The People's Will

by Jasper Kent

  Now that they were in a more open space Mihail could – and needed to – keep a greater distance between himself and Dusya. The park was laid out in a regular grid of crossing pathways, separated by trees and hedges. Under other circumstances Mihail could have followed these at random, and not worried if he had walked past Dusya more than once, as any two people walking in a park might pass each other. But even if she saw him once, she would recognize him, and though their re-encountering one another was genuinely a coincidence, he would prefer her not to know he was there.

  She did not walk through the park for long, but made directly for a bench, upon which a man was already sitting. As she approached he stood. He took her hands in his and they kissed. It was not prolonged, but tender enough for Mihail to construe the depth of their relationship. From a distance he could not clearly see the man’s face, but already he could hazard a guess as to who it was.

  The couple sat down – the man making an exaggerated show of wiping the snow from the bench, even though he had evidently already done the same on his own arrival. They began to talk and Mihail realized he had been standing watching for too long. He walked away along one of the paths, but soon returned along another. Still, he was not close enough to properly see the man’s face. He took a chance. Dusya’s back was to him, and she was busily gazing into the eyes of her beloved as he spoke to her, so it was unlikely that she would turn. Mihail risked walking past them.

  He kept his eyes fixed on the path in front of him, his head down as if to avoid the cold. Dusk had fallen, but there was still sufficient light to see by. Only for a moment did he look up. At the same moment the man looked at him and Mihail knew instantly that he was staring into the eyes of his brother. Whether he saw anything of Tamara in them was hard to say, but the waved hair and the moustache were just as Mihail had seen in the police photograph. In reality he was perhaps a little more handsome. It must have come from his father.

  Mihail walked on as though his inspection had been merely a passing glance. He almost laughed. It seemed that the subterfuge which he and Dusya had extemporized on the train was proving to be true. Whether or not she was actually his fiancée, Dusya was most certainly a friend of his brother – and an intimate one at that.

  And why should Mihail not share the joke with them? His intention when he set out that day had been to speak to Luka openly, but having followed Dusya here, he had fallen into the habit of subterfuge. It was preposterous. Dusya would be pleased to see him, and Luka more so to be united at last with his long-lost brother. Mihail almost turned to face them there and then, but still he felt the urge to be, as his father had put it, circumspect.

  He turned right, right and right again, knowing that at the next junction he would be revisiting his path of moments before. Still he could not decide whether this time he would walk by or would stop and sit, and that his brother would at last become his friend.

  He turned the final corner and looked, and saw that the bench was empty.

  It had been many weeks since the Executive Committee had formally assembled. The chairman had not been in Petersburg, but in the meantime work had continued. Mihailov was supposed to have been in charge, but had got himself arrested. He was a pawn anyway. Now that they were all gathered there was much to be discussed. It was Sofia Lvovna who spoke first. Of all of them, she had the noblest blood in her veins. Her father was Count Perovsky, once the military governor of Petersburg, who had been forced out of office as the early liberalism of Aleksandr’s reign had begun to wither. Sofia had inherited his blue eyes and prominent forehead.

  ‘Towards the end of 1880 we rented a basement property on Malaya Sadovaya Street.’ Sofia’s speech was clipped and formal. ‘The owner is Countess Megdena, but she has no direct involvement with the property. It consists of three rooms: the shop, a storeroom and a living room.’

  None of this was news to the chairman, but it had so far been kept secret from many of the others present. The choice of the shop had been his alone, and made carefully, but using criteria that would mean nothing to the rest of the committee. He’d already been down in the tunnels below, and made sure they led where he wanted.

  ‘Comrades Bogdanovich and Yakimova will run the property as a cheese shop,’ Sofia continued, ‘posing as husband and wife.’

  The chairman glanced over at them. It was a sensible choice; they would not take the roles of a loving couple too far and become distracted from their work. The same could not be said of many of the People’s Will – Sofia included. The women saw it as a liberation to choose when and to whom to offer their bodies; the men took it as an opportunity.

  ‘We’ve taken the name of Kobozev,’ explained Bogdanovich.

  ‘And how’s the cheese business?’ asked the chairman.

  There was general laughter.

  ‘Does it matter?’ asked Bogdanovich.

  ‘It matters if an ohranik notices a cheese shop that never sells any cheese!’ The chairman’s voice was raised.

  Bogdanovich nodded. ‘We’ll keep it in mind.’

  ‘And what of activities beneath the shop?’

  Sofia turned towards Kibalchich, who stood. He removed his pince-nez and wiped them on his shirt before returning them to his nose. Even so, he never seemed to look directly at the chairman as he spoke, or at Sofia, or anyone in the room.

  ‘After the failure of the explosion at the Winter Palace, I think we all realize the need for getting the correct amount of nitroglycerin in place.’ Kibalchich was making a point. For that operation he had insisted they would need more explosive to blast through two storeys of the palace and get at the tsar, but he’d been overruled. Whether it would have actually made a difference was open to debate. ‘Thankfully,’ he continued, ‘our efforts in that direction have gone well. Yevdokia Yegorovna returned to Petersburg only yesterday with the final sticks of dynamite.’

  ‘Where is she then? Why isn’t she here?’

  All eyes turned to Zhelyabov. The big, bearded man spoke calmly. ‘My duty was to act as escort on the train and ensure the safe arrival of the dynamite in Petersburg. I’ve no idea where Dusya is now; nor Luka.’

  He was right; Luka was not here either and, given their relationship, there was an obvious inference to be drawn as to the reason for their joint absence. Zhelyabov drew attention to it in contrast to his own relationship with Sofia, which neither of them ever allowed to interfere with their calling.

  The chairman grunted. ‘Perhaps it’s for the best; the fewer who know exactly what’s going on at the shop the better. And what of the tunnel itself?’ he asked.

  ‘Since you were last down there, it’s not been so good,’ replied Kibalchich. ‘The layout is just as you said it would be, at least down below. But on the main tunnel we hit a sewage pipe which flooded back almost to the shop and we had to virtually start again. Even so, it’s not going well. Since Shiryaev was arrested I’ve had no one to consult with. To be honest, none of us really has the expertise in this sort of work, particularly not when you have to keep everything so quiet.’

  ‘Do we know of anyone who’s got the right experience?’

  There were general shrugs, indicating an answer in the negative, and so the chairman moved on. ‘We’re sure of when the tsar will travel along Malaya Sadovaya?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ve been out in the city for several months watching his movements,’ explained Sofia. ‘There’s little regularity to them, except on Sundays when his return from the Manège usually takes him that way.’

  ‘Usually?’

  ‘If we don’t get him one week we’ll get him the next. More recently we’ve been watching other members of the royal family, though I think it’s better to focus on the main target.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Rysakov’s been helping me.’

  ‘Is he reliable?’

  Sofia was about to reply, but the chairman raised his hand to silence her. There were footsteps on the stairs outside. A second later the others heard them. All held their
breath. There was a knock at the door: three raps, then one, then two. It was the correct signal. Zhelyabov was closest to the door. He unbolted it and Dusya entered, followed by Luka.

  ‘You’re late!’ snapped Sofia.

  ‘We were followed,’ Luka explained. ‘You wouldn’t want us to bring an ohranik here.’

  ‘You’re certain?’ asked the chairman.

  ‘It was me he was following, I think,’ said Dusya. ‘I don’t know where he picked me up, but he was there at the Summer Gardens. Luka saw him.’

  ‘Did you recognize him?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Luka. ‘But I described him to Dusya and—’

  Dusya interrupted. ‘I think he’s the same man that I spoke to on the train from Rostov.’

  ‘Well, that’s marvellous!’ exclaimed Sofia. ‘They must know everything.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Dusya. ‘On the train he helped me – lied for me.’

  ‘And why would he do that?’ Sofia’s voice oozed scepticism.

  ‘Who knows? He’s got no love for the Ohrana, that’s for sure. Perhaps he just, you know, liked me. He was a soldier; on leave. You know what they’re like.’

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ added Zhelyabov, ‘that’s what it looked like to me.’

  ‘And it was pure coincidence that he was in the Summer Gardens today?’ asked Sofia.

  ‘Perhaps he wanted to take things further and decided to look me up. I told him my name.’

  ‘Your real name? Why would you do that?’

  ‘I was about to show my passport to an ohranik! You want me to get caught lying?’

  ‘This chap,’ interrupted Kibalchich. ‘About my height? Clean-shaven, side whiskers, curly auburn hair, brown eyes – piercing?’

  Dusya nodded. ‘That’s him.’

  ‘He was at the apartment on Maksimilianovsky Lane. He must have watched us leave and then seen you arrive.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ asked the chairman.

  ‘I’ll check with Titov, the dvornik – he’ll have seen,’ replied Kibalchich.

  ‘Who else was there?’

  ‘Just Mihailov.’

  ‘Mihailov?’ The chairman tried to hide his concern. Mihailov was supposed to be rotting in a gaol cell. If he were free it would be a threat to the chairman’s position.

  ‘A new recruit,’ explained Sofia. ‘Just a kid. No relation to Aleksandr Dmitrievich. He might prove useful.’

  The chairman grunted, then turned back to Dusya. ‘It would be easy enough for a soldier to trace you, ohranik or not.’

  ‘So what we have,’ said Zhelyabov, ‘is either a very subtle police spy or a soldier with some slight sympathy for our cause, and holding a candle for young Dusya here.’

  ‘I think, Dusya, that you’d better tell us everything you know about this man,’ said the chairman.

  She sat down and began. ‘Well, he’s a lieutenant in the grenadier sappers – an engineer. Knows everything about undermining and explosives and all that sort of thing. Went on about it for ever. He’d been supervising the tunnelling in that place … you know … General Skobyelev.’

  ‘Geok Tepe?’ suggested the chairman.

  ‘That’s it,’ Dusya confirmed.

  The chairman leaned back with a smile. ‘Comrades,’ he announced, ‘I think we may just have found our expert.’

  Not so very far from Saint George’s Church in Esher, about eight miles away, just on the other side of Leatherhead, stood Juniper Hall. In 1792, when Richard Cain was fourteen, the hall was leased to a group of French émigrés who had fled to England to escape the terror that they correctly guessed would soon come to their homeland. For many in the area – particularly for the children – there were immediate benefits. Richard’s study of French, while moderately successful, had been limited by his hearing it spoken only by his father and other staid Englishmen at his school who regarded the French people’s pronunciation of their own language as degeneration that needed to be corrected. Once he was able to converse with those for whom French was a necessity rather than an affectation, his love for it – and for all languages – blossomed. Ever the methodical child – as his father had raised him to be – he systematically discovered and then memorized the French names of every creature he had studied and previously known only in Latin and English.

  But the French occupation of Juniper Hall brought more than mere language to that corner of Surrey. It also brought death. The first body was found in the ditch beside the road from Oxshott to Chessington. The European obsession with vampires had not at the time reached England’s shores and so, while the wounds to the man’s neck were mysterious, their cause was not as immediately obvious as it might have been to a Slavic observer. The victim was never identified. In the end it was concluded that he was one of a gang of footpads who’d fallen foul of his comrades.

  But Richard Cain jumped to no such precipitate conclusions. He simply noted in his journal the time, location and manner of the death and wondered – perhaps hoped – whether such a thing would happen again. He had no reason to suppose that it was anything but a solitary happenstance, but instinct told him there would soon be more of the same. His instinct proved correct. Within two months four other murders had come to light. More followed.

  The locations of the deaths formed a rough circle, with reports from as far afield as Crawley and Guildford marking its extremities. He never identified Juniper Hall as the precise hub of the wheel, but was unsurprised when he learned the truth. As far as he could tell the events all occurred at weekends, on either a Friday or a Saturday night. Richard recorded them in a calendar and plotted them on a map, and slowly saw the pattern emerging.

  And all this might have been spotted by others attempting to investigate the crime had it not been for a series of additional deaths, again with the same wounds to the throat. The difference, and the cause of the confusion, was that in these cases the victims were not men but animals.

  Richard was not confused. He knew perfectly well there was no single killer out there, but that the killer of the animals – a dog, several rabbits, a cat and a deer – was a different creature from the killer of the men. He knew it because he had killed the animals. He had taken no pleasure in it – not in the slaughter itself – but it had been a challenge to reproduce with so great a degree of accuracy the neck wounds that were the distinctive trait of the killer.

  The first step had been to get a good look at the bodies. There had been no real trouble there. Two of them had been buried in the cemetery of Richard’s father’s own church, and so it was no problem for him to borrow a set of keys and creep into the deadhouse – if the rickety shed beside the church merited such a name – to look closely at the bodies before they were interred. On many occasions, he wasn’t alone. By the age of fourteen he had acquired a number of friends, although his later understanding of human nature led him to question the term. They were the boys who in general chose not to punch him on the way to or from school. Richard soon learned that one way to maintain this peaceful state was to distract them with the sight of something gruesome. A dissected frog or a spider devouring a fly would normally be enough, but a visit to look at a corpse – particularly the victim of a murder – might keep Richard free of their unwanted attentions for a week or more. For his own part, Richard studied the wounds, took notes, made measurements – in short he behaved exactly as his father had taught him. And yet at no level did he feel that in doing so he was being a ‘good boy’. There was no self-delusion that his actions could, through misinterpretation, be justified. He knew that he was twisting his father’s wishes to an end which the rector would not have desired, and the knowledge pleased him.

  It was not only the boys from school to whom Richard provided tours of his world of the macabre – there was also a girl. Susanna Fowler was the daughter of Edward and Lucy Fowler, who kept house for Richard’s father. She was a year older than him, and while in their younger days they had lived very much apart, Susanna had for several
years been old enough to share much of the housework with her mother, and so she and Richard came increasingly into contact.

  They often talked as friends. He would learn from her about the world outside his somewhat cloistered upbringing at the rectory, and he would tell her of his world, reading from his journals and showing her the remarkable diversity of animal life that could be found without venturing outside the churchyard. He even described to her the mechanisms of reproduction, not as handed down to him by his father – that conversation had never taken place – but from his observation of animals. He had seen what dogs and cats did, and what the oxen in the fields did, and learned from the farmers that it led to calves. He was not surprised to learn from Susanna that people procreated in much the same way. He had assumed it based on extrapolation, but was pleased to have it confirmed, and noted the discovery in his journal. He noticed, as they discussed the matter, that her manner changed slightly and that her face became a little flushed. He himself felt unusual – a little more excited than at most of his scientific discoveries. He noted down these observations too.

  And so it was quite natural that Richard should show Susanna each of the two mutilated bodies that rested overnight in the deadhouse. With the boys he brought them in as a crowd, but with her it was just the two of them. On the first occasion, she remained quite calm. Richard suspected she was hiding her fear and made an effort to describe to her in detail everything he had observed about the wounds to the neck. Still she showed no outward signs of apprehension, and so he had pulled back the victim’s head, holding it by the chin, thus allowing, as he described it, a full and clear view of the damage done to the internal structures of the neck. She fled. Richard savoured the moment, enjoying the knowledge that he had managed to in some way control her, without any need for coercion or force.