Death on the Nevskii Prospekt (9 page)

Mikhail translated, his emphases more vigorous in Russian than Powerscourt’s had been in English. Powerscourt wondered if the man knew where Great Britain was. Did he know where Kazakhstan
was? Or Georgia?

There was another burst of Russian. ‘We have no knowledge of this inspector here,’ said Mikhail. ‘My superiors instruct me to tell you that this must be a mistake.’

‘No,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it is you who are mistaken. This inspector made a report to the British Embassy itself. We are not mistaken. I demand to see the senior policeman
here.’

Powerscourt noticed that the gap between his words in English and Mikhail’s in Russian was getting shorter. Maybe when he’s back in practice he really will be simultaneous, he
thought. Powerscourt regarded this as a truly wondrous feat, akin to those of people who could unlock the hidden theorems of mathematics.

Very reluctantly the fat policeman retired to the inner quarters in search of a senior officer. Mikhail was looking at the paper once more. ‘It couldn’t be clearer, Lord Powerscourt.
The inspector is reporting the police discovery of the dead Martin at one thirty in the morning of Thursday December the 23rd. It’s as clear as a bell.’

Suddenly Powerscourt had a terrible thought. They hadn’t dumped Martin in the hall along with the drunks, had they? Left him there for hours until rigor mortis had set in? That was not a
comforting thought to take back to London and the home of the widow Martin and the parents Martin. They might never sleep again.

There was a shout from the desk. The fat policeman had been replaced by an even fatter one with a red beard and a disagreeable air of menace about him.

‘Stuff and nonsense,’ Mikhail began translating. ‘How dare you come in here and waste police time. There is no officer here of that name. There never has been. Forging official
documents is a serious offence in our country. The penalties can be up to ten years’ imprisonment. Now, I suggest you get out of here and don’t come back.’

With that he banged his fist on the table and pointed to the door. Powerscourt was not very impressed.

‘Thank you for your suggestions, Inspector. We have an appointment with the Interior Ministry. We shall certainly raise with them our treatment at your hands. We also have an appointment
at the Foreign Ministry where the displeasure and dismay of my government will be conveyed in the strongest possible terms. All we wish at this juncture is the chance to speak with your inspector
who wrote this report, complete with your very own stamp on it.’ With that, in a sudden burst of inspiration, Powerscourt picked up the stamp on the desk, moistened it in the pad beside it
and made another mark on the other side of their document. It was identical to the mark already there.

‘See?’ Powerscourt went on. ‘This stamp is the same as the one already on the report. Surely even you can see that proves it is genuine.’

The signs were pretty bad. ‘May have to beat the retreat rather sharpish, Lord Powerscourt,’ Mikhail was whispering, pulling Powerscourt back from the desk. ‘This character is
going to lose his temper, he’s going to go up like Krakatoa.’

Mikhail told Powerscourt afterwards that he thought the inspector was going to have a heart attack. The veins in his neck stood out. His face grew redder and redder. His breathing became very
heavy.

‘Just get this into your heads,’ he shouted. ‘There is no policeman here of that name. There is no policeman in St Petersburg of that name. There was no body of an Englishman
found on the Nevskii Prospekt. I do not know who has been feeding you with forgeries. I suggest you take them home. And now, get out of my police station before I lock you in the cells and throw
away the key.’ With that he left his desk and began advancing towards them with his great fist raised.

‘It’s all right, Inspector, we were just leaving.’ Mikhail was translating as fast as he was walking backwards. ‘Don’t trouble yourself with us any more. Perhaps
you need to sit down. Have a little rest. A glass of water might be helpful. Maybe you ought to see your doctor. You know you mustn’t overdo it.’

Mikhail shouted his version of the last two sentences through the door as they hurried into the street. ‘Well, Lord Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘here’s a pretty pickle and me
on my first morning in the job. Before we had the details of a dead man but no body. Now we don’t even have the details of the corpse if we believe the red-faced policeman. What do you think
we should do?’

‘I know precisely what we should do, ‘ said Powerscourt, patting the young man affectionately on the shoulder. ‘Take me to your morgues.’

The road was narrow, skirting a canal. On the far side a factory was pouring great streams of smoke into the air. Young men hurried past them carrying great bundles of wood in
their arms. There was a faint smell of bread baking far away.

‘Do you have a lot of money on you, Lord Powerscourt?’ Mikhail Shaporov sounded faintly embarrassed at having to mention money.

‘I do, Mikhail,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Rupert de Chassiron gave me a great deal at the Embassy. I assume you are going to pay out one or two bribes.’

‘I am,’ the young man laughed. ‘Tell me, Lord Powerscourt, you are an experienced investigator and I am a mere novice translator, do you think we will find Mr Martin’s
body?’

‘I would be very surprised if we do,’ said Powerscourt sadly. ‘We have to check these morgues, of course we do, but I should be amazed if we find him there. It’s
interesting that we don’t know how he died. Shot? Stabbed? Strangled? Maybe the truth would be too compromising, so they conceal it from us. If Martin has been murdered his killers could cut
a hole in the ice and drop him down it. He might never turn up anywhere at all, just be lost at sea. If the corpse did appear on the coast of Finland or down near Riga it would be unrecognizable by
then. I think he, or somebody described as him, was brought into the police station and our form filled in. That was just to tell us he was dead. Now we are meant to have got the message and keep
quiet. We can’t make much of a fuss after all if we don’t have a body.’

Mikhail Shaporov was bringing them through a side gate into the gardens of a large, rather ugly building with lines of people waiting outside. ‘This is the hospital, St Simon’s. The
morgue is down there at the bottom of the garden. I’m going to bribe one of the porters to get the key. Do you want to come with me or will you wait here?’

‘I think I’ll wait here,’ Powerscourt replied. ‘A stranger from Europe might put the prices up.’ As he idled along the path another thought struck him about Martin,
the note and the police station. Martin might never have been to the police station at all. Maybe the police inspector really didn’t exist. Maybe the note handed in to the Embassy actually
was a forgery, the stamp stolen from the police station, or even put on the paper by one of the police who had been ordered to kill him. So the red-headed policeman could have been right after
all.

Mikhail Shaporov was waving cheerfully at him with a large rusty key in his hand. ‘God knows what this is going to be like,’ he said. ‘My education up till now hasn’t run
to morgues or mortuaries. I told the porters that an old college friend had gone missing after a drinking session and might have got killed or frozen to death.’

There was a harsh squeak as the key turned in the lock. Shaporov put his hand on the right-hand wall and turned on a feeble light. ‘They don’t bother with refrigeration in the
winter,’ he whispered, ‘they let nature work for them.’

The dead of St Petersburg were piled up in rows and rows that looked like bookcases with very wide shelves, seven or eight storeys high. Some had been placed in crude hospital shrouds by the
nurses. Some, dead on arrival, Powerscourt presumed, had been left in the rags they had on as they passed away. One or two had obviously been wounded, strangely coloured gashes running down their
faces. They were a terrifying collection, Powerscourt thought. If they were among the first to rise from the dead on the last day the rest of the citizens would quake in terror as these zombies
from the morgue marched out from their wooden resting place. There was an unpleasant smell, of things or people going bad. Mikhail Shaporov was working his way methodically round the room,
sometimes checking on the labels attached to each person. He ignored the women and the old and the very young altogether. Powerscourt heard him muttering to himself as he carried out this last
inspection of these dead souls.

‘No joy here,’ he said finally. ‘It’s possible they brought him here to die but they certainly didn’t leave him in the bloody morgue.’

The second morgue could not have been more different. It was attached to a modern hospital near St Petersburg University on Vasilevsky Island opposite Senate Square and the Admiralty.

‘The only reason we’re here is that it is further away than the other place from where we think he was found, but anybody who knew the city and its facilities would see to it that he
ended up here rather than that other hell-hole. This whole hospital was designed by Germans so it’s going to be very efficient. It’s funny, Lord Powerscourt, one minute we like
foreigners to come in and design things for us – the whole of early St Petersburg was designed by foreigners after all – and then another decade on they’re not to be allowed in
because they’re decadent, or don’t understand Russia or haven’t got any soul.’

There was no need to bribe anyone here. A grave young man took them down and waited while Mikhail Shaporov carried out his melancholy duties once more. Here the dead were not piled so high and
they had their own private space, locked away inside large green compartments that looked like a giant’s filing cabinet. Name tags were pinned neatly to the handles as if they were the title
of a file or a folder. Powerscourt wondered if these dead were happier here or if they might prefer the more tempestuous atmosphere of St Simon’s. The young man engaged Powerscourt in
conversation in halting French. Powerscourt thought he told him that if the bodies were not claimed for burial inside a couple of months, the hospital buried them in a cemetery inland. Another
terrible thought struck Powerscourt, so upsetting that he had to interrupt Mikhail and bring him over to act as translator.

‘What would happen to the dead body of a foreigner that was brought in here? Would he be kept long?’

‘Possibly, if nobody came to claim him, he could be here for a while,’ the young man said.

‘And what criteria do the doctors use in picking out the corpses they are going to use for dissecting, for teaching the medical students?’

Mikhail looked perturbed as he translated this.

‘You need not fear,’ said the young man. ‘They only use the people from the poorhouses for this. Foreigners, I think not. The students and the doctors might not trust foreign
bodies.’

Even so Powerscourt could not get the thought out of his mind. Bits of Roderick Martin being cut up and examined by a crowd of students. His inner organs, his heart and his liver and his spleen,
all taken out like a sixteenth-century disembowelment and prodded and poked by a lot of twenty-year-old Russians. It was a relief when Mikhail came over and shook his head.

‘He is not here.’ They thanked the grave young man and Mikhail suddenly seized Powerscourt by the arm. ‘Do you have any plans for lunch, Lord Powerscourt? You do not? Let me
take you to a little place not far from here called Onegin’s. It doesn’t look very exciting but they serve the best cabbage soup in the city. Onegin’s is famous for it.’

Ten minutes later they were seated at a trestle table in what looked like an army refectory. Powerscourt half expected some Russian sergeant major to emerge from the door at the top and issue
his orders to the diners. Warriors of every description lined the walls, portraits of fierce-looking little Cossacks next to imperial admirals who stared out at their fleets with haughty disdain.
There were veterans of the Napoleonic Wars here, Kutuzov the seasoned general who had fought Napoleon at Borodino the only one Powerscourt recognized. On the wall above the doorway was hung a
collection of ancient musketry, some of which looked older than the city itself.

‘They say, Lord Powerscourt,’ Mikhail Shaporov looked very much at home here, ordering their cabbage soup and black bread with great anticipation, ‘that when the next European
war comes the army will be so short of weapons that they will impound all that old stuff above the door and cart it off to the battlefields.’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘Is there a military academy round here? Does that account for all the portraits and things?’

‘Oddly enough,’ said Mikhail as two enormous bowls of cabbage soup were put in front of them, ‘it’s the university students who frequent this place. The prices are low,
the food is plentiful – if it’s enough for a peasant’s main meal of the day it’s enough for a philosophy student’s lunch. I should leave that soup to cool down for a
moment, if I were you. They send it out hot enough to burn your tongue off.’

‘You were not tempted, Mikhail, to be a student here, in your own native city?’ said Powerscourt blowing desultorily at his bowl.

‘My father was very keen that I should go to Oxford, I don’t know why,’ the young man replied, ‘but my elder brother was here. I can’t tell you how different it is
being a student in England and Oxford, Lord Powerscourt.’

‘Really?’ said Powerscourt, trying the first exploratory mouthful of his soup.

‘It’s much more serious here,’ Mikhail Shaporov replied, stirring his soup slowly with his spoon. ‘It’s nearly an occupation in itself. In Oxford the height of fame
and fashion is probably to climb to the top of Magdalen Tower or the Sheldonian or drink your college cellars dry. Here the height of fame and fashion would be to blow up a government minister or
start a revolution. I don’t think undergraduates in England ever take philosophy seriously. Here you find people whose student lives are consumed by it. Some of them become so wrapped up in
it that they turn into perpetual students, staying on at the university in their quest for the answer to everything until they are in their thirties.’