Powerscourt was going to talk to his financier brother-in-law William Burke, who had risen to become very powerful in the world of money. Burke was sitting in a comfortable chair close to his marble fireplace. Powerscourt noticed that the portrait of Burke’s wife — Powerscourt’s sister — by the American artist John Singer Sargent, had now been joined by two further Sargents depicting the two eldest Burke daughters. The man’s family is now growing on the walls of his office, Powerscourt said to himself, just as it did in real life when they lived in Chelsea all those years before.
‘Francis,’ said the financier, taking off his spectacles and putting down a great folder, ‘how nice to see you. You’ve rescued me just in time.’
‘Rescued you from what, William? Bankruptcy? Debtors’ prison? The Marshalsea?’
‘Sometimes, you know, from where I sit, those places can seem very attractive. I’ve got to decide whether to buy another bank or not. I’ve got to make a recommendation to the Board in two days’ time. Do you know, Francis, I can’t make up my mind.’
‘I thought that you swallowed banks like other people might swallow a strawberry, William. You’ve been doing it for years.’
Burke laughed. ‘It’ll do me good to take my mind off it for a while. What can I do for you this morning? I sometimes think you only come to see me when you want information.’
‘Richard Wagstaff Gilbert,’ said Powerscourt. ‘What do you know of the fellow?’
‘Is he about to be recommended for a place on the Court of the Bank of England, Francis? A knighthood, perhaps?’
Powerscourt told him about the murder at the Ballets Russes and the fact that the victim had been staying with his uncle in a large house in Barnes guarded by two stone lions.
‘I see,’ said Burke, ‘but before I tell you about Gilbert, does this mean that those bloody ballet dancers are back in town? The ones who were here last year? Ballets Russes, did you say? I was nearly bankrupted last summer with the wife and daughters going to see them over and over again. And for some reason, they had to have the most expensive seats in the house so they could see everything properly. I got so sick of hearing about Nijinsky every morning that I took myself off to a hotel for breakfast.’
‘You’d better make a block booking at the Savoy for the fried eggs and bacon, William. They’re back. They’re here for about five weeks, I think. I’m surprised your women haven’t begun pestering you already.’
Burke sighed. ‘It could be worse, I suppose. Thank God they’re not interested in racehorses. Now then, Richard Wagstaff Gilbert. I don’t know a great deal about him. I know he’s very rich. Some wag once said that there are basically three ways to get rich. Inherit it. Marry it. Make it at the gambling tables. Our friend has done two out of three. He inherited one heap of money from his mother. She was an American heiress whose family owned a lot of stuff in New York and Chicago. Hotels, was it? Jewellery shops? Grocers? I’m not sure. Richard Gilbert himself made another fortune at the roulette table and traded in diamonds for a while. I think he’s involved with a lot of investment trusts. Some people don’t care for him at all. They say he sails a little too close to the wind. Is that any good?’
‘Very helpful, William, thank you very much. Are there any children, grandchildren perhaps, running round Barnes Pond with their nannies?’
‘I’ve never heard of a wife and certainly never heard of any children either. Why do you ask?’
‘Well, it’s rather a long shot. You see, just at the moment I can’t make much direct progress with this case. I can’t talk to the man Diaghilev who runs the show. He’s disappeared. But until he gives the all-clear, I can’t talk to the dancers. I can’t even see the place where the body was hidden.’
‘I don’t see, Francis, what this has to do with Gilbert.’
‘Switch on your most suspicious mind, William. We investigators have to look for all sorts of things in our work: the how, the where, the why. In my experience, jealousy is a very potent weapon for murder, especially when love and marriage and fidelity are involved. But there’s one other motive we meet much more often.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Greed,’ said Lord Francis Powerscourt. ‘Simple, old-fashioned greed.’
Very few people in Paris had heard of General Peter Kilyagin. His neighbours thought he was a retired soldier. In fact, General Kilyagin was the Chief of the Okhrana, the Russian Secret Service in France. From his grand offices near the junction of the Rue de Monceau and the Boulevard Malesherbes in the fashionable eighth arrondissement, he supervised a staff of forty full-time officers and a small army of part-timers who ranged from waiters in the fashionable hotels and restaurants to the manufacturers and shops dealing with weaponry and high explosives.
The senior ranks of the Russian military have always tolerated passions and obsessions of every sort. Mistresses, of course; hunting, music, yachting. But the General was the only one in history known for a passion for filing. This had started when he was in charge of the movement and accommodation for his regiment. Everything was carefully filed. Everything had its place. When he took on his new post with the Okhrana, he was in his element. General Kilyagin was now an expert in the alphabet soup of the Russian opposition: SDs, FDs, SPDs, old Decembrists, anarchists, syndicalists, communists, Plekhanovites, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks. He kept on file every detail his team discovered about a suspect, great or small. He could find out in a moment where Lenin last had his hair cut or the address of some minor anarchist’s mistress. He felt it was necessary, this vast network of surveillance that never slept. Russia was a very dangerous place, especially if you were a tsar or a senior government official. Tsar Alexander II, who had liberated the serfs, had been blown up by a terrorist bomb in the heart of St Petersburg. Grand Duke Serge, cousin of the present Tsar and Governor of Moscow, had been smashed to smithereens by a nitroglycerine bomb near the Nicholas Gate in the Kremlin in 1905. Only the previous year, the Russian Prime Minister Pierre Stolypin had been shot dead at the opera in Kiev. The Tsar and members of the Imperial Family were in the theatre to see him die. The opera was Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan. General Kilyagin liked to tell the tale of Stolypin’s end. ‘We told him,’ he would say rather sadly, ‘nobody could say we didn’t tell him. We warned him not to go to Kiev. We said there was a plot to shoot him dead. But he didn’t listen. The fool didn’t even wear the bulletproof vest we gave him. He said it smelt bad.’
The son of the assassinated Tsar set up the Okhrana to stem the tide of assassination and revolution. Many of the opposition fled abroad to escape the clutches of the Okhrana. They didn’t realize that the European network under the General’s control could see as far — if not further — than the home headquarters in St Petersburg. The General’s European Okhrana had very close links with the French Sûreté and its counterparts in Berlin and Vienna. They had officers in every major European capital. Their principal tactic was based on infiltrating the opposition groups. Sometimes they used agents provocateurs. They had a number of very attractive women on their books, prepared to sleep with a Bolshevik or a Menshevik, they didn’t really mind which, or delve through his rubbish bins. The General, oddly enough for a man in his profession, was not fond of violence. As a last resort he would call in his hard men, former soldiers of the Foreign Legion, who took their most reluctant prisoners to a chateau hidden deep in the mountains of the Cevennes. Some of the victims were never seen again.