Powerscourt took a sip of his tea and fingered a long thin biscuit. ‘Well, Miss Bobrinsky,’ he began.
‘Please call me Natasha,’ said the girl with a smile that could have launched a few hundred ships or more on the route to windy Ilium. ‘Miss Bobrinsky makes me sound like a governess or an old maid.’
‘I’m sure that any family in Europe,’ now it was Powerscourt’s turn to smile a pedestrian, humdrum smile that could scarcely have launched a rowing boat, ‘would be overjoyed to have you as daughter or governess, Natasha. However, let me return to Mr Martin.’ He took a mouthful of biscuit and stared earnestly into the fire.
‘I can think of any number of reasons why Mr Martin should have come to St Petersburg in those earlier years,’ he began. ‘He could have had a second wife here. I do not imagine the authorities in St Petersburg check with the authorities in London to ask whether a man has been married before. Or he could have had a relationship with a woman here and not been married to her. He could have had a child or children with either of the above and come to visit them. He could, more fancifully, have been a devotee of Russian church music and come here at Easter and the other times to satisfy his passion. In case you think that is unlikely,’ he turned and smiled at Mikhail and Natasha, ‘I was once involved with a case in England where a man wrongly arrested for murder was going round the cathedrals of England attending Evensong, or Vespers as I think it would be called in the Orthodox rite.’
‘How many did he get through?’ asked Mikhail.
‘How many services? Or how many cathedrals? Same thing, really,’ Powerscourt replied. ‘I think it was about seventeen. He was over halfway through. Anyway, on another tack, our friend Martin could have been here because of gambling debts. I gather people here do gamble in rather a big way, palaces, estates, entire stables wagered away in the course of an evening. Perhaps he ran up enormous sums and came back when he could to pay them off. I know it sounds unlikely, but I don’t think it’s impossible. Then there’s blackmail. Perhaps he was being blackmailed and came back at these intervals to settle another tranche of his debt.’
Natasha was entranced. Mikhail had told her Powerscourt was clever. Now, she felt, he was trailing his brain in front of the two of them like a matador with his cloak in the bull ring.
‘Perhaps,’ Powerscourt went on, unaware that he had been despatched to the Plaza del Toros in Pamplona or Madrid on what might prove to be his last mission, ‘ though even I think this is unlikely, perhaps he had Russian ancestry somewhere and had come to search for his past. Perhaps there was a great fortune, some vast estates maybe, waiting way out there beyond the snows and the route of the Trans-Siberian. Or, more sinister of all, perhaps Roderick Martin was a spy. A spy not for the British but for the Russians. Perhaps he came here to report back on his previous period of treachery in the service of the King Emperor and to be briefed for the months ahead in his service of the Tsar of All the Russias. Perhaps the confusion between the ministries about whether Martin was here or not was caused by the fact that only one of them knew he was a spy. The rest thought he was what he said he was, an English diplomat. Perhaps, and this is my last thought, Martin was a kind of conduit for messages that were too important or too sensitive to go through normal diplomatic channels. There is little diplomacy that does not have its back channels, secret routes for the passing of information. Maybe Martin, according to these dates, had been doing this dangerous work for years.’
As Powerscourt stopped Mikhail gave him a loud cheer and Natasha leant over and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Bravo, Lord Powerscourt! A tour de force!’
‘Superb,Lord Powerscourt!’ The laughter rang out across the Great Drawing Room. Powerscourt suddenly felt the world was a better place and that he was a younger man.
‘We have been thinking while you were away,’ said Mikhail earnestly, still smiling, ‘and we have two suggestions.’ Powerscourt was glad there had been time for thought in his absence. ‘You have a photograph of Mr Martin, maybe two or three, I think,’ the young man went on.
‘I have half a dozen, I believe,’ said Powerscourt.
‘With one or two of them,’ said Mikhail, ‘Natasha and I will go to the Yacht Club and ask around. I think we just have to say he is a relative of ours who has gone missing. But everyone who is anybody in St Petersburg goes there. We will spend several days there and see what we can find.’
‘And the other thought?’ said Powerscourt, admiring the slight flush in Natasha’s cheeks from the fire.
‘That involves my granny,’ said Natasha happily. ‘I think you’d better come along too, Lord Powerscourt. I’m sure my granny would approve of you. You see, at the times we have for Mr Martin’s presence in St Petersburg, at the start of the year, those are the great times for balls and parties. All of St Petersburg gets involved. Almost everyone attends one of these balls or soirees or supper parties or dancing parties or whatever they are called. My granny must be the only person in Russia who has attended every single function for years and years and years. And she never forgets a face, never. The only slight problem,’
Natasha began to giggle rather disloyally here, ‘is that now her memory is beginning to go. So, she’ll say of course I know who he is, I met him at the Oblonskys’ in ’95. But it may take some time to remember the name nowadays. I think we’d better give her plenty of notice before we go and see her so she can get her thoughts in order.’
‘I look forward to meeting her,’ said Powerscourt, wondering if Natasha’s granny had been a beauty in her youth. ‘This all sounds very promising.’
‘I’m not sure, you know,’ said Mikhail seriously. ‘This will only work if Mr Martin moved in our sort of world. What happens if he didn’t, Lord Powerscourt?’
‘We’ll just have to wait and see,’ said Powerscourt.
‘And there’s something I forgot.’ Natasha Bobrinsky looked very serious all of a sudden. ‘I thought of it on the way here. Lord Powerscourt, Mikhail told you about the missing Faberge Easter eggs, the Trans-Siberian Railway egg and the Danish Palaces egg?’
‘He did,’ said Powerscourt. ‘What of them?’
‘Somebody said the other day that they’d both gone abroad.’
‘Just abroad? Not London? Not Paris or Rome or New York?’
‘Just abroad,’ said Natasha. ‘Do you think they could have been trying to send somebody some sort of a message?’
For the next three days visitors to St Petersburg’s most fashionable location, the Imperial Yacht Club, were greeted at some point during their stay by Mikhail, or Natasha when she could get away, or occasionally both together, asking if, by any chance, they recollected meeting the person in the photograph. It was, they assured their victims, a question of an inheritance, a rather large inheritance, always a subject dear to an aristocrat’s heart. Powerscourt was invited in from time to time to witness these encounters and was most impressed with the seriousness with which the young people took to their task. They worked well in harness, Mikhail taking all the women and Natasha taking all the men. Mikhail would look at the women with great devotion, Natasha managed to give the impression that she, in person, might form part of the inheritance.
Powerscourt regretted that he did not have a wider choice of photograph. The Foreign Office had been in such a hurry to send him to St Petersburg that he had accepted the first clutch of photographs he had been offered. They were identical. They all showed Martin in a rather nondescript suit, with an undistinguished shirt and a dreary-looking tie with a stain near the top of it. He was seated in a garden chair with a wide expanse of lawn behind him. Powerscourt happened to know that the lawn was the lawn of Martin’s house, Tibenham Grange, in Kent. Had the photographer turned his subject round one hundred and eighty degrees, the spectator would have seen the moat, the fifteenth-century square building, the little tower, maybe from the right angle, the tiny courtyard within. Tibenham Grange was one of the finest small moated houses in England, much praised by the American novelist Henry James when he came to stay. With the Grange behind him, Martin would have looked like a man of substance, a man of discernment in his choice of property, possibly even a little eccentric to have bought such an ancient specimen in a modern age of continual progress towards a better world. But with the anonymous lawn behind him, he could have been a civil servant or, perhaps, a local government official in the lower ranks.