‘The man Martin,’ Shatilov began, ‘was brought to me here after his interview with the Tsar. He refused to tell me what their discussions were about. He said it was a matter for diplomats, not for secret policemen who weren’t intelligent enough to be employed by the Okhrana.’ That tribute to the intelligence of his staff would have pleased Derzhenov, Powerscourt thought. But he doubted it would have gone down too well in this room with the scarred Major.
‘So what did you do when Mr Martin refused to tell you the nature of his conversations?’ Powerscourt was dangling his gun ostentatiously in the general direction of the Major’s private parts.
‘Well,’ said the Major, glancing down anxiously, ‘we – we thought – we decided to take measures to persuade him to talk.’
Powerscourt took a brief walk up to the end of the table and back, gun in hand, always pointing at Shatilov. ‘What measures?’ he shouted, his face a few inches from the Major.
There was a long gap. Powerscourt wondered if he should start counting again. ‘We beat him,’ whispered the Major.
‘With what?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘The whip.’ Shatilov was virtually inaudible now.
‘Ordinary whip? Or Russian whip?’
‘Russian whip.’ The Major began to whimper now, like an injured child.
Powerscourt hadn’t finished yet. ‘When you say we, Major, do you mean you yourself, or your men or a combination of the two? And if you try to tell a lie I shall pull every last tooth out of your head.’
‘It was me,’ said Shatilov, trying unsuccessfully to rock in his chair.
‘And how long did it go on for?’ asked Powerscourt, feeling waves of pity suddenly for Roderick Martin, owner of Tibenham Grange, lover of Tamara Kerenkova, one of the brightest stars in the bright firmament of the Foreign Office, passing away here under the vicious care of a Russian sadist. He remembered somebody telling him years before that above a certain number of lashes, was it fifty or was it eighty, a victim of the knout would be sure to die. Certainly that death would be a welcome relief.
‘Until he died,’ Shatilov whispered, trying to draw back from Powerscourt.
‘And how long did that take?’ asked Powerscourt sadly, certain that some pedant in the Foreign Office would want to know the answer.
‘Less than half an hour. Maybe twenty minutes? The man must have had a weak heart or something.’
Powerscourt narrowly avoided the temptation to shoot all the Major’s teeth out, one by one. He was nearly finished.
‘And what did you do with his body?’
‘We dumped it on the Nevskii Prospekt and told the police to make a note. Then we put the body through a hole in the ice.’
Somewhere out in the Gulf of Finland, Powerscourt thought, a mutilated body was floating with the fishes. Maybe the weals on Martin’s back might have eased a little after their passage through the salt water. Even now, he felt sure, there would still be enough wounds on the battered corpse to tell whoever might find him, be they Balt or Finn or Estonian, that this man did not have an easy passage to the other side. Martin had served his King and country well. He had kept faith to the end, even at the cost of the most terrible pain. Now Powerscourt understood why they had never known how Martin had died, whether he had been shot or strangled. Shatilov could not let the police report say he had been tortured to death.
Somehow, Mikhail seemed to sense that the interrogation was at an end.
‘What are you going to do with him, Lord Powerscourt? This disgrace here.’ He nodded contemptuously at the figure of Shatilov, whimpering like one who thinks his last hour has come.
‘What indeed?’ said Powerscourt. ‘Part of me would like to kill him here and now. He murdered a compatriot of mine in the most horrible way. He is an appalling human being. I don’t think he deserves to live. But I can’t kill him. I’m not a Russian court or a Russian judge or a Russian court martial, though God knows what any of those would do with him. I’m not a Lord High Executioner.’
‘But your mission here, Lord Powerscourt, the quest to find out what happened to Mr Martin, the nature of his conversations with the Tsar, you know all that now. Your work here is done, is that so?’
‘Who knows?’ said Powerscourt. ‘Sergeant,’ he said to the man from the Black Watch, ‘can you make sure these people are properly tied up? So they won’t escape for days? And gag them so they can’t make a noise,’ he added, thinking incongruously of the victims of Derzhenov’s basement. ‘When you’ve done that, let’s go home.’
15
‘Francis.’ Johnny Fitzgerald had been inspecting the cupboards in and around Shatilov’s quarters and had collected a burglar’s haul of hammers, screwdrivers, spanners, jemmies and other tools. It looked as though he was expecting trouble.
‘There’s something you should know.’
‘What’s that, Johnny?’ asked Powerscourt, his mind still focused on the late Martin.
‘We don’t have a coach any more,’ said Johnny.
‘We don’t have a coach any more?’ replied Powerscourt.
‘We don’t have a coach any more,’ Johnny Fitzgerald repeated. ‘Two of those bastard soldiers stole the horses. And we don’t know where they took them.’
Powerscourt started to laugh. ‘Sorry, I know it’s serious, but I was just thinking of the Ambassador, not the most popular man in the Embassy, having to tell Mrs Ambassador that the coach which used to take her round fashionable Petersburg has disappeared. Is the actual carriage worth keeping?’
‘We’ve hidden it in an outhouse for now,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘But the problem is this. These people we’ve just tied up, the Imperial Guard, Royal Palaces Security Division, whatever they’re called, guard all the roads and all the railways round St Petersburg. If our friend Shatilov is found and released before we get back to the Embassy, we’ll be joining your man Martin as food for the fishes.’
‘What’s the fastest way to get back? Apart from the horses we don’t have?’ Powerscourt was beginning to grapple with this new problem.
It was Ricky Crabbe who provided a possible solution. ‘There’s a goods train coming through at eleven o’clock, my lord, going to St Petersburg. God knows where it ends up. The last passenger train is half an hour after that.’
‘I don’t like goods trains,’ said Powerscourt, who had been locked up in a goods carriage in India for an entire afternoon at the hottest time of year with a herd of incontinent cows for company, ‘but I’m happy to try again if people feel that would be better.’
‘Once you’re in one of those damned carriages,’ said Johnny, ‘you’re a sitting duck. If they lock the humans in like they lock the animals in, you can’t even jump off the bloody train.’
Shortly afterwards a small but determined group were lurking in the shadows at the end of the platform of Tsarskoe Selo station. Johnny Fitzgerald had been making small experiments with his new tools. He disappeared at one stage into a siding full of unwanted carriages. Various grunting and swearing noises announced that he was still of the party. Ricky Crabbe had appropriated a couple of stout bags which he was filling very methodically with large stones. Powerscourt was trying to learn and amplify a basic message in Russian: I am from the British Embassy, we all have diplomatic immunity. Mikhail was assuring him that if he set his mind to it he could be fluent in Russian in six months. The coach driver, saddened by the loss of his vehicle and possibly his livelihood, had taken delivery of a large number of roubles from Powerscourt and set off in search of the missing horses. He said he would be able to buy them back if only he could find the thieves. The sergeant from the Black Watch was looking out at the distant road, waiting to see if the enemy would appear.
The train was late. Local trains in Russia, Mikhail informed Powerscourt, were often late. Powerscourt practised saying I am from the British Embassy, we all have diplomatic immunity to Johnny Fitzgerald but it failed to have any impact.