Duncan Kyle - The King's Commisar

He swore, bent, placed the Coke on the pavement, and picked up the hand-microphone in his gauntleted free hand. 'Yer?' he said.

'Where are you?'

He told her.

'Outside MacDonald's again, aincher,' she said. 'Listen, go to 199 Chancery Lane, right? 'Ere you'll get fat, you will.'

Dave Legg, in replacing the mike, kicked over the Coke. He swore again. Goo from the Big Mac was dribbling down his leather gauntlet. He licked it off, crammed half the hamburger into his capacious mouth, kicked the starter, and carved up an approaching taxi as he roared through the traffic stream. Redvers Pratt greeted him pleasantly a few minutes later. Mr Pratt liked to think of himself as a student of contrasting human behaviour, and it was fascinating to think of this grubby thug entering the refined portals of 6 Athelsgate.

'This envelope is for the Senior Partner,' Mr Pratt told Dave Legg. 'Don't give it to anyone else, okay? No secretaries - him personally.'

"Sis 'andle?' said Legg.

'What? Oh, his name? He's Mr Pilgrim, you got that? Pilgrim. Six Athelsgate, that's in the City.'

'Do me a fiver, mate?' said Dave Legg mysteriously. He pulled a Mars bar from his jacket and departed, leaving the wrapper on the floor.

Seven minutes later he faced Sir Horace Malory. Already he had defied the doorkeeper, two junior employees more than willing to accept the envelope, and Pilgrim's secretary.

'It's only for this Senior Partner geezer,' Dave Legg insisted. 'Swarree said. No secketries, nobody!'

Malory smiled. 'I'm the other Senior Partner, Sir Horace Malory. You may safely leave it with me.' He could recognize the envelope, even with most of it half-concealed in Dave Legg's greasy gauntlet.

'Pilgrim, swarree sed. Mr Pilgrim, nobody else!'

'Oh, really!' Mrs Frobisher came close to stamping her foot. 'Sir Horace is -'

"E ain't this geezer Pilgrim,' Dave Legg said stoutly, and turned to Malory. 'Are you, squire?'

'Er, no.' Malory held up his hand. 'Where have you come from?'

'199 Chancery Lane.'

'Oh, I see. Dazey, Cheyne.'

'Dunno what they play, squire,' said Legg with a grin.

Malory, possessed by now of twin ambitions: to strangle this ghastly lout, and to get his hands on Dikeston's narrative, more or less in that order, was still able to force a smile. 'Perhaps if we telephone them and explain that Mr Pilgrim is out - perhaps from them you would accept different instructions?'

'Yus, mate,' said Dave Legg.

Mrs Frobisher telephoned Mr Redvers Pratt and then handed the receiver to Dave Legg with her fingertips. She rather thought he wasn't very clean.

'Geezer ere says 'e's - worrizit?'

'Malory,' Sir Horace said softly.

'Yer, Malory. Okay is it? Right, squire.'

He hung up, turned to Malory and held out the envelope. 'All yours, mate.'

'Thank you,' said Malory. 'Very much.'

CHAPTER TEN

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Fifth instalment of the account, written by Lt-Cdr H. G. Dikeston RN, of his journeyings

in Russia in the spring and summer of 1918.

I mend quickly, or at any rate my body does. As my mother used to say, there is a good healing flesh in the family. But in 1918 in Ekaterinburg it seemed too slow. On the second day on which I woke I thought with a sharp pang of the precious paper I had brought from Tobolsk and became desperate as, too weak to move, I lay wondering what might have become of it. When the nun appeared again in the whitewashed chamber, and as she fed me more of some nourishing broth, I asked, 'Where are my clothes?' and heard the weak whisper of my voice. She smiled. 'Safe. And clean, moreover, which they were not when you arrived.'

I whispered. 'Sister, this is important -'

She interrupted me. 'First the broth. It is that which is important.' And she refused to listen until the bowl was empty. 'Now?'

'In my pocket,' I told her weakly, 'are papers which matter greatly to me. Tell me, please, if -'

She raised a hand. 'Save your strength. I will go and see.'

She was back two or three minutes later. She carried a paper bag and as she sat beside my bed, I saw she was frowning with some severity.

'Here are your things.'

'Paper,' I muttered. 'In a stiff white envelope. Is it -?'

She peered into the bag, then put her hand inside. 'This?' she asked, drawing it forth. It was no longer so white, nor so pristine. In my immersion, water had reached and stained it, but I would have known that envelope anywhere. I let out a sigh of relief. The sister now said, 'You are a wealthy man?'

'No!'

The frown remained on her face, despite the gentleness of her tone and manner. I whispered, 'Why do you ask?'

'Because there are jewels here, and trinkets. They must be valuable, and they must have been in your pockets when you were brought here.'

I had not remembered until that moment, but I remembered now, at once, my shameful behaviour on steamer Rus. Oh God, I thought, how can I explain?'

But one forgets that true goodness lies in simplicity. Even as I was about to tell her the matter was secret, she said, 'I am so afraid they may be mislaid.'

'Place the envelope beneath my pillow, please, Sister.'

So she did, and it was there when Bronard came again. I had strengthened a little in the course of the day and listened to him with interest. The essence of what he had to say was that little had changed in the long month of my illness. The Imperial Family was reunited, but imprisoned together in the Ipatiev House and impossible of access. On the Urals Soviet there were some, possibly a majority, in favour of a violent end to all the Romanovs, it's not enough just to have them off the Russian throne,' Bronard quoted Goloshchokin as saying. 'We must have them under the Russian ground!'

Bronard, with his catspaw Scriabin, was engaged with the opposite view. Scriabin was, it seemed, having the same difficulty experienced by so many in dealing with the Soviets since. For even then they were men who spoke with a lofty moral tone and sought only blood. Scriabin, arguing for the justice of a properly-conducted trial, a man making a genuinely moral stand, found his was a very lonely voice. Bronard, meanwhile, was weaseling. He was for blood, he told them. Nicholas must pay with his life; furthermore, the entire family shared his guilt and they too must pay. 'But not, I keep telling them,' he said, 'unless it can be presented as Socialist justice.' He grinned that loathsome grin of his. 'You should hear me, Comrade ! I yell for blood, and then I say that we must not besmirch the name of Socialism with murder, however justified. I say that Scriabin is right, but right for the wrong reasons. That what we must show is not mercy but determination and we must show it to the world! How can we contemplate, I ask them, emulating the despotic lawlessness of Imperial Russia?'

When he had gone I lay flexing my wasted muscles in an endeavour to exercise them, conscious all the time of the paper beneath the pillow, of the jewellery I had stolen which lay with it, and of the rightful owners, who slept no more than a mile or two away and over whom the shadow of doom now stretched. It was clear that, for whatever reason, the new leaders of the Russian nation had made no move in the last month to extend mercy to the Romanovs.

I said: 'My clothes, Sister, if you please.'

'Nonsense! You're far too weak.'

'I have the most urgent business. I insist - my clothes! And if you can get one, a taxi, or a cart even, to the station!'

'But you can't travel. Not in your -'

'I must!'

I browbeat her at last into aiding me - for dressing took more strength than I had imagined. My head was light and I had little sense of balance. When I stood upright I wavered and almost fell several times, but in the end I was walking slowly, leaning upon a stick the sister gave me, out to a cart which waited in the yard of the convent. The back was filled with clean straw, upon which I reclined in no little comfort and directed the driver to take me to the house of Preston, the British Consul, in Vosnesensky Avenue. On the way, I naturally had to pass the so-called House of Special Purpose where the Imperial Family was incarcerated, and the mere sight of it, allied to the thought of the humble circumstances to which a great monarch had been reduced, made me yet more determined upon my journey, foolish or no. Preston, in the miserable manner of British diplomats abroad, made endless fuss about the advance of funds. Though he knew who I was and my purpose in the city, when the matter was raised of handing cash to me, I might have been the direst criminal. At last, losing patience, I said, 'Your trade, Preston?'