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.’