I reach for Yuri’s hand. “Please be patient. I need to take a break now. General Aristarkhov – will you give me just five minutes, before you take Yuri away?”
The general grunts. Axelson looks at me. “Miss Agnes! Why are you keeping us waiting? We need to know how you have solved this case!”
“There's something I have to do first. I need to talk to someone I trust.”
Both Yuri and the professor glance at me. But I answer their looks with a grin. “I don't mean either of you, on this occasion! What I mean is, that I need to talk to Lord Buttermere.”
Without any words, Lord Buttermere and I walk away from the group, along the edge of the waves. Gradually the sound of their voices dims and fades. All we can hear is the soft sound of the sea, as it washes across the sand with each incoming wave.
I pick up a stone, as if to throw it in the water. But instead I throw it behind me; it makes a little sound as it scuffs the sand.
“You know, Lord Buttermere, why I want to talk this business over with you? The politics around this case are very—”
“Delicate.”
“Yes. You’re an expert in all that political delicacy. But also – you know, don’t you? You know that when I stood in front of General Aristarkhov a minute ago, silhouetted in the sunshine, I wasn’t really talking about Emily.”
“Yes. I understand that.”
“Then I can tell you everything I know, Lord Buttermere. It started when I was in that room at Tri Tsarevny, in the main Dacha, where there was a picture on the wall of the fairytale Russian character, Ivan the Fool. The place wasn’t like a home, not even a rarely-used holiday home. There was nothing homely about it. It felt like a mausoleum, an empty shell.
I don’t think it had that atmosphere because the Romanovs had already departed. I think it felt like that before they ever arrived for their holiday. It always felt like that – because it had never been used, not even for their holidays. The strange dead air of that house has been going round and round in my head, for the last two years.
But I realised how Svea’s murder had actually been committed because of something else. In St Petersburg, when Axelson talked to Mr Bukin about Alexei’s tutor, he said ‘he’. He made an assumption about gender. He was probably misled by the name, picturing Nestor as a wise silver-haired Greek king. It’s a bit like the ladies' bath-house in St Petersburg….”
Lord Buttermere looks quizzically at me, and I explain. “To be honest, Lord Buttermere, I'm a bit of a shrinking violet sometimes. But when I went into a room at the bath house labelled ‘Ladies’ I gaily stripped all my clothes off. Because I never expected to see a man in there.”
Lord Buttermere laughs, and I add “Sometimes, we see what we expect to see. Expectations can mislead us.”
“Indeed.”
“When you visited Tri Tsarevny, Lord Buttermere, the guards on the old stone quay, who were very bored with their duties, told you all the legends about the place. They told you the story of Ivan the Fool and the three princesses, and how the little islands and their houses are always referred to as the First, Second and Third Princess. You asked the guards about things of more immediate interest to you – about Svea Håkansson, who you had come to meet, and about Rasputin, whose plans for a cease fire between Russia and Germany would be a disaster for both Britain and Sweden. The guards at the quay told you that Svea was in the Second Princess, and Rasputin in the Third Princess.
You went up to the main Dacha. No-one was about. You looked down at the lake, and saw the islands. You went down there, and walked along the causeway, past one island with a little house, then another.
At the third island, you saw the house that you thought was the Third Princess. You looked into the house, expecting to see Rasputin. As I said, people see what they expect to see. But when I stood up on the beach with the others, a few minutes ago, I showed how little can really be seen of a person, when they have a bright light behind them.
It was the same on the sunny afternoon that I was there, in August 1916, three weeks after the murder. The professor and I were standing at the door of the Princess house. We looked right through it, and through the French windows, at the glare of the sun sparkling on the lake. The conditions on the day you were there must have been very similar. The brightness of the sun and the lake would silhouette any person standing on the porch, when seen from that doorway.
So you saw the outline of a tall figure, standing with their back to you. The person was completely unaware of you. They had flowing dark hair, and they were wearing a long white robe, like that of a monk. The figure was leaning on the rail of the porch and looking away from you, out at the lake. And you knew that, one way or another, Rasputin had to be stopped.
You are a planner and a plotter, not a trigger-happy chancer, Lord Buttermere. But you showed me, in the butterfly gallery at the Ivangorod Museum, that you are quite ready to use a gun, if you think it is necessary.”
Buttermere nods.
“A few moments ago, I tossed a stone onto the beach behind us. You heard the sound, and being right handed, you glanced over your right shoulder, to see what the noise was. The figure you saw on the porch of the Princess house did the same, when they heard you at the door. That person was standing, facing the lake, with their head beginning to turn over their right shoulder.
You stood at the door, looking at the silhouetted figure, and you had your gun in your hand. As the figure turned their head, you fired. The bullet entered the right temple, and came out the left side of the skull, where it shattered the bones. Svea fell, into the wicker chair, her head still turned over her right shoulder. Later, that position, and that damage, was what Prince Alexei saw.”
The waves are still shining on the white sand, and the slim, elegant gentleman beside me shakes his head silently.
“Shall we turn round now, Lord Buttermere, and walk back to the others? As I said, Svea Håkansson wasn’t sitting, when she was shot. She was standing, then she fell into the chair, onto Alexei’s book, which he later pulled out from beneath her body.
I’m sure it was an awful moment for you, in that little house, when you realized what you’d done. But it was after you had flung the gun into the lake, and when you were hurrying back along the causeway, that you saw why you had been misled. There are in fact four islands, and four houses, but the first was only a storeroom. What you had thought was the Third Princess was in fact only the Second. It was Svea’s house, not Rasputin’s.
That little storeroom on its island has a lot to answer for. It misled you as to which Princess was which. But it also betrayed you in another way, when I went back there with Yuri in December 1916.
As you told me, when you went to Tri Tsarevny, you were disguised as an eccentric butterfly collector. The most obvious attribute of a butterfly collector is, of course, his butterfly net. You shot Svea, then in dismay, you went over to look at her corpse. At that point, I guess, you noticed that you’d got blood on your butterfly net.
Unlike the gun, a net would hardly sink in the lake. So throwing it into the water was not an option. But as you ran along the causeway, you decided you had to get rid of that butterfly net somehow. You hid it inside the neglected old storeroom. Months later, Yuri and I went into the storeroom, found the net, and used it to get the gun off the bottom of the lake. We assumed it was a fishing net, for children.
But Alexei wasn't allowed down by the lake, and it couldn’t have been left over from an earlier visit, because Tatiana Romanov assured me that they had never had a family holiday at Tri Tsarevny. As I said, the place was like a mausoleum: no children had ever holidayed there. So I began to wonder about the net, and whether it really did belong to a child.”