To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin

^ELEVEN END OF THE ROAD

There seems no reason to disbelieve the story that Rasputin was collected from his apartment, after midnight, by Yusupov, and that both were driven to the Yusupov Palace by someone who could have been Lazovert. The ‘canvas-topped’ car, variously described as grey or khaki, sounds like Purishkevich’s.

As to what happened next, the far-fetched stories of Yusupov and his servants and employees can be treated as suspicious, as can those of Purishkevich. That Rasputin was offered poisoned cakes and wine can again be taken as fact. However, according to Professor Kossorotov, who carried out the autopsy, ‘the examination reveals no trace of poison’.¹ That is to say, if Rasputin took any poison, either he took in only the minutest trace of poison, or the cyanide was old and had lost its potency. Although Purishkevich and Yusupov contradict each other in detail, they concur in describing doses hefty enough to kill several horses. Had Rasputin ingested anything like the amount of unadulterated cyanide that they describe, he would have died at once. Maria, Rasputin’s daughter, was ‘positive that my father did not eat the poisoned cakes, for he had a horror of sweet things… Never since my childhood do I remember seeing him eat pastries’.² Others, who believe Rasputin did eat the poisoned cakes, have argued that the cyanide had no effect as it was ‘neutralised by the sugar in the cakes’.³ In order to gain a definitive expert appraisal of this and other crucial aspects surrounding Rasputin’s death, Professor Derrick Pounder, Head of Forensic Medicine at Dundee University and a senior government pathologist, was asked to undertake a review of the original Autopsy Report and forensic evidence.

In considering the poisoning issue, Professor Pounder concluded that the sugar-as-an-antidote theory is just that – a theory, which

Poisoning was, of course, the ideal murder method. With a whole troop of policemen within sight and sound of the crime scene, it was quiet and there would be no blood. So the question arises: when it didn’t work, why didn’t Dr Lazovert drive quickly to the dispensary of the hospital train and bring back a syringe and a lethal dose of, say, diamorphine? Even Purishkevich could have laid his hands on something. An irate ‘diary’ entry for 5 December reads ‘I alone am responsible for supplying medicines, linens, boots, tobacco and books to the trenches’.⁵ It was the dispensary in his train that carried those medicines.

The next ‘fact’ we may be inclined to accept is that at least one or two shots were heard around half-past two or three o’clock in the morning If we accept that the original idea was to poison Rasputin, and that a shot or shots were fired in the middle of the night, then we have to examine the circumstances. The story of Rasputin facing a kind of kangaroo court and being expected to shoot himself in front of those assembled is highly unlikely to say the least. Purishkevich thought Rasputin was a scoundrel, and Yusupov thought he was superhuman. However drunk they were, it is hard to believe that any of the protagonists would have risked putting a gun in his hand.

Questioned by police almost immediately, Byzhinski the butler was able to indicate ‘The broken window on the ground floor overlooking the forecourt of the adjoining house’.Nobody reported finding any glass outside or hearing it shatter, but in the photographs taken next day, the study window on the courtyard side does look different from the rest; it seems to have some sort of frame, possibly masking tape, around it, and a square of paper on the inside over a hole about 10cm across. The hole is neat, as if broken from the inside at close range. Had there been a man standing in the courtyard, the hole in the window would have been about half a metre above his head.

It is unlikely that either of the two fatal shots hit Rasputin in the middle of the night. According to the Autopsy Report, ‘The victim must rapidly have been weakened by haemorrhaging arising from a wound to the liver (bullet wound 1) and a wound to the kidney (bullet wound 2). Death would have been inevitable within 10 to 20 minutes.'⁶

There was more firing hours later, recorded by a whole bevy of police about an hour after their change of shift at six o’clock – firing for which there would have been no need at all had Rasputin received both wounds by three o’clock in the morning.

Shortly after the shot or shots had been heard, Four men allegedly turned up in a car that sped off. Tikhomirov, the Okhrana man ‘detailed to watch Rasputin’, saw them and alerted the head of the Okhrana by telephone. This begs the question of what Tikhomirov was doing there in the first place. Nowhere are we told that he followed Rasputin from Gorokhovaya Street. He does not appear to have a car at his disposal – although there was one on standby at the Ministry of the Interior opposite. We do not know where he was watching from.

It seems likely that Tikhomirov was a late arrival, sent by Protopopov. When the Extraordinary Commission sat in 1917, Protopopov admitted that he had visited Rasputin just after midnight for about ten minutes.⁷ Yusupov wrote that Rasputin had told him Protopopov had been there that night, and had warned him against visiting the Yusupov Palace. There was allegedly an arrangement whereby, if Rasputin failed to telephone Simanovich by two o’clock in the morning, Simanovich would be concerned and inform the authorities. This is, on balance, quite probable. If Protopopov received a phone call from Simanovich, whom he knew well, he would have sent Tikhomirov to Yusupov’s palace.

If four men did turn up in a car, who were they and why were they there? According to Tikhomirov, they entered by the side door of number 92, which leads us to assume they were arriving by invitation. Princess Irina’s brothers, Princes Andrew, Fyodor and Nikolai are three possibilities whose names had been linked with the murder almost from the beginning.

Assuming that Rasputin had survived an attempt to poison him, the next resort may well have been something just as quiet and bloodless as poisoning, but also fatal: a severe beating.

Given that the protagonists included Dmitri Pavlovich, Yusupov (who would certainly have shrunk from physical violence of that kind, despite the claims he was to make later),⁸ and Lazovert (who was already physically ill as a result of the tension),⁹ one might imagine that a tough peasant with a reputation for getting fighting drunk might well have seemed a daunting prospect. Whether, in light of Tikhomirov’s observations, Yusupov subsequently called in extra hands must therefore be considered as a possibility. In any eventuality, the Autopsy Report certainly indicates a range of severe wounds indicative of a major physical assault:

In 1993, a team led by Russia’s leading forensic expert, Dr Vladimir Zharov, carried out a thorough review of the autopsy materials. In their report, which was never made public (but was made available to this author), they concur with this view:

Furthermore, Zharov’s team listed other wounds not referred to in the Autopsy Report, such as a ‘squashed and deformed’ nose and numerous ‘scratches of irregular shape’. One such irregular shape was the Russian letter G, the fourth letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, which was scratched on the right jaw, possibly by a sword or knife. The most probable explanation is that Rasputin was beaten up by a number of assailants before he was shot, and that one was armed with a truncheon. Zharov and his colleagues further speculate that ‘The gaping wound’ on the left hand side of the back may have been made by a sword or a knife. Had a sword or knife been plunged into his left side, Rasputin might have been left for dead in the basement dining room.

Following the beating, the participants no doubt retired upstairs to the study to relieve the night’s tension and to toast their success with a bout of drinking.

In their books, Purishkevich and Yusupov have Rasputin climbing the stairs unaided and escaping into the yard, whereupon he sprints for the gate (i. E. a thirty-metre dash through snow, part of it in the shadow of the building). Purishkevich allegedly fires four times and hits him twice. The courtyard is unlit. Purishkevich is short-sighted.

According to the Autopsy Report, two bullets were fired from a distance of 20cm and one with the gun pressed to his forehead. We can discount Purishkevich’s entire confection; Rasputin was not hit by bullets when he was on the run. But he could have staggered out, drunk and wounded. And another drunken person, who knew he had escaped, could have shot wildly from the study into the courtyard – the hole in the window is quite neat, as if fired at close range, and it is on the side of the window that a person would fire from if they were aiming towards the snow-heap and the fence. A bullet or two overhead would have made Rasputin fall to the ground, and he would not have been clearly visible from beyond the fence because of the snow-heaps.

There were bloodstains, which Yusupov wanted to disguise, leading from the outer door along the wall and along the fence. There is a police scene of crime photograph that purports to show blood traces in the snow. It is possible that Rasputin somehow escaped, and, dripping blood, collapsed in the yard and was left there, with nobody quite daring to brave the watching police and approach him.

It was this shot or shots from the window that resulted in the first visit by the police. It was as a result of this occurrence that Yusupov invented the shot-dog story. According to Yusupov, he knew there were bloodstains in the snow, and, in order to confuse forensic analysis, he decided to have a dog shot and drag its body over the bloodstains. This is frankly ludicrous. Blood does not stain snow. Even in sub-zero temperatures, blood in snow can be shovelled into buckets and flushed down the nearest drain. It is more likely that Yusupov was making excuses for the presence of a dark shape near the snow-heaps by the fence. Either that, or he was too drunk to think straight. Furthermore, his claim that, on his instructions, a servant then shot a dog makes little sense either. No one in the vicinity claims or recalls hearing this shot, which would, according to Yusupov’s story, have occurred sometime after the shot or shots heard at half-past two or three o’clock, but a good while before the shots heard just after six o’clock.

There is a hiatus of at least two hours, possibly three, between the original shot or shots in the courtyard, which had brought police to the palace, and their six o’clock roll call which was interrupted by the ejection of the women. The roll call is the only reliable timing we have between the departure of Rasputin from Gorokhovaya Street and the finding of the body. At the police station, the night shift was going off duty and the much bigger day shift was coming on. There were policemen to spare, and they saw what happened: two women, drunk, were forcibly bundled out. The most likely explanation is that these women knew the men were going to commit murder and they wanted either to stop them or to participate. And the men wanted them out of the way. Another, and not a contradictory, explanation, is that they were deliberately distracting the police from a rumpus in the courtyard.

Somebody had to have the nerve to go out and drag Rasputin back in. Daylight was approaching and he had to be got away from the building and finally disposed of. Shooting was the only way to finish him off properly, but it would cause damage in a confined space like the stairwell.

An unspecified time later, four shots were heard ‘in rapid succession from the forecourt’. This does not necessarily mean that the shooting took place on the forecourt, but it is most likely. And we can treat ‘rapid succession’ with scepticism too. Had the reports alleged that the shots rang out over a five-or ten-minute period, or in the course of the women’s departure, they would have seemed incompetent. But by this stage they did not want to see anything. A diligent policeman or Okhrana agent getting mixed up with Romanovs and Princes was likely to offend the wrong person and find his career at an end.

The group of early-morning shots, fired with a brief interval between them, came from different revolvers, according to the Autopsy Report. This view is backed up by the 1993 review led by Dr Vladimir Zharov. In 2004, Zharov told BBC Timewatch that microscopic measurements of the entry wounds proved that the three bullet-holes were of different sizes.¹¹ The report considered that the chest wound was most likely caused by a 6.35mm Browning handgun, the type used by Yusupov and Dmitri Pavlovich. The right-hand back wound was slightly larger, therefore consistent with Purishkevich’s 7.65mm Savage pistol. These two shots were, the Autopsy Report says, Fired from a distance of about 20cm, when Rasputin was standing up.¹² One bullet ‘penetrated the left-hand side of his chest and passed through his stomach and liver’ and the other ‘entered the right-hand part of his back and passed through his kidneys’. Had these shots been fired simultaneously while Rasputin was sitting or standing, the assassins would have been at risk of wounding each other, diagonally through Rasputin’s body.

There must have been an interval between shots. But how would Rasputin have remained standing? It seems most likely that he was carried out with his wrists bound and propped in a sitting position against a snow-heap; two people fired at him, and one bullet hit him as he fell forwards. Both these wounds would have, in themselves, been fatal within twenty minutes.

The Autopsy Report is equally adamant that the third bullet, which was immediately fatal, was fired at point-blank range while the body was supine. The most likely scenario is that, having shot Rasputin twice, the conspirators wrapped his body in cloth and carried it across the courtyard to the waiting car. This is consistent with the scene of crime photograph taken by the police showing a straight line of blood from the doorway across the courtyard. Had Rasputin staggered across the courtyard, as claimed by Yusupov and Purishkevich, one would expect to see an irregular trail of blood. As the killers approached the gate, either a spasm or a sound from the body indicated that he was still alive, if only barely. It is at this point that the body was then put down, and someone, with a handgun of a different calibre to the ones that had fired the first and second shots, delivered the coup de grâce that ended Rasputin’s life.¹³ The third shot is therefore the most crucial in determining the identity of Rasputin’s killer. Professor Derrick Pounder, in his review of the ballistics evidence, observed that,

Turning his attention to identifying the bullet, Professor Pounder calculated that

Full metal-jacketed bullets for handguns were the norm by the outbreak of the First World War. These were completely encased in a hard metal jacket to prevent expansion upon impact. In fact, the use of expanding, unjacketed bullets in small arms ammunition had been limited and proscribed by The Hague Accords of 1899 and 1907. Britain, however, was unique in using unjacketed bullets for its standard-issue officer’s revolver, the .455-inch (11.56mm) Webley, arguing that the design was compliant with the Accords.

In considering which handgun out of the range available at the time of the murder was the one compatible with the ballistics evidence, Professor Pounder concluded that, based upon calibre,

Dr Zharov’s 1993 review supported Professor Kossorotov’s opinion that the third bullet went straight through the head, exiting from the back, although they point out that there are no photographs of the back of the head, so this cannot be established with absolute certainty. A tell-tale clue, however, is a pool of blood in the snow which is evident in the police scene of crime photograph, close to the second courtyard gate. This is consistent with an exit wound to the back of the head while the body is lying on the ground. Dr Zharov’s team also agree with Professor Kossorotov’s view that, although Rasputin’s body was removed from the courtyard and thrown in the river, he was already dead and did not, therefore, drown.

Although the lungs contained a small amount of water, Professor Derrick Pounder also agreed that,

The above reconstruction of events is based upon a best-fit scenario taking into account the timings, reports and statements made in contemporary documents.

Whether the shots were indeed fired inside the building or outside in the courtyard, at whatever time of the night, it is clear beyond doubt from the forensic evidence that the following is true:

The first and second shots were fired at close range in quick succession to each other,¹⁹ by guns of different calibre.

The third shot, fired at point-blank range to the forehead, was the fatal shot that killed Rasputin.

None of the shots was fired from a distance, which completely negates Purishkevich’s story. His claim to have fired the fatal shot is further discredited by the fact that his gun, a Savage, fired jacketed bullets which do not match the ballistics evidence for the fatal wound.

The wound made by the fatal third shot is compatible with an unjacketed .455 bullet from a British officer’s .455-inch Webley revolver.

Rasputin did not drown – he was dead before he was thrown in the river.

With these facts in mind, we now need to establish who was actually present at the scene of the murder and, more significantly, who fired the third and fatal shot that ended Rasputin’s life.

It seems clear that Rasputin was tempted to the Yusupov Palace on the Moika by the prospect of female company – specifically, a young and beautiful Romanov married to a well-known homosexual transvestite. The implication is that he was enticed by a possible seduction. He may have seen her photograph, but he had never met her. Invited, as he was, to meet her after midnight on a Friday, he could reasonably have expected to find a private party, and indeed to meet her in the company of others; but she was not there.

Yusupov told General Popov that two women had left with Dmitri Pavlovich. But by the time he related his account to Stopford on 6 June 1917, it was already coherent from repetition, and the women were left out. He contradicts Purishkevich’s ‘diary’ published the following year by denying that any women were present at all. But the police saw two. Madame Derfelden was held under house arrest for forty-eight hours after the murder, and Okhrana snoopers reported on Vera Koralli’s stay at her hotel. Early correspondence between Yusupov and Irina – who at one point fully intended to be present – refers to other women being invited.

At least two women were there.

There is also some confusion about Yusupov’s servants. He had a batman and a house steward. His batman could have been wearing military uniform, but Purishkevich had seen Yusupov’s servants before, and knew that only two of them were going to be on duty; and he is adamant that the two men on duty that night, the one who let him into the palace and the other ‘dressed in a soldier’s uniform’ sitting on the bench, were ‘soldiers’, not identifiable by rank. He is equally clear in calling Pavlovich’s batman a ‘servant’ and voicing strong disapproval of his having been let in on the secret. Frankly, Purishkevich didn’t approve of servants at all; ‘impudent’, he thought a chauffeur would look, and they were all a security risk as far as he was concerned. He did not think that the two men who opened the door to him and helped with the general clearing-up were servants.The Okhrana agent Tikhomirov witnessed a ‘man in military field uniform’ in the courtyard earlier in the evening. Yusupov, in his statement to Major Popov, uses the same description as if prompted. This could not have been Nefedev (Yusupov’s batman) or Byzhinski (the butler) or Yusupov, Purishkevich or Sukhotin, who would have been wearing tunics, i.e. formal uniform. Field uniform was worn on active service.

Yusupov says they took a soldier with them to help dispose of the body. Had Yusupov’s servant gone with them, he would have reported back to Yusupov on his return. But it was not until lunchtime the following day that Yusupov knew for sure from Dmitri Pavlovich where and how the corpse had been dumped. This implies that the ‘soldier’ was not Nefedev or Byzhinski. It is possible that there were two other people in military uniform. British officers in Petrograd wore Russian army greatcoats over their tunics as they considered their own coats inappropriate for the extreme cold of the Russian winter.

Oswald Rayner was in the palace that night. He was part of Yusupov’s intimate circle. A reticent man, he nevertheless confided in later life to his cousin Rose Jones that he had been in the palace on the night of the murder.²⁰ He had, like John Scale, been ‘involved in the planning’. We know this because the diary of William Compton, Rayner and Scale’s chauffeur, records visits to the Yusupov Palace by Rayner and Scale on (British dates) 26 and 29 October, 3, 4, 9, 16 and 28 November and 2 December. (The corresponding Russian dates are 13, 16, 21, 22 and 27 October and 3, 15 and 19 November – five days before Purishkevich made his electrifying speech in the Duma.) The only date for which there is no entry in the diary is the day of the murder.²¹

Scale left Petrograd for Romania on 11 November (24 November in the British calendar), so he cannot have been present for the last two meetings, or on the night of the murder. There is no doubt about this: his written record of the journey, and of his actions when in Romania, is vivid and indubitably true. The blown-up factories and burning oil fields that met the German invaders bear witness to the success of his dangerous mission. He received a DSO.

Captain Stephen Alley was also involved in the planning of Rasputin’s murder. As we have already noted, he and his family had a close and longstanding personal relationship with the Yusupov family. Like Rayner, Alley was a fluent Russian speaker. Did he accompany Rayner (with whom he shared an apartment) to the Yusupov Palace that night? Speaking fluent Russian and wearing Russian field coats, the pair would have been indistinguishable from any other Russian soldiers so far as Purishkevich, or indeed anyone else who might have met them that night, was concerned.

A British presence was, if anything, originally intended to be a token one, to discreetly observe that the job had been satisfactorily carried out. It is highly unlikely there was ever any anticipation that an active part would be taken in the proceedings. Further evidence of Alley and Rayner’s complicity is found in a letter Alley wrote to Scale eight days after the murder. Scale, who had just been ordered to return to Petrograd from Romania, had voiced the opinion that merely blowing up oil fields was not sufficient. He therefore proposed that RFC planes should follow up the sabotage with regular raids to ensure that the Germans were unable to get the wells back in production.²² London, it seemed, was a little apprehensive about the idea.

There is also reason to believe that Rasputin’s body was photographed at some point in the night, as evidence that he was indeed dead, prior to the disposal of the body (which it was hoped would never be discovered). Two months after the murder, these photographs were apparently discovered by the police and referred to in a report.

This is one of a number of police and Okhrana documents that raise more questions than answers concerning an investigation which can retrospectively be seen as inept and ineffective. While appreciating that the investigation was still in its infancy when word came from on high to close it down, the omissions are astonishing. The bloodstains that were seen, and have been marked on the police scene of crime photographs, seem to have trailed from the door to a snow-heap by the second gate. The Police Report does not say the body was wrapped up or that the car drove into the courtyard. It seems that the body was picked up in the courtyard and carried across the pavement to the car.

According to the plan, this was supposed to be Dmitri Pavlovich’s car, with Dmitri driving, accompanied by Lazovert, Sukhotin, and Purishkevich.

The other omission has an internal political cause. Stepan Beletski later testified to the Extraordinary Commission that, because Protopopov was unwilling to have it known that he visited Rasputin, he had ‘ordered the external surveillance agents removed after 10.00p.m.’²⁵ He told the Tsarina and Rasputin that the guard was on, but (Beletski said) ‘it was stationed not by the gate but across the street out of sight’. In other words, there was no Okhrana man stationed within sight of whoever visited. Popov may have heard from the yard superintendent in Gorokhovaya Street that Protopopov himself had dropped by late on the night of Rasputin’s death. If he did, either he judged it wiser to leave the information out, or he was told to. A number of writers and researchers, including Oleg Shishkin²⁶ and Phil Tomaselli,²⁷ have implied that Rasputin’s bodyguard was somehow withdrawn by a sinister hidden hand acting on behalf of the conspirators. In fact, all that was necessary for the assassination plans to progress was the acquisition of the knowledge that the guard was withdrawn at ten o’clock.

Building on the fault lines of the haphazard and incomplete contemporary investigations, Purishkevich, Yusupov and Lazovert published their own accounts with ulterior motives. Purishkevich was used to the adulation of the crowd, and in 1918, after the revolution, he wanted to regain popular attention. By 1927, Yusupov needed the money. He had also remained in touch with Oswald Rayner. Lazovert, too, used his short 1923 account to boost his own modest role in events and was no doubt well paid for his trouble.

The three stories are similar in key respects: the poison failed; Rasputin did not die of the first lethal gunshot wound; he got out of the house and ran across the yard;he was hit by two more bullets; he was kicked in the head and he was beaten frenziedly by Yusupov. In that order.

The details vary. The poison is crystals or shavings;it’s in either the chocolate cakes or the pink ones; the gang stay upstairs or don’t… Neither of them has Rasputin wearing a blue embroidered silk smock – in both accounts it is white, and embroidered. It is odd that a scene that would have been imprinted on most minds was wrong in this respect. They both get the colour of the cord right.

The major difference between the accounts is the key protagonist. The eager reader of Purishkevich finds that he was the dynamic one: some kind of supernatural force flooded through him and he saved the day by shooting Rasputin. In Yusupov’s story, he tries to be the hero, but ends up the victim of Rasputin’s superhuman powers. Lazovert, too, casts himself in a central, proactive role.

Yusupov does not claim to have delivered the final shot and Purishkevich’s story does not match the forensic evidence. Many at the time expected Dmitri Pavlovich to take the blame. Within thirty-six hours it became apparent that he was not going to admit a thing. Lazovert and Sukhotin are equally improbable candidates. So who did kill Rasputin?

He was strong and healthy, and harder to kill than they had expected. The poison failed. He was stabbed with a sword and left for dead. He escaped when the others were upstairs and they heard him opening the door. One of the party fired at him through the window, maybe another went out into the yard to have a look. Further firing was impossible. Reinforcements arrived.

As soon as the police had gone away, they dragged him back into the house. They did not want to shoot him because of the police. They tied him up and waited for him to die before taking him out to the Petrovski Bridge. But he did not die.

In desperation, two of them shot him outside in the yard. As they were carrying him out to the car, a third man checked, found that he still had a pulse, and put a bullet through his brain.

With the exception of Oswald Rayner’s involvement with the production of Yusupov’s Rasputin book in 1927, no one else in British circles wrote an account about Rasputin’s murder. Sir Samuel Hoare and Sir George Buchanan wrote memoirs which included brief references to background events. Albert Stopford’s diary likewise gives a commentator’s account rather than a participant’s.

However, a rich seam of oral history has survived through the children and grandchildren of the British officers who were involved in the planning of Rasputin’s death. The family of William Compton, the chauffeur, have recollections of stories about his time in Petrograd, the terrible conditions, the Red Cross Hospital and the murder of Rasputin. According to Compton, it was ‘a little known fact’that Rasputin had been shot not by a Russian but by ‘an Englishman’ whom he had known in Russia.²⁸ He said nothing more about the man other than that he was a lawyer and was from the same part of the country as Compton himself. This story was never taken seriously by Compton’s family, who assumed that it was nothing more than a tale the old man told to add some colour to an otherwise uneventful and bleak period in his life.

According to the Compton family, William had been born not far from Birmingham. A search for his birth records reveals that he was born on 27 January 1881 in Kempsey, Worcestershire, some ten miles from where Oswald Rayner had been born and brought up.²⁹ On all official documents, right up to his death in 1961, Rayner described himself as a ‘Barrister at Law’.³⁰ He had not only confided in his cousin, Rose Jones, that he had been at the Yusupov Palace when the murder took place, but he also showed close members of the family a bullet which he claimed he had acquired from the murder scene.³¹ We also know that Rayner carried a .455 Webley service revolver, which, according to Professor Derrick Pounder, is the handgun that corresponds to the bullet that caused the fatal forehead wound.

The mysterious Englishman that the Tsar referred to during his conversation with Sir George Buchanan, whom he suspected of involvement in the murder, was certainly not Sir Samuel Hoare, who, as we have already seen, was not a college contemporary of Yusupov. Rayner was clearly the man whose identity Buchanan so carefully shielded when he came to relate the story in his memoirs.

On the afternoon following the murder, Yusupov met Rayner at the palace of his father-in-law, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich.³² Together they had dinner with Irina’s three elder brothers, Prince Andrew, Prince Fyodor and Prince Nikita, their tutor Mr Stuart and Mlle Evreinova, a lady-in-waiting to Irina’s mother. Following the meal, Rayner, Yusupov, his three brothers-in-law and Mr Stuart took a car to the railway station in order to catch the nine o’clock train to the Crimea. At the station they found a large force of Palace Police on the steps of the main entrance. On getting out of the car, Yusupov was informed by a colonel that on the orders of the Tsarina he was forbidden to leave Petrograd and was to be placed under house arrest. Prince Nikita decided to proceed to the Crimea with Mr Stuart. Everyone else got back into the car and returned to the palace. Rayner, we are told, remained there with Yusupov. Although his escape had been foiled, Yusupov would survive to tell his story. After a brief appearance in the limelight of Yusupov’s book, Rayner melted back into the milieu as unobtrusively as he had made his entrance.