'I think I know what it all adds up to. The assassin your friend's grandfather saved the Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana from in Cowes in August 1909 was Karl Vanting. It was hushed up because Tsar Nicholas the Second knew he was his illegitimate half-brother. Vanting was banished to the Danish Virgin Islands in the hope he could be reformed. It sort of worked, at least for a while. But in 1918 he went to Russia with the American army and vanished. Then he turned up in Finland with a young companion who was never officially identified. Well, I think that companion was or became Peder Aksden. I think Sir Peter Bark used some of the Tsar's money to buy the young man a new life in Denmark and to buy the silence of those people who thought they knew who he really was.

'And who were those people? Falenius gave us a clue when he changed the name of his bank. Saukko. Otter. Tolmar Aksden went to Norse mythology for the name of his company. Mjollnir. Thor's magic hammer. I think he followed the example of the man who gave him the capital to start Mjollnir. But what's the mythical significance of an otter? In Finnish myth, Tuonela is the land of the dead, from which no traveller returns. The only exception was the hero Vainomoinen. He crossed the river marking the boundary of Tuonela and was greeted by Tuonetar, goddess of the dead. She offered him some of the wondrous ale of Tuonela. He drank his fill. Then, while he slept it off, Tuonetar's son built an iron net across the river, so that Vainomoinen couldn't leave and would be trapped for ever. But, when he woke and saw what had been done, Vainomoinen changed himself into an otter and swam through the net back to the land of the living.

'In 1918, Russia was the land of the dead. Vanting's young companion escaped by changing himself into someone else. Hakon Nydahl persuaded his sister to take the young man in as a kind of replacement for the child she'd lost, supplied false records of his birth in Jutland and money for his new family. The money came through Falenius Bank, later Saukko, from the Tsar's secret accounts controlled by Sir Peter Bark. Paavo Falenius skimmed off some for his own use. Some of the rest ended up in Mjollnir. And some in Nydahl's safe at his apartment in Copenhagen. The markkaa his housekeeper stole were 1939 issue, right? Well, the signs were growing all through 1939 that Stalin would invade Finland. Falenius probably sent a large chunk of money to Nydahl because he was afraid the Soviets would overrun the country and close him down. He must have thought they'd send him to a gulag if his double dealing was found out.

'As it happened, the Soviets were never able to conquer Finland. The Germans got involved again. And Field Marshal Mannerheim saved the country, as every Finnish schoolboy knows. So, Paavo Falenius lived on. And so did his bank. He died in 1957. He has a very fine tomb in Hietaniemi Cemetery. Poor Peder Aksden was dead by then, of course. An accident with a sickle, his daughter said? I can believe it. Sharp blades are dangerous things for haemophiliacs to handle.

'You see now, Richard? The Tsar's money. The nameless young man from Russia. The change of identity to slip through the net. Hakon Nydahl's sister thought she was adopting the Tsar's haemophiliac son, Alexei. Crazy, no? But they were crazy times. No one knew for sure what had happened to the family. Rumour, rumour, rumour. But nothing certain. Vanting told some tale of rescuing the boy to atone for trying to kill his sisters. Did Falenius believe him? Maybe. More likely he reckoned he could persuade others to believe him. Was that how he extracted the money from Bark? By threatening him with a convincing impostor? Or by convincing him the young man wasn't an impostor? Dagmar, the Dowager Empress, was still in the Crimea at the time. She didn't leave until spring 1919. So, Bark had to act without consulting her. And he had to stick by his actions. Maybe, if he believed Vanting's story, he thought it was better to let the Tsarevich heal his body and mind in the seclusion of the Danish countryside and to keep his survival secret even from his grandmother in case the Soviets sent assassins after him. The young man may have had no clear memory of who he was or what had happened to him. If he was Alexei, he'd been through a traumatic experience. But, then again, maybe Bark never believed the story for a moment. Maybe he paid up to avoid the damage a false Alexei, manipulated by Falenius, could do. The same goes for Nydahl. He knew Vanting from his days in the West Indies. What did he think he was getting himself involved in? Or was he just following orders from Dagmar's nephew, King Christian the Tenth of Denmark, to bury the problem before the old lady came home? The possibilities are endless. We'll never know now.

'Whatever the truth behind it was, the plan worked well. But then a young woman showed up in Germany claiming to be Alexei's sister, Anastasia. And many people believed her, including several members of the Romanov family. If she was formally acknowledged, she'd get control of her father's estate and find out where a lot of his money had gone. So, she had to be stopped. And what better way could there be of doing that than supplying a set of fingerprints that proved she couldn't be Anastasia? Bark had made powerful friends since arriving in London. I think he arranged through them to send Clem Hewitson to Copenhagen at some point in 1925, probably the autumn, with the fake prints he was instructed to claim he'd taken on board the imperial yacht in August 1909. He and Nydahl were going to travel to Berlin, where Anna Anderson was in hospital, fingerprint her and expose her as a fraud.

'But something went wrong. Maybe Hewitson started to think Anna was genuine and wasn't willing to cheat her out of her inheritance. Or maybe he found out from Nydahl what was really going on. Bark's friends in the British Establishment wouldn't have known about his arrangement with Falenius. If Hewitson exposed that, there'd have been a big rethink. In the end, though, it would still have been hushed up. The fingerprint plot against Anna Anderson would have been abandoned, but Bark's other deal would have been quietly overlooked. The Tsar's unclaimed deposits at the Bank of England, which Bark controlled, bought a lot of silence. Anyway, Anna Anderson never did win acknowledgement as Anastasia, did she? They wore her down over the years.

'Clem Hewitson, the English policeman, and Hakon Nydahl, the Danish courtier, must have trusted each other after that more than they did their superiors. I think they decided to keep a record of everything that happened, which they could use to defend themselves if they ever needed to. I think that's what the letters were all about: insurance. I doubt Nydahl ever told his relatives he'd written them. It was a clever idea: documents in Danish, stored in England; as good as a secret code. If you could read them, you'd know whether Nydahl believed Peder Aksden truly was the Tsarevich. If he didn't, then you'd also know some of the Tsar's money, intended for his children, was stolen by a Finnish banker and used by a Danish businessman to create his own empire. Tolmar Aksden: Tsar of all the enterprises. If I'm right, he badly needed to destroy those letters. And now he has. All that's left are the fake fingerprints. On their own, they prove nothing.

'I'm sorry, Richard. But that's how I see it. It all ends in nothing.'

FORTY-SIX.

'I'm not going to let them get away with it,' said Eusden, breaking the silence that had followed Tallgren's bleak conclusion.

'Brave words, Richard.' Tallgren smiled at him. 'I would have spoken them myself once.'

'But it's worse than theft and fraud, Pekka. They've killed people, including Tolmar's ex-wife. Pernille was actually trying to help him, for God's sake.'

'She should have known better.'

'Is that all you can say?'

Tallgren looked surprised by the flare of anger in Eusden's voice. 'Anteeksi. I forgot you knew her. What was she like?'

'A fine and brave person.'

Tallgren sighed. 'I am sorry. But... they've always been ruthless. Consider what happened to Karl Vanting in the end.'

'What did happen?'

'He was found shot dead at his lodgings in Hakaniemi on New Year's Eve, 1925. It was a poor area of the city then. Whatever money Paavo Falenius gave him, he must have lost it. Then, perhaps, he asked for more. The police decided it was suicide. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't. I saw the television news this evening. They interviewed the officer in charge of investigating the explosion at Osmo's house. He talked about a gas leak as the likeliest explanation.'

'They'll find traces of explosive.'

'Will they? I guess that depends how thorough they are. Even if they do, what evidence do you think they'll find that Tolmar Aksden had anything to do with it?'

'None,' Eusden admitted.

'Let me show you something.' Tallgren rose stiffly to his feet and left the room, patting Eusden consolingly on the shoulder as he passed.

There was the sound of a filing-cabinet drawer being slid open and of papers being shuffled. Then Tallgren was back in the kitchen, carrying a bulging file. He placed it carefully on the table. On the cover was a single word written in felt-tip capitals: WANTING.

'The fruit of my research. Not very sweet, I'm afraid.'

'Wanting is... Vanting?'

'Ah. The spelling. Yes. The name's probably German originally. The W is pronounced like a V, of course. In English, it makes a sick kind of joke, doesn't it? He wanted a lot. Revenge. Wealth. Success. He didn't get any of it.' Tallgren flicked the file open. 'My notes are all in Finnish. There are some documents in Danish and Russian also. So, nothing for you to read. But something for you to see.' He slid out an A5-sized photograph, glossily printed, though the picture itself was grainy and indistinct, a black-and-white shot of a crowd of people on some steps. In one of the margins was written Helsingin Sanomat 11 Huhtikuu 1957. 'This shows some of the mourners leaving Helsinki Cathedral after Paavo Falenius's funeral. Take a look at those three particularly.'

Tallgren pointed to a short, middle-aged man near the top of the steps, who seemed to be conversing with two other men, one older, one much younger. All three were dressed in dark overcoats. The youngest man was bare-headed, but the other two wore dark Homburgs, the brims pulled down so that only the lower halves of their faces could be seen.

'Eino Falenius, Hakon Nydahl and Tolmar Aksden. There they are, Richard. Caught together, for once. They say Eino looked a lot like his father. He was in his forties then. Nydahl was in his seventies. And Aksden was... just eighteen.'

Eino Falenius was a sleek, elegantly tailored businessman running to fat, with a smudge of moustache and a confidential air. He had his hand on Hakon Nydahl's shoulder. The elderly Dane was thin and straight as a pencil, a walking cane clutched in front of him, his gaze fixed inscrutably on Falenius. Tolmar Aksden, meanwhile, was barely recognizable as the bulky, assertive figure he was to appear in the pages of the very same newspaper forty years on. He was tall and slim, a boyish lock of hair falling over his unlined brow, his face clear and open, yet also watchful, studying Falenius with the faintest of frowns, concentrating on something that was being said or something he had noticed.

'What was a teenager from a farm in Jutland doing at an eminent Finnish banker's funeral, eh? And not just in the congregation, but conversing afterwards with the banker's son? This was long before he set up Mjollnir or did business with Saukko. The official version of Tolmar Aksden's life has him pulling sheep out of ditches in 1957, not fraternizing with Helsinki money men. So, what's it all about? I asked Arto Falenius that. I asked him how he explained it. Do you know what he said? "I don't have to explain it to someone like you." And he smiled when he said it. Such a smile. I wish now I'd punched him in his smiling face. Well, it couldn't have gone any worse for me if I had, could it? Someone like me, Richard. Someone like you. They don't have to account to us.'

'We'll see about that.'

'What do you intend to do?'

It was a good question. And the answer was only just beginning to form in Eusden's mind. Run away? Give up? Write it all off as Marty's folly that he had no stake in? He could not do it. The rest of his life would diminish into an apologetic murmur if he did not at least try to bring Pernille's murderers to justice. 'Do you have a tape recorder?'

'Yes.'

'Can I borrow it?'

'Sure, but-'

'Do you know where Arto Falenius lives?'

'Yes. He owns a villa near Kaivopuisto Park. The embassy district. Very smart. His father and grandfather lived there before him. The Villa Norsonluu, in Itinen Puistotie. You're thinking of going there?'

'Tolmar Aksden's out of town. So, it has to be Falenius. He's probably the easier of the two to crack anyway.'

'Crack?'

'I'll make him explain to someone like me. On tape.'

'He'll never agree to do that.'

'I don't propose to give him a choice in the matter. Do you know anything about firearms?'

'Well, I did my eight months in the army. They made me fire a rifle. Plus take it apart and put it back together again.'

'That's more than I've ever done. I've got a gun, you see. An automatic pistol. In my coat. I've no intention of using it. But I need to look as if I know how to. And I don't want any accidents.'

'You're going to force a confession out of Falenius at gunpoint?'

'Exactly.'

'Are you crazy?'

'Probably.'

'Even if you could, it wouldn't... prove anything legally.'

'I don't care about that. I'll have it. And I'll make what use of it I can.'

'You are crazy.'

'I'm not asking you to go with me, Pekka. Just give me the tape recorder and show me how the gun works. Then wish me luck.'

Eusden slept for a few hours on the sofa in Tallgren's lounge, his sleep the dreamless unconsciousness of utter exhaustion. He woke before dawn, reluctantly ate some porridge and less reluctantly drank a mug of strong black coffee. Then Tallgren drove him over the bridges of Suomenlinna through the frozen twilight to the quay in time for the first ferry of the day. Tallgren had done his best to explain the mechanics of the gun and the intricacies of his tape recorder. Beyond that he only ventured the opinion that what Eusden was doing was madness. An admirable kind of madness, perhaps, but madness nonetheless.

'I fear you're about to make the biggest mistake of your life, Richard,' he said as Eusden climbed out of the car.

'I don't think so,' Eusden replied with a wry smile. 'A bigger mistake would be to do nothing.'

FORTY-SEVEN.

The cream gables of the Villa Norsonluu would have glowed warmly in summer sunshine, bowered in greenery, doves cooing peacefully. Late winter dawn revealed a different place. Snow obscured most of the roof, coated the branches of the leafless trees and blanketed the garden in white. There was no sound or movement from the dovecot that Eusden had seen through the boundary hedge, nor from the house behind it.

Now that he was standing there, alone, surrounded by silence, Eusden began to wonder if what he had embarked on was indeed an act of madness. He looked down the road and saw in the distance the Tricolour and the Union Jack flying over the French and British Embassies. Of all the places in all the world for him to do what he was about to do, this had to be potentially one of the most scandalous, the most ruinous, most irresponsible of all.

And what, when it came down to it, was he going to do? He had forgotten to ask Tallgren if Falenius lived alone. The size of the house suggested not. Was he married? Did he have children? Did Eusden seriously intend to force his way into some scene of domestic normality, brandishing a gun, issuing demands, crossing a line he could never step back over?

The entrance to the villa was sealed by a high locked gate. There was no camera in sight, though there might of course be one on the house, ready to record any incursion he made. He stood in the lee of the hedge, willing himself to act, facing down the doubts and fears that swarmed in his brain. The railing-topped wall behind him was scaleable, the hedge penetrable. It was the only way to get in. He had to attempt it. And soon. The longer he delayed, the likelier he was to be spotted.

Suddenly, there was a sound, breaking the silence. A door was opening, electronically operated. Eusden peered through the hedge, but could see nothing. Then a car engine started in a throaty growl. And in the same instant the gates at the entrance whirred into operation, swinging back on their expensively automated hinges. There was a rumble of fat tyre on gritted snow. A shape, low, pale and metallic, moved somewhere beyond the hedge.

Falenius was leaving. And Eusden had to stop him. He ran to the gate and reached into his pocket for the gun. The driveway curved out of sight towards the house. He stood waiting for the car to come into view, waiting and wondering what he should do. Then it appeared: a Bentley, silver-grey and sleekly profiled, nosing round the corner. A glimpse of the driver was enough. It was Arto Falenius.

If Eusden drew the gun, what, he asked himself, would Falenius do? Stop? Or accelerate towards him? Could that raked and tinted windscreen possibly be bullet-proof? There had to be another way, one that was safer for both of them. He dropped to his knees and sprawled across the pavement, blocking the entrance.

The Bentley came to a halt in the gateway. Falenius gave the horn two short blasts. Eusden did not move. All he could see of the car from where he lay was the headlamp array, the number plate and the radiator grille, with the distinctive Bentley B above it. He heard the engine cooler roar, then the driver's door slam. Arto Falenius, pinstripe-suited as in his newspaper photograph, strode towards him, gleaming brogues crunching on grit and ice. He said something in Finnish that sounded impatient. Eusden made a show of struggling to his feet.

'Sorry,' he mumbled. 'I must've slipped.'

'Are you OK?' Falenius asked, with little obvious concern.

'Yes. Fine, thanks. But you aren't.' Eusden pulled the gun from his pocket and pointed it at Falenius's midriff. 'Do exactly as I say.'

'What is this?' Falenius looked shocked and angry and alarmed in equal measure.

'What do you think?'

'You want... money?'

'No. I want a ride. And a talk.' Eusden kept the gun trained on Falenius as he walked to the passenger door of the Bentley and opened it. 'Get in. We're leaving.'

'You can't do this.'

'But I am doing it. Get in. Now.'

Falenius was breathing rapidly as he moved to the car. Eusden lowered himself carefully into the passenger seat as Falenius settled behind the wheel. The doors clunked shut, sealing off the chill of the morning.

'Drive to the seafront.'

'Who are you?'

'Richard Eusden.'

'I've... never heard of you.'

'Really? Well, your good friend Tolmar Aksden has heard of me. And it's him we're going to talk about. Start moving.'

Traffic on the seafront road was light and none of it was stopping to admire the view of the frozen harbour, covered with snow and differing in appearance from Kaivopuisto Park on the other side of the road only by being flatter. When Falenius turned off the engine of the Bentley, his shallow breathing became audible in the muffled interior of the car. He did not look directly at Eusden, staring out instead through the windscreen at the grey hummocks of islands scattered across the white-carpeted sea. He moistened his lips and asked hoarsely, 'What do you want to know?'

'The truth.' Eusden propped the recorder on the dashboard between them and switched it on. 'In your very own words.'

'The truth... about what?'

'Your relationship with Tolmar Aksden.'

'He's the new owner of Saukko Bank. We're business associates. And friends. That's it.'

'Listen to me, Arto. I already know what you're going to tell me. But I need to hear you say it. On the record. So, don't lie to me. The consequences could be fatal. You understand?'

Falenius swallowed hard. 'I understand.'

'Good. Now, I'll ask you some questions. All you have to do is give me honest answers. Are we clear?'

'Yes.'

'You're Arto Falenius, son of Eino Falenius, grandson of Paavo Falenius, the founder of Saukko Bank. Correct?'

'Correct.'

'Where did Paavo get all his money from the huge influx of cash in the early nineteen twenties that no one seems able to account for?'