The waves grow higher and higher; the boat is awash with salt water. And then a set of lights – which at first Blackstone thinks exist only in his imagination – suddenly appear, bobbing up and down in the darkness.
‘Ah,’ Vladimir says, seeing the Russian trawler himself and shouting to make his voice heard above the wind. ‘Our taxi has arrived.’
After that, everything was a blank, and the next time he was conscious of anything, they were back on dry land.
They are on a train. Blackstone knows this because he can hear the click-click-click of the wheels below him, but he has no idea how they got there. They have the whole carriage to themselves, but Vladimir is standing in the doorway, talking to someone in the corridor.
‘How sick is he?’ asks the other man.
‘It is a bad fever, but he will survive,’ Vladimir answers.
‘Are you sure of that?’ the other man says.
‘He will survive,’ Vladimir repeats firmly. ‘He will survive because I need him to survive.’
Blackstone put his glass of tea back on its saucer.
‘I need him to survive,’ he said softly.
Had he really heard Vladimir say that?
And if he had said it, what did it mean?
Vladimir looked across his desk at the young woman who had been the subject of his wrath – and then his contrition – minutes earlier.
He had nurtured many protégés over the years, he reflected. Some of them – through weakness, greed or treachery – had been a disappointment to him, and he’d been forced to deal with them accordingly. But there had been others who had developed the ability to navigate their way around the complex and all-encompassing web that he had spun over so much of Russian life.
Yes, some of them had been very good indeed, but none of them – not even Agnes – had come close to being as accomplished as this girl. Tanya was both intelligent and fearless, and though she had her weaknesses, he knew exactly what they were and was sure he could keep them under control.
‘How is your visitor?’ the girl asked.
‘Need you sound so disdainful whenever you refer to him?’ Vladimir wondered.
‘I don’t like him,’ Tanya said.
‘How can you possibly say that you do not like him when you don’t even know him?’ Vladimir said sharply.
Tanya opened her mouth to say something, then changed her mind and clamped it closed again.
‘Well?’ Vladimir demanded.
‘I know that he’s English – and that’s enough.’
‘That wasn’t what you were going to say, was it?’
‘No.’
‘So instead of saying what you really feel, you fall back – for reasons of your own – on simple prejudice. And we cannot afford prejudice in our line of work, Tanya. If we do not see things as they really are, we are doomed.’
The girl looked down at her hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘You must meet him,’ Vladimir told her. ‘Perhaps we will all go out to dinner together.’
‘Do we have to?’ Tanya asked.
Vladimir scowled. ‘I am not used to having my instructions questioned,’ he said.
‘I didn’t mean to …’
‘We will start the conversation again, and this time you will be the woman I trained – the woman I know you can be.’
Tanya took a deep breath.
‘How is your visitor?’ she asked for a second time, and though there was no particular warmth in her question, her previous antagonism had quite vanished.
‘He is making an excellent recovery from the fever,’ Vladimir said. ‘He told me that yesterday he walked almost as far as the Admiralty Arch.’
The girl frowned. ‘He told you?’
‘He told me,’ Vladimir repeated.
‘And you didn’t know that already?’
‘No.’
Once more, Tanya’s eyes became riveted on her hands.
‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ Vladimir said.
The girl looked up. ‘I don’t want to incur your displeasure three times in a morning,’ she said.
‘You have no choice in the matter,’ Vladimir said.
Tanya nodded, acknowledging the truth of the statement.
‘If you don’t know what he’s done until he tells you himself, that can only mean that you’re not having him watched,’ she said.
‘You’re quite right – I’m not.’
‘And is that wise?’
Vladimir shrugged. ‘Perhaps not – but what choice do I have? His value to me is that he is an unknown quantity to everyone but the two of us, and how could he remain unknown if I had men following him?’
‘Does he have any idea why he is here?’
‘No, but he is aware that I have brought him to Russia so that I can use him for “my own peculiar end”.’
‘You’re quoting from Shakespeare,’ Tanya pronounced. ‘That’s part of Iago’s speech in Act One, Scene One, of Othello. You used to read it to me when I was younger.’
‘So I did,’ Vladimir agreed, delighted that she’d remembered. ‘I chose that particular play precisely because of Iago. I wanted you to learn from his example – but also to become wary of developing his flaws.’
‘And are you upholding your side of the bargain with the Englishman?’ Tanya asked, changing the subject slightly. ‘Are you doing all you can for this sergeant of his?’
‘I am,’ Vladimir said, ‘though not in a way that Sam Blackstone could possibly have imagined.’
Ellie Carr looked down at the man on the marble slab in the mortuary.
The inspector who’d brought him had wanted only one question answered: was it murder, or was it suicide?
But while the question was straightforward enough, finding the answer might prove much more complicated, because the man had been hit head-on by an express train and was now spread out in front of her like a bloodied and unfinished jigsaw puzzle.
Despite an extensive search of the area around the track, parts of him were still missing and might never be found, but if he had been killed before the train hit him – if he’d been shot or strangled – then it still might be possible to uncover evidence of that among the mangled remains.
‘Where are you, Sam? Are you safe?’ she heard herself say, and she realized that though she’d thought she’d be able to banish Blackstone from her mind while she was working, she’d obviously fallen at the first fence.
Someone coughed directly behind her, and she turned to find herself looking at a tall thin man. He was, in fact, almost as tall and thin as Blackstone, but whereas Blackstone bought his suits from the second-hand stalls in the markets, this man had clearly had his made by one of the best tailors on Savile Row.
‘Dr Carr?’ the man asked.
‘If I find out that you got in here by bribing my clerk, I’ll tear the rascal’s balls off,’ Ellie Carr said.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand,’ the man replied.
‘Balls,’ Ellie repeated. ‘Testicles! The twin sacs that dangle between men’s legs – and which they all seem so inordinately proud of.’
‘I know what balls are. What I haven’t quite grasped—’
‘Let me ask you a question,’ Ellie interrupted him. ‘Are you one of those toffs who sometimes think it might be a jolly jape to take a peek at all the blood and gore in my mortuary?’
‘Certainly not!’ the man replied. ‘My name is Courtney Hartington, and I represent the firm of Hartington, Hartington and Blythe, solicitors.’
‘And which one are you?’
‘I’ve already said …’
‘Are you Hartington? Or are you Hartington?’
The solicitor gave her thin smile. ‘Since I am the senior partner, I suppose I am the first Hartington,’ he said.
‘Well, now that’s cleared that up, but you still haven’t explained why you’re in my mortuary,’ Ellie Carr said, ‘because neither I nor the bloke lying in bits on the slab need
your services.’
‘Perhaps you don’t need my services,’ Hartington agreed, ‘but your friend Sergeant Patterson most certainly does.’
‘He’s already got a solicitor,’ Ellie pointed out.
‘Yes, he has,’ Hartington agreed, ‘and while it would be quite unprofessional of me to say he’s not a very good one, I feel it my duty to point out that, in this world, you get what you pay for.’
‘And, from the way you’re dressed, Archie can’t afford to pay for you,’ Ellie said.
‘He doesn’t need to,’ Hartington replied. ‘I have already been satisfactorily recompensed.’
‘Who by?’
‘The gentleman – or lady – has made it clear to me that he – or she – would prefer to remain anonymous.’
‘And why have you come to me?’ Ellie Carr asked suspiciously. ‘Why aren’t you saying all this to Archie’s wife?’
‘My instructions are that I’m to deal directly with you.’
‘So are you saying that this gentleman …’
‘Or lady.’
‘… knows me?’
‘I’m afraid I can neither confirm nor deny your acquaintanceship with the client in question.’
‘All right, then, another question,’ Ellie said. ‘What can you do for Archie that his cut-price solicitor couldn’t do?’
‘Well, for a start, I could post his bail,’ Hartington said.
On his previous excursion, Blackstone had settled for just one glass of tea, but he had pushed himself harder that day than he ever had before, and when his body told him that it would be wise to order another tea and rest a little more, he did not argue with it.
Even when he’d finished this second glass, he didn’t leave immediately, but remained in his seat and watched the world of Petrograd pass him by, and, as a result, he’d been in the tea shop for over an hour when he finally stood up.
As he reached the door, the waitress smiled at him again.
‘Mne kazhet saya vy,’ she said.
Blackstone shrugged apologetically. ‘I’m sorry, I just don’t understand,’ he said.
‘Mne kazhet saya vy,’ the waitress repeated, more slowly this time.
‘Bol’shoe spasibo,’ Blackstone said helplessly.
As he stepped out on to the pavement, a woman strode past, and even the brief glance he caught of her face was enough to make his heart miss a beat.
The woman kept on walking, heading in the direction of Kazan Cathedral, and Blackstone just stood and watched her, unable to move.
It couldn’t be her, he told himself.
Vladimir said she was dead.
But then, he thought, Vladimir lied a lot.
He found his legs and set off in pursuit, though catching her up wouldn’t be easy, because Agnes had always been a good walker, and he was still a little weak from the fever.
How long had it been since he had last seen her, he asked himself, as the effort to reach her made him struggle for breath.
Jesus – it had been eighteen years!
They are sitting in a tiny railway carriage in the middle of the vast steppes. They have declared their love for each other and had intended to go back to England to start a new life together. But the evidence has been mounting up, and now Blackstone can no longer fight off the conclusion the evidence so clearly points to: that all the time their love had been growing, Agnes had been Vladimir’s agent and had been using him for Vladimir’s ends.
‘It was Vladimir’s decision that you should come back to England with me, wasn’t it?’ he asks.
‘I want to come back with you, Sam, my darling,’ Agnes says. ‘I know you don’t believe me now when I say that I love you, but you will in time – because I’ll find ways to prove it to you.’
‘Nevertheless, it was Vladimir’s decision,’ Blackstone says unyieldingly.
‘Nevertheless, it was Vladimir’s decision,’ Agnes agrees.
‘Why? So you can spy on me as you did on the Count?’
‘He asked me to report to him if I discovered anything interesting.’
‘Of course he did!’
‘But he did not have high expectations that I would have anything to report. When you return to your humdrum work in Scotland Yard, you’ll be of no further use to Vladimir – because he has no interest in the doings of London pickpockets and bank robbers.’
‘So what is in it for him? Why does he want you to go back to London with me?’
‘I am Vladimir’s gift to you. He believes that I can make you happy, and I know that I could. But let’s forget Vladimir, Sam. Let’s pretend that he never existed and we’re starting afresh. Neither of us has to be anybody’s gift. We could be a gift to each other!’
‘It won’t work,’ Blackstone says.
‘Why?’ Agnes asks, almost hysterical now. ‘Because of your foolish pride? Because Vladimir found me before you did?’
‘Because if I accept his gift now, he’ll have a hold over me for ever – and I can’t allow that.’
Agnes takes a handkerchief out of her bag and dries her eyes.
‘You’re right, of course,’ she admits. ‘Vladimir is hard enough to resist even if you’re not in his debt.’
He was gaining ground on the woman, but only because she was slowing down as she approached the tram stop.
He wondered why he was doing this – wondered, if he did catch her up, what they would find to say to each other after all those years.
A tram came rattling down the street and pulled up at the stop. The woman climbed on board, and the tram moved off again.
Perhaps it had been Agnes, and perhaps it hadn’t. He was no longer sure. But the one thing he was almost certain of was that she was in Petersburg, for though he was by no means a fanciful man, he could sense her presence in the air.
NINE
Vladimir’s apartment was on the first floor (or the second floor, as the Americans would call it, Blackstone reminded himself) of a prosperous-looking building not far from Nevsky Prospekt. It was rather a large apartment for a single man with only one servant, but then it needed to be large to accommodate the railway.
Vladimir’s study, at the front of the house, was where the railway had its nerve centre. From there, tracks ran off in all directions: to Moscow (Vladimir’s bedroom), to Baku (the guest bedroom), to Warsaw (the dining room), to Kiev (the small parlour) and to Vladivostok (which was sited in the lumber room overlooking the Neva, at the back of the apartment). Walls did not impede the network – if a wall was in the way, it had simply been tunnelled through.
And along each line were stations – some the sort of grandiose monuments that provincial towns with pretensions opted for, others like the tumbledown shack at which Blackstone had said his last farewells to Agnes.
The apartment was otherwise sparsely furnished – furniture was, on the whole, incompatible with the efficient running of a railway – but what little he had bought was functional and betrayed nothing of its owner’s personality.
The locomotives themselves were truly exquisite, and there were no two of them alike.
‘This one was owned by the Great Russian Railway Company and is painted in its colours,’ Vladimir explained as they sat in the study, waiting for dinner to be served, ‘whereas this model was not brought into service until after the state took over the company in the 1880s, which is why it is in imperial colours.’
And though they drew their power from the electrified track – which Vladimir controlled from a panel on his desk – each had a small boiler which produced steam as the locomotives ran along the rails.
Blackstone found it slightly disturbing that the railway existed at all. It seemed wrong that a man whose work was so grounded in the harsh realities of life should yet be able to sustain a fantasy world in his own apartment.
It was disturbing, too, that Vladimir had chosen to share this secret world with him – had exposed so much of his inner self.
But, of course, it was always possible that the railwa
y was no more than a prop in Vladimir’s game – a camouflage behind which the real Vladimir was lurking, unseen.
‘What do you get out of your rail network, Vladimir?’ he asked, testing out this latter theory.
‘I find it soothing,’ the Russian replied. ‘In a country where nothing works – where I am forced to employ chaos in order to control chaos – it is pleasant to spend a little of my time with something orderly, something that always runs as it is supposed to.’
‘So it exists purely to give you pleasure?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Blackstone said. ‘You’re not a man to waste effort, and if you can’t achieve at least two objectives with a single course of action, then you’ll find another way to do things.’
‘What do you mean?’ Vladimir asked, suddenly cautious.
‘There are two reasons you brought me to Russia. One was to protect me, but the other was so that you could use me.’
Vladimir laughed. ‘You are right, of course,’ he admitted.
‘So the model railway does have a second purpose?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what is it?’ Blackstone wondered.
‘You don’t need to know that now,’ Vladimir replied, ‘and let us pray that you never find yourself in a position where you do need to know.’
The study door flew open – almost as if they were under attack – and Vladimir’s massive servant, Yuri, entered the room and grunted something that was probably incomprehensible even to most Russians.
‘Dinner is served,’ Vladimir said grandly. ‘Let us go and see what culinary delights my master chef has prepared for us this evening.’
Most visitors to the Patterson household would have been ushered into the hardly used front parlour, but Ellie Carr was almost a part of the family, and Maggie took her into the kitchen, instead.
It was a cosy room. It smelled of baking and stews, and it was dominated by a large table at which the Patterson clan ate all their meals. A large copper kettle, permanently just off the boil, sat on the hob next to the fire, and two canaries – known to the family alone as Sam and Ellie – chirped cheerfully in a cage that rested on top of the Singer sewing machine.
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