Death on the Nevskii Prospekt (19 page)

‘De Chassiron,’ said Powerscourt, knowing that there was limited time to get any sense out of his colleague, ‘I’ve got to send a message to London, to Lord Rosebery and
the Foreign Office. How do I do that?’

‘All messages to London have to be cleared by Head of Station, His Nibs,’ said de Chassiron, rising slowly to his feet. ‘Telegraph room’s down the corridor from here.
Turn left out of my door, second door on the right. Operated by helpful youth called Crabbe, Ricky Crabbe.’ During this little speech, de Chassiron had risen slowly but steadily to his feet.
‘Going upstairs now, Powerscourt. Don’t tell His Nibs you’ve seen me. Mum’s the word.’

As Powerscourt made his way towards the telegraph room, he wondered if de Chassiron had managed to send any cables to London that day. And, if he had, what they would make of them at Okhrana
headquarters at 16 Fontanka Quai.

Ricky Crabbe, guardian and master of the telegraphic equipment, looked to Powerscourt to be little more than twenty years old. He was clean-shaven, painfully thin and had very
clear blue eyes.

‘You must be Lord Powerscourt, Lord Powerscourt,’ he said, holding out a rather dirty hand with surprisingly elegant long fingers. ‘Sorry about that, my lord, I’ve not
been myself these last two days and that’s a fact.’

‘Where did you watch the events from?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘I was over with my friend Harrison Wisebite Junior at the American Embassy, my lord,’ said Ricky Crabbe. ‘They had a near perfect view of the massacre at the Narva Gates. Then
the Americans began sending telegrams to Washington and New York as soon as the first volley was fired. My friend Harrison said it was to tell their friends and their brokers to start selling their
Russian stocks and bonds as fast as they could. Anyway, my lord, how can I help you? I think you knew my elder brother, my lord, Albert Crabbe, served with you in Army Intelligence in South
Africa?’

Powerscourt looked closely at the young man. Then an elder version of Ricky came to him, again very slim, very cool in action, this one, sending telegraphs out right up to the last moment when
the post had to be abandoned before the arrival of the Boers.

‘Albert Crabbe!’ said Powerscourt. ‘Known as Quick-Fingered Bertie to his friends! The finest and the fastest telegraphist in the British Army! What has become of
him?’

‘Well, sir,’ said Ricky, delighted to hear the praise of his brother, ‘he got bored with peace. No point staying on at army rates of pay to send out all that routine stuff,
Albert said. He went to work for one of those big banks in the City, my lord. He’s in charge of all their telegraphs and telephones and heaven knows what all now. Making a packet of money
now, our Albert, always on at me to join him.’

‘We’ll talk about this another time, Ricky,’ said Powerscourt, looking at the clock, wondering if the Okhrana’s decoders worked twenty-four hours a day. ‘I’ve
got to send a couple of messages to London. Is the Ambassador fussy about length, number of words and so on?’

‘Don’t think His Nibs knows how the machines work at all, my lord,’ said the young man cheerfully. ‘He’s supposed to see all outgoing messages, but you just write
yours out and I’ll send it off for you.’

As Ricky Crabbe checked the inner workings of his machinery, Powerscourt composed his messages with great care. To Sir Jeremiah Reddaway: ‘Proceeding with mission. Please expect inquiry
from Russian sources about our meeting in Markham Square. They merely seek confirmation that you were trying to persuade me out of retirement. They have some silly notion that we discussed Martin
and the nature of his mission. I hope to have made them see the truth but your help would be most welcome. Powerscourt.’

He sent the same message to Rosebery, via the Foreign Office. He wondered if Rosebery’s delicate nostrils might tell him something was slightly wrong in the wording of the message.

Ricky Crabbe bent over his code book. His right hand produced a new, completely unintelligible version of the messages which he proceeded to send to London at breakneck speed.

‘You’re here about that Mr Martin, aren’t you, my lord,’ he said to Powerscourt as his hands continued to tap out the code, ‘trying to find out what happened to
him, isn’t that it?’

‘You’re absolutely right, Ricky,’ said Powerscourt, remembering what hotbeds of gossip places like embassies could be. ‘Do you know anything about it? You must have all
kinds of secrets passing through your hands in such a sensitive and important post as this.’

Ricky Crabbe frowned. ‘Do you know something, Lord Powerscourt? You’re the first person who’s ever asked me that.’ He paused and stared at the last two lines of the
despatches to London. ‘There’s just one thing, my lord. I’m sure it’s nothing, nothing at all.’ He paused again, and then hit about six of his keys in rapid
succession.

‘There, they’ve gone. Now then, where was I? Mr Martin, that’s it. I’m fairly sure, my lord, but I couldn’t prove it, that at some point round about the time of Mr
Martin’s disappearance, somebody used these machines here without my knowing. There were only two times over those days when I wasn’t here on duty – once I had an urgent signal to
take immediately to His Nibs, and the other early the following evening when I was summoned for a drink in his office for Christmas. I didn’t know the summons was social, if you know what I
mean, I thought it was just to pick up a message, so I ran as fast as I could. Now I think about it, my lord, that was the time when the lock on this door broke and we couldn’t find a Russian
to come and fix it for about three days. They were all drunk. So I tried to do what I could but I suppose somebody could have walked in here and sent a message.’

‘Assuming they knew how to send one, that is,’ said Powerscourt.

‘Indeed, my lord, there’s none of the diplomats here know how to do it.’

Powerscourt wondered again if Martin had been a spy. Suddenly he remembered Sir Jeremiah Reddaway telling him that Martin had been trained in the use of the telegraph. These machines would hold
no mystery for him. ‘What made you think, Ricky, that somebody else had been on your machines?’

‘Two things,’ said Ricky Crabbe promptly. ‘I always put the cover back on when I’m not actually using it.’ He took a dark cover off the machine and replaced it
quickly. ‘When I got back, the cover was off.’

‘And the other thing?’

‘Well, that’s hard to explain, Lord Powerscourt. Telegraphists would find it easier to understand. I’ve got what they call a light hand, my lord, I don’t press down very
hard on the keys. Whoever used it when I was away, if somebody did, had a much harder fist than me, so the key felt different for a little while when I got back. It had just got used to the other
fellow, don’t you see.’

Endless possibilities were spooling out of Powerscourt’s brain. He suddenly realized how much it must have taken the young man to tell him this.

‘Ricky,’ he said, ‘I cannot tell you how grateful I am for this news. It may make a substantial difference to my inquiries. Naturally I do not have to remind you to keep all of
what has passed between us this evening as confidential.’ He smiled happily at Ricky. ‘I can see that you are going to be as valuable a member of my team here as your brother was in
South Africa!’

Ricky Crabbe turned pink with pleasure. ‘Thank you, my lord, thank you. I tell you what, my lord. I’ll keep all your messages here for you unless you want them sent round, if that
would be a good plan.’

‘Excellent,’ said Powerscourt.

‘And there’s one other thing, my lord,’ said Ricky, as Powerscourt prepared to take his leave. ‘If you want to send a really private message to London, one nobody knows
about, just let me know. Me and my brother have been experimenting with secret codes and things. I can certainly send you a message nobody else will be able to read.’

‘I’m delighted to hear that,’ said Powerscourt, shaking the young man’s hand. ‘Thank you very much indeed. And what is the appeal for your brother in his bank of
these kind of messages, Ricky?’

Ricky laughed. ‘He says we could make our fortune, my lord. These banks, he says, are so obsessed with secrecy they’d pay a king’s ransom to be certain no other bugger was
reading their messages.’

‘Hindustani Rules at the Embassy.’ Powerscourt was beginning his message to Johnny Fitzgerald, perched on the edge of de Chassiron’s desk, a sea of telegrams
floating off to his right. He wondered if he should repeat the phrase and decided against it. Johnny was sure to remember the time he and Powerscourt had been reading the ingoing and outgoing
messages to and from a rebellious Hindustani chieftain, allowing the British authorities to mount a deadly and devastating response to a rebellion the Maharajah had thought was entirely secret.
Hindustani Rules would be enough to tell him that all formal traffic to and from the British Embassy was being decoded and read elsewhere. This message was going through Mikhail’s
father’s telegraph machines to Johnny Fitzgerald via Powerscourt’s brother-in-law William Burke’s bank. ‘Urgently need information on Martin’s movements,’
Powerscourt’s message continued, ‘supposed to have been in St Petersburg on following dates: 1904, January 5th to 11th, March 21st to 29th, October 15th to 22nd. 1903, January 4th to
12th, March 23rd to 30th, October 1st to 9th. 1902, January 6th to 14th, October 5th to 12th. Please check via FO, FO travel agents, possibly Rosebery butler for unorthodox routes.’ Lord
Rosebery’s butler, a man called Leith, was famous throughout Rosebery’s wide acquaintance for his encyclopedic knowledge of United Kingdom and European boat and railway timetables. If
there was a coal steamer to Hamburg, connecting to a timber transport to Riga or Tallinn with virtually unknown railway links to St Petersburg, Leith would know about it. His admirers claimed that
his greatest coup was to have spirited abroad, for a fee of five hundred pounds, a man not only wanted by the police, but watched for in person at every port and railway station in Britain.
‘Please check Martin financial situation with William Burke. Debts? Gambling? Women? When inquiries launched please proceed to St Petersburg as fast as possible. Could be preliminary
reconnaissance for Birds of Northern Europe. Love to Lucy and the children. Looking forward to seeing you. Francis.’

Mikhail Shaporov and Natasha Bobrinsky were sitting demurely in front of the fire, drinking tea, when Powerscourt returned to the Great Drawing Room shortly after six thirty.
He thought there was something slightly different about their clothes as if they might have been readjusted in a hurry or even taken off during his absence but he made no comment. He remembered
that he was to have the pleasure of taking the two of them out to dinner in one of the Nevskii Prospekt’s finest hotels. He handed over his message to Johnny Fitzgerald.

‘It’s to my greatest friend,’ he said, smiling at the two of them. ‘We have been together on all my investigations.’

‘And will you ask him to join you here?’ asked Natasha, pouring Powerscourt a cup of tea.

‘Yes, I have,’ Powerscourt smiled.

‘I will take the message to my father’s telegraph office this evening,’ said Mikhail, ‘but come, Lord Powerscourt, we were going to talk about Mr Martin and how to find
out if he has been here.’

‘Do you know why he came here?’ asked Natasha.

Powerscourt took a sip of his tea and fingered a long thin biscuit. ‘Well, Miss Bobrinsky,’ he began.

‘Please call me Natasha,’ said the girl with a smile that could have launched a few hundred ships or more on the route to windy Ilium. ‘Miss Bobrinsky makes me sound like a
governess or an old maid.’

‘I’m sure that any family in Europe,’ now it was Powerscourt’s turn to smile a pedestrian, humdrum smile that could scarcely have launched a rowing boat, ‘would be
overjoyed to have you as daughter or governess, Natasha. However, let me return to Mr Martin.’ He took a mouthful of biscuit and stared earnestly into the fire.

‘I can think of any number of reasons why Mr Martin should have come to St Petersburg in those earlier years,’ he began. ‘He could have had a second wife here. I do not imagine
the authorities in St Petersburg check with the authorities in London to ask whether a man has been married before. Or he could have had a relationship with a woman here and not been married to
her. He could have had a child or children with either of the above and come to visit them. He could, more fancifully, have been a devotee of Russian church music and come here at Easter and the
other times to satisfy his passion. In case you think that is unlikely,’ he turned and smiled at Mikhail and Natasha, ‘I was once involved with a case in England where a man wrongly
arrested for murder was going round the cathedrals of England attending Evensong, or Vespers as I think it would be called in the Orthodox rite.’

‘How many did he get through?’ asked Mikhail.

‘How many services? Or how many cathedrals? Same thing, really,’ Powerscourt replied. ‘I think it was about seventeen. He was over halfway through. Anyway, on another tack, our
friend Martin could have been here because of gambling debts. I gather people here do gamble in rather a big way, palaces, estates, entire stables wagered away in the course of an evening. Perhaps
he ran up enormous sums and came back when he could to pay them off. I know it sounds unlikely, but I don’t think it’s impossible. Then there’s blackmail. Perhaps he was being
blackmailed and came back at these intervals to settle another tranche of his debt.’

Natasha was entranced. Mikhail had told her Powerscourt was clever. Now, she felt, he was trailing his brain in front of the two of them like a matador with his cloak in the bull ring.

‘Perhaps,’ Powerscourt went on, unaware that he had been despatched to the Plaza del Toros in Pamplona or Madrid on what might prove to be his last mission, ‘ though even I
think this is unlikely, perhaps he had Russian ancestry somewhere and had come to search for his past. Perhaps there was a great fortune, some vast estates maybe, waiting way out there beyond the
snows and the route of the Trans-Siberian. Or, more sinister of all, perhaps Roderick Martin was a spy. A spy not for the British but for the Russians. Perhaps he came here to report back on his
previous period of treachery in the service of the King Emperor and to be briefed for the months ahead in his service of the Tsar of All the Russias. Perhaps the confusion between the ministries
about whether Martin was here or not was caused by the fact that only one of them knew he was a spy. The rest thought he was what he said he was, an English diplomat. Perhaps, and this is my last
thought, Martin was a kind of conduit for messages that were too important or too sensitive to go through normal diplomatic channels. There is little diplomacy that does not have its back channels,
secret routes for the passing of information. Maybe Martin, according to these dates, had been doing this dangerous work for years.’