‘And do you think, Lord Powerscourt, that this conversation we have just had will make it easier for you to catch the murderer?’
Powerscourt noted that the conversation had now reverted to the past tense. He did not tell the Tsar that he believed his best chance of finding the murderer still lay in the three or four hours immediately after this interview.
‘I do, sir, and I am most grateful to you for your time and your patience in listening to my theories.’
‘I wish you good luck in your inquiries, Lord Powerscourt. Perhaps we shall meet again some day.’
‘I hope so, sir, I sincerely hope so.’
The interview was at an end. The symphony in gold braid and the footman with the plumed hat collected Powerscourt and the rest of the party and escorted them to their carriage. The symphony wished them Good Evening. The plumed hat bowed slightly at the departing foreigners. Not too near the palace, probably just outside the park, Powerscourt expected the carriage to be stopped and that he and Mikhail would be taken away. This was the gamble he had taken when he sent his message to the Embassy about being in a position to solve the mystery of Martin’s death inside a week. Whatever happened to Martin had happened after he left the Tsar. Somewhere between Tsarskoe Selo and St Petersburg he had been killed.
They heard their adversaries before they saw them, a rattle of horses’ hooves hurrying across the snow. Then a party of six men came into view, all in some elaborate Russian army uniform Powerscourt didn’t recognize, all with rifles slung across their backs, the leader with a pistol in his left hand. Powerscourt remembered an old army instructor telling him years before that left-handed shots had to be treated with great care as they were often more accurate than right-handers.
‘You!’ the left-hander barked at the coachman. ‘Follow us.’ A very young soldier took his place beside the coachman on the box seat and stuck a gun in his ribs.
‘What do you think is going to happen now, Francis?’ whispered Johnny Fitzgerald.
‘I think they’re going to haul me off for questioning, Johnny. If they take me on my own that probably means it’s Derzhenov. He doesn’t need an interpreter. If they want Mikhail to come too, it’s a different collection. Whatever happens, I don’t think it’s going to be good for my retirement prospects to stay with these gentlemen long, whoever they may be.’
The coach had turned out of the park and was now passing down the main street of the village. At the very end of the built-up area they turned left into the grounds of a rather dilapidated house. Faint lights could be seen in a room on the ground floor. The paint seemed to be peeling from the pillars by the front door. There was some discussion between the men who had captured them. Then Powerscourt and Mikhail were ordered out of the carriage and marched roughly into the house. Four men stayed on guard by the coach, scowling at the English and smoking strong-smelling cigarettes.
Powerscourt and Mikhail were shown into what had once been a handsome room with high ceilings and sash windows. There were a couple of battered armchairs in the middle of the room. Two wooden chairs had been placed in front of a rickety table at the opposite end from the window. Powerscourt noticed to his dismay that there were a number of stout sticks and a couple of Russian knouts or whips lying casually in the corner of the room. Opposite the chairs was a pale officer in his mid-forties with a great scar running down the lower side of his face. Most people, Powerscourt thought, would have grown a beard to hide the injury. Not this man. He flaunted it like a badge of honour. His hair was grey and his eyes were a dull brown.
‘Major Andrey Shatilov of the Imperial Guard, Royal Palaces Security Division,’ he said crisply.
‘Lord Francis Powerscourt, attached to His Majesty’s Foreign Office,’ Powerscourt replied, ‘Mr Mikhail Shaporov of the Shaporov Bank, acting as my translator. Pray explain to us why we have been taken prisoner in this fashion. I shall report this to my Ambassador here.’
Powerscourt wondered suddenly if the world of conventional diplomacy, with its notes and its niceties, its protocols and its levees, was somehow alien even in St Petersburg. Peter the Great may have been trying to civilize a nation when he built his capital here on this isolated spot, but after two hundred years he still had not succeeded. These people here, the Major with his scar and the rough soldiery outside, belonged to some alien world, the world of the peasants perhaps, tucked away in the great empty vastness of Russia with only their women and their violence for company. Russian generals, he remembered, had always been careless with the lives of their men. There were so many of them, endless reservoirs to make up the numbers when the first drafts had perished.
Shatilov’s voice was crisp. ‘It is not for you to inquire why you have been taken into temporary custody by the local authorities here, Powerscourt or whatever you say your name is.’
Powerscourt said nothing. Two of Shatilov’s thugs were lounging on the chairs in the middle of the room. One of them was fiddling with a very long piece of rope.
‘My request is quite simple,’ Shatilov said, managing to imbue even those innocent-sounding words with a charge of venom. ‘All you have to do is to tell me the nature of your conversation with the Tsar.’
Powerscourt paused for a moment. ‘Don’t translate this bit,’ he said to Mikhail, speaking very fast, ‘I want to make him lose his temper. My conversation with the Tsar was confidential,’ he went on more slowly. ‘It is not my business to tell you of his business any more than it would be for me to tell you of any discussions I might have with my King in London. What right do you think you have to make such a request?’
Shatilov was beginning to warm up nicely, Powerscourt thought. His fingers began strumming on the table.
‘Those of us in charge of the security of the imperial family are entitled to know all of his conversations! All of them. For his own safety! Now will you please tell me the nature of your conversation!’
Powerscourt wondered suddenly what would happen if it became known that the Tsar was planning to send his children abroad. It would say, as surely as if he had signed a proclamation, that he was not in control of events, that he had lost faith in the ability of his regime to protect his children. The Emperor himself would be announcing that he has no clothes. The myths and facade of autocracy, built up over nearly three hundred years of Romanov rule, would vanish like mist on a summer morning. Maybe the monarchy would fall and the Tsar would have to follow his family to England to stick family photographs into English albums and watch an English sea lapping at an English coast. The alternative, of course, might be worse, the Tsar’s children blown into minute fragments by a terrorist bomb, or murdered in their beds. It was, they had said to him in London before he left, a matter of vital national importance. Well, Powerscourt thought, looking absently at the Major’s scar, it certainly was for Tsar Nicholas the Second. And for King Edward the Seventh? The presence of the Tsar’s family in England would surely lead to an alliance with Great Britain. Confronted by the vast forces of France, Russia and the British, surely even the Kaiser would not risk a war, particularly when those other English-speakers, the Americans, might join the battle on the side of the Allies. A matter of vital national importance in London as it was in St Petersburg.
‘I would like you to tell me about a different conversation, Major Shatilov, a conversation you had, possibly in this very room, with a predecessor of mine, a man called Martin who came to St Petersburg, who saw the Tsar on a Wednesday evening, and who was found dead on the Nevskii Prospekt later that night or very early the next morning. Did you come across Mr Martin, Major? Did he perhaps sit in this very room with you and your thugs?’
There was a quick muttering from the pair in the chairs. ‘I know little or nothing of this man Martin,’ said Shatilov. ‘I repeat, before my patience runs out, tell me what happened with the Tsar!’ He looked meaningfully at the whips in the corner.