He continued searching. The twins looked slightly less hopeful than before. ‘They must be down here in this corner, behind their mother’s present,’ he went on. ‘No, they’re not there either. They must be on the other side.’ The twins were beginning to look rather anxious. Maybe their Papa had forgotten to put the presents in the bag. Lady Lucy was trying very hard not to smile.
‘They’re not that big, well, they’re not that small either. Could they have slipped out of the bag when I put it on the luggage rack? That carriage must be halfway to Dover now if it goes back the way it came.’
Visions of new possessions they had not yet seen heading back all the way to St Petersburg appalled the twins. They looked at each other sadly. Their faces fell. If he had been heartless, Powerscourt might have wanted to place a bet on which one would burst into tears first.
‘Hold on!’ he said with the air of a man remembering at last where he has buried the treasure. ‘I know what’s happened. They’re stuck between Thomas and Olivia’s presents!’ One final delve into the bag which might, Lady Lucy thought, have indicated to a cynical observer that Powerscourt knew all along where the presents were, and he produced two packages cocooned in thick brown paper.
‘Oh dear,’ he said, looking at the expectant faces of his children, ‘I’m not quite sure which one is for which child.’ He began feeling the presents. The twins were growing more impatient by the second. Then something seemed to make his mind up. ‘This one is for you, Juliet, and this one is for you, Christopher.’
There followed the normal rending and tearing sounds as the paper was ripped to shreds and thrown on the floor. Juliet had a wooden doll with four smaller dolls inside. Christopher had a Russian Imperial Guardsman in full battle kit, a defiant moustache emphasizing his superiority. Powerscourt would not have confessed to anybody in the world that he had actually bought the things at Berlin Lichtenberg station. But his present for Lucy had been purchased at a very fashionable shop on the Nevskii Prospekt itself.
‘I must go to Kent, my love,’ said Powerscourt, looking at his watch and at the twins who appeared to be arranging an assignation between the smallest of the dolls and the guardsman. ‘I was going to give you this tonight, but with all these presents going round . . .’
He handed Lucy a rectangular parcel, a book well covered in stout wrapping paper and string. There was a drawing of a very beautiful woman on the cover. The writing was in Russian. Lucy looked at him.
‘I know it’s in Russian, my love,’ said Powerscourt gently, ‘but I don’t think it will matter when you know what it is. That,’ he nodded reverentially at the book, ‘is a first edition of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Do you remember you used to have that coat I called your Anna Karenina coat when we first met? I remember meeting you wearing it one day in St James’s Square. ’
Lucy flicked through the pages, pausing now and then to look at the illustrations. ‘Oh, Francis!’ was all she could say. ‘Oh, Francis!’
The road down to Tibenham Grange was steep, twisting and turning its way through the woods. Powerscourt noticed two other dwellings on the way down. At the bottom of the hill was a large lawn, big enough for croquet or tennis, with a lake on a raised level behind it. To the left was the house itself, a near perfect medieval moated manor house, described by some historians, Powerscourt recalled, as one of the finest of its sort in England. As he paid off his cab, arranging for a pick-up at six thirty to return to the station, he saw a tubby police constable of middling years eyeing him suspiciously.
‘This house is closed to visitors at present,’ the constable said, ‘even to architects. Especially to architects.’
‘I’m not one of those,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully, drawing on long years of experience with the various layers of the police force. ‘My name is Powerscourt. I’m an investigator. I believe the Foreign Office will have told Inspector Clayton I’m coming.’
‘My apologies, sir, forgive me, please. Constable Watchett at your service, sir. I’ll bring you to the Inspector now, sir.’ Watchett led Powerscourt over a stone footbridge that crossed the moat. ‘I don’t hold with these houses with water all around them myself,’ said the constable, glancing down into the depths. ‘Damp must come in something rotten and everyone knows damp can be bad for houses, very bad.’
Constable Watchett shook his head as he showed Powerscourt into an elegant library, divided into sections by bays of bookshelves set at right angles to the windows. The Inspector was at the far end. He was a tall, thin Inspector with a slight limp as he made his way down the library to greet his visitor. His hair was a light brown and his cheerful blue eyes showed that his calling had not yet completely destroyed his faith in human nature. ‘Andrew Clayton, Lord Powerscourt,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘What a pleasure to meet you at last! I trust you have recovered from your journey.’
‘Well recovered, thank you,’ said Powerscourt, staring intently at the young man. ‘Delighted to make your acquaintance. Have we met somewhere before?’
‘Only by reputation, my lord,’ said the Inspector, ‘in South Africa. I was wounded rather badly in a skirmish during your time there. Our colonel said that if it hadn’t been for the intelligence provided by your department, we would have all been killed. I joined the police force after that.’
‘I’m sure it was nothing,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Quite soon we must have a long talk about South Africa, but for the moment, as you know at least as well as I do, we have urgent business.’
‘Of course,’ said Clayton, leading the way back to his end of the library. He pointed out a comfortable armchair next to his own. ‘Could I make a suggestion, Lord Powerscourt? My first inspector, when I was a humble sergeant, used to lay enormous stress on organizing the evidence, such as it was, in chronological order. D follows C which follows B which follows A, he used to say. It got rather monotonous after a couple of cases, but still. I know the Foreign Office have an interest in this death here, my lord, and I know you have been in St Petersburg looking into the passing of this poor lady’s husband. So perhaps you could tell me first about the Russian end, as it were, and then I can take it up from here.’
‘Very good,’ said Powerscourt and paused momentarily to organize his thoughts. He left nothing out: the despatch of Martin on his ultra secret mission to St Petersburg with only the Prime Minister knowing the purpose of his visit; Martin’s late night meeting with the Tsar shortly before his death; the discovery of his body by a police station which later denied all knowledge of him or his corpse; the Foreign Ministry’s conviction that he had never been in St Petersburg at all; the Interior Ministry’s knowledge not only of his current but of his previous visits in earlier years; the sinister presence of the Okhrana with its torture chambers in the basement of the Fontanka Quai and its master’s collection of sadistic paintings in the Hermitage; Martin’s mistress in exile out in the country who remembered her dancing days with Mr Martin in years gone by and whose husband told her he was coming to the city yet again. He threw in, almost as an afterthought, the telegraph messages decoded by the Okhrana and his own possession of a secret channel outside their knowledge. He spoke of his inability to decide if Martin was killed because of what he knew, or because he wouldn’t say what he knew and therefore had to die in case that information passed into the wrong hands; of his uncertainty over whether Martin had sent any telegrams, and if so, to whom; of the complete absence of the body of the dead Martin.
‘I don’t envy you that lot, my lord,’ said Clayton. ‘May I ask one very silly question from a country policeman in Kent not used to the ways of the big cities?’
‘Please do,’ said Powerscourt.