Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

by David Dickinson

  Powerscourt paused and took a drink of water. His bandaged arm was beginning to itch and he didn’t think scratching it would be appropriate in the circumstances.

  ‘There was the strange story of the French bonds being sold in large numbers but there was a perfectly sound reason for that. They too can be discounted.’

  ‘And the jewels, Francis, the stolen jewels from St Petersburg? Can they too be discounted as being irrelevant to the murder?’

  ‘How right you are, Lucy. There is a certain element of poetic justice in that affair. Inspector Dutfield told me yesterday that the thieves from the Premier Hotel have been apprehended and a lot, though not all, of the money recovered. I say poetic justice in that the money from the jewel raid was stolen, just like the jewels. Anastasia will just have to say that the money recovered was all they got from the sale of the diamonds and the rubies and so on. I’m sure she will be able to manage that.

  ‘There are further Russian links I’d like to come to in a minute, but consider, if you will, the possibility that the first murder, the one here in Covent Garden, was carried out by a jealous husband, possibly even one from Paris who would have had to cross the Channel to restore the family honour. I didn’t think there had been enough time here in England for Bolm to have his way with any compliant wives – the murder was committed shortly after the Ballets Russes arrived and Alexander Taneyev was killed during the first performance here in London. I didn’t believe in the French connection either, so that trail can be discounted. The boy wasn’t killed by a jealous husband.’

  ‘But what about all the girls in the corps de ballet, Lord Powerscourt? Bolm was after them all the time.’ Natasha Shaporova had collected the evidence on this count and she wasn’t going to let it go just yet.

  ‘I agree that Bolm behaved very badly with those girls. But there is only evidence of flirting, nothing more. Pretty serious flirting, by all accounts, but there was the added problem that those girls were on stage at the time the murder was carried out. So while Bolm is responsible for some pretty unacceptable behaviour – very unacceptable if you happen to be one of those girls – it wasn’t Bolm who was killed. It was Taneyev.’

  Powerscourt finally relieved some of the itching on his arm with a rub rather than a scratch. He didn’t think the doctors would mind.

  ‘We now come to a strange series of events that had nothing to with the murder. And while it may be too early to talk in detail about the Ballets Russes, they did have a key role to play in this subplot. Most of my information on this comes from Rosebery’s friend in government intelligence, and the rest of it from Inspector Dutfield and his colleagues. It helps, I believe, if you think of the Ballets Russes as a sort of glorified postbox. If you are a spy or a revolutionary, it’s a perfect vehicle for your plans. There is a man called Lenin who is the principal revolutionary in Russia. He is, more or less, on the run. He cannot stay in Russia or he would be sent to Siberia or somewhere worse. He has stayed in Switzerland from time to time and he has stayed several times in Russia. He’s even lived in London for a time and worked at the British Museum. He is currently in exile at a place called Cracow.’

  ‘Why don’t the Russians just go and arrest him? And take him back to Russia,’ asked Lady Lucy.

  ‘That’s a good question, and I have to say I don’t know the answer. Maybe the Russians think of him as a source for information or a point of contact for all the other revolutionary leaders he is in touch with. If they locked him up, this useful information would just dry up.’

  ‘I’m sure Lenin’s mail and his visitors are known to the Russian authorities at all times,’ said Inspector Dutfield. ‘They may even read all his letters before he does.’

  ‘Several years ago,’ Powerscourt continued, ‘the revolutionaries organized a bank raid in a place called Tiflis. It was a bloody affair, but the raid realized an enormous haul of money for Lenin and his colleagues. Unfortunately most of it was in large denomination banknotes, and the banks knew the numbers. So the revolutionaries couldn’t change it. They tried in a neighbouring country but that didn’t work. Remember what I said about the Ballets Russes being a sort of postbox? Lenin or his cronies must have had a friend or a supporter in the company, not necessarily a dancer. They took the money to London in the Ballets Russes’s luggage. It has been successfully changed into English pounds, and those will eventually return the way they came, in the Ballets Russes’s luggage. They may even have done this by now.’

  ‘From what you say, Francis, the authorities could have put their hands on this money any time they liked. Why didn’t they?’

  ‘I suspect, Lucy, that they are waiting to see where the money ends up. Then they may make their move, when they know the final destination. There is a further twist to the Lenin affair. He is a great scribbler, always producing pamphlets and books to enthuse his followers and keep them on the right course. You could regard them as the revolutionary equivalent of St Paul writing all those letters to the faithful across the ancient world – the Ephesians, the Corinthians and so on. It’s to make sure there is no backsliding among the converts. Anyway, he sends a new pamphlet in Russian to London to be printed in Russian and English, five hundred copies each. I don’t have to tell you how it’s going to leave the country.’

  ‘I believe, my lord,’ said Inspector Dutfield, hunting through his notes, ‘that the intelligence people think that these too will be waved through customs and everything else so that the Russian secret service, the Okhrana, can follow them, not just to Lenin in Cracow but to all the people he sends them to. That would provide a sort of Who’s Who covering Lenin’s revolutionary circle.’

  ‘Exactly so,’ said Powerscourt, ‘exactly so. All of which brings us to the two principal characters in our deadly drama. Alfred Bolm and Alexander Taneyev.’ He took another drink of water.

  ‘Nobody who has seen Alfred Bolm dance can have any doubt that he is a complete master of his craft. He was trained in the classical tradition of the Imperial Theatre School in St Petersburg and has been delighting audiences all over Europe. The key question in this whole affair has been, Who was the intended victim: Bolm or his understudy Alexander Taneyev? For a long time I thought it must be Bolm. I was wrong. Bolm was not the killer either. If you think of him as a one-man version of the Ballets Russes postal system, you wouldn’t be far wrong. One of the great difficulties for spies – I remember it well from the Boer War – is how to get your information back to your masters. Let us suppose we have Spy A, sent from St Petersburg in search of information about military experiments. He thinks he has some very important information. But he may be watched. So he takes his information to the postbox – Bolm, in this case – and the postbox passes it on to Spy C, possibly over games of chess at that club near the British Museum. Spy C might be thought of as a courier rather than a spy, perhaps. His job is to get the information home. The information about military experiments came to Bolm this way. It was Alexander Taneyev’s misfortune that he happened upon this material while it was still in the postbox, as it were. Bolm had not yet had the time to pass it on to Spy C.

  ‘We have all heard of the thought processes of Alexander Taneyev from his letters home, and that diary which ends so abruptly. We know that he was deeply worried about this information. I suspect that he confronted Bolm with what he had read. I believe he told him that he was intending to pass it on to the English authorities or, equally likely perhaps, that Bolm thought that was what he intended to do. Bolm passes this information on to Spy A, the most important link in the chain, who has already garnered crucial military intelligence. Spy A, operating under the pseudonym Andrei Rublev, kills Alexander Taneyev to shut him up. He can’t talk to the authorities if he is dead. I suspect Andrei Rublev was rather good at that sort of thing. I would be surprised if Alexander was his first victim. Taneyev must have let slip to Bolm that he had told the dancer Vera of his plans. That was why Spy A went to Blenheim Palace to kill her too. He had to get rid of them both before
they had time to walk into an English police station. After that, Spy A moved on to the experiment near Goring where he met me.’

  ‘Do you know who the identity of the spy is, Lord Powerscourt?’ Natasha had been staring at Powerscourt for some time, trying to work out what the yellow on his skin meant.

  ‘I do not; I mean, I do not know his real name. Thanks to the activities of Colonel Brouzet in Paris, and what the man said to me when we met at Goring, we know his work name was Rublev, Andrei Rublev. But I have no more idea of what his real name is than I do the name of the man in the moon.’

  ‘Andrei Rublev was a famous icon painter hundreds of years ago,’ said Natasha. ‘Would I be right in thinking, Lord Powerscourt, that you are unable to tell us anything more about the nature of that military experiment? I presume that was what caused the injuries to your arm and your skin.’

  ‘I cannot say any more than I just have. It took me two and a half hours of argument before the secret people allowed me even to use the phrase “military experiment”. I should say that Andrei Rublev is dead. He met with an unfortunate accident at the military experiment and will not trouble us any more. Inspector Dutfield is in the middle of a report to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police saying that the case of the murder of Alexander Taneyev and the poor girl at Blenheim Palace is now closed.’

  ‘I see,’ said Natasha.

  ‘Perhaps I could reassure you, Mrs Shaporova,’ said Inspector Dutfield, ‘that even I have not been permitted to know what went on at that experiment.’

  28

  Fouetté

  Literally ‘whipped’. The term indicates either a turn with a quick change in the direction of the working leg as it passes in front of or behind the supporting leg, or a quick whipping around of the body from one direction to another. There are many kinds of fouetté: petit fouetté (à terre, en demi-pointe or sauté) and grand fouetté (sauté, relevé or en tournant). Similar to a frappé. An introductory form for beginner dancers, executed at the barre, is as follows: facing the barre, the dancer executes a grand battement to the side, then turns the body so that the lifted leg ends up in arabesque.

  The silver hairs first appeared on Powerscourt’s temples shortly before his birthday. For some days nobody talked about them in Markham Square. Oddly enough, it was Christopher, the reading twin, who had recently demolished The Hound of the Baskervilles over a single weekend when staying with some of his mother’s more boring relations, who solved the problem.

  ‘I know,’ he said suddenly one morning after his father had left the house, ‘let’s call Papa Silver Blaze. You know, like the horse in the Sherlock Holmes story that is stolen but comes back to win the big race.’

  ‘Didn’t he kill somebody on the way?’ said Thomas, who knew most Holmes stories virtually off by heart.

  ‘He didn’t mean to,’ said Christopher, ‘and they’d been cutting bits out of his leg or something.’

  ‘I think it’s horrid giving Papa a nickname, however nice it is,’ Olivia complained.

  In the end the Powerscourt young did what they had always done – they talked to their mother. Lady Lucy laughed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you could ask him, couldn’t you? I’m sure he would be rather proud to be known as Silver Blaze. The horse did win the Wessex Cup after all, didn’t he?’

  For his birthday, Powerscourt decided to reverse the usual order of celebrations. He handed out the presents early. He took the twins, Christopher and Juliet, fifteen years old now, to Paris for the weekend. They talked non-stop through all the delights of the French capital in English and French – Powerscourt, in his role of educating parent, was delighted to see that their French, which Lucy spoke a lot to them at home, was now almost fluent. Only one place reduced them to silence.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Christopher whispered, and began writing in his notebook when confronted with the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. ‘Oh, my God.’

  Christopher wanted to be a journalist. He really wanted to be an investigator like his papa, but he didn’t think that would go down too well at the family dinner table. Juliet, showing a greater maturity than people credited her with, wanted to be a doctor. Her fate had been sealed when she’d asked Lady Lucy if she could be a doctor and have lots of children as well.

  ‘Why ever not?’ her mama had said. ‘You carry on. I’ll back you all the way.’

  Robert, Lady Lucy’s son by her first marriage, was now First Lieutenant of a frigate on patrol in the cold grey waters of the North Sea, playing war games against Tirpitz’s Dreadnoughts.

  Powerscourt took the greatest care of his second child, Olivia. Caught between the precocious Thomas and the talking twins, she sometimes felt left out.

  He asked Lucy to take Olivia shopping for some fashionable clothes. Although Olivia was young and coltish, Lady Lucy was correct in believing that Olivia would be the fairest of them all.

  So here they were, Powerscourt and Olivia, drinking blanc-cassis in the dining room of the Ritz Hotel on London’s Piccadilly, only open for six years, but already the place to be seen for the young and the fashionable. Olivia shared her father’s intense dislike of champagne. Powerscourt suddenly thought back to when this about-to-be-very-beautiful young woman was small. Sometimes he would take a tiny Olivia out of the bath and wrap her in an enormous towel. Then he would write an imaginary address on her back with much tickling and thumps and bangs as the parcel progressed through the postal system. This process was usually punctuated by squeals and laughter. The whole event was characterized by a continuous running commentary by Olivia’s papa. The parcel was always addressed to Olivia’s grandmother. There, he was told later, she always behaved beautifully. As the only child in the house, she was fussed over at great length. She spent a lot of time talking to the animals. She had talked of a career with horses for as long as anybody could remember.

  She still had not taken a sip of her blanc-cassis. There was a great sadness in her demeanour, as if she had been recently bereaved.

  ‘What’s the matter, my love?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘It’s you, Papa. We’re all so worried about you. You don’t look well. You haven’t looked well since you came back. And those doctors keep coming and they all leave looking like sick owls.’

  Powerscourt saw at once that this was a crucial moment in his relations with his – as it were – adult children. Tell the truth? Procrastinate? Try to muddle through? In the end he knew he had no choice.

  ‘I should have told you before,’ said Powerscourt, taking a large gulp of his blanc-cassis. ‘It’s the gas, you see, the poison gas. I had to breathe in too much of it. The doctors have told me I should be dead by now.’

  ‘Gas? Poison gas?’ said Olivia. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘If there’s another war, my love, both sides are developing different forms of nerve gases which they say they would only use if the other side starts using theirs. They could kill people in enormous numbers. There you are, sitting in your trench or your tent. There’s a slight breeze. Your enemies have shells and other forms of ammunition filled with this poisonous stuff. The Germans – let’s not beat about the bush – the Germans are the best chemists in Europe and they are believed to have the most dangerous forms of gas. It can kill you. It can send you blind. It can destroy your mind but leave your body intact, or the other way round. It’s terrible stuff, my love. I just happened to inhale rather too much of it in my last investigation. I got caught up by accident in the British nerve-gas experiments. I sometimes feel as if I’m choking, as if the gas is going to pull my lungs out. It is getting better. It’s just very slow.’

  ‘And the scar on your arm, Papa, that terrible scar?’

  Powerscourt told her of the death struggle in the nerve centre of the gas research establishment, hidden next to a hotel on the banks of the Thames so the toxic wastes could be carried away, and the Russian spy holding on to Powerscourt’s foot and his arm as he was sucked into the terrible mixture in the middle of that vast laboratory.

  �
��That’s it,’ said Powerscourt finally, ‘but there’s one thing above all else that is very important.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m still here,’ said Powerscourt with a grin. ‘I’m bloody well still here!’

  ‘So you are, Papa, so you are.’ The girl’s eyes were filled with tears. ‘Thank God you’re still here.’

  ‘Don’t be upset, Olivia, please,’ said Powerscourt, noting that Olivia had still not touched a drop of her blanc-cassis. ‘I give you a toast, my love. Raise your glass, please.’

  Two glasses clinked together under one of César Ritz’s more extravagant chandeliers.

  ‘Your future, Olivia.’

  The girl’s eyes were brighter now.

  ‘And yours, Papa. I love you so much. We all do, you see.’

  This special birthday celebration was taking place at Powerscourt House in the Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin. When Lady Lucy realized that it was also twenty-five years since Powerscourt sold the family home in Ireland, she wrote to the new owners, a branch of the Guinness brewing dynasty, still there after all these years. Lady Lucy asked if the old owner and his friends could come back for a special anniversary and birthday combined. They replied that they would be delighted to welcome the Powerscourt family and friends back on this special day. Most of the invitations were carried out by telephone in case her husband became suspicious.

  It was a beautiful summer’s day, the sea sparkling in the distance, the mountains keeping watch over the great house. A couple of kestrels circled overhead and the seagulls seemed to be flying in relays from the sand dunes to the great fountain at the bottom of the steps.