The Third Section (21 page)

‘Iuda,’ Aleksei had said, patting him on his chest so as to amplify the pain of the bullet that lay there, ‘I have beaten you.’ Even then, it had been obvious he meant a greater victory than merely to have killed him.

‘Carry on, Lyosha,’ he had persisted. ‘Tell me what you were going to say.’ And then, ‘Please, Lyosha, grant a dying man his wish.’

And then Yudin had noticed a change in Aleksei, a stiffening of his body that he had always suspected, but never been sure, indicated that Aleksei had guessed what Yudin had done, guessed that though he would die there on the cold, flat, frozen river, he would be reborn. Still Yudin had persisted.

‘Please, tell me. How did you fool me?’

And at that point, Aleksei had relented – changed his story. Yudin remembered his smile. ‘I didn’t, Iuda. I was pretending, but I won’t lie to you. I could never devise a trick clever enough to fool you.’

In the past, Yudin’s memories of the moment had been vague – it had been so close to his death. But now it all came back to him with utter clarity. And in that same moment Aleksei’s words made sense of another conundrum that had been puzzling Yudin much more recently: that of the inert nature of Tsar Aleksandr’s blood. How could Aleksei’s pretended or perhaps real trickery be related to that? The answer lay in the date. That scene on the frozen Neva had been played out in December 1825, just a month after the death of Tsar Aleksandr I.

And that was what lay at the heart of it: the reason that Aleksandr II’s blood was immune to Zmyeevich’s; the deception that Aleksei had wanted to reveal, but had hidden on realizing that Yudin would not die; the deception that was to be maintained for almost thirty years.

But now that deception was over. Yudin understood all. It was a simple enough concept, but it explained everything. Tsar Nikolai I might have died in Petersburg in February 1855, but in terms of the Romanov blood, that meant nothing.

The truth was that his predecessor, Tsar Aleksandr I, supposed to have died in Taganrog in 1825, had not died then and indeed had not died at all. It was the only explanation – and it made perfect sense.

Aleksandr Pavlovich, Tsar of All the Russias, vanquisher of Napoleon Bonaparte, still lived.

‘Madame Komarova.’

Tamara’s body jerked upright, instantly awake, but her mind was still blurred by sleep. She looked around and saw the man who had spoken. She recognized him, but could not place him. He was small, almost as short as she was. His hair was grey and there wasn’t much of it. His eyes had a yellow tint as they peered at her through his spectacles.

‘Gribov,’ she mumbled, not even realizing where in her memory the name had come from. She looked around her again. The room she was in was vast. Even in the dim light she could see it was full of books and documents. One of them, she knew without understanding why, was of inestimable importance to her.

‘You fell asleep,’ said Gribov. ‘You must have been here all night.’ He began to tidy up the books and papers on the desk where she had been sitting, straightening out the ones that had been crumpled by her lying on them.

‘No!’ she shouted, memory pouring back into her consciousness as though through a broken dam. ‘I found something.’

‘Concerning Prince Volkonsky?’

That much she still couldn’t remember, but she suspected not. She had been looking through the documents for 1812 for almost a month; there were far more than Gribov had suggested, despite
the
French occupation. Last night, late last night, she had found something. She began searching, not knowing what she was looking for but recognizing those papers that she had already rejected and throwing them to the floor. Gribov diligently followed her around the table, picking them up.

‘Got it!’ she shouted at last.

She handed it to Gribov, who soon returned it to her, though she noted that he had allowed his eyes to scan twice across its contents.

‘And how is this helpful?’ he asked.

Tamara could not remember. She looked at the paper again, refreshing her knowledge of what she knew had been so exciting a discovery the previous night. ‘You remember the murder last month, at Degtyarny Lane?’ she asked.

‘Sadly,’ nodded Gribov.

‘Well, this is the police report of another murder. It’s dated 11 November 1812.’

‘And?’

‘And it’s the same; exactly the same,’ said Tamara, her eyes continuing to scan the document.

In truth, the similarity was not exact. The victim, Margarita Kirillovna, was found in an upstairs room at a bordello on Degtyarny Lane. It could only be the same building – it was impossible to tell which room. She had suffered severe lacerations to the neck – just like Irina Karlovna – which were believed to be the cause of death. But then came the difference. Margarita Kirillovna had suffered an additional wound to the chest – she had been stabbed in the heart. There had been no sign of that with Irina. The report also stated that this last wound was believed, due to the lack of bleeding from it, to have been inflicted some time after death. But only a fool would ignore the similarities on account of that one discrepancy.

‘You suspect there might be a connection?’ Many might have uttered the question with an air of disbelief, but from Gribov it came merely as an enquiry.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, still reading. ‘I don’t know.’

But she knew how she was going to find out. At the bottom of the page was a list of witnesses – three of them. She opened her
own
notebook, ready to write the names down, but discovered that she had already done so, the previous night. She checked with the document, but she had made no mistakes. She had three witnesses to a crime of four decades earlier:

Pyetr Pyetrovich Polyakov
.

Domnikiia Semyonovna Beketova
.

Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov
.

TAMARA WAS RETRACING
her steps. She had moved away from the tables and shelves that represented the time of the Patriotic War and returned to those for the 1820s, where she had found so little information concerning her own early life. But she had seen something among those records, something which she had dismissed as of no interest at the time. With regard to the discovery of her parentage it was irrelevant, but for the moment she was more interested in murder, both in 1812 and in 1855 – and perhaps also in 1825.

She couldn’t remember what the file had looked like, but she had some idea of where she had found it. It had been on a bookcase, close to the left-hand end, on either the second or third shelf from the top. There were three bookcases for 1825, each looking very much the same as the next. The picture of her pulling out the file was clear in her memory and she could isolate its position down to four or five documents, but still she could only guess at the correct set of shelves.

It was in the third bookcase that she found it.

There were twenty-two separate cases listed, mostly of women, mostly where a husband – in a legal or, often, less formal capacity – was the obvious suspect. That these deaths were listed as unsolved was more a reflection of the innate, unspoken freemasonry of the male sex than of any lack of evidence. But it was not these that had caught her attention. They might have involved the deaths of
young
women, but the precise mechanisms of those deaths did not correspond with what she had read about Margarita Kirillovna, or seen first-hand with Irina Karlovna.

Then she found the document that she had remembered so clearly, after only a glance at it months before. It was dated Tuesday, 29 September 1825 and concerned the discovery of the body of a Kremlin guard in Red Square. To be precise, the body had been inside the Lobnoye Mesto, the circular enclosure to the north of Saint Vasiliy’s from where, years ago, imperial decrees had been read out. In that case the victim was a man, whose body had been found in the open air. There was little to connect it with either of the two deaths in which Tamara was interested, but one thing was unmistakably familiar: the manner of his death.

His throat had been cut, cut deeply with a jagged knife so that a handful of the flesh was missing. And the wound was only to the left-hand side of the neck. The report on Margarita Kirillovna had not been clear on that last point, but Tamara could certainly remember it as being true of Irina.

Continuing through the file she found a cluster of similar murders; not clustered around a single location – they were spread all over Moscow – but clustered in time. There had been five other deaths, all in the space of a week at the end of September and beginning of October 1825. All but one of the victims were men. The first was a footman. His body was found on Great Bronnaya Street. That wasn’t so very far from Degtyarny Lane, but it meant little. The second had perhaps the most detail, probably on account of the status of the victim. He was a prince – Prince Victor Markovich Kavyerin. The body had been found to the east of the city in Kitay Gorod. There was even a sketch of the wounds – again they matched what Tamara had witnessed for herself. There was also a brief description of what was known of the prince’s lifestyle. The word ‘homosexual’ had been underlined three times.

The one female victim had been found floating in the river. There was not even a name for her and the description of her wounds was minimal, but enough to convince Tamara. It had been enough to arouse the interest of someone else too. A note had been scrawled on the paper, reading ‘compare V. M. K.’ The
similarity
to Prince Kavyerin’s wounds had been noted, but beyond that, no one seemed to have made any effort to connect the five deaths.

The last murder had occurred on 3 October. The body of a cavalry captain named Obukhov had been found in the street running alongside the Maly Theatre, lying in a pool of blood. The wound to the neck was described in scant detail, but Tamara had little doubt that a more thorough investigation would have revealed all the hallmarks with which she was becoming familiar. She scanned through the report and noticed the names of two witnesses were listed – also both cavalry officers. The first – a Lieutenant Batenkov – meant nothing to her, but at the sight of the second name she clicked her tongue with excitement.

Whatever coincidence there might be in the similarities of the deaths of Margarita Kirillovna and Irina Karlovna, spaced forty-three years apart, was as nothing compared to the fact the same Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov was listed as a witness to both the 1812 murder and to one of those of 1825. Furthermore, the reasons that neither of those two crimes had been subject to anything like a full investigation now also became clear, based simply on those two letters that the investigating officer had so diligently noted after Danilov’s name.

O.K. stood for
Osobennaya Kantselyariya
– the Special Chancellery. It was the predecessor to her own organization, the Third Section, which had replaced it only months after that last murder took place. It would have been as easy for Danilov to shoo away the regular police before they could reveal anything too damaging as it had been for Yudin to orchestrate the investigation into the murder of Irina, and thereby ensure that nothing came of it.

It did not mean that Danilov was the murderer – any more than Yudin was – but his presence in both 1812 and 1825 required explanation, and beyond that demanded an answer to the simple question, where was Danilov now?

The document in her hands had one last piece of information
which
went some way to answering that. A huge arrow pointed at Danilov’s name and at its end a single word, in a different hand from the rest of the report.

It seemed that Colonel Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov had not been quite as loyal to the tsar as might be expected from a man of his position. As had evidently been discovered – probably only months after the original report was written – Danilov had been a Decembrist.

Yudin fumed. He had been made a fool of. Aleksei didn’t have the brains for it – didn’t have the imagination – and yet for thirty years he’d been able to convince Yudin that Tsar Aleksandr I had died in Taganrog; convince the whole of Russia. The whole of the world.