Blackstone and the Endgame (10 page)

And so he was.

Vladimir looked out of his office, across the dull waters of the Fontanka Canal. He loved St Petersburg (and it was always Petersburg – never Petrograd – to him). But his love of the city had nothing to do with its fine buildings or sweeping boulevards, and when people described it as a monumental city – meaning a city full of monuments – they were missing the point, as far as he was concerned.

As he saw it, the
whole
of the city – the very existence of the city – was a monument to an iron will. And it was that iron will that always had – and always would – inspire him.

There had only been marshland where Petersburg now stood when Peter the Great had decided that Russia needed a new capital – and one that looked towards the west, over the Gulf of Finland, rather than gazing into the navel of its own Slavic heritage.

What a man Peter had been – a giant, in every sense of the word. Once he had decided to relocate his capital to the very edge of his empire, he had allowed nothing to stand in his way.

He had virtually banned any building with stone in the rest of his vast empire, so that there would be enough masons available to work on his new project.

He had drafted in forty thousand serfs annually – one man from every ten or twelve households – to work on the city, and these men were marched hundreds of kilometres from their homes, often in chains.

The serfs drained the swamp and built the city. Labouring under harsh conditions, tens of thousands of them had died, but that had not halted the progress, because if Russia was rich in one thing, it was rich in expendable manpower.

In just ten years, the city was finished. It was a magnificent achievement and one that would only have been possible in Russia – and, even then, only under a strong tsar.

As his mind shifted from the glories of the past to the present realities, Vladimir sighed. The war was in its third year. At least three million Russian soldiers had already been killed, and a million more had deserted and were roaming the countryside, scavenging what they could. There was a shortage of rifles and shells, which meant that men went into battle without a covering barrage or a weapon of their own. And the supply lines, which had never been very good, had almost completely broken down.

What Russia needed was a new Peter the Great, Vladimir thought. With Peter in charge, they might still have lost three million men, but their sacrifice would have brought at least a few real victories. With Peter running the war, the men working in the munitions factories would never have dared to go on strike as they did now, for fear that the tsar himself would descend on the factory and personally rip their heads from their shoulders.

Yes, they needed Peter, and all they had was Nicholas – a weak man sustained only by his belief that God had chosen him to lead Russia.

And my own personal tragedy, Vladimir thought, as he felt a tear run down his cheek, is that I can know all this and yet still be devoted to the tsar we have.

He heard the door open behind him and whirled round.

‘Don't you ever knock?' he demanded.

The pretty girl in the doorway froze.

‘I did knock,' she protested.

‘Then knock harder next time,' Vladimir said harshly.

‘I'm sorry,' the girl said.

Vladimir wiped the back of his hand across his eyes.

‘No, I'm the one who's sorry,' he said. ‘Of course you knocked, and if I didn't hear you, it was because I was thinking of something else.'

‘Are you all right?' the girl asked worriedly.

‘I'm fine, Tanya,' Vladimir replied unconvincingly.

‘Are you sure?' the girl said.

‘I've never been better,' Vladimir told her – and this time there was more fire in his words.

As the tea began to warm him, Blackstone found himself thinking back to his epic journey from London to Petrograd, a journey which – due to a fever-induced haze – he now only retained fragments of.

They are in a small motor boat in the middle of the English Channel, lashed by the wind and the rain, rocked by waves that seem as high as small mountains. Blackstone, lying on the floor, knows they will never make it to France – that they have nothing to look forward to but a watery grave. Vladimir, on the other hand, seems as calm as if he was boating across a mill pond.

The waves grow higher and higher; the boat is awash with salt water. And then a set of lights – which at first Blackstone thinks exist only in his imagination – suddenly appear, bobbing up and down in the darkness.

‘Ah,' Vladimir says, seeing the Russian trawler himself and shouting to make his voice heard above the wind. ‘Our taxi has arrived.'

After that, everything was a blank, and the next time he was conscious of anything, they were back on dry land.

They are on a train. Blackstone knows this because he can hear the click-click-click of the wheels below him, but he has no idea how they got there. They have the whole carriage to themselves, but Vladimir is standing in the doorway, talking to someone in the corridor.

‘How sick is he?' asks the other man.

‘It is a bad fever, but he will survive,' Vladimir answers.

‘Are you sure of that?' the other man says.

‘He will survive,' Vladimir repeats firmly. ‘He will survive because I
need
him to survive.'

Blackstone put his glass of tea back on its saucer.

‘I
need
him to survive,' he said softly.

Had he really heard Vladimir say that?

And
if
he had said it, what did it mean?

Vladimir looked across his desk at the young woman who had been the subject of his wrath – and then his contrition – minutes earlier.

He had nurtured many protégés over the years, he reflected. Some of them – through weakness, greed or treachery – had been a disappointment to him, and he'd been forced to deal with them accordingly. But there had been others who had developed the ability to navigate their way around the complex and all-encompassing web that he had spun over so much of Russian life.

Yes, some of them had been very good indeed, but none of them – not even Agnes – had come close to being as accomplished as this girl. Tanya was both intelligent and fearless, and though she had her weaknesses, he knew exactly what they were and was sure he could keep them under control.

‘How is your visitor?' the girl asked.

‘Need you sound so disdainful whenever you refer to him?' Vladimir wondered.

‘I don't like him,' Tanya said.

‘How can you possibly say that you do not like him when you don't even know him?' Vladimir said sharply.

Tanya opened her mouth to say something, then changed her mind and clamped it closed again.

‘Well?' Vladimir demanded.

‘I know that he's English – and that's enough.'

‘That wasn't what you were
going
to say, was it?'

‘No.'

‘So instead of saying what you really feel, you fall back – for reasons of your own – on simple prejudice. And we cannot afford prejudice in our line of work, Tanya. If we do not see things as they really are, we are doomed.'

The girl looked down at her hands.

‘I'm sorry,' she said.

‘You must meet him,' Vladimir told her. ‘Perhaps we will all go out to dinner together.'

‘Do we have to?' Tanya asked.

Vladimir scowled. ‘I am not used to having my instructions questioned,' he said.

‘I didn't mean to …'

‘We will start the conversation again, and this time you will be the woman I trained – the woman I know you can be.'

Tanya took a deep breath.

‘How is your visitor?' she asked for a second time, and though there was no particular warmth in her question, her previous antagonism had quite vanished.

‘He is making an excellent recovery from the fever,' Vladimir said. ‘He told me that yesterday he walked almost as far as the Admiralty Arch.'

The girl frowned. ‘He
told
you?'

‘He told me,' Vladimir repeated.

‘And you didn't know that already?'

‘No.'

Once more, Tanya's eyes became riveted on her hands.

‘Tell me what you're thinking,' Vladimir said.

The girl looked up. ‘I don't want to incur your displeasure three times in a morning,' she said.

‘You have no choice in the matter,' Vladimir said.

Tanya nodded, acknowledging the truth of the statement.

‘If you don't know what he's done until he tells you himself, that can only mean that you're not having him watched,' she said.

‘You're quite right – I'm not.'

‘And is that wise?'

Vladimir shrugged. ‘Perhaps not – but what choice do I have? His value to me is that he is an unknown quantity to everyone but the two of us, and how could he remain unknown if I had men following him?'

‘Does he have any idea why he is here?'

‘No, but he is aware that I have brought him to Russia so that I can use him for “my own peculiar end”.'

‘You're quoting from Shakespeare,' Tanya pronounced. ‘That's part of Iago's speech in Act One, Scene One, of
Othello
. You used to read it to me when I was younger.'

‘So I did,' Vladimir agreed, delighted that she'd remembered. ‘I chose that particular play precisely
because
of Iago. I wanted you to learn from his example – but also to become wary of developing his flaws.'

‘And are you upholding your side of the bargain with the Englishman?' Tanya asked, changing the subject slightly. ‘Are you doing all you can for this sergeant of his?'

‘I am,' Vladimir said, ‘though not in a way that Sam Blackstone could possibly have imagined.'

Ellie Carr looked down at the man on the marble slab in the mortuary.

The inspector who'd brought him had wanted only one question answered: was it murder, or was it suicide?

But while the question was straightforward enough, finding the answer might prove much more complicated, because the man had been hit head-on by an express train and was now spread out in front of her like a bloodied and unfinished jigsaw puzzle.

Despite an extensive search of the area around the track, parts of him were
still
missing and might never be found, but if he had been killed before the train hit him – if he'd been shot or strangled – then it still might be possible to uncover evidence of that among the mangled remains.

‘Where are you, Sam? Are you safe?' she heard herself say, and she realized that though she'd thought she'd be able to banish Blackstone from her mind while she was working, she'd obviously fallen at the first fence.

Someone coughed directly behind her, and she turned to find herself looking at a tall thin man. He was, in fact, almost as tall and thin as Blackstone, but whereas Blackstone bought his suits from the second-hand stalls in the markets, this man had clearly had his made by one of the best tailors on Savile Row.

‘Dr Carr?' the man asked.

‘If I find out that you got in here by bribing my clerk, I'll tear the rascal's balls off,' Ellie Carr said.

‘I'm sorry, I don't understand,' the man replied.

‘Balls,' Ellie repeated. ‘Testicles! The twin sacs that dangle between men's legs – and which they all seem so inordinately proud of.'

‘I know what balls are. What I haven't quite grasped—'

‘Let me ask you a question,' Ellie interrupted him. ‘Are you one of those toffs who sometimes think it might be a jolly jape to take a peek at all the blood and gore in my mortuary?'

‘Certainly not!' the man replied. ‘My name is Courtney Hartington, and I represent the firm of Hartington, Hartington and Blythe, solicitors.'

‘And which one are you?'

‘I've already said …'

‘Are you Hartington? Or are you Hartington?'

The solicitor gave her thin smile. ‘Since I am the senior partner, I suppose I am the first Hartington,' he said.

‘Well, now that's cleared that up, but you still haven't explained why you're in my mortuary,' Ellie Carr said, ‘because neither I nor the bloke lying in bits on the slab need your services.'

‘Perhaps
you
don't need my services,' Hartington agreed, ‘but your friend Sergeant Patterson most certainly does.'

‘He's already got a solicitor,' Ellie pointed out.

‘Yes, he has,' Hartington agreed, ‘and while it would be quite unprofessional of me to say he's not a very good one, I feel it my duty to point out that, in this world, you get what you pay for.'

‘And, from the way you're dressed, Archie can't afford to pay for you,' Ellie said.

‘He doesn't need to,' Hartington replied. ‘I have already been satisfactorily recompensed.'

‘Who by?'

‘The gentleman – or lady – has made it clear to me that he – or she – would prefer to remain anonymous.'

‘And why have you come to me?' Ellie Carr asked suspiciously. ‘Why aren't you saying all this to Archie's wife?'

‘My instructions are that I'm to deal directly with you.'

‘So are you saying that this gentleman …'

‘Or lady.'

‘… knows me?'

‘I'm afraid I can neither confirm nor deny your acquaintanceship with the client in question.'

‘All right, then, another question,' Ellie said. ‘What can you do for Archie that his cut-price solicitor couldn't do?'

‘Well, for a start, I could post his bail,' Hartington said.

On his previous excursion, Blackstone had settled for just one glass of tea, but he had pushed himself harder that day than he ever had before, and when his body told him that it would be wise to order another tea and rest a little more, he did not argue with it.