Death on the Nevskii Prospekt (20 page)

As Powerscourt stopped Mikhail gave him a loud cheer and Natasha leant over and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Bravo, Lord Powerscourt! A tour de force!’

‘Superb,Lord Powerscourt!’ The laughter rang out across the Great Drawing Room. Powerscourt suddenly felt the world was a better place and that he was a younger man.

‘We have been thinking while you were away,’ said Mikhail earnestly, still smiling, ‘and we have two suggestions.’ Powerscourt was glad there had been time for thought in
his absence. ‘You have a photograph of Mr Martin, maybe two or three, I think,’ the young man went on.

‘I have half a dozen, I believe,’ said Powerscourt.

‘With one or two of them,’ said Mikhail, ‘Natasha and I will go to the Yacht Club and ask around. I think we just have to say he is a relative of ours who has gone missing. But
everyone who is anybody in St Petersburg goes there. We will spend several days there and see what we can find.’

‘And the other thought?’ said Powerscourt, admiring the slight flush in Natasha’s cheeks from the fire.

‘That involves my granny,’ said Natasha happily. ‘I think you’d better come along too, Lord Powerscourt. I’m sure my granny would approve of you. You see, at the
times we have for Mr Martin’s presence in St Petersburg, at the start of the year, those are the great times for balls and parties. All of St Petersburg gets involved. Almost everyone attends
one of these balls or soirées or supper parties or dancing parties or whatever they are called. My granny must be the only person in Russia who has attended every single function for years
and years and years. And she never forgets a face, never. The only slight problem,’

Natasha began to giggle rather disloyally here, ‘is that now her memory is beginning to go. So, she’ll say of course I know who he is, I met him at the Oblonskys’ in ’95.
But it may take some time to remember the name nowadays. I think we’d better give her plenty of notice before we go and see her so she can get her thoughts in order.’

‘I look forward to meeting her,’ said Powerscourt, wondering if Natasha’s granny had been a beauty in her youth. ‘This all sounds very promising.’

‘I’m not sure, you know,’ said Mikhail seriously. ‘This will only work if Mr Martin moved in our sort of world. What happens if he didn’t, Lord
Powerscourt?’

‘We’ll just have to wait and see,’ said Powerscourt.

‘And there’s something I forgot.’ Natasha Bobrinsky looked very serious all of a sudden. ‘I thought of it on the way here. Lord Powerscourt, Mikhail told you about the
missing Fabergé Easter eggs, the Trans-Siberian Railway egg and the Danish Palaces egg?’

‘He did,’ said Powerscourt. ‘What of them?’

‘Somebody said the other day that they’d both gone abroad.’

‘Just abroad? Not London? Not Paris or Rome or New York?’

‘Just abroad,’ said Natasha. ‘Do you think they could have been trying to send somebody some sort of a message?’

For the next three days visitors to St Petersburg’s most fashionable location, the Imperial Yacht Club, were greeted at some point during their stay by Mikhail, or
Natasha when she could get away, or occasionally both together, asking if, by any chance, they recollected meeting the person in the photograph. It was, they assured their victims, a question of an
inheritance, a rather large inheritance, always a subject dear to an aristocrat’s heart. Powerscourt was invited in from time to time to witness these encounters and was most impressed with
the seriousness with which the young people took to their task. They worked well in harness, Mikhail taking all the women and Natasha taking all the men. Mikhail would look at the women with great
devotion, Natasha managed to give the impression that she, in person, might form part of the inheritance.

Powerscourt regretted that he did not have a wider choice of photograph. The Foreign Office had been in such a hurry to send him to St Petersburg that he had accepted the first clutch of
photographs he had been offered. They were identical. They all showed Martin in a rather nondescript suit, with an undistinguished shirt and a dreary-looking tie with a stain near the top of it. He
was seated in a garden chair with a wide expanse of lawn behind him. Powerscourt happened to know that the lawn was the lawn of Martin’s house, Tibenham Grange, in Kent. Had the photographer
turned his subject round one hundred and eighty degrees, the spectator would have seen the moat, the fifteenth-century square building, the little tower, maybe from the right angle, the tiny
courtyard within. Tibenham Grange was one of the finest small moated houses in England, much praised by the American novelist Henry James when he came to stay. With the Grange behind him, Martin
would have looked like a man of substance, a man of discernment in his choice of property, possibly even a little eccentric to have bought such an ancient specimen in a modern age of continual
progress towards a better world. But with the anonymous lawn behind him, he could have been a civil servant or, perhaps, a local government official in the lower ranks.

Not that there was any shortage of identifications of Roderick Martin from the blue-blooded clientele of the Imperial Yacht Club. He was, an elderly dowager informed Mikhail, undoubtedly the man
in charge of the sleeping cars on the Moscow to St Petersburg express. She had had dealings with him only the week before. This was the fellow, a red-faced colonel told Natasha, who counted out the
money for you in the Moscow Narodny Bank further up the Nevskii Prospekt. The colonel would put money on it.

Nonsense, said a society beauty, dazzling Mikhail with her most flattering smile, everybody knew this man: he was a senior official in the Ministry of Finance who had entered into a sensational
wedding with an heiress some years before. The marriage, alas, had not lasted. Ability with figures, the beauty told Mikhail sadly, was not sufficient for a happy union. Powerscourt actually
wondered if that might be true until he was told that the lady was a notorious liar.

The most plausible identification came from an elderly man who drank champagne faster than anybody Powerscourt had ever seen. ‘Dobrynin!’ he said. ‘Blow me down, it’s
bloody Dobrynin! Haven’t seen the bugger for years!’

While Natasha waited for further enlightenment, the man downed the rest of his glass and held it out absent-mindedly for a refill. A Yacht Club waiter seemed to be in permanent attendance solely
for the purpose of replenishment.

‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ the elderly gentleman said. ‘Has somebody killed the bastard at last? Surprising he’s lasted as long as he has really.’

Natasha did not mention that somebody had actually killed the bastard.

‘Who is he, sir?’ she asked in her most innocent voice.

‘Who is he?’ snorted the man, holding out his glass for yet another refill. ‘I should think,’ the man said, peering round the room, ‘that a large number of the
people in this club have been through his hands. And I mean literally through his hands! A very large number indeed!’

The old man nodded as if he had solved the problem. Natasha waited. The old man peered at the photograph again.

‘Bloody man!’ he said again, memories coming back fast, probably speeded on their way by the Dom Perignon. Natasha looked at the old gentleman once more.

‘All right, all right!’ he said. ‘Women wouldn’t know about him. Bastard Dobrynin was head of mathematics in the lycée out at Tsarskoe Selo, place where Pushkin
went to school,’ the last bit said condescendingly as if even a flibbertigibbet like Natasha must have heard of Pushkin, ‘and if you didn’t get your sums right, he would beat you
and beat you and beat you until you did. Very painful subject, mathematics, for most of his pupils, even to this day.’

He peered again at the photograph. ‘Dead, did you say? No? Pity. Lost, that’s nearly as good.’ His arm shot out once more. Natasha moved away. So seriously did they take this
witness that Natasha checked with the school when she was back at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo. There had indeed been a Mr Dobrynin at the lycée. He was retired now, she was told.
But he still lived in the village, just a few minutes’ walk from the palace. If Natasha or any of her friends needed help, Mr Dobrynin still offered coaching in mathematics.

They left Roderick Martin in the Imperial Yacht Club. Or rather they left his photograph, attached to the noticeboard with a message and quite a large reward for accurate
information about him. Mikhail Shaporov’s father had been responsible for the reward, apparently telling his son that it would be enough for a down payment on somebody’s gambling
debts.

Powerscourt was delighted about the replies to his messages to London. From Sir Jeremiah Reddaway, for the present, there was no news. From Johnny Fitzgerald there was a cheerful message, saying
that he looked forward to working with his friend again. It would, he said, be like the old days up Hindustan way in India. Powerscourt had already cleared Johnny’s arrival with the
Ambassador and de Chassiron. He had also sent a note to all the ministries where he had called, to the Interior Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, even the Okhrana, advising them of Fitzgerald’s
coming.

But it was Rosebery who excelled himself in the despatch of messages to the Okhrana. Rosebery the politician had always been touchy, difficult, mercurial. He was notorious for it. He would angle
for high office and then agonize for weeks over whether he would accept the position or not. Scarcely had he sat down in his Cabinet Ministry than he would be thinking of resigning. Indeed, his
critics said that he took more pleasure from leaving office than most normal people did in accepting it. Morbid, over-sensitive, ever quick to take offence, prone to long fits of depression,
Rosebery was said to be more highly strung than his strings of racehorses. But on this occasion he had served his friend well. Powerscourt wondered if he had divined that he was writing, not to the
Foreign Office or to Powerscourt, but to the Russian secret police.

His message was addressed to the Foreign Secretary himself, with copies to Sir Jeremiah Reddaway and to Powerscourt at the British Embassy.

‘Dear Foreign Secretary,’ he began. Powerscourt suspected he had no intention of paying any attention to government directives about the high costs of international telegraph
messages. ‘Please forgive me, as a previous holder of your distinguished office, for troubling you in these difficult times. I find, yet again, that my role in events just past is being
misinterpreted, and that my position on some delicate events of recent weeks is in danger of being misconstrued.’

Nine out of ten on the pompous scale so far, thought Powerscourt with a grin. In his role of injured party, this was vintage Rosebery.

‘I propose to place on record my role in the unfortunate affair of Mr Roderick Martin for the elucidation of posterity and lest there be any misunderstandings in the present. The facts are
clear. I was informed of the demise of Mr Martin by the Prime Minister and by yourself, as you will recall, at a meeting in Number 10 Downing Street late last year. On that occasion I was not told
anything of Mr Martin’s mission or of his intentions in St Petersburg. To this day I know nothing of either of those matters. Rather I was consulted about the likelihood of Lord Francis
Powerscourt being persuaded out of retirement to inquire into the death of Mr Martin. I undertook to use whatever capital and whatever credit I possessed in that quarter on the Government’s
behalf.

‘To that end, I called, not upon Lord Powerscourt himself, but on his wife, who I believed was the principal obstacle to his returning to his former career as an investigator. I pointed
out to Lady Powerscourt that she was hindering her husband in his career and probably making him a sceptic to the question of his own courage: that men of quality in the public sphere have no right
to refuse to carry out their work merely because it might be dangerous: furthermore, that the nation would be ill served indeed if men like her first or her second husbands were to cower at home
because of the off-chance of a bullet abroad. I believe my arguments may have had some purchase with Lady Powerscourt. She grew agitated and asked me to leave. At no point in our conversation did
we discuss Mr Martin. That was not the point of my visit.

‘That, in short, is a full recapitulation of my role in this unfortunate affair. It grieves me more than I can say when it is rumoured abroad that I had inside knowledge of Mr
Martin’s objectives or of his mission to the Russian capital. These rumours are an insult to the dead and an affront to the living. I had no such knowledge. I trust, nay, I have every
confidence, sir, that you will do everything in your power to ensure that the truth prevails and that the reputation of the British Foreign Office and its servants for upright and honourable
behaviour is upheld with as much vigour today as it has been in former times. Yours sincerely, Rosebery.’

Powerscourt smiled as he read the telegraph for the second time. He had, he felt, advanced a knight into the heart of the Okhrana defences, and the knight was well protected. He wondered what
General Derzhenov would make of it when his decoders finally presented it. He wondered idly if they operated on a daily basis, the mathematics professors and the chess masters, transcripts of
Embassy messages available to read on the day they arrived in St Petersburg. Would this be enough to persuade the old sadist Derzhenov, as Powerscourt mentally referred to him, that he,
Powerscourt, knew nothing of what had brought Martin to St Petersburg?

Two days later Natasha Bobrinsky and an Embassy guard called Sandy escorted Powerscourt to the Bobrinsky household and the Bobrinsky grandmother in Millionaires’ Row
near the Embassy. Ever since Powerscourt’s abduction by the Okhrana thugs, the Ambassador had decreed that he should be accompanied wherever he went. Natasha, looking very demure in her
lady-in-waiting clothes, told Powerscourt a brief life history of her elderly relation on the way.

‘She’s my mother’s mother, Lord Powerscourt, so she started life as a Dolgoruky back in 1830 or something like that.’ Powerscourt thought the girl made the date sound as
if it belonged to a different era altogether, Iron Age rather than Bronze, as it were.