‘Yes,’ Hannah agreed. ‘But it is a necessary sacrifice. The Revolution cannot succeed until the state has been brought to its knees.’
‘You were using me right from the start, weren’t you?’ Blackstone demanded.
‘Yes, I was using you,’ Hannah admitted. ‘I needed to find out what Turgenev was up to, and setting you on him seemed the best way to do that. But when I went to bed with you, it was because I wanted to. You said you thought you were falling in love with me. Well, I have fallen in love with you.’
He noticed a tear running down her left cheek. ‘But you’re still going to kill me, aren’t you?’ he asked.
‘I have to,’ Hannah said, with a choke in her voice. ‘I have been standing here ever since the Count left, trying to find an alternative. But there is none. You must die, Sam.’
‘Why? Because it’s what Dalton wants?’
‘No. Because you know that Turgenev is not acting for the Russian government, but only in the interests of his own fanatical group. That knowledge could prevent the war.’
‘The Russians will deny that he was working for them, anyway,’ Blackstone said.
‘True,’ Hannah agreed. ‘But without your testimony, no one will believe them.’
‘You do realize that once this is all over, they’ll kill you, too.’
Hannah nodded. ‘That is probably true. But it doesn’t matter. I am only a tiny cog in the machine. I will be easy to replace, but by my death I will have allowed the Revolution to take a giant step forward.’
So this was it, Blackstone thought. This was how it all ended. He had failed in his duty as a policeman, and he was about to lose his life at the hands of the woman he loved.
‘Shall we get it over with?’ he suggested.
Another tear ran down Hannah’s cheek.
‘If you would like to close your eyes—’ she began.
‘Oh no,’ Blackstone interrupted. ‘When I die, I want to be looking at my murderess.’
Hannah was crying in earnest now. ‘I really do love you, you know,’ she said.
‘Do it!’ Blackstone said harshly.
Hannah nodded again, and raised her gun slightly.
A chest shot, Blackstone thought. If she had gone for the head, he might have stood a chance, because there was always the possibility she would miss and he’d have time to make a move. But she was too professional for that. A bullet to the chest might not kill him, but it would take him down—and once he was down she could finish him off at her leisure.
Hannah’s finger was wrapped around the trigger, and even from a distance, Blackstone could see it tightening. He looked into her eyes, hoping to find some sign that she couldn’t go through with it. But beneath a deep sadness, there was an even deeper determination.
He heard the shot, but felt no pain—no searing agony as the metal tube tore its way through his body. But something had happened to Hannah! The top of her head had exploded, sending an obscene fountain of blood and gore high into the air.
Blackstone swung round to face the door, and saw a man standing there with a smoking pistol in his hand. He recognized the new arrival. The last time they had met had been on a nighttime street in Little Russia, when this man had saved him from certain death at the hands of Count Turgenev’s thugs.
Hannah’s legs collapsed beneath her, and she crumpled lifelessly to the floor. Blackstone rushed across the room, knelt down, and cradled what was left of her head to his chest.
‘You’ve killed her!’ he sobbed.
The man in the doorway shrugged indifferently.
‘There was no choice,’ he said. ‘Perhaps if I had arrived earlier there might have been a way to spare her, but the agent I had on your tail did not tell me where you were until a few minutes ago.’
Even as he knelt there—even as the blood of the woman he still loved was soaking into his clothes—Blackstone felt the policeman deep inside him begin to reassert himself.
‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘My name is Vladimir Bubnov, Inspector Blackstone, and I am what Count Turgenev used to be.’
‘A secret policeman?’
‘Yes, I am a member of the Okhrana. As to what I am doing here—we suspected that the Count and a few like-minded men were involved in some lunatic scheme, and I wanted to find out what it was.’
And just like Hannah, you used me to do that, Blackstone thought. But it didn’t matter who had used him, or why—the only important thing was what he had found out.
He laid the bloody pulp that had once been Hannah’s head gently on the floor, and stood up.
‘Turgenev’s men are planning to assassinate the Queen,’ he said.
The Russian paled. ‘My God!’ he gasped. ‘But they can’t!’
‘On the contrary,’ Blackstone said, ‘unless we can stop them, they have an excellent chance.’
‘Do you know where this assassination attempt will take place?’ the Russian asked.
Blackstone stripped off his bloodied jacket, threw it on the floor, and strode rapidly towards the door. ‘Just follow me,’ he said.
Thirty-Four
Count Turgenev looked out of the window at the platform in front of the greengrocer’s shop across the street. His two men were already in place, standing behind the cameras that concealed their snipers’ rifles. What fools the British were to allow him such an opportunity to kill their queen.
‘If all is still on schedule, the procession should be leaving the Mansion House now,’ he said to the other man sitting at the table behind him.
But Lord Dalton did not hear the words. Instead, he was reliving the long struggle he had endured to get what he wanted finally.
He had first met Lady Emily Montcliffe when she was fifteen, and had immediately fallen in love with her. But he had not been such a fool as to announce that love, because he knew that, as things stood, the Earl would never allow his family name to be allied with that of the nouveau aristocracy. And so he had gone about things another way—by making himself useful.
The Earl would not dirty his own hands by indulging in commerce, but he had been quite willing to let others make money for him. And at first, that was just what Dalton had done. Then there had been the trip to Australia that he had made with the Viscount. What a triumph of cunning and manipulation that had been! It had helped, of course, that Hugo was such a fool that it had been easy to persuade him that investing in worthless shares had been entirely his own idea. But to come out of the whole disaster perceived not as the destroyer of the Montcliffe family’s finances but as its saviour was still nothing short of a masterstroke.
After that, it had been easy. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and when Dalton had asked the Earl for his daughter’s hand in marriage, Earl Montcliffe had had no option but to agree.
That was how it should have ended, Lord Dalton thought—with he and his one true love living happily together for the rest of their days. But then he had made some bad investments himself—not as disastrous as the ones he had steered Hugo into, but damaging enough. Ruin had been staring him in the face, and he was well aware that the loss of his fortune would also mean the loss of Emily.
He had been in a desperate state when Count Turgenev had turned up to renew their Australian acquaintanceship. It hadn’t taken the Count long to let Dalton know that he’d found out about his problems—and to offer him a way out of it.
Dalton had been horrified at first, but the horror had not lasted long. What did the life of one old lady matter—what did India matter—as long as he could have his Emily?
He looked up at the Count, who was still staring out of the window. When they had been in Australia together, they had got on well. But since he had taken the Count’s money, the relationship had changed. Turgenev had become more and more off-hand, until, not an hour earlier, the Count had compared the man he had once treated as an equal with his washerwoman.
New nobility was a fragile thing, and Lord Dalton’s
had been very badly bruised. He burned with shame that he had ever associated with a man who should treat him with such contempt—and realized that he would continue to burn until he had had his revenge.
Thirty-Five
Blackstone, and the Russian who said his name was Vladimir, sprinted across London Bridge, watched—as an unexpected entertainment—by the thousands of spectators who were being held back by soldiers and policemen. Blackstone had lost count of the number of times he had shouted out ‘Police! Emergency!’ when some official looked as if he were about to challenge him, and his arm was already stiff from holding his warrant card high in the air.
As he ran, his mind grappled with the problem of what to do once he and the Okhrana man were within reach of the platform where the assassins would be waiting. They both had pistols, but if they used them they would panic the dense crowd, and in the stampede that followed, scores of people would lose their lives.
Yet what other way was there of dealing with killers?
He reached the end of the bridge and he stopped for a second to catch his breath and look over his shoulder. The Queen’s procession was still on the other side of the river, but it was gaining on them. By the time they reached the camera platform on Southwark Street, it would be almost at their heels.
Perhaps he should give up trying to stop the assassins and stop the procession instead, he thought desperately.
But what were the chances that the soldiers who were forming the Queen’s bodyguard—and who would be no protection at all against a sniper’s bullet—would ever believe a discredited policeman when he said the monarch was in danger?
He and the Russian had reached Southwark Street, but Blackstone still had no plan. The crowd here was packed even tighter than it had been on the bridge. Costermongers—who so hated authority that it was almost a badge of honour to have gone to gaol for beating up a policeman—stood wide-eyed, waiting for a monarch who could not even begin to imagine how harsh and brutal their lives were. Women who worked in their front parlours for up to sixteen hours a day, gluing hat boxes or making paper flowers, had for once given themselves a little time off and stood crushed together, awaiting a spectacle they would remember for the rest of their lives—and would go to their graves counting themselves fortunate for having seen.
Whatever their failings or however much their passivity sometimes exasperated him, Blackstone told himself, these were his people—and he couldn’t let them down.
He could see the camera platform ahead of him, surrounded by onlookers. If he tried to storm it, he was sure that the Russians would have no qualm about firing down on him and the dense crowd. There had to be another way!
He looked up at the rooftops. In the more prosperous parts of the city, wooden seats had been erected on the roofs so that the spectators might sit in some kind of comfort. But here, south of the river, the house owners had merely rented space, and those who had paid out the few coppers they could ill afford clung precariously to the apex of the roofs and to the chimney stacks.
But how had they got up there?
They’d gone up ladders—like the one he could see just ahead of him, propped up against the side of an end terrace house!
And in a flash, Blackstone knew exactly what he had to do.
He came to a sudden halt. ‘Inspector Blackstone. Scotland Yard,’ he said to the policemen who were holding back the crowd. ‘Make a path for me into Great Suffolk Street! Now!’
One of the constables frowned. ‘Don’t know whether we can, sir,’ he said. ‘The crowd’s tightly packed, an’ the Queen’s due any minute.’
‘Do it!’ Blackstone ordered him. ‘I don’t care how you manage it—just bloody do it!’
The constables began to manoeuvre the people back down Great Suffolk Street. As he stood there bursting with impatience, Blackstone fancied that, even though he knew it would have been impossible over the excited buzz of the crowd, he could hear the click of horses’ hoofs as they pulled the royal landau ever nearer. People who had been standing there all day for one glimpse of the Queen complained and grumbled as they were pushed back, but a gap wide enough for Blackstone and the Russian to squeeze through was eventually cleared. The Inspector started to climb the ladder, with the secret policeman right behind him.
He was just at the top of the ladder when the people on the roof broke out into an ear-shattering cheer. Blackstone took a quick glance over his shoulder. The royal procession had almost crossed the river. It was close enough to make out the plumed helmets of the escort shining in the sunlight, and the white parasol that the Queen held over her head. He did not have long to act—and there was no room for mistakes.
The easiest and safest way to cross the roof would be along the apex, but every inch of it was occupied by spectators. He would have to make a run for it—gamble on his momentum counteracting gravity.
He pulled himself on the roof and felt his legs start to slip from under him. Quickly, he twisted his feet so they were at an angle to the incline and placed his left hand—palm down—on the rough slates.
‘Oy!’ someone shouted, ‘I paid frippence for this spot. I want to see the Queen, not your ’ead.’
Ignoring the man, Blackstone edged forward, and heard the scarping sound of the Russian’s feet behind him.
‘Ready?’ he asked.
‘Ready,’ the Okhrana man said.
Blackstone launched himself forward, arms spread out to provide what balance they could.
Ahead of him, he could see the platform. It looked wider from above than it had seemed from the street. The two men standing on it—Turgenev’s henchmen—were crouched behind the cameras that hid their rifles. They had positioned themselves at opposite ends of the platform, thus taking advantage of the maximum number of firing angles available to them. Two rifles aimed at one little old lady in a slow-moving coach—they couldn’t miss.
Behind him, he heard the sound of feet desperately trying to maintain traction and a grunted curse from Vladimir. Then the scraping stopped, and a second later there was a pained roar from the people below. Vladimir was gone. He had fallen off the roof and plummeted into the crowd. So now it was one police inspector—gone soft with the years of easy living since he’d left the Army—against two trained assassins.
Blackstone felt his feet slipping, just as Vladimir’s must have done. He stopped moving, and wobbled to try and regain his balance. One foot was already over the edge when he twisted round and flung himself flat against the roof. His fingers reached out and grasped the edges of a couple of slates. He prayed that on a dilapidated building like this one, they would not give way.
‘What the bloody ’ell do you fink you’re doin’?’ an angry voice called to him from the apex of the roof. ‘Why can’t you just sit still an’ watch the Jubilee, like everybody else?’
Blackstone raised himself to a kneeling position, then gingerly stood up. From the street, the sound of cheering was growing in intensity, which could only mean that the Queen’s procession was getting close. Blackstone broke into a cautious trot.
He covered the roofs of three houses and was almost directly above the platform when he felt the soles of his boots start to lose their grip again. And this time was worse than the last. This time, he wasn’t sure he was going to make it.
And suddenly he knew he wasn’t! His feet slipped more, and he was on the very edge of the roof. There was no space to twist this time—no room left for manoeuvre. He tottered there on the lip, waving his arms as a young bird flaps its wings while it is wondering whether it dare take that first leap into the void.
He was going to fall! Whatever happened, he was going to fall! All he could do, he thought in that split-second while thought was still possible, was to snatch what advantage he could from the situation.
He could have gone straight down, landing on the crowd below, but instead he dived forward, heading for the platform.
He was flying through the air—and if he carried on travelling at the same angle, he
would hit the platform headfirst. He twisted his body frantically in a desperate attempt to ensure that he landed on his feet.
He almost made it!
*
‘Blackstone!’ Count Turgenev exclaimed.
‘What?’ Lord Dalton asked.
‘Blackstone,’ the Count repeated. ‘He is not dead, as he is supposed to be. He is on one of the roofs, only a short distance from the platform.’
Dalton rushed over to the window. Yes, there was no doubt about it. The tall, thin figure who had just slipped off the roof—and was now flying through the air towards the camera platform—was undoubtedly Sam Blackstone.
He should never have trusted the Russian woman, Dalton told himself. He should have seen to it personally that the policeman was no longer a threat. But it was too late to think about what might have been. Blackstone was there. True, he was only seconds from death. But through his death, he could well stop the procession. Which meant that the Queen would not be assassinated! And he would not get the money that would save him from ruin!
At least there was now nothing to restrain him from doing what he had been itching to do for the last hour. He took a few steps backwards, placed his hand in his frock coat and ran one finger along the blade of the knife that was resting there.
*
The Russian closest to the falling man was crouched over the camera—pretending to film the crowd closer to Blackfriars Bridge—when the Inspector’s knees slammed into his back. The assassin screamed in shock and agony, then pitched forward.
Blackstone sprawled on top of him, his chest covering the Russian’s head. His knees were sending sharp shooting pains up to the tops of his legs, and he was sure that he would never walk again.
As the Inspector wriggled free from the fallen man, the other Russian quickly swung around the camera that concealed his rifle. His haste was a mistake—the tripod collapsed and the camera crashed to the floor.
Blackstone—his knees giving him hell—struggled into a crouching position. The Russian glanced down at the camera—as if he were still considering the rifle as his first choice of weapon—then reached into his pocket and pulled out a glinting cut-throat razor.
Blackstone and the Rendezvous With Death (The Blackstone Detective Series Book 1 Page 21