Death Comes to the Ballets Russes (37 page)

‘“Saturday June the eighth. The girls are still going on about Bolm. Don’t they realize that if they go on and on about something it can get more than a little boring. I am in my room at the Premier Hotel now. The traffic is always very thick down our side of the square. I am feeling unsettled. There hasn’t been time for a reply from Mama yet. I wonder how Papa is coping now Ivan is away on manoeuvres for a fortnight. Papa always says he finds it difficult being in a house full of women with no other man to talk to apart from the servants. That is why he always runs up those enormous bills at the yacht club when the men of the family are away. I wonder how he’s coping now.

‘“I have to say that I have not felt homesick since I have been here, not once. Just now I wish I was back home in St Petersburg, having family supper with some lively conversation going on.”’

‘Poor boy,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘He could have come round here if we’d known he wanted a bit of family life, couldn’t he Francis?’

‘He could have played a bit of chess with Thomas, though I wouldn’t recommend it. We haven’t heard anything like what we want, Lucy. Not yet anyway.’

Sergeant Rufus Jenkins was feeling like a lone fisherman who has taken his rods and his fishing basket and his rug to a remote riverbank and cast away all day. He
finds nothing. Just when he thinks he might as well pack up and go home, he finally catches a fish. There it was! At last! He made a careful note in his notebook, including the entries on either side of it, and hurried off at full speed to Markham Square where he expected to find his Inspector. As he wished his bus would go faster, Sergeant Jenkins thought that the Powerscourt residence was turning into a sort of extra police station.

Rhys showed the panting young man, one or two buttons undone, hair dishevelled, gasping heavily, into the drawing room.

‘Lord Powerscourt, Lady Powerscourt, apologies for bursting in on you like this, but I’ve got it! I’m sorry it’s taken so long!’

‘You are most welcome, Sergeant. We’ll get you a cup of tea – or a bottle of beer, if you’d prefer. You’ve obviously come in a great hurry with your news. Tell us, pray, what sends you hurtling round the streets of London.’

‘Sorry, my lord, I’ve come from Somerset House where I’ve been looking at the death certificates! Reverend Fortescue down in Blexham brought us the fist part of the story of the marital life of Richard Wagstaff Gilbert. Here comes the second.’

The Sergeant drew out his notebook. ‘Mrs Sophie Gilbert, née Shore, Bermondsey, October the tenth, died in childbirth. The infant also died.’

‘Was it a boy or a girl?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘It was a girl.’

‘Pardon me, my lord, my lady, a terrible thought occurred to me as I was walking upstairs here just now.’

‘And what was that?’ said Powerscourt.

‘Why, my lord. Do you think he married again? And maybe he had another family we don’t know anything about? No reason why he couldn’t have had. There’s plenty of time for him to have done that.’

‘There are an awful lot of years,’ said Powerscourt, ‘waiting for you in Somerset House if I am wrong, but I don’t think he did.’

‘How can you be so sure, Francis?’

‘Well, think of it like this. If you had a wife alive, you’d be leaving all your money to her first and then onto the children when she died. That would be the natural thing. But think of it. If you had a wife or children living, you wouldn’t be able to torment your family with the question of who you were going to leave your money to. You’d feel you were betraying your own every time you mentioned it. It’s only if you don’t have any direct descendants that you could play these terrible games. And consider this as well. If you had a wife and children of your own, your sisters would know about it. They wouldn’t take it seriously, all this talk of leaving the money to their children. I think you’re clear of another thirty-year session down there in the archives, Sergeant. What do you think Lucy?’

‘Well, he sounds a pretty odd sort of character, our friend Gilbert, with the dodgy money and the cheating at cards. You don’t think he could have a wife tucked away somewhere in secret?’

‘Oh ye of little faith,’ said Powerscourt. ‘As long as I have Thomas and Olivia and the twins I couldn’t contemplate giving any serious money to any nephews or nieces. It would be impossible. I think that idea – of the second wife and family tucked away – can be removed
from the investigation. It still leaves the three nephews with perfectly adequate motives for killing each other and increasing their chances of inheriting.’

Powerscourt and Lady Lucy returned to the diary of Alexander Taneyev, now at the National Gallery.

‘“I went to Trafalgar Square this morning to the National Gallery. They certainly have a lot of wonderful paintings, but I don’t think they are a finer collection than we have in St Petersburg. But the Claudes and the Turners are sublime. I so wish that either of them could have come to our city and painted the sunsets over the Neva. That would have been beyond anything here. It would have been so beautiful.

‘“I had a long talk with my uncle over supper at his house last night. He says that he is going to leave me all his money. He’s not going to leave a penny to Mark or Peter or Nicholas, which I think is jolly unfair. He kept going about it as if he were really enjoying tormenting my cousins. I think it’s monstrous. If I ever do get that money I shall make sure I give it to Papa and get him to divide it all up between the four of us.”’

Another telegram had arrived at the Savoy addressed to M. Diaghilev. ‘Dear M. Diaghilev, It is my unfortunate duty,’ wrote the General Manager of the Grand Hotel Monte Carlo, ‘that the bill for your stay here earlier this summer has still not been paid. I enclose a copy for your convenience. Unless this is paid forthwith, the
hotel will be unable to offer you or your associates any further accommodation in future.’

Colonel Olivier Brouzet spent the morning reading diplomatic telegrams in his office in the Place des Vosges in Paris. He wasn’t only reading the telegrams sent from his own Foreign Office at the Quai d’Orsay in his part of the city, but the messages sent in and out of Paris by all the Great Powers: the Germans, the Austrians, the English and the Russians. He called it taking the temperature of the diplomatic circuit, and it enabled him to tell his masters which issues between the principal powers on the Continent were especially important. These, he would point out in his accompanying memorandum, might need a touch or two of diplomatic massage in the weeks ahead.

Earlier that summer, the French cryptographers had succeeded in cracking the codes of the Okhrana, the Russian secret police in St Petersburg, used in messages to and from their office in Paris. There was one particular phrase that caused him great concern. He telephoned his wife to say he would be out of town for a few days. He sent word to his masters that he could be found at the local Embassy. Then he went through to his inner office and demanded details of the train and boat services to London, departing immediately.

‘I say, Lucy, we may be about to meet the Crown Jewels at last. There’s a page here that the boy has tried to cross out, but he hasn’t quite succeeded. I can still just
about read it. Thank God for the vanity of diarists. He could have ripped out the page but he didn’t.’

Powerscourt leant forward to get as close as he could to the diary. ‘“I found a strange document on Bolm’s desk this afternoon when I popped in to ask him about his performance. On the middle of the page, it said in English: This paper must not be shared with any third parties, none whatsoever. At the top of the first page of the document – the crossing out starts here – it says in English: Most Immediate and Top Secret. Not for Circulation. The next page was a report on some experiment or other; at least, I presume it was an experiment, full of equations and mathematical expressions, none of which I understand. It’s like that all the way until the last page, where it said still in English: Next Experiment. Kingfisher. Goring June 28th. 0600 hours. There were so many equations and mathematical symbols I couldn’t make any sense of it. I left Bolm’s dressing room as fast as I could and came back here to the Premier Hotel. I think I shall go for a walk to clear my head. What am I to do? Who am I to tell? All that stuff about top secret and so on. I wish Mama or Papa were here to tell me what to do.”’

‘The date, Francis, the date at the end – that’s three days from the opening night and
Thamar
, when the boy was killed. What do you think it means?’

‘Well,’ said her husband, rubbing his eyes, ‘it’s certainly not a recipe for making tea in a samovar, that’s for sure. But all those equations and things, I’m at a loss. I wonder if it has to with guns and their alignment, some means for more accurate shelling of the enemy. Or it could have to do with the navigation of submarines, that’s always tricky, apparently. Perhaps
we’d better see what our diarist has to say when he comes back from his walk.

‘Here we go. “There may be some spy ring centred on our ballet. I wonder if I shouldn’t go to the English authorities at once. I think I should confront Monsieur Bolm this afternoon. I can’t go round accusing him of things without hearing what he has to say.”’

Powerscourt turned the page. It was blank. So was the rest of the diary. Alexander Taneyev had written his last entry.