“Quite right,” Sir Roderick interrupted. “You couldn’t.”
“...but I did find what he had to say quite useful,” Blackstone continued.
“You did?” Sir Roderick asked, clearly amazed. “I must admit, I fail to see how. Quite frankly, I thought that all his talk about his lady friend was a little...a little...”
“I was referring to what he said about the strongroom.”
“What did he say about the strongroom?”
“Well, for a start, he said that there was one. He also said that the Count invited him to deposit his valuables in it.”
Sir Roderick mopped his brow with his silk handkerchief. “I remember now,” he admitted. “The Duc thought the Count was merely showing off.”
“He may well have been merely showing off,” Blackstone agreed. “But wouldn’t he also have shown off to the Prince of Wales?”
Sir Roderick continued with his mopping. “Afraid I’m not following you, Blackstone,” he said.
“The strongroom has bars as thick as your arm,” Blackstone said, quoting the Duc de Saint-Cast. “And the Prince of Wales had in his possession a precious golden egg which was a personal gift from the Tsar.”
“True.”
“So why didn’t he entrust it to the Count for safe-keeping?”
“Don’t know,” Sir Roderick admitted. “Could have been all sorts of reasons for it.”
“Can you think of one?” Blackstone wondered.
“Not off-hand,” Sir Roderick confessed.
“Doesn’t matter,” Blackstone said. “We can ask the Count himself about it, the next time we interview him.”
“Ah, we could have a problem there,” Sir Roderick said.
“A problem?”
“I wasn’t just wasting my time while I was taking tea, you know,” Sir Roderick said aggressively. “I used the occasion to have a full and frank discussion with the Grand Duke Ivan. I argued very forcibly the case that he should allow himself to be questioned, but he was adamant in his refusal. And where the Grand Duke leads, the others will follow — including the Count, who feels he’s said all he needs to say already.”
“So we’re not to be allowed to talk to any of the guests,” Blackstone said grimly.
“Oh, don’t look so down in the mouth,” Sir Roderick said, almost jovially. “After all, it’s not much of a loss, is it?”
“Not much of a loss?” Blackstone repeated, hardly able to believe he’d heard the words.
“Just consider for a moment what we’ve achieved from our interviews so far,” Sir Roderick said. “We got damn all out of talking to young Georgie Carlton, and even less from that absolute bounder, the Duc de Saint-Cast, unless you consider his amorous exploits to be of interest, and—”
“The Duc told us about the strong—”
“—and we’ve no reason to believe we’d get any more out of the Russians if they were willing to talk, which — as I’ve already explained — they’re not. The way they see it — and I’m inclined to agree with them — you’d be wasting their time. What you should really be doing is either questioning the servants or interrogating the peasants in the village.”
“I thought we’d agreed that neither the peasants nor the servants could have carried out the crime,” Blackstone said coldly.
Sir Roderick ran his handkerchief over his brow again. It was already fairly saturated with his sweat.
“You did put up quite a good argument for excluding them from the investigation,” he admitted, “and for a while I was almost convinced. But then I got to listening to what people had to say over tea and — do you know — your argument didn’t seem quite as strong as it had earlier.”
“And what did they have to say?”
For a moment, Sir Roderick looked lost for an answer. “It’s not so much what they said as what they were,” he admitted. “They’re all extremely refined people. Of course, I wouldn’t expect that to mean anything to you, but it means something to me. Take my word for it, Blackstone, none of those people would he capable of committing this particular crime. And given that, I can’t see what harm it would do to pursue another line of investigation. It might be taking you up a blind alley, but isn’t that useful in itself?”
“How?” Blackstone asked stonily.
“Well, if you can prove the peasants in the village didn’t do it, you’ll have eliminated one possibility. And isn’t the essence of good police work to eliminate possibilities?”
“The essence of good police work is to investigate the likeliest leads before the trail goes cold.”
“Why don’t you take some soldiers into the village and see what you can find?” Sir Roderick asked, in a tone which was almost pleading.
Oh, I’ll certainly go into the village, Blackstone thought. Now that most other lines of investigation have been cut off from me, I don’t have a lot a choice. But it won’t be soldiers I take with me. I’ll go with someone much more likely to help me get results.
Chapter Twelve
The moon was nearly full that night. Which was just as well, Blackstone thought. Because without the moon to guide them, only blackness lay between the bright lights of the Count’s elegant mansion and the dim lights in the string of shacks which passed as a village.
“The man I’m taking you to see is called Demitri Igorovitch,” Agnes said, as they walked side by side through the night. “That’s to say, he’s Demitri, the son of Igor.”
“What made you pick him out as the one we should talk to?” Blackstone wondered.
“You said you wanted information, though you had no idea what information it was that you wanted,” Agnes replied, and he could sense that there was an amused smile playing on her lips.
“You still haven’t answered my question,” he said.
“If you don’t know exactly what it is you want to hear, then you need to hear a great deal. And the people likely to talk most freely — and at the greatest length — are the ones who bear a grudge against the Big House.”
“Does this Demitri have a grudge?”
“He has one the size of a bear.”
“A justifiable one?”
Agnes’s clothes rustled as she shrugged. “Perhaps. He used to work up at the Big House as one of the outside servants, you see. It wasn’t a very grand job — he spent half his time up to his elbows in shit — but for someone like him it was the end of the rainbow.”
Blackstone’s work habitually brought him into contact with any number of women who swore, and it neither shocked nor offended him. Which made it even more surprising that when Agnes said the word ‘shit’ he felt himself wince.
“I take it Demitri was dismissed,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“On what grounds?”
“The Count — being the Count — need give no reasons for his actions if he chooses not to. But on this occasion he let it be known that he was dismissing Demitri for drunkenness.”
“And did he drink?”
Another shrug. “All Russians drink,” Agnes said. “And to excess, when they can afford it. There is a saying in Russia that you need three full days for drinking. The first is to get drunk, the second to be drunk, and the third to sober up again. You should see this village street in the days following the end of the Easter Fast. They’re all out of their minds — women as well as men. It’s not uncommon for one of them to die through the excess of drink during, the second day, but it doesn’t stop the others. They probably don’t even notice he is dead until the third day. And that’s at the earliest.”
They had reached the village. In most of the shacks there was only one tiny light in the window, but ahead of them they could see a hut which was brightly illuminated and had a number of crude tables outside it, around which were hunched perhaps two dozen peasants.
“The village inn,” Agnes explained. “Not much of a place, but then in this village nothing is much of a place. At any rate, it’s where they all go when they want a drink.”
> “I thought you just said they only drank on special occasions,” Blackstone said.
Agnes laughed. “No, I didn’t. I said they only drank vodka on special occasions. They daren’t take such a risk at harvest time, when every hour of daylight is vital, because once they’ve started, they know they won’t be able to stop. Besides, they couldn’t afford it.”
“So what are they drinking?”
“A foul brew called kvass. It’s a kind of beer, though not beer as you’d recognize it.”
As they drew level with the inn, one of the men called across to them. Blackstone had no idea what the words meant, but he could tell from the tone that they were not meant to be complimentary.
Agnes came to a halt, and shouted something back. Most of the men sitting around the table roared with laughter, but the man who had actually spoken to her only looked angry. Satisfied she had the result she’d been seeking, Agnes started walking again.
“What was that all about?” Blackstone asked her. “What exactly did he say to you?”
“He called me a capitalist lackey, and pus-oozing carbuncle on the backside of the working man,” Agnes said simply.
“He called you what?” Blackstone asked.
Agnes giggled. “Don’t sound so offended, Sam. Peter — that’s his name — is a member of the Social Democratic Party, which is another way of saying that he’s a revolutionary. He’s always spouting slogans. I doubt if he understands half of them himself, though they undoubtedly do sound somewhat impressive to the other peasants.”
“Does he have a large following here in the village?” Blackstone asked.
“He has no following at all. He promises them nothing but social justice and equality — and they have no interest in that.”
“So what are they interested in?”
“Land! It is the only thing a peasant ever really cares about. He marries so that the village council will allot him more strips of it, he has children to increase the size of his holdings. And when his wife or children die, he mourns not for them, but because it will lose him some of his precious earth.”
“Land can’t really be all he cares about,” Blackstone protested.
“It is,” Agnes said firmly. “Before they were emancipated, the serfs used to freely acknowledge they were their masters’ property. ‘Beat us, if that is your will!’ they’d say. ‘Brand us with red-hot irons! Sleep with our daughters and our wives until you have sated yourself on them. We are yours to do as you wish with. But the land is ours.’ That’s how they thought back then. And that, my dear Sam, is how they still think.”
His darling Hannah had been a revolutionary, Blackstone recalled. More than that. She’d been a dedicated fanatic, willing to sacrifice any number of lives — including her own — if that would advance the revolution even an inch.
“How do you feel about it?” he asked Agnes.
“How do I feel about what?”
“About freeing the peasants from their lot through revolution.”
“The peasants wouldn’t know what to do with their freedom,” Agnes said, without a moment’s hesitation. “They lead pretty miserable lives now — and I pity them for that — but left to their own devices, they would destroy themselves.”
“Is that what you told Peter the Revolutionary?”
“Not exactly,” Agnes admitted.
“So what did you say to him?”
“I employed a level of debate that his friends would understand and appreciate.”
“And what do you mean by that?”
“I told him that his mother was a whore, and that even the sows in the fields wouldn’t let him rut with them unless he got them drunk first,” Agnes said sweetly.
Chapter Thirteen
They reached a hut at the far side of the village which looked — if anything — even more ramshackle than the rest of the hovels.
“This is Demitri’s izba,” Agnes announced.
“How do you know he’s in?” Blackstone said.
“Why wouldn’t he be?”
“Isn’t it possible that he could be down at the village inn, with the rest of the men?”
Even in the pale light of the lamp in the window, he could see the almost pitying look come to Agnes’s face.
“He sold his rights to share in the village’s land when he got a job at the Big House,” she said. “It was a foolish thing to do, but Russian peasants are invariably foolish. So now he has neither job nor land. He’ll get by working for the richer peasants when they’re short-handed, but kvass — even at village inn prices — is a luxury he can’t afford.”
She walked up to the door and — with surprising firmness for a woman of her size — rapped on it with her fist.
The door swung open. The man standing there had long hair and a thick beard. His features were blunt and his eyes were cunning. Though Blackstone despised the members of the British aristocracy whom he had overheard saying that they couldn’t tell one working man from another, he was ashamed to admit to himself that this peasant looked to him exactly like all those he had seen at the inn.
“Da?” the Russian asked suspiciously, and with not a hint of welcome in his voice.
Agnes gave no verbal answer. Instead she reached into the folds of her sheepskin jacket, produced a bottle of vodka, and held it up for the man in the doorway to see.
Demitri beamed with pleasure, opened the door wider, and gestured that they should enter.
The hut was dimly lit by oil lights. At one end of the room was a crudely constructed table, with benches running around it. The woman and three children who were sitting there did not look up when they entered, or even talk about it among themselves.
At the other end of the hut was a brick stove, which would have seemed large anywhere, but in this cramped place looked enormous. It was about five feet long and four feet wide, Blackstone estimated. The top was flat, and resting on it were some shabby blankets and pillows stuffed with straw.
“The children and old people sleep on the stove,” Agnes said, reading his mind.
“And what about the rest of the family?”
“On the floor, amongst the straw.”
The only fixtures in the hut were a series of shelves holding pots and pans, and an icon in one corner, which had an oil lamp of its own.
“That’s the ‘red’ corner,” Agnes said.
“Red?” Blackstone repeated.
“Or beautiful,” Agnes said. “The words mean the same in Russian. Have you noticed the stink in here?”
How could he not have? Blackstone wondered. He’d visited some pretty foul holes in the East End of London in his time, but the particular mixture of sweat, dirt and decay which was assailing his nostrils at that moment was truly in a class of its own.
“It’s not always like this,” Agnes said. “The whole village goes to the communal steam bath once a week. That’s where they cleanse both themselves and their clothes. But at busy times of the farming year, like this is, the bathhouse remains closed.”
“Aren’t we perhaps being a little discourteous to them?” Blackstone wondered.
“Discourteous? How? They can’t understand a single word of what we’re saying.”
“Maybe not,” Blackstone agreed. “But they can’t have failed to notice that we’re ignoring them.”
“They’re peasants,” Agnes said, her tone more matter-of-fact than contemptuous. “They recognize us as their betters, and they expect to be kept waiting — even in their own homes — until we’re ready to deal with them. Still, perhaps you’re right, and we should get on with our business — before the smell completely overcomes us.”
She held up a cupped hand to Demitri, who nodded, then walked over to one of the rickety shelves and returned with three cracked and chipped glasses in his hand. He placed the glasses on the table, filled them to the top with vodka, and had downed his own before Blackstone had even had time to reach for his.
“Now we’re here, where would you like us to start?”
Agnes said to Blackstone.
“What was the name of the peasant who had his throat cut outside the Prince of Wales’s room?”
“His name was Paul.”
“Then ask Demitri who he thinks is responsible for Paul’s death.”
Agnes spoke a few words in what, Blackstone supposed, was remarkably confident Russian. Demitri thought for a moment, then replied slowly and carefully, as if he wished to use the minimum number of words to earn his vodka.
“He doesn’t know,” Agnes said when he’d finished. “But he’s pretty sure it was one of the dvorianstvo.”
“What does that mean?”
“One of the aristocrats. But he doesn’t necessarily mean someone with a title, you should understand. Anyone up the Big House who is not a servant is a dvoriane to him and his kind.”
“Why should he automatically assume that one of the aristocrats is the murderer?” Blackstone asked.
Agnes conveyed the question.
“He asks, ‘Who knows the ways of the dvorianstvo? Besides, who else would have done it?’” Agnes said. “All the men from the village call each other brat — brother — and one brat does not kill another, unless, of course, it is in a dispute about land. Paul — like he himself — had no land, so none of the villagers had any reason to murder him.”
This was rapidly turning into a complete waste of time, Blackstone decided. Even though Demitri had spent some time at the Big House, and seen a little of its ways, he was incapable of examining any incident — understanding any event — other than through a peasant’s eyes.
“What can he tell me about the morning after Paul was killed?” the Inspector asked, without much hope of hearing anything useful.
“Those who had no stomach for the killing fled like frightened rabbits,” Demitri said through Agnes. “First there was the big coach with the blinds pulled down, and then there was the ‘bird’ coach with the fat man in it.”
Blackstone felt his heart begin to beat a little faster. So there were two coaches after all, just as Captain Dobroskok had inadvertently let slip on the journey from the railway station. Not a coach and a baggage cart, as Major Carlton had so ineptly tried to suggest, but two bloody coaches!
Blackstone and the House of Secrets (The Blackstone Detective series Book 3) Page 10
