The Accomplice

  Zita fixed her eyes on his face as he talked, not allowing their glances to meet, taking in his expression. He did not seem particularly moved by the story he was recounting in such detail, but even as he was speaking she wondered why he was able to tell the story so vividly. In part it was because he wanted to shock and disturb her. And he was, to an extent, successful. She had not imagined that there was a case which corresponded so neatly both in time and place with the skeleton under the roses. Clearly, to establish a connexion between the two was not a waste of police time. The implications for Yevgenia were not agreeable.

  By 1960 she had been living at Asshe House for over a decade. Zita hoped her face did not convey her dismay. He was subtler and perhaps even crueller than his bluff exterior admitted, and she felt she was being manipulated.

  When he finished speaking, she said, “Thank you for being so frank with me, Superintendent. I had no idea that there was a particular child to be matched to the skeleton. I suppose, with dental records and that sort . of thing, it should be quite easy to establish whether it is the skeleton of Eddie Cresacre.”

  Stevens hesitated. “There may be a problem there. The records of the investigation should in theory have supplied us with that sort of check, but it seems there were no dental records for Eddie Cresacre. There was a fire at his dentist’s a few months before the kid’s death. At the time we weren’t particularly bothered as we didn’t have a body to compare them with. However, there are things we can do nowadays, even without dental records and if necessary we shall do them. For the time being at least, it’s just a question of waiting for more input from the archaeologists. Nothing in Pigot’s report eliminates Eddie Cresacre. If the archaeologists produce nothing conclusive against such an identification, we shall do some intensive work to check the hypothesis.”

  He rose to indicate that Zita had had enough of the time of a very busy man. She stood up too and was making her ritual thanks and farewell, as she made her way to the door.

  “So you can tell your clients that’s where we are at the moment. Nothing for them to worry about. They’ll even be able to start work again soon on that fancy pool they’re making. I’ll let you know when, tomorrow or the next day, I think.” He held the door for her. The gesture, even though he was a middle-aged man to whom the action might have come naturally, had a parodic quality to it. “And you can tell the former owner, too. She’s your client, as well, isn’t she? The Russian woman.”

  Zita drove back to her office thoughtfully. She opened the cupboard in the alcove beside the fireplace and looked at the dozen or so pairs of shoes which she kept there. She kicked off the co-respondents and selected a pair of loafers. A change of shoes was always conducive to clear thinking and her thoughts were now much occupied by Stevens, who need not have told her what he had, nor told it in such a way. He was trying to make her see that the body under the roses was more serious than she would admit. But not just that; his purpose was not aimed primarily at her. He meant her to pass this on to Yevgenia.

  He had appeared unmoved by the story he told. Yet there must have been some explanation for the clarity of his memory. He must have taken part in the Eddie Cresacre investigations all those years ago. It had occurred to her as he had been speaking and she had held herself back from asking him. Only that could explain the rapidity with which the association was made. It had not been a question of searching the records; it had been in his head. Thirty-two years ago. He was in his early fifties, say; he must have been a very young police officer. Perhaps it had been his first case, his first experience of the disappearance of a child, with all its concomitants of distraught parents, clamorous press, fearful neighbourhood. It had etched itself sharply on his memory, so that it remained when subsequent cases, years of actual bodily harm, murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, dangerous driving, battery and assault merged into one another, the normal course of criminal life. That would account for it, or part of it. She was still uneasy about something, however. She felt she had missed the significant detail of the meeting, which was not the co-respondent shoes. There was an excess of zeal in his treatment of the case that she could not understand. And then it struck her that Stevens knew that Yevgenia was Russian, a fact she had spent over forty years hiding from everyone else in Broad Woodham.

  Part Four

  YEVGENIA

  12

  I was born in Petrograd in 1917 in the last days of the Russian empire. My father was Baron Konstantin Kirilovich von Korff and my mother was Princess Marina Yurievna Chornoroukaya. I was their first and, as it turned out, their only child. I never knew my parents, so what I say about them is only what I have been told. I have never checked in history books or in memoirs to see if what I believe is true. Everything comes from my memories of the stories of my aunt, Zoya, who brought me up. For her, family and religion were the two pillars that held up the world and so her tales of saints and ancestors would become entangled in my mind. I am sure for many years I regarded the story of the deaths of my parents in the same light as the martyrdom of the saints Boris and Gleb.

  Aunt Zoya was my mother’s aunt, my great-aunt, a Chornoroukaya, and her interest centred chiefly on her own family. My father was a good and worthy man, ennobled by being the choice of a Chornoroukaya, but in no way an equal. This fact defined my status in the household. I was only half as good as my cousin, Alexander Chornorouky, with whom I was brought up; and, in any case, I was a girl. So I shall begin with my poor despised father. He was well over forty when I was born and came of a very ancient German noble family, that had been established in the lands of the eastern Baltic for many centuries. This area, which is now Latvia, had been ruled in succession by the Germans, the Lithuanians, the Poles, the Russians. The local aristocracy was German, the local people Latvians. Under Russian rule from the eighteenth century onwards, the Baltic Germans turned to the imperial court at St Petersburg to make their fortunes; they became a sort of noblesse de robe, a service nobility for the Tsar. My father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all jurists and ministers of the Tsar at some point in their lives. They tended to be liberal-minded, westernizing, progressive. My father was a member of Nicholas II’s State Council and Minister for Education. I am not really sure about the dates and duration of these offices. Aunt Zoya felt his service to the Tsar was worth mentioning, although she was not precise about the details.

  She was far happier telling the history of her own family. These stories would range from our distant ancestor in the eleventh century, the Prince Yaroslav Yurevich, great grandson of the Monomakh, Grand Prince of Vladimir, to the court triumphs of my mother, her beloved niece. My mother was much younger than my father, by fifteen or twenty years.

  She was an only child, very beautiful, with a strong will which allowed her to dominate her father, Prince Yuri Alexandrovich, Aunt Zoya’s second brother. He, a widower from her birth, was his daughter’s slave. She was very similar in looks and manner to her grandmother, Xenia Vassilievna Orlova, another strong-minded woman, whom her son Yuri had also adored. She, my mother that is, was very intelligent and interested in art. She painted quite seriously herself, but she saw her role as the traditional one of her caste, the patron. She bought many modern paintings, silly things, Aunt Zoya thought, and encouraged her father to buy them too. She was evidently reluctant to commit herself to marriage. She travelled widely with her father, not just to the usual places that Russian aristocrats used to go, like Nice and Rome and Egypt. She went, too, to America and India. Aunt Zoya did not altogether approve of the way my mother had been brought up. She certainly gave me the impression that it was no bad thing for my moral welfare that my childhood was so different. Aunt Zoya attributed to my mother’s extended education and travel, her “spoiling” as she called it, the fact that when the time came, rather late, for her to marry, she had to settle for a Baltic baron. However, when she was feeling more charitable, she admitted that my parents were devoted to one another. My father passionately adored his beautiful
wife; she, inexplicably to Aunt Zoya, warmly admired her middle-aged, bureaucratic husband. This is how I like to reconstruct them. They died before I have any memory of angry words, maternal sulks, paternal harshness, so they are preserved for me in the two years of happy marriage with the high point, my birth.

  They met and married in Petrograd during the war and almost immediately my mother became pregnant. For this reason, when revolution broke out in Russia in February 1917, there was no question of her moving, as other families did, out of the capital to the relative safety of their country estates. Aunt Zoya was torn between her wish to be with Marina at the birth and her duty to her great-nephew, Alexander, whom she had already adopted when his mother died in the first year of his life. In the midsummer of 1917 there was a lull in events in Petrograd, so Aunt Zoya left with Xan for the Chornorouky estates in Livland, the ones closest to the capital. She was never to return to Russia. My mother was unwell after my birth and was not thought strong enough to risk the journey to the country, so she and my father, who was deeply involved with Milyukov and Kerensky and the Provisional Government, delayed and delayed until the worst happened in November and the Bolshevik coup took place.

  Their journey from Petrograd to Kornu, the Chornorouky estate near Riga, was always referred to by Aunt Zoya in epic terms. It was one of the stories of my childhood that I asked for time and again. I suppose it was a fascination with my own earliest history, a sense that I very nearly didn’t escape, that made me demand to hear how my parents, accompanied only by a young nursemaid and a manservant, set off by coach, how they were stopped by soldiers, walked for miles, hired a cart, slept one snowy night in a barn, all lying together in straw with me tucked between them, before they arrived in Dorpat and were able to get messages to Aunt Zoya to send transport to bring them at last to Kornu. It may have just been the reassuring sense of danger evaded that I liked so much, of hearing how, after all risks and tribulations, I arrived safely into Aunt Zoya’s arms. I think it was also a kind of prefiguring. If I had not had the tale of that journey to sustain me, I might never have survived the later one, which I had to endure for much longer, under much worse conditions.

  There was great rejoicing at the arrival of the von Korffs at Kornu and for a short period the remnants of the family were reunited, for my parents found my grandfather, Prince Yuri, and his elder brother, Xan’s grandfather, Prince Yegor, also there. The only missing Chornorouky was Yegor’s son, Xan’s father, Alexander, who was thought to be with his regiment somewhere in the Caucasus. They had all somehow survived the upheavals of world war and revolution. But if they congratulated themselves, they did so too soon. After the Orthodox Christmas of January 1918 my parents moved to my father’s estate which was about twenty miles away, where they rested and took stock of a world which had been turned upside down.

  The Baltic nobility had made themselves useful to the Tsars; now they were necessary to no one. That’s how it was in the long run, something that became apparent in the twenties and thirties; at the time, I think, it was all less clear. The point about change is that it’s so fluid. The flow is not all in one direction; even if you’re about to be washed into a backwater, you don’t know it at the time. You still expect that things will alter again, to your advantage. Civil war broke out in Russia in 1918 and my family hoped for the restoration of the Tsar, with modified powers, developing the country on Western lines. I don’t think my father made any active efforts to promote the return of the Tsar. He did not join the White Army which was advancing on Petrograd. He was content to live with his wife and child on his estate and to wait and see.

  And this is what happened. The events I describe come from Aunt Zoya. I was witness to them, but as I was not two years old I do not have a coherent memory. Yet there are echoes in my mind even now which, I sometimes think, may be uncomprehending recall of the night when my father’s estate was sacked: flashing lights, roaring noises, a high-pitched scream that went on and on in a rhythmical sawing sound. Or are these memories, which I suppress as soon as they arise, early in the morning, in the moments between sleeping and waking, ones from a later time, or even worse, are they acts of imagination of what another child suffered years later?

  In the summer of 1918 my father’s house was attacked by a gang of Latvian Bolsheviks, patriots ridding their country of its oppressive foreign rulers and landowners. They broke in and looted. A trail of booty dropped in haste was found on the track leading to the woods: silver forks, a gold and tortoiseshell inkwell, things that had been seized at random. My father, woken by the noise, went down to investigate and was shot immediately. His body was found in the hall, blood lying in circle round his head, like the halo of a martyred saint. Xan and I were later shown where the same bullet that killed him entered the panelling of the hall, gruesome information which we cherished. My mother, hearing the shot and the commotion, emerged from her room and someone fired at her as she came down the stairs, but failed to kill her. A ribbon of blood traced her path as she fled up again to hide in her sitting room. She was pursued by her killers who took an ancestral sword from a display of such things in the hall. Many blows, some with the flat of the blade, some with its edge, no longer sharp, were beaten on her head and shoulders. The weapon was thrown on top of her when her assailant, in weariness or horror, had had enough. Whether she died then or only sometime later during the course of the night, Aunt Zoya never knew, though she dwelt on her niece’s end for many years, speculating how long it had taken her to bleed to death.

  What she did not tell me, because she did not know it, was that my mother was also raped, probably between being shot and finally belaboured to death by the sword. Years later I had gone back to Jamala to visit my nursemaid who had come with me to Kornu and then married and returned to her home village. It was during the war and I went to gather news and a little rent which was paid in kind, honey, ham, cheese, from some property I still held there. It was only then that Inna told me. We were sitting in the kitchen of her little wooden house. Through the open door we could see her two white-haired children playing among the untidy rows of potato flowers. She had been explaining to me about the empty shops and houses in the central square, once occupied by Jewish families. There had been a round up in the town a week earlier. Some had come out with docility and stood in meek rows while others, defiant, were hunted like rats from the cellars and lofts of the houses nearby.

  “I might as well tell you. I thought it was the worst thing that had ever happened in the world at the time which is why I never said a word to Princess Zoya. It would have killed her. Nowadays, we see and hear horrors every day. What’s one more from the past? Then, the rape of a Princess Chornoroukaya was like an attack on a holy object, blasphemy almost. But it wasn’t the sacrilege that was the most shocking; I couldn’t believe a man could rape a dying woman, bleeding to death before their eyes. And it was their eyes. Several of them raped her, there was no doubt.” And the rhythmical sawing scream suddenly came into my ears, suppressed until that moment, and I recognized it as the sound of my nightmares.

  “But now,” Inna said, “I saw what they did here only last week. And these weren’t aristocrats, like you, that they were beating and shooting and raping; they were ordinary people of the town, like us.” And I saw then how she made an exception of me, because she brought me up; but in her mind an attack on aristocrats was understandable, they were people apart, but ordinary people should not do such things to one another. And I saw too that it just depends where you draw the line; those on the other side of it can be killed and raped with a good conscience.

  At some stage, perhaps even before they began to ransack the house and before they murdered my parents, the attackers had set fire to one wing which, built of wood, had burned quickly. The flaming roof woke those few servants who still lived with us. (I say few, of course, in comparison with the numbers that used to be employed in the old days. There must still have been some forty people in residence even in the depleted days of 1918.
) They were fully occupied in trying to control the fire and, very sensibly, made no attempt to stop the attackers who ran off into the forest. It was only after dawn, when the fire had burned itself out, that the extent of the devastation of another kind was revealed in the main house. It was assumed that I, too, had been killed with my parents and it was not until some hours later still that I was discovered in my mother’s sitting room. The place had been looted, the furniture smashed in the joy of destruction and in a fierce and unsystematic search for valuables. My cradle had been turned over and I had been captured within, unnoticed by the raiders. I wonder if I crouched behind the bars, watching my mother repeatedly raped, bleeding to death, listening to her cries and groans. Did I cry and wail too, or, muffled in my overturned bedclothes, did I sleep through it all? I have no memory of the events I witnessed. It is as though it happened to someone else. And it did happen to someone else. It is that child, a witness of other horrors, whose cries of terror, stifled, never uttered, that I have heard for fifty years, not my own.

  I was found in the daylight by the distraught Inna and the other servants, oblivious of the danger I had survived. Messages were sent urgently to Kornu and Inna and I were transported there to spend the rest of my childhood with Aunt Zoya and Xan.