David Dickinson: Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

‘I suspect, Lucy, that they are waiting to see where the money ends up. Then they may make their move, when they know the final destination. There is a further twist to the Lenin affair. He is a great scribbler, always producing pamphlets and books to enthuse his followers and keep them on the right course. You could regard them as the revolutionary equivalent of St Paul writing all those letters to the faithful across the ancient world — the Ephesians, the Corinthians and so on. It’s to make sure there is no backsliding among the converts. Anyway, he sends a new pamphlet in Russian to London to be printed in Russian and English, five hundred copies each. I don’t have to tell you how it’s going to leave the country.’

‘I believe, my lord,’ said Inspector Dutfield, hunting through his notes, ‘that the intelligence people think that these too will be waved through customs and everything else so that the Russian secret service, the Okhrana, can follow them, not just to Lenin in Cracow but to all the people he sends them to. That would provide a sort of Who’s Who covering Lenin’s revolutionary circle.’

‘Exactly so,’ said Powerscourt, ‘exactly so. All of which brings us to the two principal characters in our deadly drama. Alfred Bolm and Alexander Taneyev.’ He took another drink of water.

‘Nobody who has seen Alfred Bolm dance can have any doubt that he is a complete master of his craft. He was trained in the classical tradition of the Imperial Theatre School in St Petersburg and has been delighting audiences all over Europe. The key question in this whole affair has been, Who was the intended victim: Bolm or his understudy Alexander Taneyev? For a long time I thought it must be Bolm. I was wrong. Bolm was not the killer either. If you think of him as a one-man version of the Ballets Russes postal system, you wouldn’t be far wrong. One of the great difficulties for spies — I remember it well from the Boer War — is how to get your information back to your masters. Let us suppose we have Spy A, sent from St Petersburg in search of information about military experiments. He thinks he has some very important information. But he may be watched. So he takes his information to the postbox — Bolm, in this case — and the postbox passes it on to Spy C, possibly over games of chess at that club near the British Museum. Spy C might be thought of as a courier rather than a spy, perhaps. His job is to get the information home. The information about military experiments came to Bolm this way. It was Alexander Taneyev’s misfortune that he happened upon this material while it was still in the postbox, as it were. Bolm had not yet had the time to pass it on to Spy C.

‘We have all heard of the thought processes of Alexander Taneyev from his letters home, and that diary which ends so abruptly. We know that he was deeply worried about this information. I suspect that he confronted Bolm with what he had read. I believe he told him that he was intending to pass it on to the English authorities or, equally likely perhaps, that Bolm thought that was what he intended to do. Bolm passes this information on to Spy A, the most important link in the chain, who has already garnered crucial military intelligence. Spy A, operating under the pseudonym Andrei Rublev, kills Alexander Taneyev to shut him up. He can’t talk to the authorities if he is dead. I suspect Andrei Rublev was rather good at that sort of thing. I would be surprised if Alexander was his first victim. Taneyev must have let slip to Bolm that he had told the dancer Vera of his plans. That was why Spy A went to Blenheim Palace to kill her too. He had to get rid of them both before they had time to walk into an English police station. After that, Spy A moved on to the experiment near Goring where he met me.’

‘Do you know who the identity of the spy is, Lord Powerscourt?’ Natasha had been staring at Powerscourt for some time, trying to work out what the yellow on his skin meant.

‘I do not; I mean, I do not know his real name. Thanks to the activities of Colonel Brouzet in Paris, and what the man said to me when we met at Goring, we know his work name was Rublev, Andrei Rublev. But I have no more idea of what his real name is than I do the name of the man in the moon.’

‘Andrei Rublev was a famous icon painter hundreds of years ago,’ said Natasha. ‘Would I be right in thinking, Lord Powerscourt, that you are unable to tell us anything more about the nature of that military experiment? I presume that was what caused the injuries to your arm and your skin.’

‘I cannot say any more than I just have. It took me two and a half hours of argument before the secret people allowed me even to use the phrase “military experiment”. I should say that Andrei Rublev is dead. He met with an unfortunate accident at the military experiment and will not trouble us any more. Inspector Dutfield is in the middle of a report to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police saying that the case of the murder of Alexander Taneyev and the poor girl at Blenheim Palace is now closed.’

‘I see,’ said Natasha.

‘Perhaps I could reassure you, Mrs Shaporova,’ said Inspector Dutfield, ‘that even I have not been permitted to know what went on at that experiment.’

Literally ‘whipped’. The term indicates either a turn with a quick change in the direction of the working leg as it passes in front of or behind the supporting leg, or a quick whipping around of the body from one direction to another. There are many kinds of fouetté: petit fouetté (à terre, en demi-pointe or sauté) and grand fouetté (sauté, relevé or en tournant). Similar to a frappé. An introductory form for beginner dancers, executed at the barre, is as follows: facing the barre, the dancer executes a grand battement to the side, then turns the body so that the lifted leg ends up in arabesque.

The silver hairs first appeared on Powerscourt’s temples shortly before his birthday. For some days nobody talked about them in Markham Square. Oddly enough, it was Christopher, the reading twin, who had recently demolished The Hound of the Baskervilles over a single weekend when staying with some of his mother’s more boring relations, who solved the problem.

‘I know,’ he said suddenly one morning after his father had left the house, ‘let’s call Papa Silver Blaze. You know, like the horse in the Sherlock Holmes story that is stolen but comes back to win the big race.’

‘Didn’t he kill somebody on the way?’ said Thomas, who knew most Holmes stories virtually off by heart.

‘He didn’t mean to,’ said Christopher, ‘and they’d been cutting bits out of his leg or something.’

‘I think it’s horrid giving Papa a nickname, however nice it is,’ Olivia complained.

In the end the Powerscourt young did what they had always done — they talked to their mother. Lady Lucy laughed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you could ask him, couldn’t you? I’m sure he would be rather proud to be known as Silver Blaze. The horse did win the Wessex Cup after all, didn’t he?’

For his birthday, Powerscourt decided to reverse the usual order of celebrations. He handed out the presents early. He took the twins, Christopher and Juliet, fifteen years old now, to Paris for the weekend. They talked non-stop through all the delights of the French capital in English and French — Powerscourt, in his role of educating parent, was delighted to see that their French, which Lucy spoke a lot to them at home, was now almost fluent. Only one place reduced them to silence.

‘Oh, my God,’ Christopher whispered, and began writing in his notebook when confronted with the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. ‘Oh, my God.’

Christopher wanted to be a journalist. He really wanted to be an investigator like his papa, but he didn’t think that would go down too well at the family dinner table. Juliet, showing a greater maturity than people credited her with, wanted to be a doctor. Her fate had been sealed when she’d asked Lady Lucy if she could be a doctor and have lots of children as well.