It is a mistake, I believe, you once made yourself.'

But he'd already made that connection. Misha's body was thin, all of it. 'So what's wrong with him?' Robert kept his eyes firmly fixed on to what looked like a carnival mask of his lover's face.

The old woman sighed. 'He is inbred. What more do I need to say? They can be more stupid than the rest of us, Mr Cornelius, and Misha is very stupid.'

Robert hated the malice in her voice. If Misha was stupid it was hardly his fault. 'Well, you created him.'

'Yes, God forgive me.' She paused and lit another cigarette.

'However, stupid though he may be, my poor grandson knew full well after I had done my business what Uncle Leonid had done to his great-grandfather the Tsar and his family and he decided that the old Jew was going to have to pay for that.'

'So it was Misha who killed Leonid Meyer?'

'Yes. You saw the boy, I believe, on your way home from your work.'

Robert looked across at the sad, slack-jawed but sickeningly familiar face. It all made sense now, or at least that part of it did. The thin shoulder, the unfashionable clothes ...

'But then, if you knew ...'

'Oh but I didn't even for a second dream that he would act upon his new knowledge,' she replied. 'I stupidly thought him far too dull and passive even to think about doing such a thing. However, when Misha went missing just after lunch on the Monday, I did become alarmed. He rarely left the house and had never done so on his own and then when Nicholas found that part of Mr Gulcu's old car had been tampered with ...'

'Car?' Robert frowned. 'What car?'

She smiled. 'When Mehmet died he left, amongst other things, a car in the cellar, which is also a garage, beneath this house. Because none of us could or wanted to drive we let Misha play with it, which he did. And as Nicky explained to the boy, provided he didn't tamper with the battery, which contained a powerful, corrosive acid, no harm could come to him. He obeyed this dictate about the battery until that Monday when he removed it for precisely its devastating destructive powers.'

'Acid?' Robert felt his mind reel and spin with information that was coming both too rapidly and too late.

Quite inappropriately, he thought, she smiled. 'If you had been listening to me as you should, Mr Cornelius, you would know that after the Bolsheviks shot the Romanovs they attempted to destroy their bodies with sulphuric acid.

Our little Misha here has lived and breathed that story all of his life, and so when it came to selecting a weapon with which to kill Leonid, a hated Bolshevik murderer, sulphuric battery acid seemed to offer him the kind of poetic justice he was seeking.'

Robert paused for a moment before speaking. The notion!

of using acid as a murder weapon was proving rather too much to take in. After all, hadn't the police said that Meyer had been battered to death? 'So what you are saying, MrsJ Gulcu ...'

'What I am saying, Mr Cornelius, is that Misha went to!

Leonid's apartment that afternoon, hit him over the head with either the battery or something else, I don't know, and]

then emptied the acid down his throat and over his body.'; 'But the police ...'

'The police did not make the more dreadful aspects of this crime known to the public, Mr Cornelius, fearing as they always do that demented people may copy it. I know of these things only because Misha and Natalia told me about them.'

'Natalia?' His heart jerked. 'Where does she come into all this?'

'When Nicky told me that Misha had gone, taking with him something of potential destructiveness, I called Natalia at her place of work and told her to get over to Leonid's apartment. I was hysterical by this time and bitterly regretful of what I had said to the boy. As soon as Nicky had told me about the battery, I knew what Misha was about to do. Knowing little else besides Romanov history in his poor blighted little life and, in the light of what I had so recently told him about Leonid, it seemed obvious to me. But when Natalia reached the apartment, the deed had already been done and Misha had gone. Left with only Leonid's dreadful body, which reduced the poor girl to violent sickness, she then had very quickly to decide what to do. Fearing that when the police did finally arrive they would find her brother's fingerprints on the old battery she took it away with her when she went and then deposited it on some waste ground on the way home. She was there very soon after her brother and you may even have seen her as you chased Misha down the road. Not that you would have recognised her. She always covered her head and face with a shawl when she went to visit her uncle in Balat she didn't like the way the Jews stared at her. Odd, don't you think, given her usual outlandish behaviour? But then the shawl did allow her to get that battery out unseen and so ...'

'And so,' put in Nicholas Gulcu, 'we have decided now to go to police and tell them what we tell you.'

Robert Cornelius felt the skin around his forehead pull upwards as his eyes widened in shock. 'You are going to give your own flesh and blood, however dreadful, to the police?'

'We have no option,' the old woman replied. 'I must, as I have always done, put the reputation of myself and the family as a group first.'

'But ...'

'I did what I could - via yourself, unfortunately - but when that didn't work ...' She shrugged.

Robert Cornelius looked puzzled at this point. 'You did what you could via me?'

'Yes, I told Natalia to get you to implicate the odious Reinhold Smits, which you did because you were so pitifully besotted. We were fortunate however in having the swastika-'

'What? What?' He held his hands aloft to stop her. She was moving too fast again and he was getting confused. 'What is this about a swastika? Can you tell me that, please?'

Nicholas Gulcu whispered something into his mother's ear and she nodded. 'When Misha had finished killing Leonid, he daubed a large swastika on the wall above the dead man's head. This was, as it were, a sort of calling card. The Empress Alexandra loved the swastika.

In 1918, it did not possess the vile associations that it does now. In whatever house the family lived, she always drew one on the wall. It was as much a part of her soul as her love of the colour lilac. I have them myself, swastikas, in this room, drawn in pencil underneath my lilac wallpaper.

Not that the police made that connection. They came to the obvious conclusion and with my, and your help, they soon found Reinhold Smits.'

'Who is, I understand, a Nazi, and ...'

'Reinhold Smits, or rather his father, became Leonid's employer soon after he arrived in this country. Time passed and despite the obvious disparity in their social positions, Leonid and Reinhold eventually became acquainted via a rather revolting sexual preference they both shared for very young girls. In Leonid's defence I must say that nothing illegal ever occurred on his part, but Reinhold was of a rather different order. The older he got, the younger his lovers became - a fact that he would boast about openly to his "poor little pet Jew" Leonid.' She sighed, sadly so Robert Cornelius thought. 'And it was at this time, during the 1920s, that I re-established my own association with Leonid once again. I was with Mehmet by this time and therefore secure in myself. So sometimes I would go and meet Leonid from work for a coffee or just a talk and ... It was at one such meeting that he introduced me to Reinhold Smits who was, I thought at the time, rather more pleased to see me, a complete stranger, than he should have been.'

'Why?'

'For two reasons. Firstly, and less importantly, "elderly"

as I was then, he found me attractive and secondly, Leonid had told him who I really was.'

'And so he was impressed by the fact that you said you were royal?'

She smiled at the Englishman's use of his own doubts about her when framing his question. 'No, Mr Cornelius, Reinhold was interested in me because he had plans for the person that I was. Even in the 1920s the seeds of fascism were well planted in the soil of Germany. In addition, they hated the new Bolshevik government in Russia - the young Adolf Hitler and his friends saw it as an almost pure embodiment of evil. And so did Reinhold Smits, who also when he met me started to dream about some sort of Christian crusade against the Soviet Union - preferably with this pure little Russian princess and all her Tsarist gold as a figurehead. Leonid, being the simple-minded soul that he was, saw it as a great opportunity but, as ever afraid of discovery and fearful for my life, I wanted none of it. As soon as Reinhold had gone I flew at Leonid in a fury. I told him to put a stop to this rich, powerful and arrogant German's plans, which of course he did.'

'How? How did he do that?'

'Reinhold Smits was, by that time, a fully practising paedophile. He showed and even gave photographs of his conquests to Leonid - so proud he was of it all, so safe he felt behind all his money.' Her face fell. 'Some of the little girls were as young as six. I don't think I have to spell out how Leonid managed to stop Reinhold putting his plan for me into action.'

Robert shuddered visibly with disgust. 'Blackmail?'

'Yes. And even though Reinhold hated him passionately afterwards - it informed, amongst other things, his later, even more florid, anti-Semitism - he kept on paying Leonid for the rest of his life. He was, in fact, and quite coincidentally, at Leonid's apartment making payment on the day that Leonid died.'

Robert shook his head in disbelief. 'What?'

'Oh, he got there after the deed had been done and was most horribly shocked. I know that because of a very grave error he made when he phoned to console me. However, even though I knew inside that he couldn't possibly have killed Leonid himself - apart from anything else he, such a wealthy man, had no motive - I never told Reinhold that.

I just let him sweat and worry and helped the police to find him.' She sighed. 'Such a dreadful shame they did not appear to be too interested.'

'Oh yes what a dreadful shame that is!'

Maria Gulcu physically bowed her head momentarily to his anger. 'I can understand-'

'No you can't! You can't even begin to!' Robert touched one shaking hand up to his puffy, livid face and for a moment it looked as if he was about to cry. But then he collected himself. 'I have, I think, done something truly terrible and, and ... all right, indirectly, I think I may have done it because of this - this business. I was ill, some years ago, mentally ill, and even now when I become agitated I find that I can get out of control. And' - he looked down at the floor now - 'I have been so agitated about Natalia. Because ... because I think that I knew all along, Mrs Gulcu - not all about this bloody Byzantine Russian stuff - but because I knew that she was at Meyer's apartment and even though you say that she hasn't killed anyone, she might just as well have. Hiding her brother's evidence and leading me ...'And then he looked up at her, his eyes shining. 'But I loved her, you see.'

The old woman nodded her head in recognition. 'I know.

Just as Mr Gulcu loved me. He was a good man too and had I been someone other than who I am, a fact he both protected and respected, I could have had a very good life with him. But I chose to continue to consort with people like Leonid. I chose to be different and distance myself from poor Mehmet's world. And when he died, leaving me all of his money and his property, I chose to bring our children up as Russians - to make them wear the clothes of those long since dead - to try, through them, to rebuild the blood-line I had contaminated with Mehmet.'

Robert, his teeth now gritted in anger, said, 'You're a very evil woman, Mrs Gulcu - princess or no princess!'

She shrugged. 'I should have been more careful with regard to what I said in front of poor Misha. I let my desire to be always first in everybody's affections get the better of me. And spite, of course, too. Knowing what Leonid really was and hearing the boy endlessly praise the man was, on this occasion, just a little too much. But then as you can see, the boy always looks as if he doesn't have a thought in his head. But there. If only I had listened to Leonid long ago I - I would have been more careful.'

'Meaning?'

'I mean, Mr Cornelius, that the one and only reason why poor Leonid drank to excess, as he did almost all of his life, was because he didn't trust me. Rescue or no rescue, he had killed my family, my very special, divine family, and he knew that one day I would come for him. I didn't believe it and indeed I used to laugh when he said such things, but when one of my little ones killed Leonid it was in a way my hand that was reaching out for him. Indirectly, if you will, but I killed Leonid. I have even, during the last few days, wondered whether I said the things that I did in front of Misha to obtain just that result.'

Silence, with the exception of the sobbing that was now coming from Natalia's mother, sat like a stone between all the occupants of the room - an absence waiting to be filled.

Characteristically, it was Maria Gulcu who finally obliged.

'And so now we must go to the police,' she said. 'I do not want to but-'

She was interrupted by her daughter who, still sobbing, flung herself across her mother's bed, shouting out words that Robert Cornelius could not understand. The old woman stroked her hair and attempted to calm her even though, and to Robert's open disgust, her face was still as hard as granite.

'My daughter is upset, Mr Cornelius,' she explained, 'because the plan has always been that one day we all return to Russia in triumph. With the collapse of the old Soviet Union, that even looked possible - until now. God alone knows what will happen to us now.'

Returning suddenly to the reason why he was there in the first place, Robert Cornelius shook his head and then said, 'But what of Natalia? I mean, I presume she is at ] her work?'

'Yes,' the old woman replied, 'and she will be found there by the police once I have spoken to them.'

And then Misha spoke again. Maria's reply was bellowed sharply at him. 'In English please, Misha! Mr Cornelius cannot understand!'

Robert forced himself to look at him. The identical features on the boy's face made him flinch. He'd done things he hadn't even dreamt about before for that face.

In hideously halting English he cried, 'I not want to go to prison, Grandmama! Police they even kill me for it!'

'Ah, Misha!' She sighed deeply and looked at Robert.

'What can I say? You hear he knows what will happen to him and I cannot deny it. He will confess to them as he did eventually to me. I know this. But what can I do?'

Misha screamed. It was a high, piercing, womanly sound.

'I am Romanov, you cannot!'

Every eye in the room was upon him. His agitation made him hop from foot to foot, his arms wound protectively round his body. Robert had a sudden and terrible feeling that the boy was about to go seriously out of control.

He had seen people like him before - psychotics winding themselves higher and higher up into panic until the only way to bring them down was via a needle or a straitjacket.

All the old fears returned in a huge, heavy rush. The boy's eyes were on him, narrowed, and he knew what he was thinking. It was his fault, this foreigner had messed it all up, and Robert knew that it was only a matter of time before he either raged insanely or attacked. He had to remain calm, even though he could feel his fear mounting at an alarming rate. He had to make some gesture towards him that the boy would understand.

Nobody else in the room saw the danger. Maria leant back against her pillows and just said 'Sssh!' very softly under her breath. She knew that Misha wasn't really a bad boy, he wouldn't do anything to harm anyone.

'Misha ...' Robert reached towards the boy, his hand open in a classic gesture of giving and friendship.

But the boy pulled away as if scalded. His long arm wheeled backwards through the air. As it descended it just caught the edge of the glass shade that enclosed the big candle from the bottom of the curtain.

Chapter 24.

'No, don't push, Mrs ikmen, pant instead!'

Fatma screwed up her face and small painful gasping sounds came from her mouth.

The eldest of her daughters, a wide-eyed twenty-year-old called Ci?ek, looked on in horror. 'But Mummy wants to push,' she told the doctor. 'It's hurting her!'

'Well, she can't yet!' She was young, she didn't like attending confinements and most of all she didn't like to be questioned by people who didn't understand anatomy.

'Your mother's cervix isn't dilated enough yet. If she pushes now she'll tear and I don't think any of us want that, do we!'

'No!' But her mother was in such pain! Her face was red and covered with sweat and her legs were already parted, they quivered on top of the plastic sheet below her, aching for delivery. Cicek looked at the large puddle of water and blood that had gathered down by Fatma's feet and wondered whether or not she should be thinking about clearing it up.

The doctor placed her fingers on Fatma's wrist and took her pulse. She didn't comment.

'Is she all right?'

'Your mother's doing very well,' replied the doctor, 'for a woman of her age.'

Fatma opened her eyes and looked up at her daughter.

'Where is your father? Where's Cetin!'

'He's on his way, Mummy.'

Fatma scowled. 'You don't have to humour me, you know!'

'He is!' But Cicek couldn't give it much conviction.

The doctor leant over the bed. 'Your contractions are coming every three minutes now, Mrs ikmen. You're still not fully dilated, but I can give you some pain relief which might help. Do you want that?'

'Yes!'

She walked over to her attache case and took out a syringe.