Johnny Fitzgerald, Powerscourt’s oldest friend and companion in arms, was back in town. Ever since the affair of the Elgin Marble he had lived mainly in the country, supposedly researching a new book on the birds of the Midlands. Lady Lucy had long ago established that Johnny’s principal interest in the Midlands was not, in fact, the local wildlife, but a rich widow in Warwickshire. Lady Lucy had enlisted series after series of interlocking circles of friends and relations in the search for the identity of the lady concerned. She was almost certain that her prey was a certain Lady Caroline Milne, widow of the late Colonel Sebastian Milne, formerly of the Life Guards and a previous Master of the Harbury Hunt. Lady Lucy had been on the verge of asking Johnny a number of times if Lady Caroline was indeed the object of his interest, but she had resisted. If Johnny had wanted them to know, she reasoned to herself, he would have told them. All in good time, as her grandmother used to say.
‘Well, Francis,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘I hear you’re consorting with ballet dancers and that man Diaghilev. That’s what they’re saying round the town.’
‘How very perceptive of you, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt with a laugh. He gave Johnny the details of the case.
‘And I presume that you have some delicious assignment lined up for me?’ said Fitzgerald, who had visited many Valleys of Despair and Sloughs of Despond in previous cases with his friend. ‘Lunch with the prima ballerinas? Dinner with Anna Pavlova if she’s in town? That sort of thing?’
‘I’m afraid not, my friend, I’m afraid not. Would that such entertainments were within my gift. Alas, that is not the fate I have in mind for you. But it could be worse.’
‘What do you mean worse?’ said Johnny darkly. ‘Tell me the truth now.’
‘There is a rich City businessman involved in the affair, Johnny. Name of Gilbert, Richard Wagstaff Gilbert. He lives in a big house in Barnes near the pond. He’s very rich. He also happens to be a relation of the dead dancer Alexander Taneyev. He’s his uncle. I want to know all about him.’
‘Why? Are you looking for some hot investment tips, Francis? Buy Latin American copper, that sort of thing?’
‘Well, you never know when that might come in useful. The first major problem in this case is this: who was meant to be the victim? The boy Alexander was the understudy. A much more famous fellow was meant to be dancing the part of the Prince, but he cried off. I know you’re going to ask me why and when he vanished from the stage, as it were, and I can only say that I don’t know yet. I haven’t been able to talk to him. Relations with Diaghilev are a bit frosty at the moment, so that may have to wait even longer. Our friend in Barnes appears to have no children. We know Alexander was his nephew. How many more nephews, cousins, brothers or sisters does our man have? That would be interesting.’
‘Francis,’ said Johnny, looking sadly at his friend, ‘you’re getting too devious for your own good. It must be these Russians. I think you suspect that Alexander whatever he’s called might have been Gilbert’s heir. If that is the case, who might the new heir be? He would, certainly, have a strong motive for lurking round the bowels of the opera house with a nasty dagger in his hand. Is that what you want me to find out?’
‘It is.’
‘Why didn’t you say so at the beginning? I’ll get started right away.’
Sergeant Rufus Jenkins had recruited a couple of English assistants among the younger members of staff at the Royal Opera House. The elder boy, Jamie, had just started work when the Ballets Russes first appeared in London the year before. He was employed because his father was chief electrician. Jamie could even remember some of the ballet dancers’ names, something the Sergeant thought might be beyond his powers. He, the Sergeant, had bought himself a little book that claimed to teach you how to speak Russian. The Sergeant realized very quickly that this would be hard work. French, as he used to say to his mother, had always been Greek to him at school. Why did the Russians have to have a different alphabet? Furthermore, why did they have to have so many letters — six more, by the Sergeant’s arithmetic, than the English version? Why did ‘Cc’ sound like ‘s’ in see and ‘Pp’ sound like a rolled ‘r’, for heaven’s sake? It was enough to make a man despair.
Sergeant Jenkins’ other recruit worked as a stagehand and scene shifter and general dogsbody. Nicholas wanted to be an actor and this was the only job he could find that took him into a theatre. And it was Nicholas who provided the first burst of news from the world of the Ballets Russes, over a pint of bitter at the Lamb and Flag in Rose Street, known as the Bucket of Blood in an earlier century. Jenkins didn’t want the Russians to see the connection between himself and his in-house spies, as he mentally referred to them.
‘It was a fight, Sergeant, right in the middle of the stage, must have been about eleven o’clock this morning.’
‘Not so fast, my friend. Who was on stage? What were they rehearsing? Who was fighting?’
‘Well, from what I heard, I think they were running through a new routine for Les Sylphides.’
Nicholas had a pair of aunts who lived in Brittany, so he had picked up some idiomatic French, including a number of swear words, the precise meanings of which he was unsure.
‘That choreographer who shouts at them all the time, Mr Fokine, he was doing his stuff.’
‘And who was doing the fighting?’
‘Two girls from the corps de ballet. One of them was that tall redhead called Kristina. The other one was a brunette and I don’t know her name. I could point her out to you next time you’re in the place, if you like.’
‘That would be very kind. Was it like a boxing match? Wrestling maybe?’
‘It was pretty fierce stuff. The brunette had apparently accused the one called Kristina of having given in to Bolm’s advances. She denied it. There was a lot of shoving and a lot of biting. The redhead was trying to pull something out of her stocking when they were stopped. It might have been a knife.’
‘A knife like the one used in the murder? One of those Cossack daggers?’
‘God help me, I hadn’t thought of that. It could have been, I suppose, but I’m not sure.’
‘So who stopped it?’
‘Mr Fokine and one of the big stagehands, one of the Russian ones, had to force them apart. The redhead had blood pouring out of her shoulder. The other one was limping. They were both taken away. Mr Fokine gave everybody else half an hour off. I saw him having a very large vodka all by himself in the bar. It’s always open for the Russians that place, even at breakfast time.’
‘Nicholas, you’ve done well. Please try to find out what they were fighting about. Maybe there’s going to be another round.’
The early evening sun was still streaming through the great windows of Lady Ripon’s drawing room at Coombe. She had just rearranged the flowers to her satisfaction. Honestly, it was so hard these days to find staff who knew how to do things properly. She had already been to the ballroom where she had recently built a small stage for the ballet, the floor raked at an angle like the one at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. Russian dancers always complained about the flat floors of London and Paris. Round the stage, twenty seats had been placed. Here at least the work had been carried out perfectly, probably because Lady Ripon had supervised every move herself.
She was wearing her rubies tonight, with the Nattier-blue taffeta dress. She had recently had all her jewels reset by Cartier in the fashion of the day, rather than the heavy gold settings of Victoria’s time. The dining room was her last port of call with Crooks, the butler, in attendance. She was, as she told her maid later that evening, only just in time. The first problem was the table itself. ‘Just look at those champagne flutes, Crooks. Can’t you see they’re in the wrong order? Sort it out, please. My word, you have to have your eyes about you these days.’