Death Comes to the Ballets Russes (23 page)

The audience were stunned at first. Then they burst into a long rolling round of applause that travelled right round the arena. Nijinsky rose from the waters of the lake and made his way to the edge, great drops dripping down his clothes. There was a long, slow gasp from the women in the audience as they watched him clamber ashore and be taken into the care of a stagehand who had arrived with a cloak and a dry pair of shoes. He squelched his way back to the main party at the Palladian bridge where Diaghilev and all the Russian party were standing to applaud him.

The dancers, the wet and the dry, took their places on the main stage once more. The musicians played an operatic adventure while the audience calmed down. Then, one by one, the dancers, major and minor, bowed to the audience and departed to the big house. The musicians too took up their music and their instruments and left their separate stage. The audience began to make their way home, discussing that final leap and the dive into the water. ‘An act of such dramatic surprise that has not being witnessed in or around Oxford in living memory,’ said the
Manchester Guardian
; ‘a truly dramatic denouement to a truly dramatic day’ was the verdict of
The Times
; ‘a tour de force for M. Diaghilev,’ said the
Illustrated London News
.

Pas de chat

‘The step of the cat’. The dancer jumps sideways, and while in mid-air, bends both legs up (two
retirés
) bringing the feet up as high as possible, with knees apart. The Dance of the Cygnets from Swan Lake involves sixteen
pas de chat
, performed by four dancers holding hands with their arms interlaced.

Colonel Olivier Brouzet, the man in charge of the French Secret Service, had the original of Fragonard’s
The Swing
on loan from the Louvre on the wall behind his desk. Colonel Brouzet had never been a violent man. One has to admit that the artillery of which he was a noted exponent could cause frightful carnage and terrible wounds, but Olivier Brouzet never saw the damage his cannons created. Artillery men have to be methodical and ruthless: methodical in ensuring that their troop has sufficient time to reload properly according to the rule book; ruthless in pressing home the advantage, even though there may be a
bloodstained slaughter of their enemies on the receiving end of their salvoes.

His guest this morning was in civilian clothes, a black frock coat, a linen shirt in pale blue, and an elaborate cravat that seemed to be based on a Japanese design. Colonel Maurice Martel Argaud was a star member of a fashionable cavalry regiment. He was serving a six-month attachment to the General Staff. He moved in avant-garde circles in the capital, consorting with Proust and being painted by Renoir with his friend Charles Ephrussi as guests at boating parties on the Seine.

And it was this link to the General Staff that had brought him to the attention of Monsieur, as he now was in his Secret Service role, Brouzet and his Fragonard on the Place des Vosges.

The prevailing military theory in the French Army at that time was that attack at all costs was the best policy. Its chief proponent was an officer called Grandmaison, who believed with all the passion of the convert that it was the only way to win wars.
L’attaque à l’outrance
, extreme attack, was the order of the day. It was the order of the revolutionary leader Danton to the French defenders at Verdun back in 1792:
il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace
(we must be bold, we must be bolder still, we must always be bold).

Colonel Argaud disagreed. He was a great believer in reading military history, a subject regarded as irrelevant and unnecessary by his opponents, who believed that truth was on their side and that this time things would be different. Wide reading in nineteenth-century battles convinced the Colonel that in the last century key battles, particularly those of Waterloo
and Gettysburg, had been won by defence. And Colonel Argaud was convinced that mass slaughter of his fellow countrymen would result if a policy of all-out attack at any cost was pursued. He firmly believed that wholesale destruction of the French armies would take place on the battlefields of the next war if the military authorities followed the doctrine of ‘
l’audace
’. In French military circles, this was heresy.

Powerscourt was contemplating a piece of cheese with some interest when he noticed a commotion at the door of the hotel restaurant in Woodstock, the evening of the day of the ballet. A tall young man, wearing a dark grey suit and twirling his hat in his hands, was apparently asking a series of urgent questions of the nearest waiter, questions the waiter didn’t seem capable of answering. He, in his turn, was gesturing towards the head waiter, who was advising an elderly couple about the wine list to accompany the sweet course.

‘Hold on, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I don’t like the look of this one bit.’

Shortly the head waiter himself made his way over to the Powerscourt table. ‘Lord Powerscourt? Please forgive me. The young man at the door wishes to speak to you. He says it is a matter of some urgency.’

‘I’m sorry, Lucy. I’d better see what this is all about.’

Only in the street, when they were well clear of the hotel and its staff, did the young man – Sergeant Fuller – reveal his purpose. ‘It’s Inspector Jackson, my guv’nor, my lord. He wants to see you up at the big house at once. Inspector Dutfield told him you were here.’

‘What’s happened?’ said Powerscourt, and something in the young man’s demeanour implied that something terrible had come to spoil the day.

‘There’s another dead one, my lord. Dead ballet person, I mean, my lord, apart from the one you already have down there in London.’

‘What sort of ballet person? Male or Female? Age?’

‘Female, my lord, aged about twenty to twenty-five, my lord. My Inspector said I was to fill you in along the way.’

‘You want me to come back to Blenheim Palace with you? Very good. I’ll just tell my wife.’

It was only a short walk to the back gates. ‘The time now is just after ten, my lord. We don’t know yet when exactly it happened – some time after eight thirty at the earliest and nine forty-five at the latest. The girl was found by one of the footmen, my lord. She was lying in a pool of her own blood and stuff underneath the balcony in the Great Hall, my lord. The doctors say she’d have been killed instantly. We gather she was called Vera, Vera Belitsky, my lord.’

‘Suicide on a day like this? With all that glory for the Ballets Russes? It seems unlikely.’

‘My Inspector says he’s had a case like this once before, in one of the colleges, my lord. High building: did he fall or was he pushed, that sort of thing. Only in this case it was a she.’

Powerscourt was thinking along similar lines. One case with a double possibility, dancer or understudy. Now a second. They did, however, have one thing in common.

‘There’s an old lady up there, my lord. Wants to speak to you as a matter of some urgency, she says.’

‘Would you want this old lady as your grandmother, Sergeant?’

‘No I wouldn’t, my lord. Not at any price. You’ve caught me out there, my lord. We’re not supposed to have opinions about members of the public, dead or alive, as you well know.’

They were now mounting the steps towards the Great Hall. A couple of constables waved them inside. Inspector Jackson, who looked even younger than his sergeant, came to greet them. One whole corner of the Great Hall was shrouded in sheets. The Inspector pointed up to the gallery.

‘That’s where she came from, right in the middle of that balcony. And that,’ he pointed in the direction of the sheeted section, ‘is where she ended up. The fall killed her. We’re waiting for the undertakers to take her away. Some fool began babbling on about where on earth she is going to receive an Orthodox funeral and an Orthodox burial in the middle of Oxfordshire. I ask you.’

Inspector Jackson shook his head.

‘Sorry, my lord. Let me tell you what we know. The ballet people danced here in the Great Hall, audience draped all the way up the stairs. The musicians were crammed in like mice on the balcony and the area behind, the dancers in the Great Hall down below. After the performance, the guests take a drink in the garden with the fountains out the back. Then they go in to eat in the State Dining Room with a few overspilling in the big room behind. They’re all still there. The butler, a former military man, I understand, realized that they all had to be kept in the same place. That went down well, as you can imagine. My men are now working their way through them: invitation cards,
please, name and address, where were you at the time of the murder?’

‘Who found the body?’

‘Sorry, my lord. One of the footmen found her. Thank God he had the good sense to go straight to the butler.’

An angry Lady Ripon was advancing towards them, brushing aside a couple of constables as if they were flies in her drawing room. She carried an enormous bag in her right hand – clutching it, Powerscourt thought, like a weapon of war.

’Good evening, Inspector,’ she boomed, making the word ‘Inspector’ sound like an inferior sort of servant, somewhere between a sous chef and an under footman.

‘My name is Lady Ripon, Patron of the Royal Ballet, I wish to speak to your companion, Inspector,’ she carried on, ‘the man called Powerscourt.’

Inspector Jackson showed that he might have met her type before.

‘That won’t be possible in here, Lady Ripon. This area is closed off. Perhaps you’d care to have your conversation outside. Our constables will be able to keep an eye on you out there.’

‘Well, Powerscourt,’ she began as they reached the bottom of the great steps that led into Blenheim Palace, ‘I thought I had forbidden you entrance here this evening. But you turn up nonetheless. We’ll let that pass for a moment. My people and I employed you to find out who killed that understudy down in London.’

She made the word ‘understudy’ sound like a packet of tea you might have to pick up at the grocer’s when the Fortnum and Mason delivery hadn’t arrived on time.

‘You have failed. And now your prowess has led to a second murder, one you were powerless to prevent.
What do you have to say for yourself? If you were one of my servants or my staff, I should dismiss you on the spot. But I would have to consult with the board of the Royal Opera House who are, alas, not here at the moment.’

‘I am truly sorry about the second murder, if murder it was—’ Powerscourt began.

‘Don’t give me this if it was murder nonsense, Powerscourt. Everyone can see it was a murder. That’s why all these policemen are charging about all over the place, making marks on the floors where they shouldn’t, knocking over valuable pieces of porcelain, no doubt. You couldn’t survive a fall like that onto a marble floor. It’s not possible. Don’t tell me all this would be going on for a mere suicide of a junior member of the corps de ballet.’

Powerscourt told her precisely that. ‘And, let me tell you Lady Ripon, it is only right and proper that a young girl should receive the same attention if she was a suicide or a murder victim.’

‘Your observations are outrageous, Powerscourt. Your performance is pathetic. Your record as an investigator is in ruins. Your future employment prospects are zero. Have no doubt that I shall tell all the society members – a select band in which you are not included – of your failures and your incompetence.’

With that Lady Ripon drew her cloak around her and swept back into the hall. Powerscourt had to admit that he was not sorry to see her go.

The French Secret Service believed that Argaud and his small band of confederates were passing their views
on to a hostile power. Quite who this hostile power was, they were not entirely sure, but they felt it was unlikely it was to England, and possible but unlikely it was to Russia. Germany was the obvious place. If the German High Command knew that wave after wave of Frenchmen were going to pour out of their trenches in their ridiculous coloured uniforms and charge the German trenches, then victory would be assured. For a German victory, it would just be a matter of making sure there was enough ammunition for the machine guns.