“So how were you able to receive orders from St Petersburg almost as soon as the incident occurred?”
The Captain stared at Blackstone for fully half a minute, and when it became plain that the Inspector had no intention of flinching, he said, “You told me you had two questions. What was the second one?”
“You said earlier that you knew nothing of the incident we were sent here to investigate, didn’t you?”
“I did. And are you now calling me a liar?” the Captain demanded angrily. “Because if you are, I will overlook the fact that you are no gentleman and demand satisfaction. Swords or pistols. You shall have the choice.”
Blackstone laughed. “Good heavens, Captain, you do get worked up about nothing, don’t you?” he said. “I wasn’t calling you a liar at all.”
“It certainly seemed that you did,” Dobroskok said sullenly.
“Not at all,” Blackstone assured him. “I accept that as an officer and a gentleman you are a man of your word. Which makes it even more surprising that when Sir Roderick and I were discussing the fact that the Prince of Wales had been robbed and assaulted — which is the incident you know nothing about — you didn’t even bat an eyelid.”
The Captain turned his head, and looked out of the window. “We are approaching the village,” he said. “Soon, we will reach the Count’s estate.”
Chapter Six
The coach had been keeping up a fair pace to that point, but now slowed down to almost a crawl.
“We are approaching the cordon I have thrown up around the Count’s chateau and the village,” Captain Dobroskok said. “Now you will see for yourself, Sir Roderick, just how effectively I have sealed off the area.”
Blackstone stuck his head out of the window. Ahead of the coach was a line of mounted soldiers — spaced no more than twenty yards apart — which only started to curve inwards in the middle distance.
“Well, Sergeant, what do you think?” Dobroskok asked complacently. “Would it come up to the standards that you — as a non-commissioned officer — would regard as acceptable?”
“It’s very impressive,” Blackstone said.
And it was! He had heard officers boast of their own efficiency more times than he cared to remember — give a man a smart uniform, shiny leather boots and a charger to ride, and he is already halfway to believing that he is God Almighty — but this particular boast was far from empty. Dobroskok had the area in an iron grip. No one could get anywhere near the cordon without being noticed. Even under the cover of darkness, it would be all but impossible to break through.
Blackstone did a rapid mental calculation. Dobroskok had claimed he had hundreds of men at his command, but based on the deployment he had seen so far, the Inspector was willing to wager that was an underestimate — that there had to be a thousand or more. If he’d ever had any doubts about the affair being concerned with more than the disappearance of a golden egg, those doubts were now completely quashed.
The carriage came to a halt. Captain Dobroskok opened the carriage door, rose from his seat, and stepped down to the ground.
“No doubt we will meet again at the Count’s chateau, Sir Roderick,” he said through the open door.
“No doubt,” Sir Roderick agreed.
Blackstone watched the Captain mount his horse, then said with a frivolity he was far from actually feeling, “You don’t think it was my questions which drove him away, do you?”
“Does your ignorance know no bounds, Blackstone?” Sir Roderick demanded. “Captain Dobroskok is an officer in the Hussar Guards. A true commander of his men. An inspiration to all those who serve under him.”
“Yes, I saw how he ‘inspired’ the soldier who dropped his rifle at the railway station,” Blackstone said dryly.
“A true commander of men, who leads from the front,” Sir Roderick continued, ignoring the comment. “It is not seemly that he should ride in a carriage while his men are on horseback.”
“Really?” Blackstone said. “That’s funny, because I got the distinct impression that, ever since we left the railway station, riding in a carriage had been exactly what he was doing.”
“He rode with us as a matter of courtesy — but you would know nothing about such things, would you?”
Sir Roderick was angry, Blackstone thought. But then that came as no surprise. The anger had been building ever since he himself had had the temerity to question Dobroskok, and was bound to come to eruption point sooner or later.
“You were extremely rude to the Captain,” the Assistant Commissioner said. “More than rude. You were downright insolent!”
“I was questioning him about the ‘incident’. Isn’t that standard police procedure, sir?”
“And you used me,” Sir Roderick continued, his fury mounting. “Me! Your acknowledged superior! An assistant commissioner! Let me tell you, Blackstone, I didn’t come all the way to Russia just to have a mere inspector like yourself make me into his dupe.”
Then whose dupe did you come all this way to be? Blackstone wondered. But he settled for saying no more than, “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.”
“Don’t know what I’m talking about!” Sir Roderick repeated contemptuously. “That… that…” He paused, to take a deep breath. “You let me explain away the fact that there were so many soldiers already here — which I only did out of politeness, to save Captain Dobroskok from embarrassment — and then you took my argument to pieces before my very eyes, making me look a complete fool.”
You were a complete fool, Blackstone thought. “Wouldn’t it have been better to let the Captain’s embarrassment run its full course, sir?” he suggested. “That way, we might have found out the real reason the soldiers were here.”
“There are certain… certain forms… which have to be observed whatever the situation,” Sir Roderick said, waving his hands in the air in front of him. “When one asks questions, one must always remember the status of the person one is questioning.”
“That’s not the way things happen during a criminal investigation,” Blackstone said.
“Your approach simply won’t do,” Sir Roderick told him. “It won’t do at all. I am your superior, in case you’ve forgotten, and I will dictate the lines on which this investigation travels.”
“Then we’ll never catch our man,” Blackstone said simply.
“So now Captain Dobroskok has gone, you’re turning your insolence on me, are you, Inspector?” Sir Roderick blustered.
“I’m merely stating the facts as I see them,” Blackstone replied. ‘You have no experience of investigations, sir, whereas I have a large number of cases already to my credit. If we use your methods, we’ll fail. If we use mine, we’ll have at least some chance of success.”
“Your methods, as you choose to call them, have already enraged an officer in His Imperial Majesty’s cavalry,” Sir Roderick pointed out.
“And I’ll probably get right up a few more important noses before I’ve finished, sir,” Blackstone countered. “But it’s the only way that we have any chance of getting a result.”
The procession of coach and escort entered the village, if village was what it could be properly called. It had no centre, as did villages in England. Instead, it was spread out along a dirt road which was passable enough at that moment, but must have been nothing less than a sea of mud when the rains fell or the winter snow melted.
The small square houses which made up the village were constructed of roughly hewn logs, and squatted close to the ground like malevolent and poisonous toads. Beside each one of the hovels there was a patch of land on which the villagers grew the vegetables they used to supplement their otherwise meagre diet. One of the huts, no less cramped and squalid than the rest, had a crude onion-shaped dome atop of it to signify that it was the church.
The peasants themselves stood by the side of the road. The men, dressed in loose blouses and baggy trousers, were barefoot and had long hair and bushy beards. They were short, but heavil
y built, with muscles made hard by countless hours of back-breaking labour in the fields. The women, of similar build to their husbands, wore drab long skirts and had their heads covered with kerchiefs. All had their eyes fixed firmly on the ground, and could not strictly have been said to be watching the procession pass at all, but there was no doubt that they were well aware of what was going on. Only the small children — too young as yet to know any better — gazed up with frank and startled curiosity.
Not a word had been spoken by these peasants, not an angry gesture made in the direction of the coach or the soldiers, yet Blackstone sensed an animosity as great as any he had felt when patrolling through the hostile villages of Northern India in his army days.
“Of course, if you refuse to conduct yourself in a manner that I consider appropriate, I could always send you packing back to London, you know,” said Sir Roderick, who had obviously been turning their previous heated exchange over in his mind ever since it had come to a close. “And if I do that — if I do send you back — your career will be in ruins.”
“I’ve only ever met two Russians before,” Blackstone said, almost reflectively. “Both of those encounters took place in London, a couple of years ago now.”
It was not quite true. He had, in fact, met three Russians. But one of them had been Hannah, his one true love who was lost to him forever — and he was not prepared to bring her into the conversation with this bureaucratic stuffed-shirt who liked to pretend he was a policeman.
“I don’t see how the number of Russians who you’ve met — or haven’t met — has anything at all to do with the matter we are currently discussing,” Sir Roderick said.
“One of them was a Count Turgenev,” Blackstone said, ignoring the comment. “He offered me ten thousand pounds to help in his murderous endeavours. I turned him down.”
“Ten thousand pounds!” Sir Roderick repeated incredulously. “But that’s… that’s a fortune.”
“Yes, it is,” Blackstone agreed. “I could work for a hundred years and never earn anything like that.” He paused for a moment, as if reflecting on the kind of the life the money could have bought him. “The other Russian said he was called Vladimir,” he continued, “but I don’t think that was his real name. He was a member of the Russian secret police — the Okhrana. He offered me another ten thousand pounds, on behalf of the Tsar. I didn’t have to do anything for it. The money was simply a reward for not helping Count Turgenev. I turned him down as well. You don’t have to believe me, of course, but, looking at the expression on your face, I think you do.”
“What’s the point of all this?” Sir Roderick Todd asked, intrigued, despite himself.
“I can’t be bribed, and I can’t be threatened,” Blackstone said. “You might be able to get me kicked off the Force—”
“There is no might about it!”
“But I’ll find some kind of work — even if it’s only as a labourer on the docks — and I’ll survive as I always have.”
“Good God, hearing you talk like that, it’s almost as if you were driven by some notion of .of honour,” Sir Roderick said, disbelieving. “Is that how you see it, Blackstone?”
“No, sir, I certainly wouldn’t put it as strongly as that,” the Inspector replied. “Honour’s something that’s been pretty much reserved for gentlemen like yourself, so I’d prefer to think of it as preserving my integrity.”
Sir Roderick took a handkerchief out of his pocket, and mopped his brow. “Look here, Blackstone, it is very important that we solve this case. There are people back in London who are watching both of us, you know.”
He realized he’d made a mistake the second the words were out of his mouth, but for a moment he looked as if he thought he’d got away with it.
Then Blackstone said, “Both of us?”
“You have a rather patchy record, you know,” Sir Roderick said weakly. “Some brilliant successes, I’ll grant you, but there have been occasions when you’ve crossed the wrong person. And that’s always a mistake.”
“And what about you?” Blackstone asked.
Despite a relative chill in the carriage, sweat was pouring from Sir Roderick. He mopped his brow again. “No one in authority questions my ability,” he said shakily, “but there have been certain concerns raised about my health. I need to prove that I am robust enough to carry out my duties effectively.”
So they do know about your drug-taking, do they? Blackstone thought, and was shocked to discover that his main feeling for Sir Roderick at that moment was one of pity.
“Some of the things I’ll do during the course of the investigation, I’ll do because I have no choice in the matter,” he was surprised to hear himself say, “do them because, as far as I know, there’s no other way.”
“But…” Sir Roderick protested.
“But, on the other hand, it’s true that I do tend to go after my targets like a dog that’s scented a bitch on heat,” Blackstone continued. “And maybe that’s not always appropriate in this particular kind of situation. So perhaps when you think I’m going too far, you’ll warn me, and I’ll pull back — if I can.”
What was this? Blackstone asked himself. Why was he feeling sorry for a man who, in his entire life, had never had to struggle for anything? Because, he supposed, Sir Roderick never had had to struggle.
A bloke brought up in an orphanage — like he’d been — was used to taking knocks, and sprang back easily. But for someone like Sir Roderick — whose path had always been made smooth for him — it must be quite devastating to learn that things didn’t automatically go as he might wish them to.
“I think we got off on the wrong footing,” Sir Roderick said. “You’re quite right that you can be like a dog that’s scented . . . like a bull in a china shop. But perhaps I… perhaps I haven’t always been as understanding of our different backgrounds as I might have been.”
It must be a big step for a man like Todd to admit to a man like him that he’d been wrong, Blackstone thought. And for a moment he almost found himself quite liking the Assistant Commissioner.
“I think we’re almost there,” Sir Roderick said.
They were. The coach passed through a pair of large ornate iron gates, and in doing so left one world behind it and entered another quite different one. It was no longer running along a rough track, but over a road which was so smooth that the coach frame hardly rattled at all. Nor was the view of drab peasant huts any longer. On either side of the road were carefully manicured lawns and flower beds of such richness and profusion of colour that it must have taken a team of full-time gardeners to keep it like that.
Blackstone pulled down the window and stuck his head out of the coach. Ahead of him, he could see the Count’s house. A chateau, Captain Dobroskok had called it, and though he had never seen one himself, Blackstone could quite believe that was exactly what it was.
The main building was three storeys high, and appeared to have been faced with the finest white marble. A terrace ran the entire length of the middle floor, and was supported by carved columns which would have looked a little ostentatious in even a largish Greek temple. There were two more wings, running at right angles to the main building, and equally as long as it. Blackstone could not even begin to guess how many rooms the ‘chateau’ contained.
To the right of the house was a large artificial lake with a fountain in the middle of it. Beyond the lake were six or seven massive greenhouses. Swans glided on the water, and peacocks strutted on the lawns, both of them enjoying a life of luxury such as the peasants in the village they had just left behind them could only ever dream of.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” said Sir Roderick’s voice behind him.
Blackstone pulled his head back into the carriage. Sir Roderick seemed not have changed his position since they entered the grounds, and from where he was sitting, he could not possibly have seen the house.
“You been here before, have you, sir?” Blackstone asked.
“To this particular estate?�
�� Sir Roderick replied. “No, I have not. But I have visited enough Russian stately homes in my time to know exactly what to expect from it. For you, I imagine, it is something of a revelation. A place like this is something your undernourished imagination could never have properly envisaged in a million years.”
He was getting some of his confidence back, Blackstone thought — and with it, some of his arrogance.
“I hope you see now that you need me just as much as I need you — if not more so,” the Assistant Commissioner continued. “Houses like this one are as familiar to me as the slums of the East End must be to someone of your background. I have spent a great deal of my time attending civilized house parties like the one at which the Prince was robbed.”
“Civilized?” Blackstone repeated. “What happened to the Prince doesn’t seem very civilized.”
Sir Roderick gave him a small smile, a further indication — if one were needed — that he felt very much back in control of the situation, and was not about to be rattled again by a comment from a mere inspector.
“Only the robbery itself was unpleasant,: he said. “I’m sure the party which preceded it was most urbane.” He paused for an instant. “You do take my point, don’t you, Blackstone? You’re on totally unfamiliar territory, and without a guide, you’ll soon be hopelessly lost.”
That would be true if the guide really knew his way around, Blackstone thought. But if the guide was like Sir Roderick — a man who knew how things seemed, rather than how they were; who could observe events happening but not know why they had happened — then he might well be better off striking off on his own and trusting to chance. The carriage had come to a halt in front of the house. Immediately — and apparently from nowhere — half a dozen servants in impeccable livery appeared by the door.
One to open the carriage door, one to greet us, one to take our baggage, Blackstone thought. And what about the rest? There was probably even one there ready to scratch their arses, should they start to itch.
Blackstone and the House of Secrets (The Blackstone Detective series Book 3) Page 5