David Dickinson - Death on the Nevskii Prospekt

Ricky Crabbe crawled over to Powerscourt. ‘I had him covered, sir, but I didn’t want to shoot in case I only wounded him and he shot you. I’ve seen off one of those soldiers coming up to the roof. Don’t think the rest will be in any great hurry.’

A couple of minutes later they were dropping down into the first carriage, nearly stepping over Johnny Fitzgerald who was lying flat on the floor with a pair of enormous spanners in his hand. The sergeant was by his side, his tunic removed, his shirt sleeves rolled up, ready for some enormous feat of physical exertion.

‘Am I glad to see you, Francis. The peasants pretending to be soldiers are all down at the back of the train. We’re all here now, us and the four ladies.’

Powerscourt saw the women huddling together as if for warmth right in front of the door into the driver’s compartment. Mikhail stood between them and the door. God only knew what debauchery they expected now there were four of the foreigners to play together. Powerscourt told Johnny about the Major’s end. ‘I bet you were glad to see the end of him, Francis. Killed at the bridge eh? Like Horatius he asked, “Now who will stand on either hand And keep the bridge with me?” No answer in both cases. Now, if you’ll stand back, I’m going to try this. I’ve nearly finished but I had to wait till you showed up, Francis. All my life I’ve wanted to do this.’

Johnny took one of his enormous spanners and bent over the divide between the first and second carriages. There was an enormous grunt, then another, closely followed by a screech of metal. Then he and the Black Watch sergeant lent all their force into pushing the second carriage away from the first. As Powerscourt stared at the second carriage he saw a wounded soldier enter it at the far end. But as the man began to walk towards the front of the train, he seemed to be getting, not closer, but further and further away. They could see a look of astonishment on the man’s face as he realized he would never reach the front of the train, that he would not reach the doctors of St Petersburg on this journey. Johnny had decoupled the engine and the first carriage from the rest of the train. What remained of Shatilov’s pathetic army would soon be stranded in the middle of the countryside with no engine. They would probably block the line until they could be towed away. As Powerscourt looked round his little band, Johnny with grease on his hands and his arms, Ricky Crabbe, his clothes filthy from crawling along the roof, Mikhail with a great bruise on his forehead from bumping into the rungs up to a carriage roof, the sergeant trying to get the dirt off his arms, he felt very proud of them. Johnny was still staring out the back, rubbing his hands together in his delight, rejoicing in his severed train. It was Mikhail who spoke.

‘I’ve managed to convince the ladies, Lord Powerscourt, that you at least are a respectable person. I’ve told them you can reassure them in Russian. They’re going to ask you now.’

With that Mikhail had a brief conversation with the four women. One of them stared hard at Powerscourt and fired a rapid salvo at him in Russian.

‘I am from the British Embassy and we all have diplomatic immunity,’ Powerscourt replied in what he hoped was his best Russian and trying to remember where Mikhail had told him to put the emphasis. There was another blast from the four ladies. Powerscourt looked inquisitively at Mikhail.

‘What have we here?’ he asked.

‘They say,’ Mikhail laughed, ‘that you’re nothing better than a damned horse thief and they’re going to report you to the authorities the second this train reaches St Petersburg.’

Before he went to bed that night Powerscourt drafted a letter for the Ambassador to send in the morning. It was addressed to the Tsar and outlined in considerable detail what had happened to him and his colleagues, the theft of the horses, the beginnings of torture, the total lack of respect afforded to citizens of the United Kingdom and a man attached to its Foreign Office. How would the Russians feel, he asked rhetorically, if a member of their diplomatic staff on a mission to the King in Buckingham Palace was hijacked on his way out and taken to be stretched on the rack at the Tower of London? Powerscourt made no reference to their escape and the little battle on the train. Nor did he say anything about the substance of his conversation with Nicholas the Second. He doubted very much if the letter would reach the Tsar himself. Some court official would doubtless read it, but even that, he felt, should be sufficient to put a stop to the activities of Major Shatilov’s successors. In that assumption he could not have been more wrong.

For at eleven o’clock the following morning a distraught and tearful Mikhail presented himself at the British Embassy. Natasha, he told a weary Powerscourt and de Chassiron, resplendent in a new shirt from Paris, had disappeared. A friend of hers was in the city that morning. Natasha had told her, Mikhail reported, that she thought she was being followed by some of the soldiers of the guard. Perhaps they had taken her prisoner. Perhaps they were going to mistreat her.

‘She disappeared once before, didn’t she,’ asked Powerscourt as gently as he could, ‘and she came back again, didn’t she?’

‘That was because the little boy was ill, my lord,’ said Mikhail. ‘He’s not ill now, at least not for the present.’

De Chassiron saw how upset the young man was. Anybody might fall in love with Natasha. He himself could easily have fallen in love with her. Perhaps the entire squad of soldiers in the Alexander Palace had fallen in love with her.

‘You don’t suppose,’ Mikhail was tormenting himself now, ‘that they will take revenge on Natasha for what happened to the Major and the others last night?’

That thought had crossed Powerscourt’s mind some moments before. He looked at his watch. The engineless train should have been discovered by now. Perhaps Shatilov’s mutilated body had also been found. It would take some time, he thought, to work out how he had met his end. The presumption would be that he had been killed by one of the Englishmen rather than destroyed by a bridge. He stared hard at a print of King’s College Cambridge behind de Chassiron’s desk, the Chapel standing out like a bulwark or a beacon of man’s love of God in a sceptical and scientific city. He could see de Chassiron lounging about on the grass in his gown, arguing with the dons. Powerscourt wondered if the print followed him on all his postings, a travelling reminder of the glory of youth accompanying him into the shallows of middle age.

It must have been the print that made up his mind, he told Johnny later. For when he turned his gaze back to de Chassiron he knew exactly what he was going to do.

‘There’s only one thing for it,’ he said. ‘The Ambassador has, I hope, sent on the letter I drafted for him last night. That made no mention of the little battle on the train or the death of the ghastly Major. Any references to those events would, it seems to me, be likely to have the most unpleasant consequences. Who are these English people anyway? What is their business here? They are spies. Of course they are spies. And what happens to the heroic defenders of the person of the Tsar and the integrity of his realm when they apprehend these villains and try to extract information from them by traditional Russian methods? Why, the heroic Major is slain doing his duty. Powerscourt and the rest of his English rabble are murderers. To the cells with them! Death to the traitors! Long live the Tsar!’

‘You could have a point there, Powerscourt,’ drawled de Chassiron. ‘At the very least you could be locked up for years before any case came to trial. Last night you were up on the roof of a railway compartment. Maybe in view of the fact that these people guard the roads and the railways you’ll have to leave on another.’