‘I don’t know. The housekeeper doesn’t know. I’ve nearly finished,’ said Johnny, eyeing his still half-full glass of port. ‘We know she was popular with the locals. We know she was hard up, sometimes very hard up. I don’t think she was mean. We know she was having a relationship of some sort with the Colonel, dead or alive. And . . .’ Johnny paused melodramatically, like the conjurer finally about to produce a hatful of rabbits or the Queen of Sheba, ‘we know that a week or ten days before her death she received a visit from a foreigner. A rather unusual foreigner.’ And Johnny tapped the side of the nose in the manner of the Tibenham residents he had described a few moments ago.
‘Stop teasing, Johnny,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Who was it, Hottentot or Zulu, Afghan or Bedouin?’
‘Russian,’ said Johnny. ‘The lad in the fly brought him to and from the station to Tibenham Grange. When he asked the stranger where he came from – the man was wearing an astrakhan coat, for God’s sake – he said Russia. And then he smiled, apparently.’
‘Pretty big place, Russia,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Any city, by any chance? Kiev? Archangel? Moscow? Minsk? St Petersburg?’
‘I’m afraid he didn’t say and the lad didn’t ask. Pretty remiss of him, but there you are.’
Powerscourt started walking up and down the dining room, running his hand along the backs of the chairs. ‘Damn! Damn! Damn! I hate to say it but the really infuriating thing about this case is that so many people are dead. Both Martins for a start. We can’t ask them a thing.’
‘You know what happens in those circumstances, Francis,’ said Johnny flippantly, ‘there’s one lot of dead people and another lot of live people who want to find out what happened. The live lot send for some investigators to find the answers. That’s why we’re here, Francis, to find out why the other buggers are dead, isn’t it?’
‘Of course, Johnny, you’re right. I’m being stupid,’ said Powerscourt with a smile. ‘But there are so many things a Martin could answer if only they were here. Who was this Russian? What was he doing here? Had he come from the Embassy to offer his condolences? Had he come from the Okhrana with a final message? Or had he come to find out if Mrs Martin had received a message from her husband in St Petersburg? Or was he the spy Martin’s handler in London, come to see Mrs Martin with messages of sympathy and large bundles of cash? I know I’m supposed to be offering suggestions as to what has been going on. I don’t discount the spy theory at all. Maybe the Okhrana asked Martin once he was in St Petersburg to perform some final, unbelievably dangerous act of treachery. He refuses. They kill him and create this smokescreen which has baffled me ever since.’
A disconsolate Powerscourt sat down and began to run his fingers through his hair.
‘Don’t worry, Francis,’ said Lucy, ‘you’ve had cases as difficult as this in the past and you’ve always solved them in the end.’
‘It wouldn’t look too good,’ her husband said bitterly, ‘if I allowed myself to be brought out of retirement for a case I couldn’t solve. I’d be finished then, as an investigator, totally finished and hung out to dry.’
‘Francis, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, leaning over to refill his friend’s glass, ‘you are forgetting one of the most salient facts of this investigation, if you can have a most salient fact. What is that? I hear you ask. Quite simply this. You have been operating on your own. Single. Unaided. Achilles without Patroclus. Aeneas without whatever he’s called, the faithful Achates. Wellington without Blucher at Waterloo. You have not had me at your side to offer sympathy, friendship, intelligence, common sense and alcohol on your journey through this vale of tears. But I am here now. Oh yes, Johnny Fitzgerald is now on the case. So why don’t you make all our lives easier by offering up your thoughts as to what might have happened to the late Roderick Martin. And,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘to his wife, if you have formed any theories yet in that department. You don’t usually wait for the facts to get in the way of the theories.’
Powerscourt smiled. Lady Lucy felt relieved and stood up to give her husband a quick kiss on the cheek. ‘When you’re ready, Francis,’ she said, ‘we’re ready when you are.’
‘I said earlier,’ Powerscourt began, ‘that I would speculate about what has been going on in this case. I don’t think I feel capable of speculation yet, so what I would like to offer you are some questions to which I don’t know the answers.’ He gazed at Lady Lucy, suddenly realizing that the shape of her mouth and her chin were identical to those of their twin daughter Juliet. He found the thought cheering, knowing that a partial replica of Lucy would be at large in the world long after the original had gone.
‘Question Number One,’ he said, Lady Lucy fascinated to see that he was not, for once, emphasizing his point by tapping the index finger of one hand into the palm of the other, ‘may seem obscure, but it would help enormously if we knew the answer. Why did Martin not tell his mistress Tamara Kerenkova that he was coming to St Petersburg? He had always told her before. Why not this time? It was, after all, about to be the season for balls and dancing, even if the balls were not as magnificent as in years gone by on account of the Tsar not providing any entertainment because of the war with Japan. Did Martin know that her husband was in St Petersburg? But then that didn’t seem to have bothered either of them before. Has anybody any suggestions?’
‘Is it possible,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘that Martin had broken it off as you implied earlier? He promised his wife he would not see her and he kept to his word.’
‘And surely it’s equally possible,’ said Johnny, ‘that her husband did not know about any giving up on Martin’s part. Kerenkov killed him. He told the local police about the body and then his naval friends made it disappear. Isn’t it possible that we’re not dealing with high politics at all, Francis, but with the old story of the revenge of the jilted husband?’
‘Perfectly possible,’ agreed Powerscourt, ‘but that wouldn’t explain the interest of the Russian secret service in Martin and his movements. The biggest unanswered question is Martin’s meeting with the Tsar. Who arranged it? The British? Possibly. Or the Tsar? What in God’s name were they talking about that was so sensitive it had to bypass the Ambassador and the diplomats and the diplomatic protocol and the diplomatic bag? Military matters? Something to do with the naval conflict in the Far East? Were the British offering to break their treaty with the Japanese and ally themselves with the Russians? Unlikely, I should have thought. Were the British looking to extend their alliance with France to include France’s ally, Russia? The normal channels might be a trifle stormy just now after the sinking of those fishing boats, but the Tsar could take a long view. He needs all the allies he can get against his cousin Willy in Berlin, after all.’
‘Why are you so sure it had to do with high politics, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy.
‘Because,’ he replied quickly, ‘I can’t think what else it might have been. The Tsar doesn’t need a man like Martin to get him an invitation to Cowes Week or to Ascot. He’s got teams of flunkeys to look after that side of things. If his wife wants some more furniture, they’ll send for a man from Maples, not a man from the Foreign Office. And it looks as if Martin was sent from London on a mission which included, or perhaps mainly consisted of, seeing the Tsar. I’m sure it had to do with politics, Lucy.’
‘And the third question, Francis?’ Lady Lucy was well used to questions in her husband’s investigations that came in numbers now, numbers sometimes quite small, unrolling themselves like the platforms in some great railway station, on other occasions growing into large numbers that taxed her ability with figures.
‘I think,’ Powerscourt began, ‘that the last question has to do with the inability of the various bits of the Russian bureaucracy to agree with each other. Why weren’t they all singing the same tune about Martin’s death? Why didn’t the Foreign Ministry know about Martin’s previous visits to St Petersburg? Come to that, why didn’t the Okhrana? I think there may be a perfectly simple explanation that has to do with the nature of bureaucracies whether they’re in modern Russia or ancient Rome. They’re all competing with each other in a spirit of Darwinian struggle if not for the survival of the fittest, then certainly to be the part of the system with the best information for their master. De Chassiron told me that all sorts of the imperial protection units had their elite corps looking after the Tsar, the police, the household troops, the customs, the navy and so on. One of them is going to know what happened to Martin, I’m certain of it. As to which one, I simply haven’t a clue.’