Death Comes to the Ballets Russes (31 page)

Brown’s Hotel, tucked away behind Piccadilly, prided itself on being one of London’s most private and discreet establishments. It was not one of those hotels you would go to if you wanted to be seen. Leonid Solkonsky’s suite was on the first floor. No shortage of funds, Powerscourt thought, back in the Solkonsky ménage near the Winter Palace or the vast estates in the interior. Any hope of solving the murder of Alexander Taneyev in one of London’s finest hotels vanished when the footman opened the door of the sitting room and showed him in.

An old gentleman, with white hair and a small white beard, wearing some Russian military uniform covered with medals, walked very slowly to greet him. He was leaning heavily on a stick in his right hand.

‘Lord Powerscourt,’ the old gentleman showed him to a seat near the window, ‘would you like some tea?’

‘That would be very kind.’

‘I always find English tea – well, English tea from Ceylon – so much better than the stuff we have at home.’

He rang the bell and lowered himself carefully into another armchair. ‘You must forgive the uniform, Lord Powerscourt. For today only I have returned to my old role as Colonel Solkonsky of the Preobrazhensky Guards. I am an honorary Colonel of the regiment, having served in it all my life.’

‘Should I call you Mr Solkonsky, or Colonel Solkonsky for today?’

‘Forgive me if I opt for Colonel, Lord Powerscourt. It is only to honour an old man’s whim. You see, I have to see three doctors this afternoon, all of them distinguished in their field. I always find the uniform brings with it a certain amount of respect. You’re not likely to be left in the corner of some damned waiting room for most of the afternoon. Quicker service, that’s the thing.’

‘I hope the reason for the three doctors in an afternoon is not too serious, Colonel.’

‘That is kind of you, Lord Powerscourt. They draw me diagrams on pieces of paper; they talk in some abstract medical language. I have had enough of the doctors of St Petersburg, so I have come to London.’

‘Well, I hope your afternoon session is successful, Colonel.’

The tea arrived and the Colonel leant forward on his stick as it was poured. ‘Well, that is kind of you.’ He smiled at the waitress.

‘It is my heart, Lord Powerscourt,’ he continued as the waitress closed the door quietly behind her. ‘I
am short of breath all the time. I have great difficulty going up the stairs. This might sound like the normal condition of an elderly man whose time here is drawing to a close. But it has not happened gradually, as it does, I am told, in most cases. It has come over me in rather a rush in the last month or so. Then I would have made my way up the stairs – slowly, but without any strain. Now I have to take the lift, and even the walk to my rooms here leaves me exhausted and out of breath. That is why these London doctors think they may be able to reverse the position, at best, or slow the process down if total recovery is impossible.’

‘I wish you all the best, Colonel.’

‘But tell me, Lord Powerscourt, apart from the doubtful pleasure of taking tea with an elderly Russian Colonel in Brown’s Hotel, what is the purpose of your visit here today?’

‘I have come about the murders at the Ballets Russes, Colonel.’

‘And what, pray, have they got to do with me?’

‘This is rather difficult. We have learnt, Colonel, that there was an unfortunate link between your family, or what we think may be your family, and the family of the murdered young man, Alexander Taneyev, some years ago.’

‘And what form might that unfortunate link take?’

‘There was a duel, and some talk of revenge on generations to come.’

Colonel Solkonsky began to laugh. He began to laugh so furiously that Powerscourt feared he might be overdoing things in the heart department. Finally he clapped his hands together.

‘Enough,’ he spluttered through his tea. ‘Forgive me for laughing, Lord Powerscourt. This is an old, old story in the Solkonsky family. I should point out that I am a second or third cousin to most of the family who were involved. Even the Solkonsky of the duel was only a distant cousin of mine. There are many branches of the family, and in my one we are about as far removed as it is possible to be from the family with the duel without turning into total strangers.’

‘Why did you find the whole thing a laughing matter, Colonel?’

‘Well, there has long been a family joke about the aftermath of the duel, the Solkonsky’s Pushkin moment, if you will, since the great poet himself was killed in an unnecessary duel all those years ago. Nobody has ever given it any thought, that notion of revenge. But some family wit has always claimed that one day it would come back to haunt us all, and it has. Right here this morning. Forgive me if I find it amusing. On the day of my appointment with the three doctors too!’

‘I can see that. Just tell me, Colonel, as far as you know, that there is no possibility of any member of the Solkonsky family having come to London to kill Alexander Taneyev.’

‘I am the only member of the Solkonsky family here in London,’ the Colonel told him. He raised himself very slowly to his feet and grabbed hold of his stick to steady himself. ‘Do I look to you, Lord Powerscourt, like a man who is going to negotiate his way into the bowels of the Royal Opera House and kill somebody?’

Not for the fist time, Alfred Bolm was coming to the top of the agenda. Inspector Dutfield brought one small portion of new intelligence and some bad news to the Powerscourt household.

‘One of my men following Alfred Bolm has reported that he is a regular visitor to the chess club,’ he began.

‘Chess club?’ said Lady Lucy, as if this was some bastion of London society she had not yet encountered, ‘what chess club? Whose chess club?’

‘It’s a small outfit, my love,’ said Powerscourt, ‘near the British Museum, full of intellectuals and scholars taking a rest from the Reading Room nearby.’

‘Are you a regular attender, Francis?’

Powerscourt laughed. ‘I’ve never actually been inside. I’ve passed it lots of times, but I’ve never looked in.’

‘I see,’ said Lady Lucy, who seemed convinced that chess clubs must be some form of den of iniquity, like those places where people went to smoke hashish and other illegal substances.

‘The other news is not so good, my lord, my lady. It’s this. We can’t find any letters to Alexander Taneyev. They’re not where they ought to be if they were there, if you see what I mean. Personal effects, that’s our category, that’s for passports, wallets, permits, small change, keys, letters, bus ticket stubs, they’re not there. Valuables, that’s different, that’s a different category of item altogether. They’re not there either. I’ve looked.’

Powerscourt had a sudden vision of the most unfortunate members of the Metropolitan Police, whose daily bread was earned filing all these belongings of the dead, the murdered, the victims of traffic accidents, into neat piles and then labelling them for a posterity that seldom came.

‘Perhaps he hid them in his hotel room?’ suggested Lady Lucy.

‘We’ve checked there too,’ said the Inspector. ‘My Sergeant, still toiling away around the technical staff and possible visitors to the opera, tells me that his mama divides men into hoarders and throwers-away. It’s quite a useful maxim in this case; maybe he just threw them away.’

‘I think there might be something in that,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Our eldest son, Thomas, is a thrower-away. So is his younger brother Christopher. Their father on the other hand is a hoarder; he never throws anything away unless you force him. I once found a Test match ticket in his jacket pocket three years after the match had taken place. I think Sergeant Jenkins’ mother might have a point.’

‘There is something else, mind you,’ said Powerscourt, anxious to move the conversation away from long-forgotten Test matches, ‘if Alexander thought the subject matter was highly confidential, he might not have wanted to leave it anywhere where somebody else might have seen it. That’s why he might have destroyed it. Or hidden it, or possibly, though I think this is unlikely, given it to somebody else to keep. That way he could not be incriminated directly.’

‘We shall go back to the dancers,’ Inspector Dutfield sounded a little weary, ‘and see if anybody was holding a number of letters from young Taneyev. He probably told them they involved affairs of the heart.’

Powerscourt had been summoned to the Royal Opera House and was being shown into an enormous box,
close to the right of the stage on the circle level. A rather difficult rehearsal seemed to be in progress. And waiting for him in the corner seat was Diaghilev himself, hat and cane resting on the seat behind him.

‘Welcome, Lord Powerscourt,’ Diaghilev began. ‘I promised to talk to you when we met by that bridge at Blenheim Palace. Well, here I am. Let me say at the outset that I hear you had a disagreeable interview with that woman Lady Ripon. Any enemy of that woman is a friend of mine, I can assure you. I presume she was the person who employed you to investigate this case?’

‘That is correct, Monsieur Diaghilev.’

‘I suspect my relations are more difficult with her than yours.’

‘And why would that be?’

Down on the stage, the dancers seemed to be protesting very loudly about some move they were meant to make. Powerscourt noticed that M. Fokine was nowhere to be seen. Nijinsky himself was acting as choreographer for the day.

‘I feel trapped,’ said Diaghilev, leaning forward for a better view of the stage. ‘On the one hand Lady Ripon is very successful at raising money to sponsor the Ballets Russes. But then she makes such unreasonable demands. We are to appear and dance for our lunch or our supper at her house and at the houses of her friends. Sometimes I think we shall never have any time off at all. Dancers need time to rest or they cannot give their best on stage. But I cannot say no to her, or the money may be withdrawn and the Ballets Russes may be unable to pay the bills.’

‘I can see the difficulty, Monsieur Diaghilev.’

‘I presume that in your case Lady Ripon is endlessly
asking why the case has not been solved, why you failed to prevent that second murder in the palace?’

‘You are absolutely right.’

‘I know you are going to ask me again about the murders. I repeat what I said before. I have nothing to say to you on that score. I live for my art. Nothing more, nothing less. I have asked my colleagues to cooperate with you. I was deeply moved by Blenheim Palace, I have to say.’

‘Really?’

‘I have arrived at the ballet by a roundabout route, Lord Powerscourt. I began with a minor role at the Imperial Theatre at St Petersburg. That didn’t work out. My friends and I collaborated on a journal called the
World of Art
. About ten years ago I organized an exhibition of Russian painting, particularly portraits, at the Tauride Palace in the capital. To collect the portraits I travelled all over the country, deep into the interior, where nobody before had ever arrived asking for paintings of the ancestors. If you can imagine a run-down Blenheim Palace, its grand interiors left to rot slowly through the seasons, a couple of aged retainers and a part-time steward all that’s left to look after the place, trying to hang on to the past and to hold back the future. Well, I must have visited hundreds of such places. After a while they can get under your skin.’

‘How is that?’

‘Well, when I thought about it, and it is a lonely business criss-crossing the whole length and breadth of Russia, I thought that all these palaces meant the end of a world. The end was there in front of me. Remote, boarded-up family estates with great houses frightening in their dead grandeur, inhabited by people who
were no longer able to bear the weight of their past splendour. It wasn’t just the men and women who were ending their lives here, it was a whole way of life. You could see it in their eyes. The eyes of the ancestors said that they were happy in their world, in a fully functioning estate like your Blenheim Palace, if you like. They were part of something living. The eyes of those remaining are dead; they have nothing to look forward to. I felt sure that we are living through a period of enormous upheaval, that there must be a new culture to replace the old one which is dying, if it is not already dead.’