The Frozen Circle

by Peter Watt

  ‘It’s no big deal,’ Joshua shrugged. ‘You and I saw worse on the front and know that the army sent men back into action with less than this. Maria is capable of cleaning up the wound and stitching it.’

  Bill accepted Joshua’s explanation and went outside to look at the vehicle. ‘I need a few spare parts,’ he said. ‘In a couple of days the automobile will not exist.’

  Bill drove Joshua home and when the sun rose the next day he came back to the house to find that it was deserted. Bill found a bucket, mop and scrubbing brush to clean up the blood in the living room and in his search for the cleaning items came across a battered journal. He slipped it into his pocket. By the time that he had finished in the house he knew it would be ready for renting; he had removed every trace of the bloody events of the night before.

  Closing the door behind him, Bill stopped to peer across the Valley cloaked in a sheen of green shoots. The storm the night before had brought life to the town and promised prosperity to all. Bill might never see his friend return in his lifetime but he would be faithful to his memory. It was the least a former soldier could do for the man who had been closer than a brother in a time when they had shared a place in hell.

  EPILOGUE

  Valley View

  Present day

  A month had passed since the biggest day Valley View would probably experience for another hundred years. Morgan, Ken and Mark had been thoroughly Q & A’d. The internal inquiries department of the police force had plenty of questions about the shooting. But the three had walked away with a clean record for the arrest. Even though Petrov Batkin was able to provide an alibi for the murder of Daniel Kildare, he faced charges of attempted murder, malicious wounding and being in possession of a prohibited firearm. His case was still before the courts.

  Sarah Locksley faced a murder charge over the death of the farmer but it was tough providing forensic evidence; she had made few mistakes other than the switching of the registration plates. Despite their suspicions and circumstantial evidence concerning her role in the death of Daniel Kildare the police had trouble finding any substantial evidence to link her to the crime. It was not the clean result of a conviction that the police would have liked to have but at least they had the consolation that they had done their job.

  A leading Queens Counsel was put on Sarah’s case. Who was paying his substantial retainer was not known, but Morgan suspected the woman was a British intelligence agent, and the money was coming from the coffers of the British government. If nothing else, they would want to get her out of Australia and deal with her on their own grounds. Morgan was certain the beautiful young woman would charm the jury and she would walk free.

  Monique appreciated how close she had come to being killed. If Morgan had not arrived when he did she felt that she would have lost her life at the hands of the great-granddaughter of Major James Locksley over nothing more than a matter of family honour. Monique had been able to put all the pieces together and see that the ghosts of whoever had been unearthed in her backyard had reignited an old mission. But Monique had also discovered something magical – thanks to the efforts of Gladys Harrison and her little group of amateur historians who had continued to dig into the history of Valley View.

  ‘So, where are you taking me?’ Morgan asked as Monique drove her car west of the township.

  She had arrived after his routine jog and asked him to get dressed and go with her on a short journey although she would not tell him where or why.

  ‘We will be there soon,’ she replied. ‘Just be patient and don’t ask any more questions.’

  Morgan rolled his eyes and gazed out at the paddocks now baking under the hot sun of an early summer. He knew the road that petered out into a dirt track of loose gravel but he also knew there was little along the road other than the occasional lonely farm house well set off the road.

  ‘Did you get the results back of the DNA test?’ he asked, despite her request to desist from his questioning.

  ‘I did,’ Monique answered, staring ahead to avoid the potholes in the road, and not elaborating any further, much to Morgan’s irritation. ‘We are there,’ she added.

  Morgan peered through the dust-covered windscreen as she turned off the road.

  ‘It’s the old Valley View cemetery,’ he said in a puzzled voice. ‘What the hell is out here to get you so worked up about?’

  Monique stopped the car and turned off the engine. The only sounds they could hear in the lonely place were those of the wind in the grass and the distant warble of a magpie.

  They stepped out of the car and Monique took Morgan’s hand. He was surprised at her gesture; nothing so intimate had passed between them before. She led him beyond a few tumbled-down grave markers until they came to a corner of the little cemetery.

  ‘There,’ she said, pointing to a tombstone wide enough for two names and covered in dry lichen. Morgan stooped to read the weathered inscription.

  Captain Joshua Larkin MC, DCM, MM 1889–1931

  Maria Larkin 1901–1952

  ‘I’ll be damned!’ Morgan said quietly, touching the stone as if expecting to feel the flesh of those buried in the ground at his feet. ‘How in hell did they end up here? From what I read I thought that Larkin and his princess would have remained overseas, rather than risk returning.’

  ‘It seems that my great-grandfather asked to have his body returned – and his son obliged,’ Monique said. ‘I expect that Joshua thought the last place the British would look for him was here. From what I have read of his story I suspect that he was a daring man. He changed his name in England but kept in touch by mail with his old friend, Bill Crawford. They still have his letters but the family have always honoured Bill’s oath to keep them secret. Our family was well off and when my great-grandmother was dying, she requested to be buried beside her husband. Bill Crawford made the arrangements at this end. He was a loyal friend to my great-grandfather to the end. You asked me if I got the DNA results back,’ Monique continued, holding out a sheet of paper. ‘It’s copy of a letter translated from French into English and was written by my great-grandmother just before she died. I found it last week when I went through a pile of family papers that have been stored away in an old shoe box.’

  ‘What does it say?’ Morgan asked.

  ‘In the letter, Maria admitted that she was never a royal princess but an impostor.’ Monique explained. ‘That Yakov killed her family, sparing her, because she looked almost identical to the real Princess Maria. According to her she was to be passed off by Yakov as the princess if the Czechs captured his family. But she also realised that she would be disposed of after Yakov evaded the invading Czechs, and when she escaped she was able to take a substantial amount of the Romanov family fortune Yakov was holding, supposedly to support her royal story. She believed, albeit falsely, that the English would pull out all stops to save her and she could live the life of a real royal princess. In Paris, before they were married, she confessed to Joshua Larkin who she really was – Maria Smirnoff, a girl from a wealthy family distantly related to the Czar. So the Brits were always chasing a ghost. But in his journal Joshua always referred to her as his princess.’

  ‘I guess she was his princess,’ Morgan smiled. ‘I’ll be damned.’

  Monique nodded and tears welled in her eyes. ‘At least we know that my great-grandfather was not one of those bodies buried in my backyard, but I guess we will never know who they were, just as we will never know their full story.’ She stepped forward and kissed Morgan on the lips and he responded.

  ‘You were like the spirit of my great-grandfather when he swore to keep my great-grandmother safe from harm,’ she said, leaning on his shoulder.

  ‘What about David?’ Morgan asked clumsily, feeling foolish for bringing up his name.

  ‘It is well and truly over between us,’ Monique replied. ‘I think you were in my mind from the moment I first set eyes on you that day at the police station when you changed over my driver’s licence. It was as if de
stiny meant us to be together – just as it had for my great-grandparents. You see, ghosts are real. I think that you have the spirit of Captain Joshua Larkin and I that of my great-grandmother, Maria. It is as if we were destined to play out their story.’

  The sun was setting in a cloudless sky and the horizon took on a soft, orange hue. Morgan embraced Monique, his arms around her. ‘I think your great-grandparents are watching us now,’ he said with a broad grin. ‘I think that we should find somewhere private away from their prying eyes.’

  Hand in hand they walked towards the car. For a moment Morgan thought he heard a soft voice on the late afternoon breeze, rustling the dry grasses of the old cemetery. But graveyards could have that effect on even the most rational of men.

  London

  Present day

  Sam Briars knew that he had drunk too much. The crowds around him in the hotel bar were mostly young executives, celebrating the end of the working week. He pushed his shot glass of vodka away, glaring with rheumy eyes at the attractive young woman. If only she knew what he had done for his country she would be impressed, he thought. But he knew that his past employment by MI6 meant a lifetime of grey silence.

  ‘Unfair,’ he muttered, slurring his words, and the pretty young woman wearing the set smile and expensive clothes moved to increase the space between them. Unfair that Harry Stanton had hauled him into his office and accused him of breaching every protocol of the organisation. That he had been dismissed for leaking harmless information to Sarah Locksley was an insult. How could what he had done been construed as a serious breach of security? She was, after all, one of them. But he had had the last word when he stormed from his supervisor’s office. Oh, yes, he would show them all how pompous and ridiculously arrogant they were for picking unfairly on him. His story of MI6 incompetence would be leaked to the media. The world would know of a modern-day attempt to kill the last Romanov. He was smarter than those lesser humans whose knowledge of computer technology only extended to knowing how to click onto the porno websites. Everything was trafficked through cyberspace nowadays and he had enough to sell his story.

  Sam felt ill.

  ‘You have had enough, mate,’ the barman said. ‘You ought to go home while you can.’

  Sam focused on the barman, a tough-looking type straight out of a gangster movie.

  ‘Go’in now,’ Sam slurred, shifting away from the bar and reeling through the packed, happy crowd, into the biting cold of a London night at the onset of winter.

  He was vaguely aware that he was on the narrow sidewalk merging with the Friday night revellers seeking taxis, or walking arm in arm singing football songs and kicking at imaginary footballs. Despite his drunken haze Sam realised that the group approaching him were spread across the footpath, blocking his way. He wisely chose to step onto the roadway to avoid a possible shove from one of the football followers.

  But he was not aware that he had strayed into the centre of the road until he saw the blinding headlights of a car travelling at high speed towards him. The impact hurled Sam into the air and back onto the footpath.

  A girl in the crowd screamed. The drunken football fans suddenly felt a false sense of sobriety. Already blood was spreading from the smashed head of the young man at their feet.

  Later witnesses were unable to recall much about the vehicle that hit the young man and continued without attempting to stop. The incident became just another fatal traffic accident on a busy Friday night. Samuel Briars would never get to tell the story of how a secret unit within MI6 bungled an operation in a friendly nation to kill the last Romanov descendant who was the descendant of an impostor anyway. It was much ado about nothing.

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  Most Australians pause on the eleventh hour of the eleventh month of each year to reflect on the sacrifices made by our servicemen and women in what was known as the Great War. If they happen to be near one of the many war memorials erected following the global conflict they would most likely see inscribed: The Great War 1914–1918. But not all our war memorials are inscribed with these dates. There are many, such as in my former home town of Finch Hatton in Queensland’s beautiful Pioneer Valley, that have etched into the stone the dates of the Great War as 1914–1919. Very few query the discrepancy.

  The inclusion of 1919 on some memorials is to recognise the many hundreds of forgotten Aussie soldiers who fought in the Russian campaign, in support of the Russian White Army – those loyal to a non-socialist government overthrown by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks. The Aussie soldiers were recruited into the British army to campaign in northern Russia as part of a multi-national expeditionary force composed of many Western nations and Japanese troops from the east. The British commanders allowed the Aussie soldiers to wear their distinctive uniform, even though they were actually under British army orders. When withdrawn by October 1919 the soldiers returned to Australia and their courageous service was hardly recognised in a nation that wanted to put the war behind them. Two Aussie soldiers earned the award of the Victoria Cross for their bravery in the Russian campaign while serving with British army units: Corporal Arthur Sullivan and Sergeant Samuel Pearse (posthumously).

  The story of the execution of the Russian royal family would be well known to many of my readers and some may remember the Anastasia affair that generated many novels and even Hollywood films of a young woman who feigned to be the Princess Anastasia having survived the massacre of her family. She had even been able to fool many of those related to the Russian royal family but DNA tests later proved her to be an impostor. However, for many years after the exhumation of the pit containing the remains of the Czar and his family the DNA could not be identified for his young son and daughter Maria. It has only been since 2008 that the heir to the throne and his sister Maria’s DNA has been finally identified, putting to bed any rumours of their survival. That mystery inspired this novel.

  Although the guns fell silent on the Western Front on 11 November 1918 they did not in the rest of Europe. Many small but vicious wars continued with Poles fighting Germans, Russians fighting German-supported Latvians, and Russians engaged in a bloody and ruthless civil war while also fighting invading Western Forces are just a few examples of the conflicts that were off-shoots of emerging nationalism in Europe. The echoes still reverberate today.

  It is beyond the scope of these brief notes to explain the politics and personalities behind the intrusion into Russia by the Allied Forces, but for those interested in the subject I can recommend Robert Jackson’s At War with the Bolsheviks: The Allied Intervention into Russia 1917–1920 (Tandem, London, 1972). My novel depicts only a fraction of a campaign that saw so much happen in those turbulent years of our Aussie link to the modern-day nation of the Russian Federation.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My heartfelt thanks go to my publisher, Cate Paterson, my editor, Catherine Day, and publicist, Jane Novak. Special thanks also to Jan Hutchinson and Deborah Parry for their work in the production of this book. And I would like to wish Paul Kenny all the best in his new job and thank Jeannine Fowler and James Fraser for their years of support.

  As always, my thanks to my agent, Geoffrey Radford, for his tireless work on my behalf – here and overseas. I would also like to send out thanks to a special team of people: Irvin Rockman CBE, Rod Hardy and Brett Hardy, who are working to bring my stories to a wider audience.

  A special thank you to Glen Jones, former homicide detective with the NSW Police, for his advice to a pre-DNA police investigator. Mate, I will take the flak for any errors in the homicide investigation procedures in this book.

  I would like to single out Fran McGuire and Wendy Rose at the Maclean Library for their very generous assistance in providing the material for research. Thank you, ladies.

  I would also like to thank the following from Maclean who have been of great support throughout the year: Graham Mackie, Mick and Andrea Prowse, Kevin and Maureen Jones, John and Isabel Millington, and Tyrone and Kerry McKee. And to all at Cor
owa and Finch Hatton – you are not forgotten.

  Since the release of my previous novel I have lost two wonderful people from my life: my mother, Elinor Watt, who passed away in January 2008, and a good mate, Mel Lowth from Finch Hatton, who passed away in July 2008. Both will be missed.

  A special recognition goes to my brother, Tom Watt, his wife, Colleen, and my nieces Shannon, Jessica, Sophie and Charlotte from Hazelbrook. An overdue mention is now rectified.

  Not forgetting a friend, colleague and favourite author alongside Bev Harper – Tony Park, whose latest novel, The Silent Predator, is well and truly in the Wilbur Smith tradition.

  Finally, my sincere thanks to all the readers who have contacted me over the years to express their kind thoughts on the books to date. You keep me writing.