‘Here we are!’ said de Chassiron suddenly, holding up a battered copy of a railway timetable. ‘There’s an express to Berlin in two and a half hours, Powerscourt, you’ll be able to pick up a connection there easily enough.’
‘Thank you,’ said Powerscourt, his brain a long way away. ‘Could you bear to hold on here for a minute while I compose a message or two for the Foreign Office with Ricky here.’
With that Powerscourt followed the young man into his telegraph room. ‘I have a number of questions and messages for you, Ricky,’ he began. ‘The first is the least important. I presume that if I send a message to the Foreign Office, and you turn it into code, that it could be read at the other end within minutes of arrival?’ Powerscourt was thinking of the Okhrana at this point rather than the Foreign Office.
‘Correct, my lord,’ said Ricky Crabbe.
‘Something like this then,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Terrible news death of Mrs Martin. Returning London via 19.30 to Berlin.’
In less than half a minute, Crabbe had coded the message and sent it off to London.
‘Now then, Ricky, I want to try your secret system to your brother. This message is to be sent to Mr Burke, whose address I am writing for you on this piece of paper. “Returning London because of death of Mrs Martin in mysterious circumstances. Please inform Lady Lucy I leave today, Friday, on the 19.30 from St Petersburg to Berlin. All love, Francis.” There was nothing in the message that needed to be kept secret, but Powerscourt wanted to test this secure channel of communication in case it was needed for more important messages in the future.
‘That’s going to cheer up your wife, my lord, knowing you are coming home.’
‘Never fear, Ricky, I shall be back here very soon. Now I want to ask you about keeping records of the telegraph messages and things like that. I’ve suddenly realized that it could be very important.’
‘Fire ahead, my lord,’ the young man said.
‘When you send messages out, Ricky, do you keep a copy?’
‘I have to, my lord. Normally I have the piece of paper with the original message, handwritten by the Ambassador or Mr de Chassiron. Then I code it, sometimes on the bottom of the same piece of paper, sometimes on a different sheet. The Foreign Office Telegraphy School, my lord, is adamant that all outgoing messages, copies and originals, must be filed.’
‘I’ll come back to that in a moment, if I may. Tell me about the incoming messages.’
‘Same thing, really, my lord. We have to write them down. Sometimes we have to decode them. Other times we can bring the message to the recipient as taken down. But even before I leave this room, I have to make a copy. If the traffic goes on increasing at current rates, my lord, we’re going to have to rent a warehouse to keep all the stuff.’
‘Do you file the messages under subject matter or under day of the month?’
‘Day of the month, my lord, with the subjects subfiled in alphabetic order. Messages from Bucharest ahead of those from Vienna, as it were.’
‘Now then, Ricky, I come to the point. You told me before that it was possible that Mr Martin could have sent a couple of messages out of here when the office was empty. What would have happened to them?’
Ricky Crabbe looked at him keenly. ‘Well, I don’t think he would have left any copies lying around for me to file, my lord. He’d probably stuff the message in his pocket and get rid of it later. As for the far end, it may have gone to the Foreign Office, though if it had they would have surely told you about it, my lord, or to some telegraph office at a local train station or in a town. God knows whether they’d keep copies, probably they would until it had been collected.’
‘And if it had gone to the Foreign Office, would he have sent it in code?’
Ricky Crabbe paused and stared at his machinery. ‘I doubt if he would have sent it in code at all, my lord. He might have done. But not even Mr de Chassiron knows how to use the codes.’ Suddenly Ricky stopped staring at his wires and buttons and turned slightly pale. ‘Do you think, Lord Powerscourt, that he could have sent a message to his wife saying he’d found the Crown Jewels or whatever else he had found out? And because of what he knew, one lot of Russians killed Mr Martin here, and another lot could have killed Mrs Martin in Kent if they knew what was in the message? Or if they tortured poor Mr Martin till he told them what was in the message?’
Powerscourt nodded. ‘Well done, that is indeed what I am wondering. Please don’t tell anybody else about it, Ricky, you were very quick to work that out.’ Powerscourt looked at his watch. An hour and three quarters left before his train. ‘Could I ask you one further favour, Ricky? Could we have a look at the incoming traffic from the Foreign Office over the five days before I came here?’
Ricky pulled a series of files down from his shelves. Once they were properly sorted he read with growing astonishment Sir Jeremiah Reddaway’s very full accounts of the Foreign Office’s efforts to make him change his mind and return to detection. Now for the first time he realized the importance of the visit of Lord Rosebery to Markham Square. One mystery at any rate was solved, even if a whole lot more awaited him in London. General Derzhenov didn’t have battalions of spies lurking behind the trees in Markham Square to know the details of Powerscourt’s visitors come to persuade him out of retirement a month before. He just read Sir Jeremiah’s telegrams.
‘Ricky,’ he said, shaking the young man’s hand, ‘thank you so much for your help. If anything important should happen in my absence, please send a message to Mr Burke on your secure channel with your brother. Don’t go near the Foreign Office. If I need to get in touch with you I’ll go through your brother.’
‘Mr Burke’s office will have the address by now, my lord. Can I say I hope we see you back here soon? And that your mission to Kent is successful?’
Powerscourt wondered if there was a suggestion that his visit to St Petersburg had been unsuccessful. As he walked back to de Chassiron’s room, he decided to write a series of very short letters. He wrote to Mr Bazhenov, Deputy Assistant Under Secretary at the Interior Ministry, to Mr Tropinin, Under Secretary at the Foreign Ministry, to General Derzhenov of the Okhrana in his torturer’s lair on the Fontanka Quai and to Mrs Tamara Kerenkova, onetime mistress of the late Roderick Martin. He informed them as a matter of courtesy that he had been recalled because of the sudden, mysterious death of Mrs Martin. He thanked them for their assistance during his stay and said that he looked forward to renewing their acquaintance on his return. With Mikhail and Natasha he was as optimistic as he dared be in the circumstances.
‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ he said. ‘It may be that the second death makes it much easier to solve the first. Depend upon it, I have often known that happen in the past. Natasha,’ he smiled at her, ‘please take very great care. I know I’ve said it before but I dread to think what might happen to you if they ever found you out, those people at the Alexander Palace. Mikhail, I fear we shall never find the body now, but please keep trying. And if you need to get in touch, Ricky Crabbe has his own methods of reaching me in London.’
‘Why do you think the body will never be found, Lord Powerscourt?’ asked Mikhail.
‘I suspect that somebody doesn’t want us to see what happened to Roderick Martin before he died. He may have been tortured because he wouldn’t tell his captors what they wanted to know. Or he may just have been killed because his captors didn’t want anybody else to know what he knew. Or he may have been killed in frustration because he wouldn’t tell them what he knew. I just don’t know. Martin’s body was left out on the Nevskii Prospekt in the middle of the night and then spirited away. Something tells me that whatever his secret, the people who wanted to find it still haven’t done so. At least one of them, the Okhrana, hope I will lead them to it.’