“I tell Patterson everything,” Blackstone pointed out. “He’s my sounding board.”
“A mute needs no sounding board,” the AC said, and laughed, as if he had been incredibly witty. “But to return to the matter in hand. His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, has recently paid an unofficial visit to Russia. Whilst there, he graciously consented to spend a few days on the country estate of a certain Count Rachinsky.”
Graciously consented to eat him out of house and home, from what I’ve heard, Blackstone thought. But he wisely kept silent.
“On the third night of his visit to the estate,” Sir Roderick continued, “an intruder broke into his room, and not only severely manhandled the Prince himself, but also stole a Faberge golden egg.”
“A what?” Blackstone asked.
Sir Roderick looked at him in amazement. “Have you never heard of the famous Faberge eggs?”
“No, sir, I can’t say that I have.”
“But everyone knows about them.”
“Perhaps in your social circle, sir,” Blackstone said, “but certainly not in mine.”
The AC sighed, as if he were finding all this much harder work than he’d anticipated. “Pierre Faberge is a St Petersburg jeweller,” he explained patiently. “There are those who say that he is the finest jeweller in the entire world. And his speciality — the pieces of work which have attracted the most acclaim — are his eggs.”
“Eggs?” Blackstone repeated.
“Eggs,” Sir Roderick confirmed. “Eggs which are made of gold or platinum, and encrusted with precious stones.”
There were people slowly starving to death not more than a few dozen yards from this coach, Blackstone thought. And there were probably folk in exactly the same condition in St Petersburg. So what business did this Faberge bloke have making golden eggs encrusted with diamonds? And what business did people like the Prince have buying them?
“So this egg was stolen somewhere in Russia,” he said. “What’s that got to do with us?”
“It was stolen from the man who will soon be your king,” the AC said severely.
Not my king, thought Blackstone, who had republican leanings. But aloud, all he said was, “Even so, it’s a matter for the Russian police.”
“The police in Russia are more concerned with watching political dissidents than they are with apprehending criminals,” Sir Roderick said. “Besides, they are not to be told of the matter.”
“Why aren’t they?” Blackstone asked, in a tone which came close to being a demand.
“The egg in question was a gift to the Prince from His Majesty, the Tsar of Russia,” Sir Roderick explained.
“And presumably, the man who stole it was a subject of the Tsar, so it’s still a Russian matter,” Blackstone countered.
“That is not the way our masters in government see it, and thus it is not the way we see it, either,” Sir Roderick said. “It has been agreed that we will investigate the robbery ourselves. To which end, you and I will sail to St Petersburg tomorrow, and travel from there to the Count’s estate in the country.”
Blackstone considered what to say next. Outright refusal was clearly out of the question, so he was going to have to be sneaky.
“I’m an orphan,” he said. “I was brought up in Dr Barnardo’s home for orphans.”
“I fail to see what that can possibly have to do with the matter in hand,” the AC said frostily.
“After I left the orphanage I joined the Army and served in the ranks,” Blackstone continued. “And since then I’ve been a policeman.”
“We’re both policemen, Inspector.”
“But not the same kind of policemen, sir. I don’t deal with cabinet ministers and mandarins in the civil service. My work involves me with what people like to call the ‘dregs of society’.”
“I’m a patient man by nature,” Sir Roderick said, in a voice which revealed quite the contrary inclination. “But even my patience has its limits. So tell me, Inspector, exactly what point are you trying to make?”
“I’m not used to dealing with members of the aristocracy,” Blackstone said. “Not even members of the Russian aristocracy. You’d be far better off taking someone else with you.”
“Two years ago, you had a case which involved not just the aristocracy but the very monarchy itself,” Sir Roderick said.
“Oh, you’ve heard about that, have you?” Blackstone asked disappointedly. “I thought it was supposed to be a secret.”
“It is a secret,’” Sir Roderick agreed. “But I am a member of the charmed circle which has been told about your exploits.” He laughed, genuinely amused this time. “Don’t look so down in the mouth, Inspector. Even if you do find it difficult to deal with your betters, there’ll be no need for you to have much contact with them on this particular case.”
“Won’t there?” Blackstone asked.
“Of course not! You’ll be investigating a robbery, Inspector Blackstone. And when you do apprehend the criminal, you’ll probably find that he differs very little — apart from his nationality — from the scum who you’re normally forced to rub shoulders with.”
“In other words, you’ve already ruled out the idea that any of the other guests at the house could have been the robber,” Blackstone said.
“Naturally,” Sir Roderick replied, clearly astonished. “The other guests will all have been people of quality. And people of quality do not act like common criminals.”
No, they don’t, Blackstone thought. Sometimes they can act one hell of a lot worse. But, again, he kept the thought to himself.
Chapter Two
The man by the window was going under the name of Sasha for the moment, though that would — almost inevitably — change soon. He was looking down on to Nevsky Prospekt, the widest and most fashionable street in all St Petersburg. He could see the carriages which carried the rich ladies single-mindedly intent on shopping for luxuries until exhaustion overtook them, and the trams which rattled along at some speed as they transported the city’s army of bureaucrats from one ministry to another.
But there was more to the Prospekt than mere silk ribbons and red tape, he thought. It was on this street that the imposing Kazan Cathedral and the Passage Theatre were located, both institutions serving — in their own ways — as soup kitchens for the perpetual hunger of the Russian soul.
And just beyond the Prospekt stood perhaps the most impressive building in an altogether impressive city: The Winter Palace!
Once a year, in early spring, the Tsar would emerge from this symbol of his imperial power in great state, and walk with due solemnity over the few hundred yards to the frozen River Neva.
Except it wasn’t called the Neva on that special day, thought “Sasha”, who, in one of his many other incarnations, had witnessed the event himself. No, for that day alone, it was re-christened the River Jordan.
The Tsar would come to a halt at a hole cut in the ice, and accept a cup of Neva water — of Jordan water — from the Archbishop. And he would drink it! This man — on whose inadequate shoulders the mighty Russian Empire rested — would actually drink the polluted water of the Neva. It hadn’t killed him yet — though it might well have done. It hadn’t even seemed to make him ill. So perhaps there really was something behind the mumbo-jumbo after all.
Sasha brushed aside such fanciful thoughts. His job was not to examine the mystical foundations on which tsarism rested, but to attend to the nuts and bolts which truly held it in place — to concentrate on the immediate problems, rather than the larger sweep of history.
“Have all the necessary arrangements been made?” a voice behind him asked. The speaker was a man approaching sixty. He was sitting in a chair near the door — he always liked to keep his escape route open, Sasha thought — and was dressed in an expensive and elaborate uniform which identified him as an important official rather than a high-ranking soldier.
Sasha turned to face him. “Yes, everything is in place, sir,” he said.
“You’re absolutely sure about that? We would not like there to be any mistakes made.”
Always so precise, Sasha thought. Always getting ready to apportion blame before anything had even gone wrong.
“The soldiers have their instructions, the officials have been informed of what is involved,” he said aloud.
“And the newspapers?”
“The newspapers have been warned that if they step out of line, then what will happen to them will make what they have suffered previously seem like a mushroom hunt in the woods.”
“And what about the arrangements from the London end?” asked the man in the chair, who was never satisfied.
“They, too, are well underway.”
“Who can we expect to be arriving?”
“Sir Roderick Todd, who knows something of the nature of Russia — though considerably less than he imagines he does — and an Inspector Blackstone, who knows nothing at all.”
“Are you happy with the choice?”
“I am as happy as I could be, given that the circumstances under which they will be used are not of my making. I have considerable confidence in one of our visitors, and some hopes for the other.”
“There are those who will not want these Englishmen to succeed,” warned the man in the chair.
“I know,” Sasha said. And he was thinking: Well, of course there are those who will not want them to succeed! There are hundreds of such people. Perhaps even thousands!
“They — these people to whom I refer — may not be content merely to hope that Todd and Blackstone meet with failure,” the man in the chair said. “They may take positive steps to ensure that failure.”
“I am aware that there are inherent dangers in the plan as it stands.”
“Good. It is always wisest to be aware of that.”
“And I have marshalled every resource available to me in an effort to ensure that nothing goes wrong”
“There were other options to this plan of yours,” the man in the chair reminded him.
Yes, there were, Sasha thought. But they would all have failed! Because you do not — you cannot — adjust the workings of a sensitive and exquisite timepiece with a hammer. It calls for a much lighter touch — for the employment of much more delicate instruments.
“Yes, indeed, there were several other options,” the man in the chair said, underlining his point. “Options which were put forward by wiser and more experienced heads than yours. But you would have your own way. You would insist on using the Englishmen as your agents.”
“They are not my agents,” Sasha said.
The man in the chair raised a heavy, sceptical eyebrow. “Are they not?” he asked.
“At least, they do not know they are my agents,” Sasha amended. “They do not know that they are working for purposes other than their own.”
“They may find out,” the man in the chair cautioned.
“They will find out,” Sasha countered. “But by then it will be too late, because they will already have fulfilled their purpose.”
“And once they have ‘fulfilled their purpose’, as you put it, will they be allowed to live?”
Sasha shrugged. “Sir Roderick Todd is not without some influence in certain important English circles. It might prove difficult to explain why he had suddenly disappeared.”
“And the other man? The Inspector?”
“He is part of what the English call ‘the poor bloody infantry’. He has no influence of any sort.”
“So you will kill him?”
Sasha shrugged again. “At this stage of the operation, who can say anything for certain?” he asked.
Chapter Three
Blackstone and Sir Roderick Todd had been met at the docks in St Petersburg by a closed carriage. With the blinds firmly down, they had been whisked across the city to a railway station, the name of which — since he did not read Russian script — Blackstone still did not know. Once there, they immediately boarded the train. They had now been on it — travelling south — for more than thirty-six hours.
It was, Sir Roderick informed the Inspector, the express train, a term which seemed to indicate — in Russian terms — that it was almost always quicker to take it than to walk. It stopped at countless small wooden stations, where it disgorged peasants in filthy sheepskin jackets, and minor officials in top hats and frock coats. It delivered parcels from St Petersburg — a place which was surely no more than a distant rumour to those who received the packages — and took on further bundles to be delivered to Kiev, which was the end of the line.
None of the frantic activity induced by the arrival of the train in these decaying hamlets — the pushing and shoving, the shouting and cursing, the chasing after escaped piglets and bartered transactions involving sacks of turnips and pieces of cloth — touched Blackstone and Sir Roderick Todd in any way. Even at points where the rest of the train was full to bursting, no peasant attempted to enter their carriage. And even the top-hatted bureaucrats would do no more than give it a look — a mixture of envy and resentment — before moving on.
In the carriage itself, there were two sleeping compartments — one for each of them — and a small, but well-equipped bathroom which they were expected to share. The rest of the space was taken up by a simple kitchen and an extensive lounge with space in it for two armchairs, a chaise-longue, a dining table and a cast-iron, pot-bellied stove, the flue of which disappeared through the carriage roof. A blank-faced, tight-lipped attendant in a white braided jacket was always on hand to serve them drinks and cook their meals on a small spirit stove, but otherwise contrived to make himself invisible.
For an orphanage boy like Blackstone, who had never left the East End of London before he joined the Army, travelling in this manner was something of a revelation. Sir Roderick seemed perfectly at ease in his surroundings, though not with the company he was forced to keep. He had, in fact, said no more than a few dozen words since the two of them had set sail from Tilbury.
Perhaps it was snobbery, Blackstone thought — the gentleman policeman in all his finery not wishing to waste his time making small talk with the working-class policeman in thick boots and a second-hand suit. Perhaps, more charitably, it was awkwardness — Sir Roderick might wish to talk, but simply did not know what to say to someone so much further down the social ladder than he was.
But the Inspector did not actually think it was either of these things. Sir Roderick was more guarded than aloof. It was as if he had a secret locked tightly away inside him, and he was afraid that if he opened his mouth too often it might just spill out. Thus he stayed hidden behind his opened newspaper, which he bought as they left England and by now must have read in its entirety at least a dozen times.
To occupy his own mind, Blackstone gazed at the country-side which moved past the open window at the speed of a lethargic snail. So this was Russia, he told himself. This was the place where the only woman he had ever loved had once lived.
He had served in India, a country sixteen or seventeen times larger than the one in which he had been born. He had marched across Afghanistan — a state which could have conveniently hidden little England in the middle of one of its high mountain ranges. But nothing — nothing — had prepared him for this. Russia was vast. It was unremitting. As he gazed at the flat, unrelenting land which stretched from horizon to horizon, it seemed almost impossible to believe that there was space left on the planet for anything else. And though he remembered the mountains and valleys, hills and dales, they now all seemed to him like nothing more than a dream. For how could waterfalls and seashores truly exist, he asked himself, when everything was Russia — and Russia was everything?
The meal on the second evening included small black specks which looked to Blackstone like frog spawn, but were — according to Sir Roderick — the finest and most expensive Caspian Sea caviar. Blackstone took a tentative taste, then — deciding that the caviar’s greatest quality was its outrageous cost — pushed the rest to the edge of his plate.
> The meal over, the attendant withdrew to some other part of the train, and Sir Roderick folded his now-well-worn newspaper and announced that he intended to retire for the night.
Blackstone himself did not feel so much tired as drained from lack of activity, and instead of going to his sleeping compartment, he lit a fresh cigarette and gazed out of the window. Occasionally, he caught sight of the flickering lights of some hamlet that the train chugged past, but for most of the time there was nothing to see but the unrelenting darkness.
He was being kept in the dark himself, he thought. In fact, the more he considered the matter, the less he understood why he was in Russia at all. In the grand scale of things, the robbery of a golden egg seemed insignificant. And even if it were valuable — even if it were worth a king’s ransom — there seemed little point in arriving at the scene so long after the robbery itself. Whoever had stolen the egg would probably be long gone by the time he and Todd got there, and even if the thief had remained, the egg itself would by then undoubtedly be in Antwerp or Paris — places where it was likely to fetch the best price.
An even bigger question was why, given that it had been decided someone had to be sent on this fruitless quest, he should be the one selected. There were other officers in Scotland Yard who knew more about jewels, and had at least a passing familiarity with Russia. There were other officers who were better at dealing with the aristocracy, too. In fact, he couldn’t think, off-hand, of a single one who was worse at dealing with the upper classes than he was himself. There had been complaints about his antagonism towards his ‘betters’ — complaints which were on his record for all to see — and he rightly suspected that if he hadn’t been such a good thief-taker, he would have been out of the Force long ago.
So why him? Why was he there at all?
The wheels of the train had kept up a constant rattling against the rails since the train had pulled out of the station in St Petersburg, but now Blackstone’s sharp ears detected a new source of rattling — one which was even more insistent and perhaps more urgent.
Blackstone and the House of Secrets (The Blackstone Detective series Book 3) Page 2
