David Dickinson - Death on the Nevskii Prospekt

Had Lady Lucy gone to the tall window and looked out into the street she would have seen a cab draw up with two people inside. One seemed to be a very tall man who opened the door for his companion from the inside as if he did not want to be seen, the other a striking lady in her late thirties dressed entirely in black, right down to the fashionable black gloves she folded away as she advanced to the Powerscourt front door.

‘Mrs Martin to see you, Lady Powerscourt.’ Rhys the butler announced their guest with his usual cough.

Lady Lucy held out her hand. ‘How do you do, Mrs Martin,’ she said formally, ‘I don’t think we have met before.’

‘No, we have not.’ Mrs Martin sounded rather nervous as if her mission, whatever it was, seemed more formidable in reality than it had appeared before.

‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ Lady Lucy was growing suspicious about her visitor, so correct in her mourning clothes. ‘Perhaps you’d like to sit down.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mrs Martin, taking up her position in Powerscourt’s favourite armchair by the side of the fireplace. ‘I think I had better explain myself, Lady Powerscourt. You must forgive me for coming in like this. I think you know of my husband, my late husband. Roderick Martin was the man found dead on the Nevskii Prospekt in St Petersburg. That is the death the Foreign Office wished your husband to investigate.’

Lady Lucy turned pale. Her suspicions had been right. Death had come all the way from Russia’s capital to her drawing room in Markham Square. But what did this spectre in black want of her?

‘I am so sorry,’ Lady Lucy managed to say. ‘It must be terrible for you.’

‘What I find particularly upsetting, Lady Powerscourt, is that I know so little of the circumstances. I know my husband went to Russia to carry out some sort of work for the Foreign Office. I cannot find out what that work was. They simply refuse to tell me. I do not know why Roderick died. I do not think the Foreign Office know that either. I cannot get them to recover the body and return it to us for a proper English burial. He could have been dumped out to sea for all I know. We have no children, Lady Powerscourt, but Roderick’s parents are still alive. They find the not knowing even more difficult than I do. They are on the verge of tears or breaking down almost every minute of the day. Roderick’s father said that his heart would break if he could not bury his only son.’

Mrs Martin paused. Still Lady Lucy did not know what was coming.

‘I’m not quite sure how I can help,’ said Lady Lucy, suspecting that almost anything she said to this newly bereaved woman would be wrong.

‘I’m surprised you can’t see it, Lady Powerscourt,’ Mrs Martin replied, staring coldly at her hostess. ‘I told you, it’s the not knowing that’s the most difficult thing. Even after the drink and the sleeping draughts, that’s what keeps his old parents awake every night. It eats you up, like some parasite that chews out your insides. You see, Lady Powerscourt, the Foreign Office told us they were going to send a special man to find out the truth about what happened to Roderick. They said he was the best man in the country for this sort of work. We all felt better for a day or two after that. We thought we were going to find out the truth. Maybe this miracle worker could even come back with the body as well and my husband could be laid to rest in his graveyard. But it didn’t happen. The special man isn’t going. He’s not going to find out what really happened. You know as well as I do who that special man is and you know as well as I do who the special woman is who’s stopping him. One of those Foreign Office people told me that if it was up to your husband, he’d take the commission and go to St Petersburg tomorrow. You’re the one who’s stopping him. You’re the one bringing misery to all that’s left of my family. You’re the one who’s torturing those two old people who’ll never see their only son again.’

‘You don’t understand, Mrs Martin.’ Lady Lucy was close to tears. ‘Francis, my husband, has nearly been killed so often in these investigations. It happens almost every time. Last time he was at death’s door with the twins only a few weeks old. Imagine their growing up without a father.’

‘I’m terribly sorry, Lady Powerscourt,’ Mrs Martin spoke very slowly now, ‘but it’s you who don’t understand. You think you have rights that nobody else has, rights to hold on to your husband because he was nearly killed once or twice. Think what would happen if everybody behaved as selfishly as you. Wellington’s army and his commanders would never have driven the French out of Spain or won their great victory at Waterloo if their wives hadn’t let them go. We would now be living in some French department with a French prefect enforcing French laws in the French language from a French town hall with a French tricolour flying from the top and statues of Napoleon in every town square. What would happen to the Royal Navy if the wives refused to let their men go back to sea, whining about the fact that they might get killed in some naval engagement? There can’t be one set of rules for you and another set of rules for everybody else. We owe certain duties to society as society owes certain duties to us. But the duties have to be the same for everybody. Your rules are entirely selfish. They would lead to a feeble rather than a Great Britain. They would lead to a nation where every man could opt for cowardice rather than courage. We wouldn’t have an empire. I doubt we would have our liberty. I think you pretend your rules show the mark of courage when they show the opposite. You’re turning your husband into a coward, or that’s what everybody will think.’

Mrs Martin began to cry slowly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she blurted out between her tears, ‘I shouldn’t have said that very last bit. I think I’d better go now.’

A watcher in Markham Square would have seen Mrs Martin climb back into the carriage she had come in at the other end of the Square. A very tall, very slim gentleman opened the door for her. He waited for her to speak. Sir Jeremiah Reddaway was most curious to learn if his latest emissary to the Powerscourt household had been more successful than the last.

Lady Lucy stared blankly at the wall with the bookshelves. She knew that Francis had already decided where to put the first of his cathedral volumes when it was published. She wondered how much pain she had caused him since the return from Positano. She wondered if he would be happier now. She wondered if she had loved him too much, trying to wrap him in a cocoon of love that would keep out the rest of the world. She hoped not. She didn’t think you could love a man like Francis too much. She wondered what he would say when she told him he was released from his promise and was now free to go to St Petersburg if that was what he wanted to do. She went and sat in the chair by the window that looked out over Markham Square and waited for Francis to come home.

Lord Francis Powerscourt had been told by the Foreign Office that they would provide an interpreter who would travel with him from London. It was, Powerscourt reflected bitterly as he stared down the platform at Victoria station, just about all they had been able to tell him. Sir Jeremiah had, of course, known all the details of Roderick Martin’s early life and career. Educated at Westminster School and New College Oxford, a brilliant linguist, fluent in French, German and Russian and able to cope in Italian, he had entered the Foreign Service with a formidable reputation. Over time he developed a judgement of men and events that was as sharp as his ability at languages. As well as his education in diplomacy, Roderick Martin was trained in the more mundane matters like codes and the use of telegraph machines. He had served in all the great capitals of Europe and by the time of his mission to St Petersburg at the age of thirty-eight, his contemporaries were already speculating about when and where he would take up his first posting as Ambassador. But of the journey to Russia they knew nothing, except that his body had been found early in the morning on the Nevskii Prospekt. Word had come from the Prime Minister that they were to send a man, their best man if possible, to St Petersburg. The Prime Minister himself would brief him. He was to report only to the Prime Minister on his return. That was all. Martin’s wife, Martin’s parents knew no more than his employers. He had stepped into his compartment on this very train, Powerscourt said to himself, he had gone to the Russian capital and he had been killed. That was all anybody seemed to know about him. Maybe the Embassy there would be able to tell him more but they hadn’t been able to tell the Foreign Office very much at all. Even Sir Jeremiah Reddaway, as proper and punctilious as a man in his position should be, had heard the rumours. Martin was having an affair with some diplomat’s wife and had been killed by hired thugs. He had merely run across a bunch of drunken peasants or workers in the wrong part of town and been murdered for his wallet. The beauty of these theories, as Powerscourt saw clearly, was that they disconnected the murder from the mission. Powerscourt believed the opposite was the case. Maybe, Sir Jeremiah had said hopefully, those long legs stretched out in front of his own Foreign Office fire, the mission had to do with the Russian sinking of a British fishing boat and the deaths of two sailors as their navy sailed halfway round the world to fight the Japanese. Maybe they wanted a diplomatic alliance against the Germans. Powerscourt found it hard to believe any of the rumours.