Death on the Nevskii Prospekt

10

Two more deaths, Powerscourt thought bitterly. The one in Moscow would surely bring more hatred and division to a country that already suffered from a surfeit of both. The one in Kent might bring an end to the family Martin, for, as far as Powerscourt knew, there were no children of the marriage. De Chassiron was scrabbling through a little booklet brought out from one of his desk drawers. Ricky Crabbe was hovering with intent by Powerscourt’s side, as if expecting a telegraph message to materialize almost instantly.

‘How terrible,’ said Natasha Bobrinsky. ‘Two more dead people. Will it never stop?’

‘I presume you will have to go back to London, Lord Powerscourt?’ asked Mikhail. ‘Would you like me to accompany you? It can be a long and tedious journey.’

Powerscourt managed not to say that he had no need of an interpreter in his own country. ‘That’s a very generous offer,’ he said, ‘but you need to stay here and keep watch over Natasha. I know you think I’m being absurdly old and fussing, Natasha, but I am sure you could be in very great danger if your employers or some of their staff find out that you are in touch with me and the British Embassy.’

‘Here we are!’ said de Chassiron suddenly, holding up a battered copy of a railway timetable. ‘There’s an express to Berlin in two and a half hours, Powerscourt, you’ll be able to pick up a connection there easily enough.’

‘Thank you,’ said Powerscourt, his brain a long way away. ‘Could you bear to hold on here for a minute while I compose a message or two for the Foreign Office with Ricky here.’

With that Powerscourt followed the young man into his telegraph room. ‘I have a number of questions and messages for you, Ricky,’ he began. ‘The first is the least important. I presume that if I send a message to the Foreign Office, and you turn it into code, that it could be read at the other end within minutes of arrival?’ Powerscourt was thinking of the Okhrana at this point rather than the Foreign Office.

‘Correct, my lord,’ said Ricky Crabbe.

‘Something like this then,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Terrible news death of Mrs Martin. Returning London via 19.30 to Berlin.’

In less than half a minute, Crabbe had coded the message and sent it off to London.

‘Now then, Ricky, I want to try your secret system to your brother. This message is to be sent to Mr Burke, whose address I am writing for you on this piece of paper. “Returning London because of death of Mrs Martin in mysterious circumstances. Please inform Lady Lucy I leave today, Friday, on the 19.30 from St Petersburg to Berlin. All love, Francis.” There was nothing in the message that needed to be kept secret, but Powerscourt wanted to test this secure channel of communication in case it was needed for more important messages in the future.

‘That’s going to cheer up your wife, my lord, knowing you are coming home.’

‘Never fear, Ricky, I shall be back here very soon. Now I want to ask you about keeping records of the telegraph messages and things like that. I’ve suddenly realized that it could be very important.’

‘Fire ahead, my lord,’ the young man said.

‘When you send messages out, Ricky, do you keep a copy?’

‘I have to, my lord. Normally I have the piece of paper with the original message, handwritten by the Ambassador or Mr de Chassiron. Then I code it, sometimes on the bottom of the same piece of paper, sometimes on a different sheet. The Foreign Office Telegraphy School, my lord, is adamant that all outgoing messages, copies and originals, must be filed.’

‘I’ll come back to that in a moment, if I may. Tell me about the incoming messages.’

‘Same thing, really, my lord. We have to write them down. Sometimes we have to decode them. Other times we can bring the message to the recipient as taken down. But even before I leave this room, I have to make a copy. If the traffic goes on increasing at current rates, my lord, we’re going to have to rent a warehouse to keep all the stuff.’

‘Do you file the messages under subject matter or under day of the month?’

‘Day of the month, my lord, with the subjects subfiled in alphabetic order. Messages from Bucharest ahead of those from Vienna, as it were.’

‘Now then, Ricky, I come to the point. You told me before that it was possible that Mr Martin could have sent a couple of messages out of here when the office was empty. What would have happened to them?’

Ricky Crabbe looked at him keenly. ‘Well, I don’t think he would have left any copies lying around for me to file, my lord. He’d probably stuff the message in his pocket and get rid of it later. As for the far end, it may have gone to the Foreign Office, though if it had they would have surely told you about it, my lord, or to some telegraph office at a local train station or in a town. God knows whether they’d keep copies, probably they would until it had been collected.’

‘And if it had gone to the Foreign Office, would he have sent it in code?’

Ricky Crabbe paused and stared at his machinery. ‘I doubt if he would have sent it in code at all, my lord. He might have done. But not even Mr de Chassiron knows how to use the codes.’ Suddenly Ricky stopped staring at his wires and buttons and turned slightly pale. ‘Do you think, Lord Powerscourt, that he could have sent a message to his wife saying he’d found the Crown Jewels or whatever else he had found out? And because of what he knew, one lot of Russians killed Mr Martin here, and another lot could have killed Mrs Martin in Kent if they knew what was in the message? Or if they tortured poor Mr Martin till he told them what was in the message?’

Powerscourt nodded. ‘Well done, that is indeed what I am wondering. Please don’t tell anybody else about it, Ricky, you were very quick to work that out.’ Powerscourt looked at his watch. An hour and three quarters left before his train. ‘Could I ask you one further favour, Ricky? Could we have a look at the incoming traffic from the Foreign Office over the five days before I came here?’

Ricky pulled a series of files down from his shelves. Once they were properly sorted he read with growing astonishment Sir Jeremiah Reddaway’s very full accounts of the Foreign Office’s efforts to make him change his mind and return to detection. Now for the first time he realized the importance of the visit of Lord Rosebery to Markham Square. One mystery at any rate was solved, even if a whole lot more awaited him in London. General Derzhenov didn’t have battalions of spies lurking behind the trees in Markham Square to know the details of Powerscourt’s visitors come to persuade him out of retirement a month before. He just read Sir Jeremiah’s telegrams.

‘Ricky,’ he said, shaking the young man’s hand, ‘thank you so much for your help. If anything important should happen in my absence, please send a message to Mr Burke on your secure channel with your brother. Don’t go near the Foreign Office. If I need to get in touch with you I’ll go through your brother.’

‘Mr Burke’s office will have the address by now, my lord. Can I say I hope we see you back here soon? And that your mission to Kent is successful?’

Powerscourt wondered if there was a suggestion that his visit to St Petersburg had been unsuccessful. As he walked back to de Chassiron’s room, he decided to write a series of very short letters. He wrote to Mr Bazhenov, Deputy Assistant Under Secretary at the Interior Ministry, to Mr Tropinin, Under Secretary at the Foreign Ministry, to General Derzhenov of the Okhrana in his torturer’s lair on the Fontanka Quai and to Mrs Tamara Kerenkova, onetime mistress of the late Roderick Martin. He informed them as a matter of courtesy that he had been recalled because of the sudden, mysterious death of Mrs Martin. He thanked them for their assistance during his stay and said that he looked forward to renewing their acquaintance on his return. With Mikhail and Natasha he was as optimistic as he dared be in the circumstances.

‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ he said. ‘It may be that the second death makes it much easier to solve the first. Depend upon it, I have often known that happen in the past. Natasha,’ he smiled at her, ‘please take very great care. I know I’ve said it before but I dread to think what might happen to you if they ever found you out, those people at the Alexander Palace. Mikhail, I fear we shall never find the body now, but please keep trying. And if you need to get in touch, Ricky Crabbe has his own methods of reaching me in London.’

‘Why do you think the body will never be found, Lord Powerscourt?’ asked Mikhail.

‘I suspect that somebody doesn’t want us to see what happened to Roderick Martin before he died. He may have been tortured because he wouldn’t tell his captors what they wanted to know. Or he may just have been killed because his captors didn’t want anybody else to know what he knew. Or he may have been killed in frustration because he wouldn’t tell them what he knew. I just don’t know. Martin’s body was left out on the Nevskii Prospekt in the middle of the night and then spirited away. Something tells me that whatever his secret, the people who wanted to find it still haven’t done so. At least one of them, the Okhrana, hope I will lead them to it.’

There were over twenty people out in the night air, men and women, standing in the clearing in the forest, dressed in home-made white robes. Three bonfires marked the limit of their territory. In the centre of the area stood a man called the Pilot, the leader of the group and the Master of Ceremonies for this evening. Beside him was his wife, known as the Blessed Mother. Behind them a group of drummers beat out a rhythm of ever-increasing frenzy. Each person carried a candle and as the candle burnt down they began to dance, slowly and reverently at first and then with more vigour. The Pilot noticed that the stranger who had come to his house earlier that day and soothed his sick daughter was dancing particularly wildly, his dark head rolling vigorously as if he was drunk. As the delirium grew and the dance grew wilder yet, the celebrants flung their robes to the ground and knelt before the Pilot to be whipped with birch rods. Then they began to whip each other with the birch rods, the khylysti that gave their name to the sect, the drums beating faster still, the candles flung to the ground, their terrible hymn broadcast into the forest air.

I whip, I whip, I search for Christ,

Come down to us, Christ, from the seventh heaven,

Come with us, Christ, into the sacred circle,

Come down to us, Holy Spirit of the lord.

At the point when hysteria was about to engulf them all, the Pilot grabbed a woman and dragged her to the ground. According to the rules of the sect it was impossible for anybody to refuse a member of the opposite sex at these orgies. The Pilot was followed by the other khylysti members until there was a mass of groaning, shrieking couples on the ground. There were more women than men. The unfortunate just had to wait their turn. The Pilot noticed that the stranger seemed to be giving himself generously to the business. The drums beat on, calling the faithful to their duty. This was the first necessity of their belief system. Without sin, there could be no repentance and no salvation. Without first indulging in these rites of darkness there could be no entry into a state of grace. The Church frowned on these practices and they had been declared illegal by the state, even though there were said to be over a hundred thousand khylysti members across Russia.

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.’

‘Do they think she stood on the parapet and jumped? Or toppled over and fell?’ Powerscourt was feeling the pull of the water again. Heights, even heights as low as this, had always unsettled him.

‘They don’t think it would have mattered. Her body would have crumpled – the doctor’s words, not mine – and the head would have shot forward to strike the stone wall that is the side of the footbridge. They think that is what killed her.’

‘You mean the doctors aren’t sure?’

‘The poor woman was in the water for over forty-eight hours. They think the blow from the bridge did for her, but she drowned as well, if you see what I mean, just to be on the safe side, perhaps. She was floating face down in the moat when the Kennedys found her, Kent’s answer to Ophelia.’

Powerscourt looked closely at Inspector Clayton. Police inspectors were not, in his experience, known for familiarity with the works of Shakespeare and the paintings of Waterhouse and Millais. He wondered suddenly if Letitia Martin had known about Tamara Kerenkova, waltzing round the state rooms of St Petersburg with her, Letitia’s, husband. Had that, perhaps, been resolved between them? Or had Martin’s return to the Russian capital, in his wife’s view, been the final betrayal of their love? Had the terrible irony been that Martin had, in fact, kept true to this imagined promise of fidelity to his wife? For he had not been in touch with Tamara on his return to St Petersburg, a fact that had given Tamara considerable disquiet. Powerscourt stared down into the water for answers that never came. He tried to imagine the despair Letitia Martin might feel if she thought Roderick had returned to her, only for him to betray her once again.

‘You look very pensive, my lord,’ said Clayton. ‘Does anything strike you about the circumstances up here?’

‘Only how short a distance you have to fall to kill yourself, Inspector. She could have slipped, of course. Or, as we both know, been pushed. I was trying to imagine how Mrs Martin might have felt about her husband going back to Russia. She probably knew about the mistress, not necessarily the name but of her existence. Wives usually do. Now, it seems, he is going back to her. Any stories he tells his wife about the extreme secrecy, only the Prime Minister knowing the full story and all that, will all sound like special pleading to her. After he goes, and then dies, she grows increasingly miserable. It’s a double betrayal, first his going off to see that woman again, and then not being alive to be reproached for it. Her unhappiness deepens,

‘. . . for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath:

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain.’

‘John Keats, my lord,’ said Inspector Clayton proudly. ‘Stanza six if my memory serves me.’

‘It serves you very well, I think, Inspector,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Let me step back a little, as it were, from this fanciful speculation about Mrs Martin’s state of mind. Was it wet that day? Would the stones underfoot have been slippery?’

‘It was wet, my lord. If there had been two people up here the rain would have washed away any traces of their feet, if you see what I mean. Do you wish to stop up here a little longer, my lord? Or shall we go down and I’ll see if I can persuade the constable to make us some tea?’

Powerscourt took another look at the view from the little tower. He felt sure he would be up here again. ‘Some of Constable Watchett’s tea would be excellent, Inspector. There are a number of points I would like to raise with you back in that splendid library, if I may,’ he said, making his way down the stairs and back the way they came. Once again the water in the moat, its shifting elusive surfaces, the way it shimmered one minute and was absolutely still the next, fascinated him. Maybe the Powerscourt family could go and live in a house with a moat. He could sit by a window and pretend to read a book while watching the changing behaviour of the surface of the water. He checked himself when he realized that somebody would have to be on call twenty-four hours a day to pull the twins out after they fell in, which they surely would, several times a day.

Inspector Clayton removed the rope that had guarded Mrs Martin’s bay in the library and pulled up a couple of chairs. Constable Watchett had found some tasty fruit cake to accompany the tea.

‘Will?’ said Powerscourt, the word muffled by the cake.

‘Will who?’ said Clayton, wondering if Powerscourt had discovered another suspect.

‘Sorry,’ said Powerscourt, washing his mouthful down with some of the constable’s excellent tea, ‘do we know if Mrs Martin left a will? Or,’ he said after a pause, ‘come to that, Mr Martin?’

The Inspector sighed. Powerscourt seemed to have touched a sensitive point. ‘I have to confess, my lord,’ he began, ‘that I feel bad about this will business, very bad. The family solicitors are Evans Watkinson and Ragg over at Tonbridge. When I started this case, I’ll be honest with you, my lord, I had a mass of work to finish off from two other cases. So I asked Constable Watchett to write to them on my behalf.’ Powerscourt wondered if the letter had been laced with home-spun wisdom better suited to the local pub than to a solicitor’s office. ‘Anyway, my lord, a letter came back, addressed to me, suggesting I remember my duties, which include liaising with the deceased’s solicitors, before asking ill-qualified members of the constabulary to address their betters. I have written a letter of apology, but they have still not replied. It was not well done, my lord, and now my Chief Constable asks about the wills every other day.’

Powerscourt smiled at the Inspector. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I remember similar problems of bureaucracy and administration in South Africa. Give me the address for Evans Watkinson and Ragg before I go this evening, and I will call on them tomorrow.’

‘Thank you, my lord, thank you very much. I may say that I found no sign of any wills in the desks of either Martin, but they could have decided to keep them with the lawyers for safety.’

‘Let me ask you something else, Inspector, something that I think might have led to Mrs Martin’s death. Is there any sign that she received any letters or cables from her husband while he was in Russia?’

‘Cables? Not that I have seen so far, my lord.’

‘This is going to sound preposterous, Inspector, so please make allowances for a tired investigator whose wits may have been sapped by prolonged exposure to the Russian temperament and the Russian climate.’ Powerscourt took another draught of the Watchett tea and promised himself a further piece of cake if he could make his proposal believable.

‘It goes something like this. Martin, you will remember, saw the Tsar in his country palace about fifteen miles from St Petersburg. Furthermore, Martin saw the Tsar on his own. That means the questions under discussion must have been of the utmost importance, questions of the highest national policy, questions so sensitive that Tsar Nicholas didn’t want anybody else to hear about them. Let us suppose, however, that somebody else in the entourage gets an inkling of what they talked about. They pursue Martin back to St Petersburg. Before they find him he sends a message to his wife, telling her what he knows. When the somebody else and his colleagues catch up with Martin, they torture him until he tells what he knows, including the fact that he has passed the information on to his wife. They kill him, and dump the body on the frozen river. A few weeks later, they come here and kill his wife, leaving the body in the moat. By the time the Kennedys find Mrs Martin, the killer or killers have reached Hamburg or Berlin on their journey back to St Petersburg.’

Inspector Clayton peered outside at the fading of the light. Soon it would be dark and he always found the place oppressive then.

‘There’s only one query I have with that premise, my lord,’ said Inspector Clayton, eyeing Powerscourt carefully as he tucked in to another slice of fruit cake. ‘If you are being tortured, not that I am an expert, mind you, but suppose you have told your enemies what you know. Why do you need to tell them you have sent a message to somebody else as well?’

‘That’s a very fair observation, Inspector,’ Powerscourt replied. ‘Let me try to answer it. The answer, I believe, lies in the psychology of torturer and tortured, if you follow me. The torturer believes that there is always one further piece of information to be extracted from his victim, no matter how much he has dragged out of him already. And the tortured man thinks he would have attained relief by disclosing the most important thing he knows. But he hasn’t. Why can’t they leave him in peace? So he throws them one more titbit, in the hope that the pain will finally stop. By this stage, that is probably all he can think of.’

‘Thank God we live in a civilized society where these things don’t happen,’ said the Inspector. ‘There are a couple of things you need to be aware of, my lord. I’ve just heard your cab coming down the hill, so I’ll be brief. The first I have no direct knowledge of, merely station gossip. There is or there was some feud about the ownership of this house, Lord Powerscourt. There was a long court case between different branches of the Martin family before Roderick and Letitia took up residence.’

‘And the second?’ asked Powerscourt, hoping for a sympathetic lawyer under the age of seventy-five on the morrow.

‘Johnny Fitzgerald told me about it this morning, my lord,’ said Inspector Clayton, ‘and no doubt he will have more details for you this evening – he told me he was dining at your house. It seems that Mr Martin may not have been the only one to have strayed from the holding the betrothed from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part. Mrs Martin was very friendly with a Colonel Fitzmaurice, a retired military man from over Ashford way. They went away together, my lord, though nothing else has ever been proved.’

‘And what of the gallant Colonel, Inspector? What does he have to say for himself?’

‘That’s the problem,’ said the Inspector, raising a hand to ask the cabbie by the door to wait a moment longer. ‘Unless Johnny Fitzgerald has had some luck today, the Colonel has disappeared, vanished off the face of the earth. My Chief Constable believes he may have gone to join the Martins on the other side.’