Death in a Darkening Mist

by Iona Whishaw

  “Nevertheless, I don’t want to frighten him. Do I look presentable?”

  “You look l . . . like your old self.”

  It alarmed Darling how easily he might have slipped and said “lovely.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  AMES WAS ON HIS BEST behaviour. He had produced a small crowbar, which he had procured at Mr. Wing’s hardware. It had taken, he hoped, long enough. He had found Darling and Miss Winslow gathered at his desk looking at the suitcase with interest, two empty cups of tea sitting on the window sill.

  “Try not to hack it to smithereens, Ames,” Darling had suggested, indicating the thin wood slatting on the suitcase. “If there is something inside, we’d like it in one piece.”

  The wooden slats were glued firmly in place, and even careful prying had made the pieces snap off in dishevelled strips. Lane watched as the wood came away. Was she completely off base? There was no reason to suppose now that her father had been doing anything but fixing his suitcase, just as he had said.

  Her heart sank as the removal of the wooden slats around the bottom half of the suitcase revealed nothing. But the first slat on the top of the suitcase came away easily, and they saw why very quickly. Under it was tucked a folded piece of paper. This was extracted gingerly by Darling and carefully unfolded. His first impression was that it was just paper used somehow in the construction of the suitcase, but then he saw that it was a yellowing piece of paper with notes on it. They were in Russian.

  “Your department,” he said, handing it across to Lane. “Let’s get the rest off. I was rather hoping for something more revealing. Identity papers. Something.”

  Lane took the paper. It had been folded in three and flattened so effectively that it was nearly severed at the folds. The writer had written about the new constitution, and how glorious it was that there was a national discussion about it. That was true socialist democracy. But then the writer was critical of some unnamed “officials” whose behaviour in the matter of bribe-taking flew directly in face of the moral demands of the glorious constitution. It was, she thought, typical moralizing propaganda. It was not evident what newspaper it had been written for. When was the new constitution? Mid-thirties some time? She turned the paper over, but there was nothing to reveal the date.

  “He might be a journalist of some sort,” she said. “This is a sort of first draft of an article you might see in one of their newspapers, like Pravda. It is signed Pavel Zaharov.”

  So involved was she in reading that she did not look up until she heard Ames exclaim, “Aha!” She saw that two more folded pieces of paper had materialized at her elbow, and that Darling was seizing a small doubled paper, about the size of a wallet card, not newsprint, from Ames.

  “It is, as I had hoped, some sort of official identification. And look at that! A photo of our very man, somewhat younger!” Darling’s pleasure was palpable. He turned the open document to show them. It was clearly an official document, with spindly writing on various lines and some sort of stamp. The photo, like all photos of its ilk, showed its owner at his most sombre. Darling handed it to Lane.

  “What do we have here, Miss Winslow?”

  She took it and carefully scanned the front and the inside pages. “It is, as you say, an identity booklet. It is called a Metricheskaya Kniga. It’s the sort of thing anyone would carry to show their place and date of birth. You couldn’t travel outside the country with it, but it was possibly needed to apply for work and so on, or to show officials if there was any sort of trouble. This one was issued in 1930 to, ah . . . the same person who wrote this article. Pavel Zaharov. Born in Leningrad in 1899. It wasn’t even Leningrad then. It was St. Petersburg.”

  “And one more, sir,” Ames said suddenly, producing another small yellowed piece of folded paper.

  “Perhaps this one will tell us who shot him and why,” said Darling wistfully. “It appears to be a private letter.”

  Lane took it. It was short, written in black ink that was fading to grey. She got up and went to stand by the window where the light provided some assistance.

  P. I will meet you as usual, behind the Marinsky. I am frightened now. I am afraid of your wife, and I am afraid of the police. I think this may be the last time. We must settle that it is. I cannot take any further risk. M

  Lane read them the note.

  “Aha! The lovely Marina,” said Ames.

  “Miss Winslow, we need to get as complete a picture as we can. Do you have time to stay today and write out what we have? I can find you much more comfortable quarters, and ply you with tea, or,” here he consulted his watch, “lunch. It’s past one-thirty. Let’s go down to Lorenzo, and see what Mrs. L has on tap for us. If you’ve time, I mean, and we could finish this lot afterwards.”

  Lane realized that she was famished. The emotional exertions of the day, and the somewhat challenging distraction provided by reading faded papers in Russian, had used up a good deal of energy.

  “Well, yes then. Why not?” Otherwise she would have to go home. She wasn’t ready for that.

  “Ames, clean this mess up, would you?”

  Thinking of a snappy riposte, which he kept to himself, Ames recognized that something, he wasn’t sure what, had developed in his little office, and though he would be deprived of a Lorenzo lunch, he thought that a ham sandwich from next door, eaten with his feet up on his desk, might provide him with plenty of time to meditate on the matter.

  “Yes, sir. And I’ll move these papers to your desk and find a pad of paper and some pens for Miss Winslow’s use.”

  “OLIVIA! COME, QUICK. Look at that!” Lorenzo guided his wife to the door into the restaurant from the kitchen and pointed through the round window. “It is the inspector, and, surely, the woman!”

  “She is beautiful,” his wife said, “but what makes you so sure they are in love?”

  Lorenzo wondered at the wisdom of asking what man would not love a woman of such beauty, but settled on, “I like this man. He is generous, he doesn’t treat people badly no matter where they come from, and he thinks. I suspect he has a big heart, and I suspect he has been badly hurt. Why is he not married until now?”

  “He was at war,” said his wife with repressive logic.

  “Well, now he’s not. And here is his not-compliant woman.”

  “THERE’S NO POINT in looking at the menu. Lorenzo chooses. He’s a bit of a bully like that.”

  “These people are looking at menus,” said Lane, indicating the few late lunchers around them.

  “I know. I’m subjected to the most unfair treatment. I can’t explain it. My authority does me no good in here. Good afternoon, Lorenzo. This is Miss Winslow. She is helping us with a case. How is Mrs. L today?”

  Lorenzo folded the hand Lane offered in both of his. “I am delighted to meet you, at last, signorina.” He seemed reluctant to let her go, but he finally turned to the inspector. “Mrs. Lorenzo is in great mood today. She make a beautiful carbonara.”

  When he’d swept off, Lane turned to Darling. “‘At last?’” she asked.

  “English isn’t his first language. He’s mixing up his idioms.”

  “His English seems excellent.”

  Darling longed to move past the usually enjoyable repartee and have her talk about her father, but he feared if he asked she would close up and become again aloof and secretive.

  “Canada is an amazing country,” she said. “I don’t know what I expected. I think I expected what I got up at the lake . . . a lot of immigrants from England. But I have met Russians, Italians, Japanese. It’s like where I grew up, really. Only there it was Russians, Swedes, Latvian, Jews, Germans, English. A veritable League of Nations. I wonder if they are trying to get away from something, or coming to something.”

  “I suppose it is much the same thing. You told me yourself in the summer that you were wanting to get away from your memories of war, and you thought you could start a new life here.” This came uncomfortably close to when she had been a suspect during
the summer and he had learned this information during an interrogation, but she did not seem to react to this possible breach of etiquette.

  She looked suddenly grim. “Well, Inspector. It turns out you can’t get away. Whatever it is finds you. I have been found. Here, for example, is my father, whom I almost never saw in life, come to haunt me in death.”

  “Can you tell me about that?” he asked.

  Could she? Disclosure was not her strong suit. “I shouldn’t really be boring you with this. Who doesn’t have some ghastly relation in their background? I can say this much: we didn’t get on. He didn’t like children, I suppose, and he was away for his diplomatic work more than he was at home. He’s left me some money that I don’t trust, and my grandmother hinted that he was not nice to my mother. I know when my mother died—I was five—he became even more unpleasant.” She looked across the room and out through the steamed-up window on to the street. People in dark coats and hats moved like ghosts through their distant lives. She turned back again to Darling, her eyebrows knitting over troubled eyes.

  “He died in 1943, but I just learned of it. It’s so odd, isn’t it? For me it has just happened. It feels like just one more secret. Today people go around telling people they are spies. It seems to be like any other job; I’m an accountant. I’m a spy. But in those days you pretended you were something respectable. I can add it to all the other secrets; where he went, what he did, that he was hurtful to my mother. What is no secret,” she added bleakly, “is that I have become just like him.”

  Darling saw with relief that Lorenzo was coming towards them with two plates of carbonara.

  “I am certain that despite all of our worst fears, we are not just like our parents,” he said softly.

  Hearing the kindness in his voice, she relented. “I’m so sorry. I’ve no right to inflict my anger about my miserable life on you. Besides, it gives the wrong impression. I am really a massive optimist. Perhaps that’s why I take things so hard. It has been a lot to take in . . . and you were so kind. Earlier, I mean.” She could still feel his arms around her. All in a day’s work for him, she supposed. “This smells wonderful. I’m sure I can tackle any number of dreary articles of Soviet propaganda with this inside me,” she said, shifting, in a way that Darling regretted, to cheery brightness.

  Always astonished by the palliative effect of a good meal, Lane felt her mood had moved away from the precipice by the time coffee arrived. She said, “I think I’m trying to avoid thinking about how he might have died. I go on about how horrible he was, but I can’t bear the thought that he might have suffered, that he might have died alone. I think my grandmother knew but didn’t tell me. Given his work I have to assume he was shot, or imprisoned. Possibly tortured.”

  Given her work, Darling reflected, she could have met the same fate. He reached out without thinking and took her hand. She did not remove it immediately.

  “Inspector, is it your goal to make me cry?”

  In truth, he did not know what his goal was. He knew that he could not afford it, whatever it was, but her hand lay softly in his. “I was just thinking that you and your father were more or less in the same line of work, and that it could have happened to you. I was just feeling rather pleased that it hadn’t. After all . . . I can’t read Russian.”

  “WELL, MAYBE YOU are right for once, Lorenzo,” said his wife a little later, watching the inspector and the beautiful English girl leave.

  Leningrad, September, 1937

  Zaharov had not even known he was being followed. Perhaps if he’d realized, he would have been more careful. Things had not been the same in the last four years, and even he, a faithful party journalist, perhaps ought to have seen it coming. But he had never had anything but praise from the party for the honesty of his reporting, though secretly he knew he was a little biased. He didn’t outright fabricate to keep on the good side of anyone, including the politburo, but he did emphasize what needed to be emphasized. He believed with all his heart that the Revolution, though it was twenty years old, was still vulnerable and young, and he had a duty to protect it and strengthen it. It would need leaders who understood. It would need some of the proletariat to be better educated, and he said so.

  He’d gone to the bar by the canal, drunk, he would have admitted it, a little too much vodka, and stumbled home to the apartment on Orbeli that he and his wife shared with four other families. He knew his wife would be disappointed with the state of him, but, he reasoned, he had to have some way of coping with Strepov’s mother, who occupied the room next to theirs and complained morning, noon, and night in a high, wheedling voice. As he turned the corner, worried about what Vera was going to say, and the irritation already growing in him at the prospect of old woman Strepova, he could not have known he would have neither to deal with ever again.

  Strepov himself was at the door when he got there, holding it open a smidge, looking at him through the crack as if this was not his own apartment.

  “What are you doing? Let me in. What’s going on?”

  “Your wife has left. You should go too.”

  “What, so you can shift your mother into our room?” He pushed at the door angrily, but it held. Strepov was a big man, who now seemed suddenly anxious.

  “I’m not joking. You should go. Someone was here in a suit looking for you. He had papers. I didn’t like the look of him.”

  “He took my wife?” Zaharov was sobering up quickly in an attempt to understand what was happening.

  Strepov gave a mirthless laugh. “No, comrade, she went off quite willingly, and in a big hurry, with some gigolo from that office where she works at the agricultural ministry. The other guy wanted you, and I want you out of here. I don’t need any trouble.”

  With a cold snap of fear, everything fell into place. He looked anxiously up and down the dark, rank hallway. What had he said in his last article? Whom had he criticized? Whatever it was, he was suddenly an enemy of the Revolution. It would mean prison, a trial, a camp, and if he was not lucky, Siberia.

  “What did they take?” he asked now, thinking of his papers. If they were looking to damn him, they could fabricate a litany of crimes against the state from his notes. It would all be in there. “I need my stuff, my clothes, something.”

  The door moved now, enough to accommodate two small suitcases. “Look, I packed whatever I could find. They didn’t find all of your papers, I don’t know what they are, but I threw them in. Now, get out.”

  He had seen them when he looked cautiously at the street from the shadow of the apartment entrance. Two of them, smoking and talking quietly. How had they missed him when he staggered home just now? Did they know about the cellar exit? He flew into the small courtyard, slung with washing, and ran down into the cellar. It was dark and stank from the barrels of souring cabbage. The door was jammed, and cursing, he yanked at it, terrified the noise would alert anyone out there. But there was no one. He waited. No one came. Fools, he thought. By dawn he was on a dusty farm road outside Leningrad contemplating his next move. If he could get out, make it to Finland, or farther, America even, he could use his few remaining papers to seek asylum.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE THREE OF THEM SAT around Darling’s desk, the discovered papers piled neatly next to a pad of paper, now covered with writing.

  “What do we have, then?” Darling asked. “Any and all ideas welcome.”

  “I think . . .” began Ames.

  “Not yours, Ames. I’d like to hear Miss Winslow’s. She has experience with this sort of documentation.”

  Ames toyed with taking offence, but instead graciously ceded the floor to her with a wave of the hand.

  “Let’s start with this, then,” she began. “He was obviously a journalist, and I should have said a true believer, judging by his overwrought rhetoric. He was married, the note tells us that, and he had a lover. The note and the photo, unless his wife was Marina and the lover had a different M name. We know he was there, maybe in Leningrad, though he
could have been anywhere, I suppose. No, wait. The Marinsky theatre is in Leningrad; it is also where he was born. The newspaper articles, if that’s what they are, seem to come from the mid- to late 1930s, judging by the content, so let’s say that’s when he left the Soviet Union. We know he’d been in Canada at least five or six years. That takes us back to ’40. The war started in ’39, so let’s say he got somewhere across the sea before then. Once here, he tried to blend in to a community where he could speak Russian and he would not be faulted for not speaking English well. Did he come here on purpose because the Doukhobors are here? So this brings us to other unanswered questions: Why did he leave? Let’s suppose the obvious: he fell afoul of the authorities with something he wrote. Why were these three articles so important that he had to hide them in the lining of his suitcase? It’s possible he fled in a hurry and grabbed what he was working on. Or perhaps he had the intention of presenting himself as a refugee somewhere, and would have needed them as some sort of proof of why he was in trouble with Stalin.

  “Why bring his ID, if his intention was to go to another country and change his name? Surely he wanted to lose himself. Anyone breaking this suitcase open would have identified him in a minute. Again, with the refugee scenario, it was the only documentation he had in case authorities caught up with him.

  “Why include that desperate note from M? Emotional reasons, perhaps? We have speculated that his attachment to the photo suggested he’d not got over her, and this note was all he had. I imagine we will never really know what happened to him, or why he came, or indeed, how he got into the country and passed himself off as someone else for all this time,” Lane concluded.

  “Lucidity, Ames. Watch and learn,” Darling commented.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I have reread the articles,” Lane continued. “They are about vastly different subjects: the constitution; a boy who died, apparently in the service of the Revolution, and has been elevated to hero status; and this one about the collectivization of farms. The only thing I can find in common is his style; he’s apt to moralize and lecture. He chides officials for misbehaving, he questions the validity of the uses this boy’s martyrdom are being put to, he suggests that the Kulaks, these are rich farmers who are destroying the aims of socialism, should be made to serve as foot soldiers in the army instead of being sent to the gulags. Here, let me read you an example.