David Dickinson - Death on the Nevskii Prospekt

Powerscourt thought the Tsar made investigating sound like a most disagreeable profession. Perhaps he imagined investigators scouring the files of his ministries for examples of administrative incompetence or worse, looking into the inefficiencies of his armies, or, saddest of all, creeping round his household for long enough to tell his subjects that their future sovereign Alexis the Tsarevich might have bled to death before he was one year old, never mind attaining his majority.

‘I am not alone in being an investigator, sir. There are a number at work in London at present. I only operate when people ask me to. Usually they ask me to investigate murders.’

The Tsar sounded faintly relieved to hear Powerscourt and his ilk were not contemplating opening a branch office in Moscow or St Petersburg. ‘Do you think Mr Martin was murdered, Lord Powerscourt?’

‘I most certainly do, sir.’

‘And,’ the Tsar went one, ‘do you expect me to know who killed him?’

‘No, I do not, sir,’ said Powerscourt, wondering if the Tsar did actually know but wouldn’t say, ‘but I would find it very helpful to know what you talked about with Mr Martin.’

‘I cannot help you there, I’m afraid, Lord Powerscourt. The matter was confidential.’

Confidential enough to get a man killed, Powerscourt thought bitterly. Confidential can mean fatal on a bad day in the Tsar’s palace at Tsarskoe Selo.

‘I fully appreciate that, sir,’ said Powerscourt, looking at a photograph of three very happy little girls draped round their papa on a yacht, ‘but I would like to appraise you of what I propose to tell my government about your conversation with Mr Martin on my return.’

‘And why should that interest me?’ said the Tsar rather shortly, as if he had had enough of investigators.

‘It should interest you, sir, because it will contain my account of what transpired between you and Mr Martin. I give you my word that if you wish to correct my version in any way, I shall not tell a single soul who provided the information. Come, sir,’ Powerscourt smiled suddenly at his host, ‘come on a little adventure with me. Put aside the cares of state for ten minutes or so. Join the ranks of the investigators!’

The Tsar lit himself a cigarette. He returned the smile. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘for the moment I am your Mr Sherlock Holmes of 221b Baker Street. Sherlock Romanov perhaps. I shall consider what you have to say. Begin please!’

Powerscourt drew a deep breath. Now was his opportunity. From Markham Square to Tsarskoe Selo, via the British Embassy, Kerenkov’s shipyard, Kerenkova’s dacha, the eyes of Natasha Bobrinsky and the torture chambers of Okhrana boss Derzhenov was a long and complicated journey.

‘When I first began investigating the death of Mr Martin,’ he began, trying to be as honest as he could with the Tsar, ‘I thought that he had been sent here by the British Government with some proposal or other. A new treaty perhaps, an alliance with the French against Germany, maybe. It was possible, I thought, that he had been killed because somebody didn’t like the proposal or didn’t like your response to it. That all seemed perfectly possible.’

‘But you changed your mind, Lord Powerscourt. Why did you do that?’

‘I spent a lot of time, sir, trying to work out the dynamics of the meeting, who summoned who, that sort of thing. After a while I decided that the most likely sequence of events was rather different. The first event was you sending a message to England, to the King, I think, with a request that he should only discuss it with his Prime Minister. I think the request was in the form if not of a question, then something very like it. You see, sir, I began to think that the meeting had more to do with family than it did with affairs of state. That would explain why the conversation, if you like, began as monarch to monarch rather than minister to minister. And the need for confidentiality, for secrecy, if you will, explains why a man had to come from London rather than going through the British Embassy here.’

‘I was going to ask how you arrived at that conclusion but I shall save my questions for the end of this fascinating piece of investigation, Lord Powerscourt!’ Sherlock Romanov finished his cigarette and immediately lit another. Powerscourt noticed that some of his fingers were deeply stained with nicotine.

‘The second event,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘was Mr Martin arriving here with the answer from London. Again I can only guess at what the answer was. And I can only speculate as to why up until now no action has been taken.’

‘And what was the answer, Lord Powerscourt?’ The Tsar was now surrounded by a penumbra of smoke, his hand emerging from time to time to knock off the ash at the end of his cigarette.

‘I think, sir, that the question sent by you or your agents to London went something like this: Would the British royal family, and by extension, the British Government, be happy to welcome the Tsar’s wife and children to England while the present unrest in Russia continues. And,’ Powerscourt was reluctant to divulge this piece of news, ‘were there doctors in London who were experienced in the treatment of haemophilia.’

‘God bless my soul!’ The Tsar had turned pale.

‘And the answer, brought by Mr Martin,’ Powerscourt carried on relentlessly now, ‘was Yes, as long as the Russian royal family were content to live quietly in the country and didn’t expect to be taken round London on a never-ending quadrille of state banquets and ceremonial balls. A suitable place could be found for them in Norfolk, close to the Royal Family establishment at Sandringham.’

The Tsar looked at Powerscourt with considerable pain in his eyes. His question now had a slightly desperate air. ‘There is a flaw, of course, in this theory of yours. Do you see what the flaw is, Lord Powerscourt?’

‘I am not sure it is a flaw, sir. I presume you refer to the fact that your wife and children are still here in Tsarskoe Selo, St Petersburg, not in Norfolk, England. But I do not believe that invalidates any of the rest of the theory, sir. There has been a British frigate on patrol in the waters off the coast here for a number of weeks now. People are beginning to talk. It seems possible to me, sir, that a number of factors could have intervened to modify the situation. The Empress might not have liked the plan. She might have preferred to stay with her husband in his hour of duty and help him fulfil what she saw as his obligations as ruler of Russia. The Tsar’s advisers, if they heard of the plan, might have thought it an unhelpful act to send the Tsar’s family and his heir out of the country. Hostile elements in society, not just the bomb-throwing fraternity, might have branded it cowardice, a vote of no confidence by the Tsar in the Tsar’s own administration. And finally, sir,’ Powerscourt thought he must stop very soon, ‘if security is so bad at present that you cannot attend the funeral of one of your own relations, blown to smithereens by the Kremlin walls, it might also be too bad to permit a party of six with all their attendants to make their way from here to a main-line railway station or to the English frigate.’

The Tsar crossed his legs and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘You will be interested to hear, Lord Powerscourt, that almost all of what you said is true in one sense or another. I congratulate you. But I have two questions for you. How did you know we were thinking of sending the children to England? And how did you know about my son?’

Powerscourt thought fast. He knew that if he mentioned the disappearing toys or the vanished Trans-Siberian Railway egg, Natasha would be in trouble. He did not dare rely on her testimony for the haemophilia either. He decided to take a huge gamble, not with the first question, but with the second.