Death Comes to the Ballets Russes (36 page)

‘God bless my soul, Inspector, that’s a pretty fine piece of work!’

‘I have to say I have no idea if it is true or not. There is one other thing. If a member of the Ballets Russes or anybody connected with the opera wanted to kill her in London, they’d have been liable to bump into
a policeman or an investigator like yourself at any point and in any place. Up there in Blenheim Palace, there were only the footmen at that particular time. Not to mention our two strangers who had the great advantage that the Blenheim people thought they were Ballets Russes and the Ballets Russes people thought they were palace people.’

‘And what have you done about the strangers, Inspector?’

Inspector Jackson finished his tea. ‘We have circulated their descriptions all around Oxford and in all the towns and villages where the visitors could have come from.’

‘How do you think the killer knew who his victim was, if you see what I mean?’

‘I did think about that, my lord, but he could have asked any of the ballet people. You could have spotted a member of the Ballets Russes a mile off.’

‘You have done good work, Inspector, well done.’

‘Do you know, Lord Powerscourt, I’ve been an Inspector now for six years and this is the most unusual case I’ve come across in all that time. I think I may be able to tell my grandchildren about it in years to come.’

‘Only “may” be able to tell them, Inspector?’

‘That’s right, my lord. I’m bloody well not going to tell them we’ve all failed to work out who the murderer was.’

‘“London June the fifth. I wonder if it’s extravagant and rather vain to buy another diary every time we move to a fresh city. Certainly there’s still lots of room
left in the French one. But I can always go back to that the next time I’m in Paris. I shall have in time a whole volume about Paris.”’

Alexander Taneyev’s diary had arrived by police constable late that afternoon. Inspector Dutfield had said he would come round later. Powerscourt maintained that his policeman colleague was feeling guilty about not having found it before. Lady Lucy told him he was being uncharitable.

‘Do carry on, Francis,’ she said.

‘“Rehearsals start tomorrow with Monsieur Fokine. I have danced in all of these works before, mainly in Paris. My two understudy roles I have also danced before, both in Monte Carlo. I am lucky that I have been allowed to stay with my uncle, though they have told me at the hotel here that there will always be a room ready if I need it. It is two years now since I came to London with Mama and the girls.”

‘I say Lucy, do you think I should skip a few bits and see how long before we get to the relevant parts?’

‘I don’t think you should skip anything just yet, Francis. I think it would be disrespectful.’

‘“We were given half an hour today to walk around Covent Garden and take a full tour of the opera house. It’s certainly grander than the ones in Paris, but nothing like our own place on Theatre Street back home. Maybe the fact that the Imperial Family come to see us in St Petersburg makes a difference. Everything has to be special all the time. I don’t think the King here is very keen on the opera, even though they say he looks exactly like the Tsar. I think Mama told me they are cousins.”

‘And that’s the end of Wednesday June the fifth. What do you think of it so far, Lucy?’

‘Promising start, I should say. It looks as though he puts down whatever comes into his head.’

‘On we go. “Thursday June the sixth. Another rehearsal. Monsieur Fokine spends a lot of time shouting at the girls in the corps de ballet. I think they just find it hard to concentrate when they’re left stuck in some position or other while he concentrates on something else. Mama and the girls always tell me how lucky I am to spend so much time with all these lovely young people. I tell them it’s not like that at all. They’re work colleagues, that’s all. I just wish some other older members of the company behaved in the same way.”

‘Hello hello, Lucy. Do you think this is Bolm, enter stage left, as it were?’

‘Probably, Francis. Just read on. There may be more.’

‘“Monsieur Diaghilev looked in on the rehearsals today. He was talking to that composer Stravinsky, who looks very strange to me. People are already saying that Monsieur Diaghilev is about to run out of money, but they say that all the time.”’

Sergeant Rufus Jenkins had taken up smoking again. He had managed to give it up at the request of Marjorie, his girlfriend from the Post Office – well, in fact, as the Sergeant told himself regularly, it was more of an ultimatum really – me or those damned cigarettes – and hoped that if he only smoked on duty and changed his clothes when he got home, he might get away with it. Marjorie couldn’t stand the smell. She said it made her feel ill. The Sergeant rationed himself to one every half an hour. He was now in the second half of 1887, and had reached the letter P. Most
of those letters were more than familiar to him now and he groaned as he reached the letter P. He knew it contained a good number of popular Christian names. Patrick Gilbert, Newcastle under Lyme, Patrick Gilbert, Wolverhampton, Patrick Gilbert, Southampton, Patrick Gilbert, Ludlow Shropshire.

Ahead were the Pauls and the Peters and God only knew how many of those. The Sergeant lit another cigarette in anticipation.

‘“Friday June the seventh. Sometimes I find life in the ballet rather confusing. Our main purpose is our art, to produce the finest ballet in the world. M. Diaghilev keeps telling us that if we work hard we will reach that goal. It’s the languages, really. With my uncle I speak English. With some of Diaghilev’s people I speak French, as they prefer that to Russian. On my ballet work I speak Russian, like everybody else. The stagehands and everybody else speaks Russian. Which one do I belong to? At home I always feel Russian, even though Mama insists we speak English all the time, rather than French. My old nurse – I do hope she hasn’t died yet, she must be well over eighty now – always spoke to me in Russian. She couldn’t do anything else. But what am I? Am I Russian or am I English? I have spent a lot of time in England, with these two summers over here, and I find I can think in English. I can’t do that in French, though I can speak it fluently. And of course I can think in Russian. I wouldn’t like to lose the English bits of me if I was told I was Russian, any more than I would like to lose the Russian bits of me if I was told I was English. What am I to do? I shall write
to Mama, although I know what she will say. She will say I am English. If I wrote to Papa he would say I was Russian. It’s all very confusing.”’

Rhys was coughing at the door. ‘Urgent message from the Oxfordshire Constabulary,’ he announced. ‘From Inspector Jackson, my lord, my lady.’

‘“We have received intelligence from a number of places concerning the Russian who might have been at Blenheim Palace,”’ Powerscourt read, feeling rather like one of the slaves of some Eastern potentate whose sole job was to read messages or to tell stories to his master when the master was bored. ‘“The first one said that he had been seen entering the Ashmolean Museum. We have no reports of his coming out, but I doubt if he is still inside. The second sighting was of him at the railway station, about to board a train, presumably, unless he was meeting somebody. The third report, from rather further afield, has him walking through the village of Goring on the borders between Oxfordshire and Berkshire. They could, of course, all refer to the same man. Further reports as news comes in.”’

‘I can see that a man might want to catch a train or visit the Ashmolean Museum, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘but what on earth was he doing in Goring? What do you know of Goring, Francis?’

Bourrée

The word originates from an old French dance resembling the
gavotte
. In ballet, this denotes quick, even movements often done on
pointe
; the movement gives the look of gliding.

‘What do I know of Goring?’ mused Lord Powerscourt. ‘Absolutely nothing, my love. I shall return to the diary.

‘“Saturday June the eighth. I think the rehearsals have gone very well. This morning I had to take on the role of the Prince in
Thamar
in case Bolm should be indisposed or is too busy chasing the corps de ballet. I have watched Bolm perform this role so many times and I know, heaven knows I have been told often enough, that my role is to perform it in exactly the same way as he does. I am not to add any little touches of my own. The audience, Monsieur Fokine says, have come to see Bolm, not me, and the least I can do is to replicate down to the smallest movement what he would have done.”

‘There’s a break here, Lucy, as if he added this last bit later in the day. Here we go:

‘“Some of the girls are thinking of complaining about the way Bolm treats them all. They ask me for my advice! I agree that his antics, his endless approaches, sometimes physical, would be quite disgusting if you were a girl. Perhaps I am lucky in that I have sisters and I know how I would feel if anybody behaved like that with them. But I tell them that the Ballets Russes is more important than any individual. One of the girls told me that I sounded like Diaghilev when I said that. I told her I didn’t care. One complaint of that nature could split the company apart, half for Bolm and half against Bolm. The performances would never recover. The unity of the company must come first. And I tell them that Fokine, for one, must know what is going on. If he knows, Diaghilev knows. Maybe somebody high up will have a word with Bolm. That, I tell them, would be for the best.”’

Sergeant Jenkins was having another cigarette. He wondered if the smoke got into your hair. He could always say that he was surrounded by people smoking inside and outside the building. People were always smoking on the bus. He thought he could mount a reasonable defence against that charge. He was on the Rs now. He hoped for a moment that the entry might be for a Mrs Richard Gilbert rather than a Mrs Sophie Gilbert, née Shore. Ahead of them was another long line of Raphaels, Richards, Roberts and Ruperts. He consoled himself with
the thought that the place closed in forty minutes’ time.