‘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.