‘The full treatment, boss?’ one of the soldiers asked.
‘Not yet, tie them up first,’ said Shatilov, going over to the corner and picking up a whip.
‘Sorry about this, Mikhail,’ said Powerscourt.
‘Don’t worry, we’ll be all right in the end,’ said the young man cheerfully.
By now the two men were tied securely to their chairs. Powerscourt found he could just about move his arms. If there was a deus out there somewhere, he said to himself, he wished he would hurry up and get out of his machina. Shatilov was pacing up and down behind the chairs, brandishing the whip in his left hand. Powerscourt felt there appeared to be a poverty of imagination in Russian torture methods, whips, whips and more whips.
‘Do you see this, Lord Powerscourt?’ Shatilov was showing him the leather thong. ‘In a moment, this is going to tear into the bare flesh of your back. After a while there won’t be any flesh left. All you have to do is to tell me the nature of your conversation with the Tsar and nothing will happen to you.’
‘Is this what you did to Martin? Whip him till he died?’
‘Cut his coat off!’ Shatilov was shouting to his assistants. Powerscourt felt his jacket being ripped away from his back.
‘You can keep your shirt on to start with, you bastard,’ yelled Shatilov, and the whip whistled through the air to bite deeply into Powerscourt’s back.
‘Tell me about your conversation with the Tsar,’ Shatilov shouted. ‘You’ve got ten seconds before I whip you again. After that your shirt comes off. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six -’
On the count of six there was a tremendous crash as Johnny Fitzgerald and the sergeant from the Black Watch rushed into the room, pistols in their right hands. They made straight for the two soldiers who had left their guns by the chairs in the centre of the room. But it was Ricky Crabbe who was the real revelation in the rescue party. Powerscourt was to say later that he had seen David as in David and Goliath reborn in a dingy house on the outskirts of the Tsar’s Village. He had bestowed about his person a number of large stones. The first of these, less than a second after Johnny had entered the room, he despatched with remarkable accuracy at the head of Major Shatilov. It took him right in the centre of his face and he collapsed to the ground, blood pouring from his face, hands searching amidst the blood for what might remain of his nose.
‘Fantastic shot, Ricky!’ said Powerscourt as Johnny Fitzgerald released them from their ropes. ‘I am so glad to see you all! Now, let’s tie them up. I want to have a word or two with the Major here when he’s strapped to the chair.’
The Black Watch sergeant was expert at binding the prisoners in ways they would not be able to escape from. Shatilov was spitting blood down his uniform as he was locked in position. Powerscourt took a pistol from Shatilov’s pocket and pulled up a couple of chairs next to him.
‘Can you make this sound as bloodthirsty as you can, Mikhail? He’s got to believe that I mean it when I say I’m going to kill him.’
‘Of course,’ said Mikhail.
‘Now then, Major, let me just explain the rules now we’re in charge.’ Powerscourt laughed what he hoped was a bloodthirsty laugh. The Major seemed to find it difficult to talk. ‘All you have to do is to tell us what happened to Mr Martin. Then everything stops. Possibly including you. I haven’t decided on that yet. But what you need to understand is that there are a number of ways in which we could help you talk, and there are a number of us to do it. The sergeant,’ Powerscourt pointed to the six feet four inches of the man from the Black Watch, ‘is very keen to see what happens with one of your knouts on a bare back. Death perhaps by whip. Ricky, our expert marksman here, is anxious to see what happens when people are pelted with stones from different distances. Death maybe by stoning. A biblical death for you, Major. Johnny Fitzgerald is a great believer in the sticks or canes you keep in the corner of the room. Another death by beating. I, believe it or not, Major, believe in the pistol as the means of making you talk. I have made a rough count of the number of bullets available here for this particular gun and I have so far counted fifty-four. I am curious to see how many wounds the human body can sustain before it actually dies.’
There was a sort of gurgle from the chair. Ricky’s stone had certainly left its mark.
‘So,’ said Powerscourt, pointing his pistol absent-mindedly into the middle of Shatilov’s wounded face, ‘let us begin. Why don’t we start with the moment Mr Martin was brought here at about a quarter to ten in the evening. Why don’t you take it on from there, Major?’
There was another gurgle from the Major. Powerscourt turned the pistol to the ground and fired it six inches from Shatilov’s left foot. The noise was deafening. The two soldiers twitched in their ropes as if they thought they might be next.
‘Perhaps that might help your concentration.’ Mikhail was sounding very fierce as he translated the ferocious Powerscourt, the Powerscourt hungry for wounds and thirsty for blood.
There was another gurgle. Powerscourt now placed the barrel of the gun in the middle of Shatilov’s bloody mouth. He could feel the teeth rattling inside. ‘I don’t have to use all the fifty-four bullets, Major. I could kill you now, rather like, I suspect, you killed Mr Martin and took his body away. Now it’s my turn to count to ten. You’d better start talking before I get to ten, Major, or your mouth will disappear. Probably not quite enough to kill you as long as I avoid what passes for your brain. One, two, three . . .’
There was a lot of rustling about in the Shatilov chair. He was trying to shake his head.
‘Four, five, six . . .’
Shatilov’s hands were tied behind his back so he could not point. ‘I think he’s trying to ask you to take the gun out of his mouth, sir,’ said Mikhail.
Powerscourt peered closely at the Major. ‘Seven,’ he said. He withdrew his gun from Shatilov’s mouth. ‘Eight.’
‘It was all an accident,’ Shatilov began, the words slurred and heavy as if he were drunk, and Powerscourt thanked God he hadn’t had to reach ten. He wasn’t at all sure what he would have done.
‘I don’t want to know whether you think it was an accident or not, Major. I’m sure the scribes and Pharisees would have described Christ’s death on the cross as an accident, given half a chance. Just tell me when and how things happened.’
The Major looked at Powerscourt with pleading eyes. Please don’t kill me, they seemed to be saying. Powerscourt was remaining pitiless for the time being. His quest was nearly over.
‘The man Martin,’ Shatilov began, ‘was brought to me here after his interview with the Tsar. He refused to tell me what their discussions were about. He said it was a matter for diplomats, not for secret policemen who weren’t intelligent enough to be employed by the Okhrana.’ That tribute to the intelligence of his staff would have pleased Derzhenov, Powerscourt thought. But he doubted it would have gone down too well in this room with the scarred Major.
‘So what did you do when Mr Martin refused to tell you the nature of his conversations?’ Powerscourt was dangling his gun ostentatiously in the general direction of the Major’s private parts.
‘Well,’ said the Major, glancing down anxiously, ‘we – we thought – we decided to take measures to persuade him to talk.’
Powerscourt took a brief walk up to the end of the table and back, gun in hand, always pointing at Shatilov. ‘What measures?’ he shouted, his face a few inches from the Major.
There was a long gap. Powerscourt wondered if he should start counting again. ‘We beat him,’ whispered the Major.
‘With what?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘The whip.’ Shatilov was virtually inaudible now.
‘Ordinary whip? Or Russian whip?’
‘Russian whip.’ The Major began to whimper now, like an injured child.
Powerscourt hadn’t finished yet. ‘When you say we, Major, do you mean you yourself, or your men or a combination of the two? And if you try to tell a lie I shall pull every last tooth out of your h
ead.’
‘It was me,’ said Shatilov, trying unsuccessfully to rock in his chair.
‘And how long did it go on for?’ asked Powerscourt, feeling waves of pity suddenly for Roderick Martin, owner of Tibenham Grange, lover of Tamara Kerenkova, one of the brightest stars in the bright firmament of the Foreign Office, passing away here under the vicious care of a Russian sadist. He remembered somebody telling him years before that above a certain number of lashes, was it fifty or was it eighty, a victim of the knout would be sure to die. Certainly that death would be a welcome relief.
‘Until he died,’ Shatilov whispered, trying to draw back from Powerscourt.
‘And how long did that take?’ asked Powerscourt sadly, certain that some pedant in the Foreign Office would want to know the answer.
‘Less than half an hour. Maybe twenty minutes? The man must have had a weak heart or something.’
Powerscourt narrowly avoided the temptation to shoot all the Major’s teeth out, one by one. He was nearly finished.
‘And what did you do with his body?’
‘We dumped it on the Nevskii Prospekt and told the police to make a note. Then we put the body through a hole in the ice.’
Somewhere out in the Gulf of Finland, Powerscourt thought, a mutilated body was floating with the fishes. Maybe the weals on Martin’s back might have eased a little after their passage through the salt water. Even now, he felt sure, there would still be enough wounds on the battered corpse to tell whoever might find him, be they Balt or Finn or Estonian, that this man did not have an easy passage to the other side. Martin had served his King and country well. He had kept faith to the end, even at the cost of the most terrible pain. Now Powerscourt understood why they had never known how Martin had died, whether he had been shot or strangled. Shatilov could not let the police report say he had been tortured to death.
Somehow, Mikhail seemed to sense that the interrogation was at an end.
‘What are you going to do with him, Lord Powerscourt? This disgrace here.’ He nodded contemptuously at the figure of Shatilov, whimpering like one who thinks his last hour has come.
‘What indeed?’ said Powerscourt. ‘Part of me would like to kill him here and now. He murdered a compatriot of mine in the most horrible way. He is an appalling human being. I don’t think he deserves to live. But I can’t kill him. I’m not a Russian court or a Russian judge or a Russian court martial, though God knows what any of those would do with him. I’m not a Lord High Executioner.’
‘But your mission here, Lord Powerscourt, the quest to find out what happened to Mr Martin, the nature of his conversations with the Tsar, you know all that now. Your work here is done, is that so?’
‘Who knows?’ said Powerscourt. ‘Sergeant,’ he said to the man from the Black Watch, ‘can you make sure these people are properly tied up? So they won’t escape for days? And gag them so they can’t make a noise,’ he added, thinking incongruously of the victims of Derzhenov’s basement. ‘When you’ve done that, let’s go home.’
15
‘Francis.’ Johnny Fitzgerald had been inspecting the cupboards in and around Shatilov’s quarters and had collected a burglar’s haul of hammers, screwdrivers, spanners, jemmies and other tools. It looked as though he was expecting trouble.
‘There’s something you should know.’
‘What’s that, Johnny?’ asked Powerscourt, his mind still focused on the late Martin.
‘We don’t have a coach any more,’ said Johnny.
‘We don’t have a coach any more?’ replied Powerscourt.
‘We don’t have a coach any more,’ Johnny Fitzgerald repeated. ‘Two of those bastard soldiers stole the horses. And we don’t know where they took them.’
Powerscourt started to laugh. ‘Sorry, I know it’s serious, but I was just thinking of the Ambassador, not the most popular man in the Embassy, having to tell Mrs Ambassador that the coach which used to take her round fashionable Petersburg has disappeared. Is the actual carriage worth keeping?’
‘We’ve hidden it in an outhouse for now,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘But the problem is this. These people we’ve just tied up, the Imperial Guard, Royal Palaces Security Division, whatever they’re called, guard all the roads and all the railways round St Petersburg. If our friend Shatilov is found and released before we get back to the Embassy, we’ll be joining your man Martin as food for the fishes.’
‘What’s the fastest way to get back? Apart from the horses we don’t have?’ Powerscourt was beginning to grapple with this new problem.
It was Ricky Crabbe who provided a possible solution. ‘There’s a goods train coming through at eleven o’clock, my lord, going to St Petersburg. God knows where it ends up. The last passenger train is half an hour after that.’
‘I don’t like goods trains,’ said Powerscourt, who had been locked up in a goods carriage in India for an entire afternoon at the hottest time of year with a herd of incontinent cows for company, ‘but I’m happy to try again if people feel that would be better.’
‘Once you’re in one of those damned carriages,’ said Johnny, ‘you’re a sitting duck. If they lock the humans in like they lock the animals in, you can’t even jump off the bloody train.’
Shortly afterwards a small but determined group were lurking in the shadows at the end of the platform of Tsarskoe Selo station. Johnny Fitzgerald had been making small experiments with his new tools. He disappeared at one stage into a siding full of unwanted carriages. Various grunting and swearing noises announced that he was still of the party. Ricky Crabbe had appropriated a couple of stout bags which he was filling very methodically with large stones. Powerscourt was trying to learn and amplify a basic message in Russian: I am from the British Embassy, we all have diplomatic immunity. Mikhail was assuring him that if he set his mind to it he could be fluent in Russian in six months. The coach driver, saddened by the loss of his vehicle and possibly his livelihood, had taken delivery of a large number of roubles from Powerscourt and set off in search of the missing horses. He said he would be able to buy them back if only he could find the thieves. The sergeant from the Black Watch was looking out at the distant road, waiting to see if the enemy would appear.
The train was late. Local trains in Russia, Mikhail informed Powerscourt, were often late. Powerscourt practised saying I am from the British Embassy, we all have diplomatic immunity to Johnny Fitzgerald but it failed to have any impact.
‘You could be saying put all your money on Shatilov in the two thirty at Doncaster for all I know, Francis,’ he said cheerfully, ‘and I think you should sound a little more guttural, if you know what I mean. But carry on practising. It may turn out useful sooner than we think, if only the bloody Russians would understand what you’re saying to them.’
Maybe it was the mention of Shatilov that brought their problems. To their left they could hear, approaching at a good speed, their train, gusts of smoke almost matching the colour of the surrounding snow. To their right the night air was rent with whistles and the sounds of shouting men on the other side of the platform, hurrying to reach the station before the train could leave. Somehow or other Shatilov’s men must have been alerted to the flight of the English party. Maybe, Powerscourt shuddered as he thought of it, he was leading this revenge mission in person, whip conveniently stuffed into a coat pocket. Powerscourt did not rate his chances very high if he met Shatilov again. The train was drawing to a halt at the little station. There were half a dozen carriages with a guard’s van at the rear. There were more passengers than you might have expected. The sergeant was swearing viciously under his breath.
‘Do we take the train or not, Francis?’ asked Johnny.
‘We go,’ said Powerscourt, ‘last carriage before the guard’s van. If we stay here we’re marooned, miles from anywhere.’
The whistles were very close now. The train driver would have to be deaf not to hear them. The five men bent double so their heads would not protrude above the height of the carriages as they r
aced into the train. They could hear feet running up the platform. Powerscourt hung briefly out of the window in time to see a party of twelve men marching into the front carriage behind the driver. The last man aboard, his face wreathed in a series of bloodstained bandages, with a pistol in his left hand, was Major Shatilov, with a face, Powerscourt reported to his friends, like thunder.
‘Never mind, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, fiddling with some giant spanner in his stolen bag, ‘you can say to them as they come through the connecting door that you’re from the British Embassy and we all have diplomatic immunity. That should do the trick.’
Everybody laughed. Their compartment had a dozen wooden benches with a party of four middle-aged Russian women at the front. Mikhail placed himself on sentry duty at the connecting door where he would be able to see any soldiers coming on their way down the train. The sergeant kept him company, fingering one of the Russian guard’s pistols in his pocket as he stared up the carriage. ‘Can you get on to the tops of these coaches, Johnny?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Did you have time to see as the train came in? And could you jump from one to another?’
‘The answer to both of these questions is Yes,’ said Johnny, returning the spanner to his bag, ‘particularly if you come from the British Embassy and have diplomatic immunity.’ Ricky Crabbe was fingering the stones in his David’s pouch, selecting the ones he liked best and putting them in his coat pocket. Powerscourt checked that he had the gun and the bullets from the Shatilov villa. Not for the first time that evening he regretted that they had not been able to bring any weapons with them but Powerscourt was certain that anybody trying to enter the Alexander Palace with a gun would have been in Siberia inside a fortnight if not trussed up and gagged in one of Derzhenov’s basement cells.
‘This is what I think we should do,’ Powerscourt said, looking anxiously at the four middle-aged women. ‘We can’t stay here in this carriage with the ladies. I don’t want to retreat into the guard’s van. Johnny, I think you and Mikhail and the sergeant should get on the roof now and move forward as far as you can, all the way into the first carriage. That way you’ll be behind these soldier people. If things get really rough, you could attack them from behind. Ricky and I are going to be Leonidas and the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae here for a while but I don’t think we’ll hold them very long. Then, unlike Leonidas, we’re going to bolt too. Mikhail,’ Powerscourt recalled the young man from his sentry duty, ‘can you get rid of these ladies here?’ As he pointed to them Mikhail paused briefly, then a look of great seriousness appeared to descend on his young features. He began speaking loudly to the women. After a while he pointed vigorously up towards the front of the train. One of the women appeared to ask a question. Mikhail shouted back and pointed again. Looking with horror at the three Englishmen, the four Russian ladies grabbed their belongings and shot out of the carriage.
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