‘It is a very little thing I can tell you, but believe me when I tell you it is true. Many people will try to tell you that your Mr Martin was not here a couple of weeks ago, that his body was not found by the Nevskii Prospekt, that as there is no body there can be no crime and as there was no Mr Martin, Lord Powerscourt, there is nothing for you to investigate, and as there is nothing for you to investigate you may as well go home and leave St Petersburg to its fate. This is what some people want you to believe.’
‘Are you saying that that is not the truth?’
‘I tell you, Lord Powerscourt, he was here, he was killed here. That is all I can say.’
‘Did you see him, Mr Tropinin? Did you have a meeting with him as you are now having one with us?’
The little man held his hand up. ‘I told you I had one thing to say. That was it, I cannot tell you anything else.’
‘Do you know why Mr Martin came to St Petersburg? Can you tell us that much?’
‘I have nothing further to say.’
‘Do you know if he succeeded in his mission, whatever that was, Mr Tropinin?’ This was Powerscourt’s last throw.
‘I cannot help you. I have nothing more to say.’
Lord Francis Powerscourt was standing on the roof of the Stroganov Palace at twelve o’clock on Sunday morning, wearing an enormous borrowed coat in dark grey that brushed the ground as he walked. He liked to think it had belonged to some military man in the distant past, a campaigning Shaporov perhaps, commanding the artillery in battles long ago and far away. On his head he wore a thick Shaporov Russian hat. Beside him, Mikhail was wearing a similar coat and had two very expensive pairs of binoculars wrapped round his neck. By his side, wearing the warmest coat and gloves that London’s Jermyn Street could provide, stood Rupert de Chassiron, Secretary to the British Embassy, who had been invited to share the view and the spectacle from the top of the palace. The three men had come to watch the great march of workers that was going to set out from different points of the city and converge on Palace Square, site of the Tsar’s residence, the Winter Palace, where their leader, Father Georgy Gapon, was to hand in a proclamation to the Tsar. While they waited for the marchers to appear, Mikhail told Powerscourt about his recruitment of Natasha and her news from the palace about the boredom and the rituals and the vanishing eggs and the sick little boy.
Below them, diminutive people strolled along the Nevskii Prospekt in their Sunday best. Late worshippers were going in to a service at the Kazan Cathedral to their right, a favourite place for prayer and meditation of the Empress Alexandra. The trams rolled on their tracks towards the Alexander Nevskii Monastery. On their immediate left was the Moyka river and beyond that the great expanse of Palace Square flanked by the General Staff Building, the Hermitage and the Winter Palace, the winter sun glistening off its golden domes. Across the frozen Neva, slightly to the north, the forbidding Fortress of Peter and Paul, burial ground of the Romanovs and prison fortress for their enemies. Further round to the north-west, Vasilevsky Island, home to the university and cabbage soup. To the north-east behind the Finland station, the Vyborg side, home to many factories and unimaginable squalor. To the south-west, beyond the Yussupov Palace and the Mariinsky Theatre, lay the Narva Gates, built to commemorate victory over Napoleon, and behind them the Putilov factories where the current wave of strikes began. From all these different districts the great columns of marching people would be snaking their way towards the heart of St Petersburg.
Today, both Mikhail and de Chassiron had told Powerscourt, might be a key date in Russian history.
‘Today could change everything,’ de Chassiron said, waving a hand expansively across the city spread out in front of them, glad to be able to embrace historical change in person. ‘Autocracy could be banished. The will of the people could bring about a constitution. Of course it depends whether the Tsar pays any attention to them. He’s perfectly capable of ignoring the whole thing.’ And with that he screwed his monocle back into his left eye and continued his close inspection of the fashionable ladies down below.
‘I believe that the Tsar is not even in St Petersburg at the moment,’ said Mikhail Shaporov, whose connections with the imperial household were better than most, ‘and I don’t believe he is intending to come here at all today. Quite what the marchers will do when they hand their petition in to the Chief of Protocol rather than the Tsar of All the Russias, I cannot tell you. I dread to think how cross it could make them, unless, of course,’ Mikhail peered over towards the Winter Palace as if the Chief of Protocol might be rehearsing his welcome even now, ‘he manages to convince them that the Tsar is inside and will consider their point of view.’
‘How do you know that, about the Tsar not being here today?’ De Chassiron was on the scent of the source like a bloodhound.
‘I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid,’ said Mikhail cheerfully, ‘but believe me when I say it is totally accurate.’
‘Can I ask you a question, Mikhail?’ said Powerscourt. ‘This palace here, the one we’re standing on, it belongs to one of your cousins, you say?’
‘It does,’ said Mikhail. ‘My mother came from a very large family so I think we are related to half the aristocracy in the city. My father complains that you cannot drink tea in the Yacht Club without falling over three or four relations, all of them asking you for money.’
Powerscourt saw, to his enormous delight, that the mother Shaporov would have to make the acquaintance of Lady Lucy as quickly as possible. They could start comparing notes on numbers of second cousins and impoverished younger sons.
‘And was the Beef Stroganov invented here? That dish with beef and onions and mushrooms and sour cream and so on? Was it so called because the original chef was employed in this palace?’
‘It was named after a General Pavel Alexandrovich Stroganov, of the family of this palace,’ said Mikhail. ‘That must have been about twenty-five years ago. It has made my father very sad.’
‘Why is that?’
‘My father is very competitive. You will see what I mean when you meet him. “Why should this useless family of Stroganov have a dish named after them”, he said, “when they have not done anything for a hundred years except ride their horses and sleep with other people’s wives and drink their vodka? We have done lots of things. We are rich. Why should there not be a Veal Shaporov or something like that?”’
The young man shook his head. ‘It’s all passed now, the obsession for a recipe that would bear the family name. But for a while it was bad, very bad. We had new cooks coming all the time as the old ones whose new recipes did not find favour were thrown out. I was quite young, so I missed out on most of these strange dishes. There was roast chicken with rhubarb and peaches, I remember. Caviar with chestnut and dill sauce. Christ!’
The marchers were intending to meet in Palace Square at two o’clock. In the side streets down below Powerscourt could see groups of soldiers, rubbing their hands together to keep warm, rifles slung across their backs. Some distance away, over by the Admiralty, he could see the cavalry trotting slowly along in perfect formation. What this city needs today, he said to himself, is not soldiers or cavalry but a properly trained detachment of the Metropolitan Police, led by officers with experience in controlling large crowds.
Mikhail was glancing through a roughly printed paper.
‘They’ve written a proclamation, gentlemen, a letter to the Tsar. Would you like to hear some of it?’
Dim memories of great petitions in English history floated across Powerscourt’s brain. The Chartists, hadn’t they marched to London bringing some great petition with innumerable signatures asking for reform? Hadn’t there been a Petition of Right from the Lords and Commons to the King in 1628 that pointed the way to the English Civil War? Not a good omen for the Tsar, Powerscourt thought, King Charles the First in his impeccable white shirt being led to the scaffold outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall.