Now Steinhauer’s smile was fixed, and I felt a twinge of sympathy. Albert knew better than to boast about my work, what he knew of it. In my business we do not advertise our successes or our failures. Yes, my name was known to coppers and criminals the length and breadth of Europe, but that was a hindrance as much as an advantage; the best sort of reputation is no reputation at all.
“He snared his man the same way the French did,” the Kaiser went on, laughing. “By appealing to his base appetites!” Again Steinhauer shrugged and smiled, as if the tale was hardly worth telling. The Emperor drained his glass and turned with a smirk to Albert. “The allure of the fairer sex has been the undoing of many a great man, wouldn’t you agree, Uncle?”
The Prince did not rise to the bait, but blew out a long stream of smoke and tossed his still-glowing cigar into the blazing fire. Then he rose, slowly and not very steadily, to his feet. All in attendance immediately stood up straighter. Wilhelm scowled, cut off mid-anecdote, but Steinhauer almost imperceptibly relaxed.
“I am going to retire,” Albert announced. Turning to Ross, he added, “If there is any change in Her Majesty’s condition, let me and His Imperial Highness know at once.”
3
Wednesday 23 January 1901
My dear Amelia,
I plan to return to London tomorrow on the first train, but must go straight to Scotland Yard. Her Late Majesty’s funeral will be on a scale no one living has ever seen, and although Patrick Quinn is superbly capable there are a million arrangements to be made. I will not be home until late—very late, I expect—so do not stay up to greet me.
I was in the room when Her Majesty passed away: her children were by her bedside, and she died peacefully in the arms of the Kaiser Wilhelm. Both he, and the King, and all those present—myself included—were in tears at her passing. For England Victoria’s decease is the end of an era, but for her family it is a purely human tragedy
I stopped writing.
I have ever been a poor correspondent; I know all too well how the most minor detail in a letter can present an opportunity to a reader with ulterior motives. For that reason my letters home had always been terse, colourless and impersonal, but Amelia was used to that, and understood. Indeed, if I were to carry on in this style, she’d worry that either the letter was a forgery or I was losing my mind.
Yet I had witnessed so much in the last twenty-four hours it was hard to resist the urge to write it all down. The term “historic” has been worn threadbare by lazy journalists, but these past few days had been momentous, and I knew that much of what I had seen would be erased from the official history.
Those last moments by the Queen’s bedside were still vivid: how her favourite servant Abdul Karim had been hustled from her presence, his tearful yet dignified protests ignored, and how the Kaiser with his one good arm had held the Queen as she passed away, then given way utterly to his grief; how he had wept over her body like a child, until even Albert had become impatient; how all had been struck dumb until Dr. Reid had taken it upon himself to utter the words “Her Majesty the Queen is dead. Long live the King!” though he nearly choked on them.
And all the while I stood in the corner, motionless and mute, powerless this once to fend off Death.
The next day I had witnessed the two Emperors laying Victoria’s body, shrunken and frail, into its coffin, and the heated disagreement—frankly, squabble—among the children over the items that would join her. The late Queen had made her own list; no one objected to the inclusion of the embroidered dressing gown that had once belonged to their father the Prince Consort, but she had also stipulated that a daguerreotype of the Highlander John Brown be included. Her daughter Beatrice loudly insisted that the image should be removed and destroyed and Brown’s mother’s wedding ring be removed from Victoria’s finger—they were tokens of a foolish infatuation, Beatrice had insisted, that would provoke a scandal when mourners viewed the body lying in state. The other princesses were of the same mind, but the new King had stated flatly that their mother’s wishes were to be honoured in full. Tempers had become heated, and when I took Dr. Reid aside and murmured a compromise—that the photo and ring be present but concealed by flowers—it was quickly accepted.
The peace did not last long; the acrimony between Albert and Wilhelm intensified at dinner that night. Wilhelm, sneering at the simplicity of colonial natives, had used a vulgar term for blacks, only for the new King to interrupt. He abhorred such language, Albert declared, especially in relation to his own subjects. While not an order, it was as close to one as a polite request could be, but Wilhelm had seen fit to ignore it and had carried on with his sneers and slurs until the glacial chill from the head of the table nearly froze the diners to their gilded seats.
Then came the Court announcement that Albert would not be crowned King Albert, after his German father, but as King Edward VII. The Kaiser took this as a personal slight, with good reason: Albert had neither consulted nor warned him, and in courtly politics such an omission was as good as a gauntlet across the face.
Wilhelm for his part had not tried to hide his anger, but complained loudly to his retinue that Edward’s decision was an insult not just to him personally but to all of Germany. Even the Princess Alexandra, warm and patient as she was, made no attempt to intervene or smooth ruffled feathers; she disliked the Kaiser as much as her husband did, if not more. It was as if with Victoria gone the two princes no longer saw any reason to be civil to each other. Royals are as human as the rest of us, of course, and family spats are inevitable, but such rancour between two heads of state did not bode well for future diplomatic relations.
Precisely none of which was suitable for putting down on paper, even to a woman as discreet as my wife. I crumpled the half-written letter into a tight ball, tossed it onto the fire and watched it blacken and catch and burn.
Then picked up my pen again.
My dear Amelia
I shall be home late on Thursday night. Don’t wait up.
W
4
“You are Chief Superintendent Melville?”
“I am, Miss. Come in and sit down. Thank you, John.” Jenkins nodded and closed my office door behind him. The veiled visitor did not sit, but waited by the chair facing my desk, clearly expecting me to draw it back for her. I obliged, noting at the same time the stains on her coat and the mud around the hem of her dress. This was a genteel young woman, Italian by her accent, but down on her luck. All the same her posture was straight-backed and defiant; she was clearly aware of her shabby appearance and keen to make a good impression.
“Thank you for seeing me,” she said.
“Not at all,” I said. “Can I offer you some refreshment, Miss…Minetti, is it? Tea, perhaps?”
“Thank you, but no.”
The officers manning the front desk at Scotland Yard knew they should never turn away anyone who claimed to have a tip-off, even on a day like today. It was Thursday; the royal funeral would take place in nine days’ time, on the first Saturday in February, and there were still a million details to attend to—I had been at my desk since dawn. But my policy had always been that it was better to waste a few minutes indulging a fantasist than miss a crumb of real intelligence, and besides, I needed a break.
As I settled into my seat and took a more direct look at my visitor, I confess I felt ready to indulge her indefinitely, even if she did turn out to be spinning a yarn. She was in her mid- to late twenties, dressed in green, with a very fine figure. When she rolled up her veil, I saw she was strikingly pretty too, with large brown eyes set wide apart in a heart-shaped face, framed in thick honey-blond hair. But her olive skin was caked with powder and rouge; I suspected she had been making a living on the streets. Few streetwalkers I knew would approach a policeman for help unless they were desperate. And this woman needed help; the face powder did not quite conceal the bruise around h
er right eye.
“Are you sure?” I pressed her. “Something to eat, perhaps. I understand you’ve come a long way.”
Whitechapel, Jenkins had said, a good hour on foot from our offices on the Embankment. And from the state of her skirt she had walked all the way rather than spend money on an omnibus.
“Later, perhaps,” she said. “Thank you.”
“I understand you have some information you wish to share.” She had mentioned a plot of some sort to Jenkins, but against whom or what, I had yet to learn. Now she glanced down at her gloved hands; I recognised the tic of shame and waited for her to speak.
“I am teacher of Italian. I come to England four years ago, to work as governess. But I lose that position after a…misunderstanding. With my employer. His wife, she would not give me references, and I do not have money to go home to Napoli. Now I…I work from home. I give…private lessons.” Comforted by how plausible that polite fiction sounded, she looked up at me, and I nodded.
“I see,” I said. “Go on.”
“Recently, I find a client, a pupil. He tell me he is Romanian.”
“You were teaching him Italian?”
“English. He told me he just come to England, and he have not much money.”
“When was this?”
“October, November. After a few weeks, he say he have no money at all, and nowhere to live…”
“And you offered him accommodation?” I prompted, as gently as I could.
“Yes. And soon he become, he became, more than my pupil. He gave me gifts—a beautiful fan—and he asked me to marry him.”
She was blushing now and avoiding my eye. I picked up a pencil, partly to make notes, but mostly so she would not feel I was staring at her, judging her.
“Can I ask, what was your fiancé’s name?”
“He say his name is Iosif Dalca. From Bucharest.”
“Dalca…” The name meant nothing to me. “I take it you don’t believe him?”
“He has friends now, who visit. Two men. They came last week, from Holland, they said, by a fishing boat. They talk in private, not in Hungarian or Romanian, but Russian. They think I do not understand Russian, but I do.”
“How is that, if I might ask?”
“I learn it from neighbour, back in Napoli. I have, how do you say, ear for languages.”
“And what is it these three men talk about?”
“The funeral of the Queen that will happen soon. There will be a great procession, with many nobles. Your King, and the Kaiser Wilhelm, and Leopold of Belgium? They plan to kill Kaiser Wilhelm.”
I stopped scribbling and looked up. She met my stare directly, without blinking.
“Do they, now?” I kept my voice neutral. Even if her story was true, there were plenty of blowhards who blethered about revolution to their friends, in Russian, German, French and English, without ever getting off their backsides.
“These friends of the man called Iosif,” I said, “do you know their names?”
“One is called Dimitri. The other one, the tall one, he is called Jean. But two nights past, they called Iosif something else, something strange. Dimitri called him Akushku.” I frowned. Many anarchists, especially those with criminal records, used aliases to confuse the police. This sounded more like a code name. “It means, ‘man who helps babies to be born.’ ”
“Thank you,” I said, making a note. The term had an ominous ring to it.
“I think Iosif is not his real name,” she went on. “I think he is not Romanian. I think he speaks English already. And I think he does not mean to marry me. And when I tell him this…” Her hand brushed the bruised orbit of her eye.
“He used me,” she went on. Her voice shook, but there were no tears. This was anger—anger at her own naivety, and her lover’s brutality. “He needed a place to stay where no one asks questions. And when he and his friends have finished their business, he will leave England. And leave me.”
I kept an open door to informants precisely because it saved so much wasted effort. Over the decades I had learned to tell within a minute when I was being spun a yarn by some “concerned citizen” hoping to scrounge a few sovereigns, or some fantasist convinced their Jewish tailor was murdering his clients with poisoned needles. Minetti struck me as utterly sincere; with every calm, measured word she spoke, what had started as a vague sense of foreboding on my part was hardening into an iron fist of dread clenched around my gullet.
“This man,” I said. “Iosif, the one his friends called Akushku. Can you describe him for me?”
“Tall. As tall as you. Not quite thirty years old. Blue eyes, fair hair. Strong. And his left hand—it has no, no…ring finger. From an accident as a boy, he said.”
Mentally I scanned all the portraits-parlés—detailed written descriptions—of anarchists we had on file. None of them matched these details. Was this an elaborate fiction, after all?
“What about his friends? Can you describe them?”
“Jean, he is tall, but very thin, very pale, with bad teeth, black hair, but nearly bald. Dimitri, he is small. Small like me. Dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes, with, what do you say, a squint? I think he is from Bulgaria. He plays with knife, all the time—a hunter’s knife.”
The iron fist tightened its grip. I knew those men, I thought: the knifeman was a Bulgarian called Averbukh, his colleague the Serbian Bozidar. Two murderous thugs who sailed under an anarchist flag of convenience and were currently wanted by every police force in Europe. Each of them was vicious enough in his own right; from what sort of man would they be taking orders?
I took a deep breath to compose myself before I spoke again, for my own sake as much as hers. I had expected this, after all, and Special Branch had seen off countless threats like this before. Fast, hard, decisive action would tear this poison plant up by the roots.
“Miss Minetti, before you answer my next question, I want you to think about it very carefully. Does Iosif, or any of these men, suspect you have come to see me?”
“No.” She shook her head insistently. “They think I am a stupid girl, infatuated. Iosif does not care where I go or what I do, during the day. At night, he wants me there.” She didn’t say what for, but it didn’t take much imagination.
“And where are they at this moment?”
“Every day they go out, I don’t know where. When they come home they make plans. I show you—”
She snapped open her handbag, drew out a scrap of paper with blackened edges and passed it over to me. It was a map of the West End, or rather the remains of a map, rescued from a fire; yet there was enough of it left to make out a line in red crayon heading north from Victoria Station along Park Lane—the proposed route of the funeral. I stared at it, chewing my moustache, and barely heard Miss Minetti’s next remark.
“Iosif, Akushku, he writes nothing down. If makes pictures, he burns them, always. This one I saved. If he knew…”
He’s thorough, this one, I thought. As if he’s done this before.
“You will arrest them, yes? Before they hurt anyone.”
“We will, I promise you.”
“Iosif…will you hurt him? Beat him?”
“If it comes to that. And I expect it will. But rest assured, he’ll never know it was you who helped us.”
“I do not care if he knows,” she said, and there was broken ice in her voice. “I want him to know. I want him to feel what it is like to be hurt. To be betrayed. By someone who said they loved you.”
* * *
—
“Akushku, you say?”
“It’s a code name, sir. It means ‘male midwife.’ ”
Anderson scowled. I rarely discussed my tip-offs with him, or sought his approval for my plans, but I needed Anderson’s signature on a warrant for the action I had in mind.
“This terroris
t calls himself a midwife?”
“I suspect it’s by way of a black joke. He means to deliver a new world order—a process that will be bloody and painful. Indeed, for men like these, the bloodier the better.”
“You suspect? And yet you haven’t questioned this man, or even established that he actually exists.”
“He exists all right. I visited the young lady’s lodgings, this afternoon.”
“Ah yes.” Anderson nodded with an air of worldly wisdom. “This young lady. Tell me about her.” As my old mentor Superintendent Williams used to say, the four essential qualities for a policeman are honesty, sobriety, punctuality and being extremely selective about what you tell your boss.
“She’s a former governess, sir,” I said. “Now making a living teaching languages. The suspect is a former pupil of hers.”
“And did he by any chance become her paramour? And spurn her?”
I sighed inwardly. Prim Presbyterian as he was, Anderson hadn’t ascended that greasy pole without some insight into human nature. “Her motive for coming to us, sir, is less important than—”
“There you have it.” He sat back in his chair, smirking. “This is the tale of a woman scorned, William.”
“She also mentioned two confederates, whose descriptions match those of two known criminals from the Continent.”
Anderson waved my protests away. “So send a few detectives to detain these men for questioning.”
“Sir, we’re talking about violent anarchists who might well be armed—”
“Armed? Did this young woman mention any weapons? Did you see any, when you came calling on her?”
Calling on her? What was he suggesting—that I was some jealous client?
“I would rather go in with too much force than too little. If I’m wrong, the worst we’ll suffer is some embarrassment.”
“Some embarrassment? Chief Superintendent, half the crowned heads of Europe are arriving in London as we speak. This is a time of introspection, of national mourning—the last thing we need is a massive armed raid on a few foreign troublemakers, especially on such tenuous evidence.”
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