Death on the Nevskii Prospekt

2

Lord Francis Powerscourt had been told by the Foreign Office that they would provide an interpreter who would travel with him from London. It was, Powerscourt reflected bitterly as he stared down the platform at Victoria station, just about all they had been able to tell him. Sir Jeremiah had, of course, known all the details of Roderick Martin’s early life and career. Educated at Westminster School and New College Oxford, a brilliant linguist, fluent in French, German and Russian and able to cope in Italian, he had entered the Foreign Service with a formidable reputation. Over time he developed a judgement of men and events that was as sharp as his ability at languages. As well as his education in diplomacy, Roderick Martin was trained in the more mundane matters like codes and the use of telegraph machines. He had served in all the great capitals of Europe and by the time of his mission to St Petersburg at the age of thirty-eight, his contemporaries were already speculating about when and where he would take up his first posting as Ambassador. But of the journey to Russia they knew nothing, except that his body had been found early in the morning on the Nevskii Prospekt. Word had come from the Prime Minister that they were to send a man, their best man if possible, to St Petersburg. The Prime Minister himself would brief him. He was to report only to the Prime Minister on his return. That was all. Martin’s wife, Martin’s parents knew no more than his employers. He had stepped into his compartment on this very train, Powerscourt said to himself, he had gone to the Russian capital and he had been killed. That was all anybody seemed to know about him. Maybe the Embassy there would be able to tell him more but they hadn’t been able to tell the Foreign Office very much at all. Even Sir Jeremiah Reddaway, as proper and punctilious as a man in his position should be, had heard the rumours. Martin was having an affair with some diplomat’s wife and had been killed by hired thugs. He had merely run across a bunch of drunken peasants or workers in the wrong part of town and been murdered for his wallet. The beauty of these theories, as Powerscourt saw clearly, was that they disconnected the murder from the mission. Powerscourt believed the opposite was the case. Maybe, Sir Jeremiah had said hopefully, those long legs stretched out in front of his own Foreign Office fire, the mission had to do with the Russian sinking of a British fishing boat and the deaths of two sailors as their navy sailed halfway round the world to fight the Japanese. Maybe they wanted a diplomatic alliance against the Germans. Powerscourt found it hard to believe any of the rumours.

And where was his interpreter? There were only a few minutes to go before departure. Powerscourt had a very clear picture in his mind of the Russian Interpreter as he referred to him. He would be middle-aged, portly, wear thick glasses and fuss a lot about his business. He would look rather like a bank manager going to seed. He would have little conversation outside the business of interpreting and would prove dull company on his journey. He turned to the door of his compartment where a good-looking young man was preparing to stow his case on the luggage rack.

‘I’m afraid that seat is reserved,’ said Powerscourt.

‘I know it is,’ said the young man. ‘It’s reserved for me.’

‘For you?’ said Powerscourt, astonished. ‘That can’t be, I’m afraid. It’s reserved for my Russian interpreter.’

‘I know,’ said the young man with a smile, ‘I am your Russian interpreter. You are Lord Francis Powerscourt. I am Mikhail Shaporov, sent by your Foreign Office to assist you. If you don’t want my services, just let me know.’

Now it was Powerscourt’s turn to smile. ‘Forgive me, please. Delighted to meet you. And my apologies for the confusion. To be perfectly honest, I was expecting somebody older. I had, in fact, decided that my interpreter was going to be middle-aged and look like a bank manager going to seed.’

The young man laughed. Powerscourt saw that he was just under six feet tall with a broad forehead and a Roman nose. His cheekbones were high and he had very fair hair and soft brown eyes. Powerscourt thought he could do considerable damage to the young ladies.

‘Perhaps I should tell you a little about myself, Lord Powerscourt, to reassure you that the young can be as good at interpreting as the middle-aged. My parents – well, I suppose you’d have to call them aristocrats -live in an enormous palace or indeed palaces in St Petersburg. My father has branched out into banking and other sorts of financial business. I have been working in his offices here in London to learn all about it. I lived the first sixteen years of my life in St Petersburg and then I was sent to school in England and then to Oxford, to Trinity College, if you know it. So you see, Lord Powerscourt, I know both societies. I have done quite a lot of translating for my father. I think it must have been he, or your Ambassador in Russia, who recommended me for this kind of work. I have often done it before. I rather enjoy it.’

‘I’m delighted to hear you know St Petersburg,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I’m sure that will be a great advantage in our mission.’

‘Can you tell me something about that?’ said the young man doubtfully. ‘All I learned from the Foreign Office was that it was very secret and I had to set out for the station as fast as possible.’

Very slowly the great train drew out of the station and began its journey towards the hop fields of Kent. A number of friends and relations were left waving disconsolately on the platform. Powerscourt wondered how much he could tell young Shaporov and decided that nothing he knew was a secret worth preserving. So he told him everything.

‘That’s all rather exciting,’ said the young man, ‘except for the fact that this poor man is dead. And nobody, you say, knows what he was doing in St Petersburg?’

‘Only the Prime Minister, as far as I can tell. Have you any idea at all what could bring about such a level of secrecy as far as Russia is concerned?’

‘Scandal?’ said Mikhail Shaporov happily. ‘Blackmail? Secrets of state? Diplomatic treaties that have to be kept hidden for a decade? It’ll be very disappointing, Lord Powerscourt, if we just find that he hadn’t settled his debts at the casino or was carrying on with another man’s wife. Though,’ he went on rather sadly, ‘if people were killed for adultery in St Petersburg, the population would drop very quickly.’ Powerscourt wondered if there was some personal pain hidden behind the sadness.

‘The thing is,’ the young man went on, ‘you did say that this poor dead diplomat was a very important sort of fellow, a top dog in the Foreign Office collection, so the chances are that it has to do with great secrets. I do hope we can find out.’

Shaporov peered out of the window. ‘Forgive me, Lord Powerscourt, but your England always seems quite small to me. Some years ago my parents took us all on the Trans-Siberian Railway just after it opened, thousands and thousands of miles of track. I thought it was splendid. My younger brother, mind you, he got claustrophobia after being kept in the train carriages for days and days. He hardly ever goes in a train now if he can help it.’

Powerscourt wondered if the young Mikhail’s contacts in St Petersburg might be useful to him. The young man yawned.

‘Will you excuse me, Lord Powerscourt? I did not have very much sleep last night and then I had to prepare for our journey. Would you mind if I went next door and had a nap?’

When he had the compartment to himself again, Powerscourt began thinking about Lucy. He had found her, on his return from the London Library, sitting on the chair by the window in Markham Square, looking out very sadly into the weak late afternoon sun. He thought she had been waiting for him. Close up, she looked more miserable still. He thought she had been crying.

‘Lucy, my love,’ he strode across the room to her, ‘whatever is the matter?’

She burst into tears and fell into his arms.

‘Don’t worry, Lucy. It can’t be that important. We still have each other. We still love each other.’

After a couple of minutes she composed herself. She took his hands in hers as she had those years before on the balcony in Positano.

‘Francis,’ she said, ‘I release you from your promise not to take on any more investigations. You are free to go to St Petersburg as far as I am concerned. I hope I have not made you too unhappy in the meantime. It was my first husband, you see, who went away on the nation’s business and got killed. I couldn’t bear to have it happen again, I really couldn’t. But I’ve got to let you go. I see that now. I hope you don’t think I’m some sort of jailer, Francis. Please forgive me for the whole thing.’

Powerscourt kissed the top of her head and held her very tight. ‘Might I ask, Lucy, what brought about this change of mind? Have you had a revelation? Has somebody been to talk to you?’

She smiled. ‘I had a visit from Mrs Martin, the wife of the dead man in St Petersburg. His parents are still alive. It’s driving them all mad, not knowing what happened to Mr Martin, you see. And when the Foreign Office told them they were sending a top investigator to find out the truth, they cheered up, they thought they were going to find out what had been going on. Then they were even more despondent when they learnt the investigator wasn’t going. She said it wasn’t fair that I could keep you safe at home while he went off to die. She said Britain would have lost every war it ever fought if the wives stopped their men going off to defend the country. She made me feel rather selfish, actually, Francis.’

‘Did you tell her you had changed your mind, Lucy?’

‘No, I didn’t. I hadn’t, you see, changed my mind, not then. That came later while I was sitting by the window waiting for you to come home.’

Powerscourt handled his wife very delicately in the two days that followed her change of mind before his departure. He could only guess at how much it must have cost her. He could not imagine how she would worry while he was away. Whatever else he did, he must try to find the answers as quickly as possible. He took her out to her favourite restaurant. He promised to take her to Paris when he returned. Above all, he told himself constantly, he must not crow, he must not boast, he must not sing for joy as he walked about the house. For Lord Francis Powerscourt would never have told his wife. He would and did tell Johnny Fitzgerald. He was so happy to be back in harness, as he put it to himself, with a difficult case and a romantic location. The curious thing about his elation was that Lady Lucy saw it too. After twelve years of marriage she could sense her husband’s mood without him having to speak a word. And, although she would not have told her husband this, she was happy because he was happy.

Mikhail Shaporov slept all the way across the Channel. He slept through France. Powerscourt began to wonder if he was going to sleep all the way to Russia when he finally appeared just outside Cologne. They had crossed the Rhine, the first of Europe’s great rivers the train would traverse on its long trek across a continent. It began snowing just before Hamburg. The fields and the farmhouses disappeared in a soft carpet, the sharp edges of the buildings in the cities disappeared in a white blanket. Mikhail dragged Powerscourt to an open window, admitting freezing wind and torrents of snow, to see the spray shooting up and curving gracefully backwards as the great dark engine pounded forward through the white snow. They were shedding passengers now faster than the replacements were coming on board. Considerable numbers got off at Hannover. More got off for the architectural glories of Potsdam, more still for the pomp and swagger of Berlin. There were only a few hardy souls left for the long haul to Warsaw and the final route through to the Baltic glories of Riga and Tallinn. At last, after three days’ travelling, at half past six in the evening, they arrived in St Petersburg. Mikhail had arranged transport for himself to his palace and for Powerscourt to the British Embassy. They arranged to meet at the Embassy at nine o’clock the following morning. Powerscourt had made a number of appointments by telegraph before leaving London.

‘Leave your bags here, the porter will take them up.’ The voice was languid but powerful, its owner a beautifully dressed diplomat of some thirty-five years called Rupert de Chassiron, Chief Secretary to the Embassy. He radiated an effortless charm. From time to time a hand would be despatched on an upward mission to check the status of his hair, which was beginning to let him down by going thin on top. De Chassiron sported a very expensive-looking monocle which gave him, as intended, an air of great distinction. ‘His Nibs, that’s the Ambassador to you and me, is off at some charity function with that frightful wife of his. I’m to take you to the feeding station.’

Powerscourt resisted the temptation to ask for further details of the frightful wife. He remembered from his time in South Africa that embassies could become very claustrophobic, always prone to feud and faction. They were walking past the Alexander Monument, surrounded by the great buildings of the Admiralty and the Hermitage and the Winter Palace, powerful and menacing in the dark.

‘Been here before, Powerscourt? Seen all the stuff?’

‘I came here some years ago with my wife. We saw quite a lot of stuff then.’ So much stuff, he remembered suddenly, that after four days Lucy could hardly walk and had to spend the next day being ferried round the city in a water taxi.

‘Here we are,’ said the diplomat, ‘they know me here. Booked a private room. Don’t have to eat the Russian food if you don’t want to. Place is called Nadezhda. Means hope. Always needed in these parts, hope, in as large a helping as you can lay your hands on.’

A nervous young Tatar waiter showed them to their room. There were no windows and the most remarkable feature was the wallpaper. It was dark red with patterns that Powerscourt could only refer to mentally as vigorous. If you were feeling kind you would have said there were loops and twirls and hoops and arches and circles of every size imaginable. If you were feeling unkind you would have said the designer was a madman. If you were visually sensitive you might well have felt sick. Powerscourt felt he knew now why this was one of the private rooms.

‘Tatar pattern, Powerscourt,’ said de Chassiron cheerfully. ‘Local traditions not confused down there with six hundred years of design history from Renaissance buildings to Aubusson tapestries. You want a twirl, you give it a twirl. Not exactly restful, would you say?’ he remarked as a waiter brought him some wine to taste.

‘Excellent, he said, ‘the local rich are very partial to French wine, thank God. This Chablis is first rate.’

As they started on their first course, blinis, Russian pancakes, with caviar, de Chassiron began to talk about Martin.

‘Let me tell you, Powerscourt,’ the diplomat paused briefly to swallow a particularly large mouthful, ‘all I know about Martin. Won’t take long.’ He took a copious draught of his wine. ‘Came here on a Tuesday. Wouldn’t tell a soul what he was here for, why he had come, what he hoped to achieve. Wouldn’t tell the Ambassador anything, much to His Nibs’ fury. Went off somewhere, God knows where, didn’t tell a soul where he was going, on Wednesday morning. Next seen dead early on Thursday morning as you know. Not clear if he died Wednesday night or Thursday morning. Not clear if he died where he was found or somewhere else. That’s it. The last unknown hours of Roderick Martin.’

Powerscourt helped himself to a few more blinis. ‘They’re really very good, these blinis,’ he said. ‘I can tell you one thing, you know one more fact than I do. Apart from the bit with the Ambassador, that’s all I know too. I don’t know any more than you do. All attempts to get the Prime Minister to talk have failed.’

De Chassiron wiped his mouth carefully. Powerscourt thought he might be rather vain about his appearance. As his wild boar and the diplomat’s fish arrived, Powerscourt asked for a diplomatic overview of where Russia now stood, its main political and foreign attitudes that might, somewhere, contain a clue to the life and death of senior British diplomat Roderick Martin.

De Chassiron smiled. ‘Be happy to oblige, Powerscourt, nothing diplomats like doing better than spinning their private theories about history and current trends. But where to start? I tell you where I’ll start. St Petersburg is a very deceitful place. You look at these incredible buildings all about the centre of the city designed by Quarenghi and Rastrelli and these European architects in their sort of heavy international baroque, and you think you’re in Europe, in another Milan or Rome or Munich. It’s deceptive in exactly the same way that America is deceptive, except that in New York or Washington it’s the common language that makes you think you share a common culture and common values. You don’t. Here it’s the architecture that makes you think you’re just in another part of Europe. For the Doge’s Palace in Venice read the Winter Palace. For the Uffizi in Florence read the Hermitage. It’s not true. Even here, in a city designed to turn his fellow countrymen into good Europeans, Peter the Great never quite succeeded. And if they’re not truly European in this place, think of the rest of the Russians, most of whom are peasants who have never even seen a city and wouldn’t know a baroque one from a city built, or more likely destroyed, by Genghis Khan.’

Powerscourt’s mind wandered off briefly to contemplate a city built or razed to the ground by Genghis Khan. Birmingham, he decided, maybe Wolverhampton.

‘There’s another thing about these buildings, Powerscourt.’ De Chassiron paused to spear a large mouthful of his fish. ‘I don’t know what a democratic building would look like, maybe it would have to look classical like that damned Congress in Washington, but these buildings here, they’re autocratic, they’re to be lived in by one lot of autocrats and handed over to another lot of autocrats. Those great palaces outside the city, Peterhof and Gatchina and Tsarskoe Selo, they’ve all got a shadow over them and the shadow is that of Versailles and the Sun King. These Romanovs are the last serious autocrats in Europe, if not the world. Our King has the powers of a lowly parish clerk, heavily watched by a suspicious parish council, compared to them. And consider this.’ He held up the passage of a particularly large slice of his fish and waved his fork at Powerscourt. ‘What sort of representative bodies, councils, assemblies, parliaments do you think the Tsar has to help him in his work of administering this vast empire? Two? Three? House of Commons? House of Lords? Not one, not even a House of Lords. I’ve always suspected that Kings of England were very happy to have all their aristocrats penned up in a House of Lords. They could plot against each other rather than plot against the King. Very satisfactory all round. But here, these aristocrats may not be fully European but they know the political power exercised by their counterparts elsewhere. If you were an English lord or a duke, your power might not be as ostentatious as it once was but it’s still pretty real and there’s probably more of it than people imagine. If you’re a Prussian Junker you have enormous power. Here you have nothing, whether you’re a peasant, a worker or an aristocrat.’

‘So what do the people who would be in the Lords or Commons, or the Congress in Washington, do here? Where do their political energies go?’

‘That’s a very good question, Powerscourt. I wish I knew the answer.’ De Chassiron screwed his monocle in for another brief inspection of the wine list. ‘Some of them campaign for reform and so on. Some may even join one or two of the more extreme left wing sects that spring up all the time. They gamble. Quite often they gamble huge fortunes away. They fornicate with other people’s wives. Then they fornicate with yet other people’s wives. There’s a great deal of that going on. The wives must get worn out. The cynics say that Tolstoy wasn’t writing fiction when he described the affair between Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky. Some of them drink. That’s usually in addition to, rather than a replacement for, the fornication with the wives of others and the reckless gambling. Sometimes they retire to their estates in the country. Lots of these people own properties the size of a small English county, for Christ’s sake. Not many last out though in the rural idyll. Prolonged exposure to the theft and violence of the peasantry sends them back to the cities. There’s a story, probably apocryphal, about one aristocrat who retired to the country to read all of Dostoevsky and improve his soul. After three novels he blew his brains out. People said it was Petersburg’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment who pushed him over the edge.’

Powerscourt found it hard to see how any of these varied activities could lead to the death of an English diplomat. ‘What about the violence?’ he said. ‘What about all these assassination attempts? Could they have anything to do with Martin’s death?’

‘The French Ambassador, Powerscourt, the wisest foreigner in the city, says this is a society at war with itself. There could easily, in his view, be a civil war or a revolution here. Nothing is stable. The Tsar is both symbol and cause of so many problems. Symbol because he stands for nearly three hundred years of autocratic rule, and the autocratic principle will not permit him to share power with any council or elected assembly. He is a terrible administrator but if any minister he appoints manages to do the job properly he is fired because he puts the Tsar in a bad light. Then you get more toadies and the trouble starts all over again. He and his family are more or less prisoners in that palace of theirs out in the country. The security people won’t let them go anywhere else in case they’re blown up. In Tsarskoe Selo, at least, they’re safe because they’re guarded by thousands of soldiers and police twenty-four hours a day. It’s gilded, their cage, it’s very gilded, but it’s still a cage.’

A surly-looking waiter had removed their plates. De Chassiron had ordered another bottle of Chablis and was contemplating the menu. ‘I can recommend the cranberry mousse, Powerscourt,’ he said finally, placing the order before his guest had a chance to reply.

‘Then there’s this bloody war,’ he continued, staring intently at the demented wallpaper. ‘They’re going to lose it and there’ll be the most enormous fuss. Imagine Mother Russia being defeated by the Japanese, little better than savages in the view of most of Russian society, small inferior yellow savages at that. It’ll be a terrible blow to the imperial prestige when they lose to the little yellow chaps with their ridiculous moustaches. They say the Tsar was one of the most eager campaigners for war.’

‘Do you think that could have had anything to do with Martin’s mission?’ asked Powerscourt, rather enjoying his crash course in Russian politics. ‘Could they have been asking for help with the war? A naval alliance or something like that?’

‘It’s possible,’ said de Chassiron, ‘but why all the bloody secrecy? It’s not as if His Nibs is going to take a sled down the Nevskii Prospekt and shout the news aloud to all comers. I wonder, I haven’t told anybody else this, and it’s only a theory, but I wonder if it didn’t have to do with security. Once the Okhrana are involved everything gets much more complicated and much more secretive than it need be.’

‘The Okhrana are the secret police?’ Powerscourt was hesitant.

‘Indeed,’ said de Chassiron, settling the bill. ‘They’ve almost certainly noted your arrival and will check your movements all the time you are here. They are the most suspicious, the most paranoid organization in the world. And they will, almost certainly, follow us all the way back to the Embassy.’

Next day Mikhail Shaporov presented himself at a quarter to nine in the morning at the British Embassy. He was wearing a grey suit with a pale blue shirt and looked as though he might have been a young lawyer dressing in a conservative fashion to avoid prejudicing the judge by his tender years.

Powerscourt waved a piece of paper at him. ‘I’m told this is a report from the Nevskii police station informing the Ambassador that they have found a British national in their possession. I should say a dead British national.’

Mikhail read it quickly. ‘That is correct, Lord Powerscourt. And we have an appointment to see the policeman who wrote it at nine fifteen? Come, it is not far. I presume that nobody has succeeded in extracting the body from this police station? Indeed, it is probably no longer there. It may be in one of the morgues. I have the addresses of the two most likely in these parts.’

‘That was very intelligent of you, Mikhail,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I am impressed.’

‘I’m afraid it’s not me you have to thank for it, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Mikhail with a smile, ‘it’s my father. He’s lived here almost all of his life. He may have bribed many policemen in his time, I do not know.’

The police station was a nondescript three-storey building behind the Fontanka Canal. A collection of drunks, sleeping, comatose or dead, were sprawled across the hallway inside the front door. Their beards were long and unkempt, their hair was matted, their clothes were filthy. A powerful smell of dirt and damp and human waste rose strongly from them. Powerscourt noticed that the young man paid them absolutely no attention. This was the background of his life, a sight he had seen so often he hardly noticed it. Perhaps it was the background to the lives of all the citizens of this city, lost souls given up to vodka to escape the pain of their daily lives, drink-sodden refugees from the tensions of everyday existence in St Petersburg who sprawled across the floors of its police stations until they were granted the temporary consolation of a cell.

Powerscourt saw that Mikhail had opened a conversation with the fat policeman behind the desk.

‘He’s new here,’ he said to Powerscourt, ‘he’s gone to make inquiries. That could mean a couple of minutes or a couple of days. They don’t care how they treat people at all, the local police. Not like in London.’

Just then a door at the far end of the hall opened and two burly policemen emerged. They began dragging the drunks through the doorway into some unknown territory behind.

‘Cells?’ said Powerscourt.

‘Maybe,’ said Mikhail, ‘maybe they’re just throwing them back on to the streets now it’s daylight. This lot may have been brought in during the night to stop them freezing to death. Even here they don’t like corpses lying about in the streets first thing in the morning. Doesn’t look too good in the shadow of the Winter Palace if winter’s victims are stretched out in front of it, dead from the winter cold. Bad for business. Might upset a passing Grand Duchess.’

The fat policeman had returned. Once more Mikhail engaged him in conversation. After a couple of minutes he gestured to Powerscourt. ‘I’m getting nowhere, Lord Powerscourt. I think you need to let him have it. Sent by Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, all that sort of stuff, big guns, heavy artillery.’

‘I am afraid, Constable,’ Powerscourt began, ‘that I find your position very unsatisfactory.’ He heard Mikhail’s translation coming out just behind his own. ‘I am here as a representative of the British Foreign Office and the British Prime Minister. I wish to speak to the police inspector named here,’ Mikhail waved the document at the policeman as he spoke, ‘who reported the death of a British diplomat to the British Ambassador some days ago. It is imperative that I speak to him.’

Mikhail translated, his emphases more vigorous in Russian than Powerscourt’s had been in English. Powerscourt wondered if the man knew where Great Britain was. Did he know where Kazakhstan was? Or Georgia?

There was another burst of Russian. ‘We have no knowledge of this inspector here,’ said Mikhail. ‘My superiors instruct me to tell you that this must be a mistake.’

‘No,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it is you who are mistaken. This inspector made a report to the British Embassy itself. We are not mistaken. I demand to see the senior policeman here.’

Powerscourt noticed that the gap between his words in English and Mikhail’s in Russian was getting shorter. Maybe when he’s back in practice he really will be simultaneous, he thought. Powerscourt regarded this as a truly wondrous feat, akin to those of people who could unlock the hidden theorems of mathematics.

Very reluctantly the fat policeman retired to the inner quarters in search of a senior officer. Mikhail was looking at the paper once more. ‘It couldn’t be clearer, Lord Powerscourt. The inspector is reporting the police discovery of the dead Martin at one thirty in the morning of Thursday December the 23rd. It’s as clear as a bell.’

Suddenly Powerscourt had a terrible thought. They hadn’t dumped Martin in the hall along with the drunks, had they? Left him there for hours until rigor mortis had set in? That was not a comforting thought to take back to London and the home of the widow Martin and the parents Martin. They might never sleep again.

There was a shout from the desk. The fat policeman had been replaced by an even fatter one with a red beard and a disagreeable air of menace about him.

‘Stuff and nonsense,’ Mikhail began translating. ‘How dare you come in here and waste police time. There is no officer here of that name. There never has been. Forging official documents is a serious offence in our country. The penalties can be up to ten years’ imprisonment. Now, I suggest you get out of here and don’t come back.’

With that he banged his fist on the table and pointed to the door. Powerscourt was not very impressed.

‘Thank you for your suggestions, Inspector. We have an appointment with the Interior Ministry. We shall certainly raise with them our treatment at your hands. We also have an appointment at the Foreign Ministry where the displeasure and dismay of my government will be conveyed in the strongest possible terms. All we wish at this juncture is the chance to speak with your inspector who wrote this report, complete with your very own stamp on it.’ With that, in a sudden burst of inspiration, Powerscourt picked up the stamp on the desk, moistened it in the pad beside it and made another mark on the other side of their document. It was identical to the mark already there.

‘See?’ Powerscourt went on. ‘This stamp is the same as the one already on the report. Surely even you can see that proves it is genuine.’

The signs were pretty bad. ‘May have to beat the retreat rather sharpish, Lord Powerscourt,’ Mikhail was whispering, pulling Powerscourt back from the desk. ‘This character is going to lose his temper, he’s going to go up like Krakatoa.’

Mikhail told Powerscourt afterwards that he thought the inspector was going to have a heart attack. The veins in his neck stood out. His face grew redder and redder. His breathing became very heavy.

‘Just get this into your heads,’ he shouted. ‘There is no policeman here of that name. There is no policeman in St Petersburg of that name. There was no body of an Englishman found on the Nevskii Prospekt. I do not know who has been feeding you with forgeries. I suggest you take them home. And now, get out of my police station before I lock you in the cells and throw away the key.’ With that he left his desk and began advancing towards them with his great fist raised.

‘It’s all right, Inspector, we were just leaving.’ Mikhail was translating as fast as he was walking backwards. ‘Don’t trouble yourself with us any more. Perhaps you need to sit down. Have a little rest. A glass of water might be helpful. Maybe you ought to see your doctor. You know you mustn’t overdo it.’

Mikhail shouted his version of the last two sentences through the door as they hurried into the street. ‘Well, Lord Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘here’s a pretty pickle and me on my first morning in the job. Before we had the details of a dead man but no body. Now we don’t even have the details of the corpse if we believe the red-faced policeman. What do you think we should do?’

‘I know precisely what we should do, ‘ said Powerscourt, patting the young man affectionately on the shoulder. ‘Take me to your morgues.’

The road was narrow, skirting a canal. On the far side a factory was pouring great streams of smoke into the air. Young men hurried past them carrying great bundles of wood in their arms. There was a faint smell of bread baking far away.

‘Do you have a lot of money on you, Lord Powerscourt?’ Mikhail Shaporov sounded faintly embarrassed at having to mention money.

‘I do, Mikhail,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Rupert de Chassiron gave me a great deal at the Embassy. I assume you are going to pay out one or two bribes.’

‘I am,’ the young man laughed. ‘Tell me, Lord Powerscourt, you are an experienced investigator and I am a mere novice translator, do you think we will find Mr Martin’s body?’

‘I would be very surprised if we do,’ said Powerscourt sadly. ‘We have to check these morgues, of course we do, but I should be amazed if we find him there. It’s interesting that we don’t know how he died. Shot? Stabbed? Strangled? Maybe the truth would be too compromising, so they conceal it from us. If Martin has been murdered his killers could cut a hole in the ice and drop him down it. He might never turn up anywhere at all, just be lost at sea. If the corpse did appear on the coast of Finland or down near Riga it would be unrecognizable by then. I think he, or somebody described as him, was brought into the police station and our form filled in. That was just to tell us he was dead. Now we are meant to have got the message and keep quiet. We can’t make much of a fuss after all if we don’t have a body.’

Mikhail Shaporov was bringing them through a side gate into the gardens of a large, rather ugly building with lines of people waiting outside. ‘This is the hospital, St Simon’s. The morgue is down there at the bottom of the garden. I’m going to bribe one of the porters to get the key. Do you want to come with me or will you wait here?’

‘I think I’ll wait here,’ Powerscourt replied. ‘A stranger from Europe might put the prices up.’ As he idled along the path another thought struck him about Martin, the note and the police station. Martin might never have been to the police station at all. Maybe the police inspector really didn’t exist. Maybe the note handed in to the Embassy actually was a forgery, the stamp stolen from the police station, or even put on the paper by one of the police who had been ordered to kill him. So the red-headed policeman could have been right after all.

Mikhail Shaporov was waving cheerfully at him with a large rusty key in his hand. ‘God knows what this is going to be like,’ he said. ‘My education up till now hasn’t run to morgues or mortuaries. I told the porters that an old college friend had gone missing after a drinking session and might have got killed or frozen to death.’

There was a harsh squeak as the key turned in the lock. Shaporov put his hand on the right-hand wall and turned on a feeble light. ‘They don’t bother with refrigeration in the winter,’ he whispered, ‘they let nature work for them.’

The dead of St Petersburg were piled up in rows and rows that looked like bookcases with very wide shelves, seven or eight storeys high. Some had been placed in crude hospital shrouds by the nurses. Some, dead on arrival, Powerscourt presumed, had been left in the rags they had on as they passed away. One or two had obviously been wounded, strangely coloured gashes running down their faces. They were a terrifying collection, Powerscourt thought. If they were among the first to rise from the dead on the last day the rest of the citizens would quake in terror as these zombies from the morgue marched out from their wooden resting place. There was an unpleasant smell, of things or people going bad. Mikhail Shaporov was working his way methodically round the room, sometimes checking on the labels attached to each person. He ignored the women and the old and the very young altogether. Powerscourt heard him muttering to himself as he carried out this last inspection of these dead souls.

‘No joy here,’ he said finally. ‘It’s possible they brought him here to die but they certainly didn’t leave him in the bloody morgue.’

The second morgue could not have been more different. It was attached to a modern hospital near St Petersburg University on Vasilevsky Island opposite Senate Square and the Admiralty.

‘The only reason we’re here is that it is further away than the other place from where we think he was found, but anybody who knew the city and its facilities would see to it that he ended up here rather than that other hell-hole. This whole hospital was designed by Germans so it’s going to be very efficient. It’s funny, Lord Powerscourt, one minute we like foreigners to come in and design things for us – the whole of early St Petersburg was designed by foreigners after all – and then another decade on they’re not to be allowed in because they’re decadent, or don’t understand Russia or haven’t got any soul.’

There was no need to bribe anyone here. A grave young man took them down and waited while Mikhail Shaporov carried out his melancholy duties once more. Here the dead were not piled so high and they had their own private space, locked away inside large green compartments that looked like a giant’s filing cabinet. Name tags were pinned neatly to the handles as if they were the title of a file or a folder. Powerscourt wondered if these dead were happier here or if they might prefer the more tempestuous atmosphere of St Simon’s. The young man engaged Powerscourt in conversation in halting French. Powerscourt thought he told him that if the bodies were not claimed for burial inside a couple of months, the hospital buried them in a cemetery inland. Another terrible thought struck Powerscourt, so upsetting that he had to interrupt Mikhail and bring him over to act as translator.

‘What would happen to the dead body of a foreigner that was brought in here? Would he be kept long?’

‘Possibly, if nobody came to claim him, he could be here for a while,’ the young man said.

‘And what criteria do the doctors use in picking out the corpses they are going to use for dissecting, for teaching the medical students?’

Mikhail looked perturbed as he translated this.

‘You need not fear,’ said the young man. ‘They only use the people from the poorhouses for this. Foreigners, I think not. The students and the doctors might not trust foreign bodies.’

Even so Powerscourt could not get the thought out of his mind. Bits of Roderick Martin being cut up and examined by a crowd of students. His inner organs, his heart and his liver and his spleen, all taken out like a sixteenth-century disembowelment and prodded and poked by a lot of twenty-year-old Russians. It was a relief when Mikhail came over and shook his head.

‘He is not here.’ They thanked the grave young man and Mikhail suddenly seized Powerscourt by the arm. ‘Do you have any plans for lunch, Lord Powerscourt? You do not? Let me take you to a little place not far from here called Onegin’s. It doesn’t look very exciting but they serve the best cabbage soup in the city. Onegin’s is famous for it.’

Ten minutes later they were seated at a trestle table in what looked like an army refectory. Powerscourt half expected some Russian sergeant major to emerge from the door at the top and issue his orders to the diners. Warriors of every description lined the walls, portraits of fierce-looking little Cossacks next to imperial admirals who stared out at their fleets with haughty disdain. There were veterans of the Napoleonic Wars here, Kutuzov the seasoned general who had fought Napoleon at Borodino the only one Powerscourt recognized. On the wall above the doorway was hung a collection of ancient musketry, some of which looked older than the city itself.

‘They say, Lord Powerscourt,’ Mikhail Shaporov looked very much at home here, ordering their cabbage soup and black bread with great anticipation, ‘that when the next European war comes the army will be so short of weapons that they will impound all that old stuff above the door and cart it off to the battlefields.’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘Is there a military academy round here? Does that account for all the portraits and things?’

‘Oddly enough,’ said Mikhail as two enormous bowls of cabbage soup were put in front of them, ‘it’s the university students who frequent this place. The prices are low, the food is plentiful – if it’s enough for a peasant’s main meal of the day it’s enough for a philosophy student’s lunch. I should leave that soup to cool down for a moment, if I were you. They send it out hot enough to burn your tongue off.’

‘You were not tempted, Mikhail, to be a student here, in your own native city?’ said Powerscourt blowing desultorily at his bowl.

‘My father was very keen that I should go to Oxford, I don’t know why,’ the young man replied, ‘but my elder brother was here. I can’t tell you how different it is being a student in England and Oxford, Lord Powerscourt.’

‘Really?’ said Powerscourt, trying the first exploratory mouthful of his soup.

‘It’s much more serious here,’ Mikhail Shaporov replied, stirring his soup slowly with his spoon. ‘It’s nearly an occupation in itself. In Oxford the height of fame and fashion is probably to climb to the top of Magdalen Tower or the Sheldonian or drink your college cellars dry. Here the height of fame and fashion would be to blow up a government minister or start a revolution. I don’t think undergraduates in England ever take philosophy seriously. Here you find people whose student lives are consumed by it. Some of them become so wrapped up in it that they turn into perpetual students, staying on at the university in their quest for the answer to everything until they are in their thirties.’

Powerscourt was now seriously engrossed in his soup. It was thick, far thicker than any vegetable soup he had ever eaten in London. He thought he detected carrot and potato and garlic and maybe tomato and maybe lemon juice and possibly sour cream, as well as the eponymous cabbage. It was remarkably filling, giving the impression that the consumer was not in a barrack-style restaurant near the university but out in the great expanse of the Russian countryside, flat fields reaching to the distant horizon, an occasional tree providing a modicum of shade, a lone peasant pulling a handcart along a dusty road, a sense of space stretching out till eternity, cabbage soup that tasted of the earth of Mother Russia herself.

‘People always think,’ said Mikhail Shaporov, ‘that they must have a battalion of grannies in the kitchen here, imported from the nearby countryside perhaps, who have inherited this recipe from their grannies and so on, a direct line of grannyhood going back to the foundation of the city itself, hunched over their ancient saucepans, chopping and tasting and stirring and checking their soup all day long.’

‘Not so?’ said Powerscourt.

‘There’s only two of them who make it, Lord Powerscourt. They’re in their early twenties and learnt the recipe from their mother. They’re the proprietor’s daughters.’

‘A man could do worse than marry a woman for her soup, perhaps. What do you say, Mikhail?’

‘Indeed. And there are rumours that these two have been working on a surprise for Easter time. People say they’ve developed an entirely new borscht.’

‘Cabbage soup on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, borscht on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. You would live like a king.’

‘What I am about to ask you has nothing to do with soup or marriage, Lord Powerscourt, but with our plans today after the interview in the Interior Ministry this afternoon. Do you think you will need my services after that, after I have taken you back to the Embassy, of course? It’s just that I have made a provisional arrangement to meet somebody for an hour or so at six o’clock. Don’t get me wrong, please. If you need me I’ll translate for you all day and all night.’

Powerscourt wondered at the mental process by which his young friend had gone from soup and marriage to discussion of his plans for an evening rendezvous.

‘Forgive me for asking you, Mikhail, but would I be right in thinking you are going to meet a young lady?’

‘You are quite right, Lord Powerscourt.’ Mikhail went slightly pink as he replied. ‘It is a young lady and could I make a further suggestion? This has only just come to me, and you may think it absurd.’

‘I’m sure I won’t think it is absurd, once I know what it is,’ said Powerscourt.

‘My friend is called Natasha. She comes from a very grand family here in Petersburg. Just now she is working as a lady-in-waiting to the Empress and her daughters at the Tsar’s country palace in Tsarskoe Selo. Do you think it might help if I told her about your mission and our work in pursuit of the vanished Martin? I haven’t seen or spoken to her since I went to London. Her letters to me were very stilted and stiff as if she felt somebody was reading them, I think. But it has always been said that the best-informed people in St Petersburg are the servants who wait at the Tsar’s table and his coachmen and suchlike people. She might hear something to our advantage.’

Powerscourt scraped the bottom of his bowl to extract the very last drop of cabbage soup. ‘Let me put it like this, Mikhail. Do you think it would be dangerous for her if she were known to be close to the British Embassy?’

‘Dangerous, possibly. I don’t think she’d end up dead on the Nevskii Prospekt but I think she’d be out of a job pretty quickly.’

‘I think you must decide, Mikhail,’ said Powerscourt, looking serious all of a sudden. ‘I think it would be unwise to involve Natasha in the decision, however level-headed she is. There’s nothing more attractive to some women than a whiff of danger. I think I would insist that she only listens. She never asks any questions. She doesn’t poke her nose into areas that don’t concern her. Some women, mind you, would find even that limited prospectus hard to stick to.’

‘I will think about it before our meeting,’ said Mikhail Shaporov, trotting off to pay the bill. ‘I insist on paying for lunch, Lord Powerscourt. When we Russians introduce distinguished visitors to our national cuisine, it is only fitting that we should pay. I insist, I really do.’

As they made their way across the river to their next meeting Shaporov told Powerscourt some of what he knew of the Interior Ministry. Most of his information, he said generously, came once again from his father, some of it from his friends who had had dealings with it, some of it simply absorbed from the air and the streets of his city. Mikhail gave his English visitor the Russian bureaucracy in numbers. Eight hundred and sixty-nine, the number of paragraphs in Volume One of the Code of Laws that defined the rules and conduct of the Imperial Civil Service. Fourteen, the number of different Civil Service ranks, each with its own uniform and title. The top two ranks of civil servants were to be addressed as Your High Excellency. Those in ranks three and four to be addressed as Your Excellency. The less fortunate in ranks nine to fourteen had to make do with Your Honour. White trousers changing to black, red ribbons changing to blue, even adding a stripe here and there could mark momentous turning points in the orderly progression of the bureaucrat’s life. He could be promoted by one rank every three years from ranks fourteen to eight and one every four years in ranks eight to five. Promotion – and Mikhail emphasized how typical it was, this interface between the autocracy and the bureaucracy that would only make it less likely that either could function effectively – promotion to the last four ranks was at the discretion of the Tsar and carried a hereditary title. With great care not to displease, taking as few decisions as possible in case they gave offence, a man might reach the top of the tree by the age of sixty. This carefully modulated bureaucracy, Mikhail said, was strangling Russia, strangling it in a slow bureaucratic bear hug.

They could see several of these bureaucrats now, coming down the steps of the Interior Ministry building, some of them carrying briefcases.

‘They’re not going home already, Mikhail, are they? It’s just before three o’clock, for God’s sake.’

‘You don’t want to overdo it, if you’re a bureaucrat, Lord Powerscourt. It’s a very hard life in the Interior Ministry. Some of these fellows may have had to attend a couple of meetings in the morning. Think how exhausting that must have been for them.’

Powerscourt had been inside a number of ministries in London where the splendour was reserved for the quarters of the minister and his most senior officials. The rest had been furnished with due regard to the exigencies of the public purse and the dangers of newspapers launching crusades about governments wasting taxpayers’ money on luxurious surroundings for civil servants. But nothing, he thought, could prepare you for the drabness of the interior of the Russian Interior Ministry. The floors were covered in something grey that might once have been the Russian equivalent of linoleum. The walls were painted with a dark colour that looked as if it might have been originally intended for a battleship. A long hopeless corridor stretched out for a couple of hundred yards behind the reception desk, manned by a small man with only one arm.

‘Mr Bazhenov, Room 467, fourth floor. Lift over there. Enter your names in this book before you go up.’

Every public building you went into in St Petersburg, Powerscourt was to discover, took down your name and address as if they proposed to establish a regular correspondence. He wondered briefly about instituting a similar system in Markham Square.

The lift was gloomy and stank of sweat and urine. Mikhail Shaporov pressed the bell for the fourth floor.

‘Do you think the more important chaps live higher up, Mikhail?’ said Powerscourt. ‘Only ranks eight and above allowed on floor three?’

‘God knows,’ said Mikhail, sounding more cheerful than the surroundings warranted. ‘Do you know, Lord Powerscourt, I have lived in this city most of my life and this is the first time I have ever been inside a government building. It’s a revelation.’

It seemed that Room 467 must be at the outermost limit of the fourth-floor corridor where the room numbers started illogically at 379 opposite the lift. Clerks carrying files sauntered past them on their way to unknown bureaucratic destinations. Their feet sounded loud on the grey floor covering that might once have been linoleum. One or two doors were open and Powerscourt and Mikhail had brief visions of rooms filled with desks like classrooms for the grown-up and sad-faced men seated at them reading files or making entries in great ledgers. Through the dirty windows on their right they could see a small courtyard below where figures seemed to march round and round as if on some everlasting ministerial treadmill. They passed a conference room with a fine table and velvet-covered chairs round it, waiting for another meeting. Powerscourt thought he saw a thick layer of dust on the mahogany surface as if the last meeting had taken place some time ago, the committee dissolved perhaps, the junior minister moved on. Maybe only ghosts had their being in there now, coming out only at night – God, what must this building be like in the dark – taking ghostly notes of ghostly meetings and recording them in ghostly files.

Now they had reached Room 467. The name plate announced the presence of Vasily Bazhenov, Third Assistant Deputy Under Secretary, Administrative Division, Ministry of the Interior. Powerscourt wondered what pain and humiliation had to be gone through to win these undistinguished spurs. He noted that the name plate looked very old as if Bazhenov had been in post for many years. Perhaps promotion had passed him by. Perhaps the jump from Third Assistant Deputy Under Secretary to Second Assistant Deputy Under Secretary was too much for him. Perhaps Vasily Bazhenov would be old and crabbed and waiting for retirement.

But the voice that answered Shaporov’s knock and bade them enter was cheerful. So was the bureaucrat. He spoke quite slowly as if to give Mikhail plenty of time to translate. Powerscourt and his friend were seated on one side of a circular table in chairs that did not have velvet upholstery but were perfectly respectable nonetheless. Bazhenov had a number of files in front of him. He was about forty years of age with a wild shock of black hair that looked as if it repelled all attempts to control it. His eyes were grey, his nose small and his long black beard seemed to be acting in sympathy with his hair. Powerscourt wondered if he had a wife who wrestled with his appearance before she despatched him every morning on his bureaucratic Via Dolorosa. The man could have been taken for some wild Siberian preacher rather than a Third Assistant Deputy Under Secretary in the Administrative Division.

‘You are interested in a Roderick Martin, I believe,’ he said to Powerscourt.

‘That is correct, Mr Under Secretary,’ said Powerscourt, remembering Rosebery’s advice to promote all army officers, civil servants and policemen. ‘We were given to understand that you might have some details about him here.’

Bazhenov sighed deeply. ‘In one sense, I have to disappoint you, Lord Powerscourt. I – we – cannot help you with this Martin. Under normal circumstances, there would be all kinds of information about such a man. The time and date of his arrival and departure. The record of where he was staying. If he was an important person holding important meetings with important government officials, there would be a record, as there will be of this meeting.’

The Third Assistant Deputy Under Secretary smiled. There had been almost a note of irony, Powerscourt thought, of mocking as the bureaucrat detailed his lists of information, though it was hard to tell in another language. Information, after all, was the currency he dealt in, wrested from the reluctant population to be stored in the unforgiving files of the Interior Ministry.

Bazhenov opened his hands wide. ‘But we have no records for the year 1905. No place of entry. No place of residence. I wish I could help you, gentlemen, but I cannot.’

The man’s lying, Powerscourt thought to himself. Surely he knows Martin came here and was killed here last December. He remembered the fat inspector with the red beard shouting at them in the police station where his investigations in St Petersburg had begun. Perhaps they’re all liars. But he could see little point in an argument. Better to hear what the man might have to say.

‘You are being as helpful as anybody could be, Mr Under Secretary,’ said Powerscourt at his most emollient, ‘but I would ask you to consider things from my government’s perspective. Mr Martin, a distinguished member of his ministry in London as you are of yours here in St Petersburg,’ Bazhenov half rose to his feet and bowed to Powerscourt at this point, ‘comes here last December and holds, we believe, a series of meetings, possibly with the Foreign Ministry, we are not sure. On the evening of the same day he is murdered. The death is reported by a policeman in the police station nearest to the British Embassy. It is even committed to paper.’ That, Powerscourt felt, should have maximum appeal to the bureaucrat. The spoken word, it was nothing, worthless as air. Pieces of paper, records, minutes, memoranda, these were his life’s blood. ‘Now the police deny all knowledge. They say the piece of paper must be a forgery.’ Truly, Powerscourt said to himself, forgery would be the sin against the Holy Ghost of bureaucratic machines everywhere. It could cast doubt on everything it touched. It, or the suspicion of it, could spread through the files like the Black Death. ‘They say Mr Martin cannot have come to St Petersburg. But he left London on a special mission to the Russian capital. He has not returned. We have no reason to believe he is alive. We believe he is dead. You gentlemen say he never came here at all. Who or what are we to believe?’

Then Bazhenov produced one of the classic bureaucratic ploys, a Sicilian defence amidst the paperwork. ‘I wish I could help you, Lord Powerscourt. Leave it with me for a day or two. Perhaps some information has been mislaid. Perhaps one of the other organizations of the state will be able to help.’

Powerscourt was to learn later that other organizations of the state meant the secret police, the Okhrana, or other even shadowier organizations devoted to the safety of state and Tsar. ‘That is most kind of you, Mr Under Secretary. We are very grateful. Permit me to ask one question before we take our leave. You said at the beginning that you had no information concerning Mr Martin for the year 1905. That implied, maybe I misunderstood you, that you might have information about other months.’

Bazhenov laughed and slapped an ample thigh. ‘I said to my second assistant this morning, Lord Powerscourt, that they are clever people, these English. They will surely ask the right question to unlock this information.’ Powerscourt wondered how many assistants the man had. Three? Five? Seven? Perhaps he could ask the next time they came. ‘No information for the year 1905 is indeed what I said. But consider our Mr Roderick Martin or, perhaps, your Mr Roderick Martin. He lives at a place called Tibenham Grange in Kent in your England. He is married. He works for your Foreign Office. Is this Mr Martin also your Mr Martin?’

‘He is,’ said Powerscourt sensing suddenly that some bombshell was about to arrive that would blow his investigation wide open.

‘Why, then, we have only one Mr Martin between the two of us, not a multiplicity of them, not a flock or a gaggle or a parliament of Martins. We do not believe he came here in 1905, but we know he came on three other occasions in 1904, three times in 1903 and twice in 1902. We could find out if he came also in previous years by the time of our next meeting. You could say, Lord Powerscourt, that Mr Roderick Martin of His Majesty’s Foreign Office was a regular visitor to our city.’