Death Comes to the Ballets Russes (33 page)

‘Richard Wagstaff Gilbert has been married. He married a girl called Katie Shore in a village called Blexham when he was in his twenties. He’ll deny it, mind you. He keeps it very secret. That’s all. I don’t know if he has had any children with this Katie. Wouldn’t those mothers and aunts just love to know?’

Powerscourt was looking forward to his visit to the chess club. He knew who most of the visitors would be. Scholars toiling during the hours of daylight to produce the definitive history of the English Civil War; imperial propagandists scribbling away on the divine providence that gave England her great empire beyond the seas; revolutionary foreigners, surrounded by the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, producing the definitive blueprint for revolution today or tomorrow, crackpots bent on proving that the descendants of Alfred the Great had settled in Weybridge and were awaiting the call to arms to save England from her troubles. When darkness fell in winter, or when the museum closed in the summer, a number of these citizens, supplemented by some mathematically minded civilians no doubt, crossed the road to the chess club in Great Russell Street.

There was a sullen porter at the door. Powerscourt was shown into a large room where there were no overhead lights. On each of the twenty chess tables was a lamp, lit if a match was in progress. One hundred and sixty pawns, forty castles, knights and bishops and twenty queens were ready for action to defend their king.

‘Where’s the manager, please?’ Powerscourt addressed the nearest player, who looked like a schoolteacher fled from his marking and his preparations. He moved a knight forward to what looked to Powerscourt like a dangerously exposed position. He himself had given up chess since Thomas began defeating him every time at the age of twelve.

‘In the office. Down there at the back.’

The office was small and looked out across all the various battlefields.

‘Got to keep an eye on what’s going on,’ said the manager. ‘We had a fight in here the other day about a disputed castling. Morgan’s the name, by the way, James Morgan.’

‘My name is Powerscourt. I am an investigator. I am looking into some strange circumstances at the Ballets Russes.’

‘And how can we help you here? We offer recreation for the mind of a different kind to the Ballets Russes, but there must be some similarities.’

Powerscourt brought out a publicity photograph of Alfred Bolm and showed it to the manager.

‘This man here, Alfred Bolm, does he come here at all?’

The manager looked at Bolm as if he were an old friend. ‘Why, it’s Mr Bolm. I didn’t know he was in the middle of his dancing days. He came here last summer, certainly, and he has been here three or four times this year.’

‘Is he a good player, the dancing Mr Bolm?’

‘Well, he’s good by our standards, he can beat most of the ordinary players here, but he’s not very good by Russian standards. Most of them – and we have about half a dozen here – can beat Mr Bolm quite easily. Calm
down over there! Calm down, for God’s sake, or I’ll have you expelled!’

A couple of foreign-looking players at a table by the corner were on the verge of a fight.

‘Tell me, Mr Morgan, was there anything unusual about Mr Bolm? Did he play with anybody in particular?’

‘Well, there is one thing. He’s been in a couple of times with the same chap – they’ve signed in and paid their dues in the normal way. Mr Bolm always brings a briefcase with him. I’d say his partner was Russian, probably, with one of those little beards they go in for and a cap pulled down over the eyes.’

‘And you didn’t notice anything unusual about their game?’ said Powerscourt.

‘Not really, no.’

Before he left, Powerscourt scribbled his address in Mr Morgan’s client book and asked to be kept informed about any further visits from Mr Alfred Bolm. Particularly ones where his companion was the same Russian as before.

Blexham is one of a multitude of English villages that have no claim to fame whatsoever. Its bulls win no prizes at agricultural shows. Its football team languishes at the bottom of its league. Even its wives and mothers win no awards for cakes or prize puddings. Its sons and daughters have brought no national renown in good works or politics or anything else back to adorn their village. It lies along a lengthy street with a couple of shops at one end, the pub – the Laughing Cow – in the middle and the church at the other end.

Powerscourt decided the church might provide a better chance than the pub, as this was late afternoon and the regulars were presumably still out in their fields. He found the vicar puzzling over the church accounts in his vestry.

‘Powerscourt? Lord Francis Powerscourt, did you say?’ The Reverend William Fortescue must have been in his late sixties, with white hair and very thick glasses. ‘Forgive me, but a little Irish genealogy is a hobby of mine. Would I be right in thinking that you sold Powerscourt House to a member of a big brewing family some years ago?’

‘You are correct, vicar. I am married to a lady called Lucy and we have four children, if that helps in your researches at all?’

‘That is very kind of you.’ The vicar pointed to his account books, full of details of church restoration and money for the repair of damaged tombstones. ‘They used to balance, these books – what came in, what went out; but the population has dropped so much our income must have gone down; fewer weddings, virtually no baptisms, a lot of funerals. You can’t ask a lot for funerals. Enough of our troubles here. How can I help you today?’

‘I am looking into some strange goings-on at the Ballets Russes in London. As part of that investigation, we need some information about a man called Richard Wagstaff Gilbert, currently resident in Barnes in London. We believe he got married here some years ago.’

‘I won’t ask you why you are interested in this gentleman. That would be presumptuous. What age did you say he was?’

The Reverend Fortescue moved over to a shelf with large dark red ledgers labelled ‘Births, Marriages and Deaths’.

‘He is now in his sixties, must have been born in the eighteen fifties. We’re not, you’ll be relieved to hear, in quest of a baptism; only a wedding, which would have happened round about the eighteen seventies, if our man was typical of the time – though people in real life never are, in my experience.’

‘This volume here starts at eighteen seventy, Lord Powerscourt. Perhaps we could begin our search here.’

Powerscourt wondered, as the vicar riffled through his pages, if all candidates for ordination for the Church of England had to take handwriting classes. For the writing was excellent, even as vicars came and vicars went.

‘They say Blexham is a coming up and going down sort of place,’ the Reverend Fortescue said, peering through his pages. ‘The Bishop or the Dean or whoever sits in those glorious seats in the choir at Salisbury Cathedral up the road, sometimes they give it to a young man on the way up, his first parish – as it were; and then they give it to somebody on his way down, the last parish in a man’s career. That’s me.’

Powerscourt saw that his eyes read the entries a lot quicker than the vicar’s as generations of Blexham hopefuls, Grants and Smiths and Hoopers and Farmers joined their lives together in Holy Matrimony. But of a Shore and a Gilbert there was as yet no sign.

The year eighteen hundred and seventy-six contained what they were looking for, a Katie Shore married to a Richard Gilbert. There were the usual attendant signatories. The vicar sounded relieved but tired.

‘There we are, my lord, I’m so glad to have been able to find it for you. It wouldn’t do to disappoint a member of the Powerscourt family.’

‘I’m sorry to have to trouble you further, vicar, but could we check the births and the deaths register for the few years after?’

‘Of course. It’s likely that they moved away, mind you. A lot of people of their age moved away to Salisbury, or even to London to look for work that wasn’t based on agriculture. That’s why our local population keeps falling.’

An hour later, Powerscourt decided to call it a day. The unfortunate Sergeant Jenkins could begin his work at Somerset House at the year 1882, when Gilbert should have been thirty years of age.

‘You could look in the graveyard here, if you like, Lord Powerscourt. I just hand over the money to the man who tidies up the grass and props up the falling headstones. I don’t think I’ve ever read the names, now I think of it. There’s enough to do, looking after the living.’

Powerscourt did indeed check on the headstones, the same names coming to meet him that he had seen born, married and buried in the register. If the little church of St Michael and All Angels Blexham had any secrets about the family of Richard Wagstaff Gilbert, it was keeping them close to its heart.

Captain Yuri Gorodetsky didn’t have to wait for his master to speak this time. The General came straight on the line when he placed the call.

‘Gorodetsky, you idler, what is going on in your neck
of the woods? What news of the Bolsheviks of Bethnal Green? What are the bastards up to now?’

‘Nothing is happening here, General. The Bolshevik money remains in the capitalist bank in the City of London. There is absolutely no sign of any plans to move it just yet.’

‘And the printer you wrote to me about, the rogue, overcharging like that? You’d think that an outfit dedicated to the equality of man could at least offer a decent price, rather than an exorbitant one for running off a few pamphlets. No intelligence there yet, I suppose. And what do our English colleagues have to say for themselves? I find it hard to believe that there is no activity at all.’

‘They pay their informers well, as always, the English. They’ve had years of experience doing that. They say things do turn quiet sometimes. The comrades go about the place doing their work and recruiting for the cause. They still have the occasional meeting to rally support. I think they may be waiting for instructions about Lenin’s pamphlet. I can’t believe a number of those won’t be left behind for the believers in Bethnal Green.’

‘I have news for you, Captain, but you must keep it a secret. I am not meant to know myself. I only found out about it by accident and I don’t propose to let you in on how I came across it.’

Most people lower their voices when speaking of secrets. General Peter Kilyagin raised his as far as it would go, so the Captain had to hold the instrument away from him.

‘Headquarters, that’s St Petersburg Okhrana, have sent a man to England. They sent him some time ago
– how long, I do not know. His mission is known only to a select few at the very top of the Okhrana. I know nothing about the details of his mission.’

‘But why, General, why are we sending one of our top men to London? Why not to Berlin or Hamburg or Wilhelmshaven or one of those naval construction places?’

‘Don’t be absurd, Gorodetsky! Are you expecting our masters to behave rationally? Anybody who has spent time in the domestic department of the Okhrana knows only too well the fantastic lengths the revolutionaries will go to in order to blow up a train or a bridge. Their minds – I’ve always believed this – are shaped by that experience of bombs and explosions and they take it with them into the foreign service.’