tell them it’s not like that at all. They’re work colleagues, that’s all. I just wish some other older members of the company behaved in the same way.”

‘Hello hello, Lucy. Do you think this is Bolm, enter stage left, as it were?’

‘Probably, Francis. Just read on. There may be more.’

‘“Monsieur Diaghilev looked in on the rehearsals today. He was talking to that composer Stravinsky, who looks very strange to me. People are already saying that Monsieur Diaghilev is about to run out of money, but they say that all the time.”’

Sergeant Rufus Jenkins had taken up smoking again. He had managed to give it up at the request of Marjorie, his girlfriend from the Post Office — well, in fact, as the Sergeant told himself regularly, it was more of an ultimatum really — me or those damned cigarettes — and hoped that if he only smoked on duty and changed his clothes when he got home, he might get away with it. Marjorie couldn’t stand the smell. She said it made her feel ill. The Sergeant rationed himself to one every half an hour. He was now in the second half of 1887, and had reached the letter P. Most of those letters were more than familiar to him now and he groaned as he reached the letter P. He knew it contained a good number of popular Christian names. Patrick Gilbert, Newcastle under Lyme, Patrick Gilbert, Wolverhampton, Patrick Gilbert, Southampton, Patrick Gilbert, Ludlow Shropshire.

Ahead were the Pauls and the Peters and God only knew how many of those. The Sergeant lit another cigarette in anticipation.

‘“Friday June the seventh. Sometimes I find life in the ballet rather confusing. Our main purpose is our art, to produce the finest ballet in the world. M. Diaghilev keeps telling us that if we work hard we will reach that goal. It’s the languages, really. With my uncle I speak English. With some of Diaghilev’s people I speak French, as they prefer that to Russian. On my ballet work I speak Russian, like everybody else. The stagehands and everybody else speaks Russian. Which one do I belong to? At home I always feel Russian, even though Mama insists we speak English all the time, rather than French. My old nurse — I do hope she hasn’t died yet, she must be well over eighty now — always spoke to me in Russian. She couldn’t do anything else. But what am I? Am I Russian or am I English? I have spent a lot of time in England, with these two summers over here, and I find I can think in English. I can’t do that in French, though I can speak it fluently. And of course I can think in Russian. I wouldn’t like to lose the English bits of me if I was told I was Russian, any more than I would like to lose the Russian bits of me if I was told I was English. What am I to do? I shall write to Mama, although I know what she will say. She will say I am English. If I wrote to Papa he would say I was Russian. It’s all very confusing.”’

Rhys was coughing at the door. ‘Urgent message from the Oxfordshire Constabulary,’ he announced. ‘From Inspector Jackson, my lord, my lady.’

‘“We have received intelligence from a number of places concerning the Russian who might have been at Blenheim Palace,”’ Powerscourt read, feeling rather like one of the slaves of some Eastern potentate whose sole job was to read messages or to tell stories to his master when the master was bored. ‘“The first one said that he had been seen entering the Ashmolean Museum. We have no reports of his coming out, but I doubt if he is still inside. The second sighting was of him at the railway station, about to board a train, presumably, unless he was meeting somebody. The third report, from rather further afield, has him walking through the village of Goring on the borders between Oxfordshire and Berkshire. They could, of course, all refer to the same man. Further reports as news comes in.”’

‘I can see that a man might want to catch a train or visit the Ashmolean Museum, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘but what on earth was he doing in Goring? What do you know of Goring, Francis?’