He glanced through the letters on his desk all of them from the diminishing band of exiles who scratched a living out in Siberia. There was nothing ostensibly from Aleksei he seemed to write to his son less and less these days, no doubt because his son never replied. Or at least, when he did, those letters were intercepted and destroyed by Yudin. But Aleksei was not stupid. He might easily have persuaded a fellow exile to slip something into one of his letters. They'd all need checking anyway, but not just yet. There was no hurry for them to be delivered.

Thoughts of Aleksei, along with those of the murder on Degtyarny Lane, began to intertwine in his mind. It was in that same house that Aleksei's mistress, the lovely although nowadays probably not so lovely Dominique, had lived and plied her trade. Yudin smiled at the memories of a time when he had so thoroughly duped Aleksei. It had been so simple; Yudin had enacted a little charade involving himself and a woman, knowing that Aleksei was watching. But what Aleksei had never been able to determine was whether that woman had been his lover, Dominique, or some other. It had been enough to convince him that Dominique had become a vampire, enough to persuade him to offer himself up to her as a willing victim. Yudin chuckled, imagining the scene in which Aleksei had awoken to discover that neither he nor his mistress had joined the undead. Yudin had not witnessed it, or heard tell of it in any detail. He knew simply that it must have taken place, because he had planned that it would. He had played Aleksei for such a prostak that even now Yudin could look back on it as his finest hour.

But the thought itself brought up another memory, a memory of thirteen years later Yudin lying on the frozen Neva, cradled in Aleksei's arms, a bullet from Aleksei's gun nestling in his heart. Aleksei had used that same word almost that same phrase.

'Oh, this is no simple checkmate, Iuda,' Aleksei had said. 'You've been fooled played for a prostak and now I'm going to tell you all about it.'

Aleksei had little known that, even in death, Yudin had chosen life, of a sort. He had grabbed the vial that hung around his neck and drunk it a vial of vampire's blood that would ensure that, though he might die, yet would he live again as a voordalak. Even so he had been genuinely fascinated to learn how Aleksei might have tricked him.

'Do go on, Lyosha,' he had said, and then, after drinking the blood, 'Go on, Lyosha.' Suddenly, for the first time, he remembered every word.

'Iuda,' Aleksei had said, patting him on his chest so as to amplify the pain of the bullet that lay there, 'I have beaten you.' Even then, it had been obvious he meant a greater victory than merely to have killed him.

'Carry on, Lyosha,' he had persisted. 'Tell me what you were going to say.' And then, 'Please, Lyosha, grant a dying man his wish.'

And then Yudin had noticed a change in Aleksei, a stiffening of his body that he had always suspected, but never been sure, indicated that Aleksei had guessed what Yudin had done, guessed that though he would die there on the cold, flat, frozen river, he would be reborn. Still Yudin had persisted.

'Please, tell me. How did you fool me?'

And at that point, Aleksei had relented changed his story. Yudin remembered his smile. 'I didn't, Iuda. I was pretending, but I won't lie to you. I could never devise a trick clever enough to fool you.'

In the past, Yudin's memories of the moment had been vague it had been so close to his death. But now it all came back to him with utter clarity. And in that same moment Aleksei's words made sense of another conundrum that had been puzzling Yudin much more recently: that of the inert nature of Tsar Aleksandr's blood. How could Aleksei's pretended or perhaps real trickery be related to that? The answer lay in the date. That scene on the frozen Neva had been played out in December 1825, just a month after the death of Tsar Aleksandr I.

And that was what lay at the heart of it: the reason that Aleksandr II's blood was immune to Zmyeevich's; the deception that Aleksei had wanted to reveal, but had hidden on realizing that Yudin would not die; the deception that was to be maintained for almost thirty years.

But now that deception was over. Yudin understood all. It was a simple enough concept, but it explained everything. Tsar Nikolai I might have died in Petersburg in February 1855, but in terms of the Romanov blood, that meant nothing.

The truth was that his predecessor, Tsar Aleksandr I, supposed to have died in Taganrog in 1825, had not died then and indeed had not died at all. It was the only explanation and it made perfect sense.

Aleksandr Pavlovich, Tsar of All the Russias, vanquisher of Napoleon Bonaparte, still lived.

'Madame Komarova.'

Tamara's body jerked upright, instantly awake, but her mind was still blurred by sleep. She looked around and saw the man who had spoken. She recognized him, but could not place him. He was small, almost as short as she was. His hair was grey and there wasn't much of it. His eyes had a yellow tint as they peered at her through his spectacles.

'Gribov,' she mumbled, not even realizing where in her memory the name had come from. She looked around her again. The room she was in was vast. Even in the dim light she could see it was full of books and doc.u.ments. One of them, she knew without understanding why, was of inestimable importance to her.

'You fell asleep,' said Gribov. 'You must have been here all night.' He began to tidy up the books and papers on the desk where she had been sitting, straightening out the ones that had been crumpled by her lying on them.

'No!' she shouted, memory pouring back into her consciousness as though through a broken dam. 'I found something.'

'Concerning Prince Volkonsky?'

That much she still couldn't remember, but she suspected not. She had been looking through the doc.u.ments for 1812 for almost a month; there were far more than Gribov had suggested, despite the French occupation. Last night, late last night, she had found something. She began searching, not knowing what she was looking for but recognizing those papers that she had already rejected and throwing them to the floor. Gribov diligently followed her around the table, picking them up.

'Got it!' she shouted at last.

She handed it to Gribov, who soon returned it to her, though she noted that he had allowed his eyes to scan twice across its contents.

'And how is this helpful?' he asked.

Tamara could not remember. She looked at the paper again, refreshing her knowledge of what she knew had been so exciting a discovery the previous night. 'You remember the murder last month, at Degtyarny Lane?' she asked.

'Sadly,' nodded Gribov.

'Well, this is the police report of another murder. It's dated 11 November 1812.'

'And?'

'And it's the same; exactly the same,' said Tamara, her eyes continuing to scan the doc.u.ment.

In truth, the similarity was not exact. The victim, Margarita Kirillovna, was found in an upstairs room at a bordello on Degtyarny Lane. It could only be the same building it was impossible to tell which room. She had suffered severe lacerations to the neck just like Irina Karlovna which were believed to be the cause of death. But then came the difference. Margarita Kirillovna had suffered an additional wound to the chest she had been stabbed in the heart. There had been no sign of that with Irina. The report also stated that this last wound was believed, due to the lack of bleeding from it, to have been inflicted some time after death. But only a fool would ignore the similarities on account of that one discrepancy.

'You suspect there might be a connection?' Many might have uttered the question with an air of disbelief, but from Gribov it came merely as an enquiry.

'I don't know,' she said, still reading. 'I don't know.'

But she knew how she was going to find out. At the bottom of the page was a list of witnesses three of them. She opened her own notebook, ready to write the names down, but discovered that she had already done so, the previous night. She checked with the doc.u.ment, but she had made no mistakes. She had three witnesses to a crime of four decades earlier: Pyetr Pyetrovich Polyakov.

Domnikiia Semyonovna Beketova.

Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov.

CHAPTER IX.

TAMARA WAS RETRACING her steps. She had moved away from the tables and shelves that represented the time of the Patriotic War and returned to those for the 1820s, where she had found so little information concerning her own early life. But she had seen something among those records, something which she had dismissed as of no interest at the time. With regard to the discovery of her parentage it was irrelevant, but for the moment she was more interested in murder, both in 1812 and in 1855 and perhaps also in 1825.

She couldn't remember what the file had looked like, but she had some idea of where she had found it. It had been on a bookcase, close to the left-hand end, on either the second or third shelf from the top. There were three bookcases for 1825, each looking very much the same as the next. The picture of her pulling out the file was clear in her memory and she could isolate its position down to four or five doc.u.ments, but still she could only guess at the correct set of shelves.

It was in the third bookcase that she found it.

Murders. Moscow. 1825. Unsolved.

There were twenty-two separate cases listed, mostly of women, mostly where a husband in a legal or, often, less formal capacity was the obvious suspect. That these deaths were listed as unsolved was more a reflection of the innate, unspoken freemasonry of the male s.e.x than of any lack of evidence. But it was not these that had caught her attention. They might have involved the deaths of young women, but the precise mechanisms of those deaths did not correspond with what she had read about Margarita Kirillovna, or seen first-hand with Irina Karlovna.

Then she found the doc.u.ment that she had remembered so clearly, after only a glance at it months before. It was dated Tuesday, 29 September 1825 and concerned the discovery of the body of a Kremlin guard in Red Square. To be precise, the body had been inside the Lobnoye Mesto, the circular enclosure to the north of Saint Vasiliy's from where, years ago, imperial decrees had been read out. In that case the victim was a man, whose body had been found in the open air. There was little to connect it with either of the two deaths in which Tamara was interested, but one thing was unmistakably familiar: the manner of his death.

His throat had been cut, cut deeply with a jagged knife so that a handful of the flesh was missing. And the wound was only to the left-hand side of the neck. The report on Margarita Kirillovna had not been clear on that last point, but Tamara could certainly remember it as being true of Irina.

Continuing through the file she found a cl.u.s.ter of similar murders; not cl.u.s.tered around a single location they were spread all over Moscow but cl.u.s.tered in time. There had been five other deaths, all in the s.p.a.ce of a week at the end of September and beginning of October 1825. All but one of the victims were men. The first was a footman. His body was found on Great Bronnaya Street. That wasn't so very far from Degtyarny Lane, but it meant little. The second had perhaps the most detail, probably on account of the status of the victim. He was a prince Prince Victor Markovich Kavyerin. The body had been found to the east of the city in Kitay Gorod. There was even a sketch of the wounds again they matched what Tamara had witnessed for herself. There was also a brief description of what was known of the prince's lifestyle. The word 'h.o.m.os.e.xual' had been underlined three times.

The one female victim had been found floating in the river. There was not even a name for her and the description of her wounds was minimal, but enough to convince Tamara. It had been enough to arouse the interest of someone else too. A note had been scrawled on the paper, reading 'compare V. M. K.' The similarity to Prince Kavyerin's wounds had been noted, but beyond that, no one seemed to have made any effort to connect the five deaths.

The last murder had occurred on 3 October. The body of a cavalry captain named Obukhov had been found in the street running alongside the Maly Theatre, lying in a pool of blood. The wound to the neck was described in scant detail, but Tamara had little doubt that a more thorough investigation would have revealed all the hallmarks with which she was becoming familiar. She scanned through the report and noticed the names of two witnesses were listed also both cavalry officers. The first a Lieutenant Batenkov meant nothing to her, but at the sight of the second name she clicked her tongue with excitement.

Colonel Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov (O.K.) Whatever coincidence there might be in the similarities of the deaths of Margarita Kirillovna and Irina Karlovna, s.p.a.ced forty-three years apart, was as nothing compared to the fact the same Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov was listed as a witness to both the 1812 murder and to one of those of 1825. Furthermore, the reasons that neither of those two crimes had been subject to anything like a full investigation now also became clear, based simply on those two letters that the investigating officer had so diligently noted after Danilov's name.

O.K. stood for Osobennaya Kantselyariya the Special Chancellery. It was the predecessor to her own organization, the Third Section, which had replaced it only months after that last murder took place. It would have been as easy for Danilov to shoo away the regular police before they could reveal anything too damaging as it had been for Yudin to orchestrate the investigation into the murder of Irina, and thereby ensure that nothing came of it.

It did not mean that Danilov was the murderer any more than Yudin was but his presence in both 1812 and 1825 required explanation, and beyond that demanded an answer to the simple question, where was Danilov now?

The doc.u.ment in her hands had one last piece of information which went some way to answering that. A huge arrow pointed at Danilov's name and at its end a single word, in a different hand from the rest of the report.

It seemed that Colonel Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov had not been quite as loyal to the tsar as might be expected from a man of his position. As had evidently been discovered probably only months after the original report was written Danilov had been a Decembrist.

Yudin fumed. He had been made a fool of. Aleksei didn't have the brains for it didn't have the imagination and yet for thirty years he'd been able to convince Yudin that Tsar Aleksandr I had died in Taganrog; convince the whole of Russia. The whole of the world.

It was unthinkable, and yet it was the one, simple conclusion that made sense of all that Yudin had observed in the new tsar's blood. If Aleksandr I were alive somewhere, then any power that Zmyeevich might be able to exert over the Romanovs could be focused only on him. He wondered if Zmyeevich had worked that much out. It didn't matter. Even if Zmyeevich were to track Aleksandr down and complete the process of making him a voordalak, it would be of little benefit. Power in Russia had pa.s.sed to his brother Nikolai and now to his nephew Aleksandr II. Aleksandr I had made himself invincible by becoming inconsequential. Yudin laughed out loud at the genius of it.

Gribov turned and glanced at him, but said nothing. They were walking along the deep, dark corridor that led to the Kremlin's archives. It was a convenience that had played no small part in Yudin's choice of office the fact that it gave him access to a network of tunnels and pa.s.sages beneath the citadel that would have made Daedalus himself proud. He could find his way almost anywhere and never have to venture into the daylight. It would have tested even his patience to await the safety of darkness before making that short journey, but he would have managed it. What was a few hours compared to the years during which Aleksei and Aleksandr and G.o.d knew who else had been laughing at him?

And it was the 'who else' that mattered most. If others were in on the subterfuge and they must have been then they might still know where Aleksandr was. He would be seventy-seven now. He could die at any moment, or live for another decade or more. It was a margin of uncertainty that Yudin could not endure.

They had arrived at the entrance to the library. Gribov opened the door and stepped inside. In the distance, through the forest of shelves, he glimpsed a single, glowing lamp. He'd also noted that Gribov did not need to unlock the door.

'There's someone in here?' he asked.

'Madame Komarova,' replied Gribov.

Yudin grunted. He would be interested to learn what she was up to, but it wasn't the matter that most demanded his attention. 'I want everything on the last days of Aleksandr Pavlovich,' he said.

Gribov led him over to the right of the cavernous chamber, through the mess of papers and books to an area that appeared much tidier than the rest.

'Papers relating to the imperial household are better organized than most,' Gribov explained. 'Even so ...'

Yudin followed the direction that Gribov's hand indicated and found himself facing a huge bookcase, taller than either of them and three times as wide as it was tall. Books, papers and files lay in disorganized heaps.

'Is this all?' he asked.

Gribov didn't catch his sarcasm. 'These shelves cover his reign. There's more on his youth, if you're interested.'

'This will do.'

'I could stay and a.s.sist.'

That was the last thing Yudin wanted. 'No,' he replied. 'I'll manage. But stay down here. I'll call if I need you.'

Gribov departed, and within seconds had vanished into the shadows. Aleksandr had become tsar at the age of twenty-three. The shelves in front of Yudin represented his entire adult life at least in the eyes of those who had fallen for Aleksei's trickery. Thankfully, Yudin needed only to concern himself with the final weeks of that life; somewhere, he presumed, around the right-hand end of the bottom shelf. He got down on his hands and knees and looked, pulling out several volumes, pamphlets and files and placing them on the floor beside him. When he was done, he carried them to a table and read them in the glowing lamplight.

There were a number of letters from Aleksandr himself, and from his wife, Yelizaveta Alekseevna, but they were lacking in the sort of detail that Yudin required. There was a copy of an account published only the previous year by a Scottish doctor named Robert Lee a Fellow of the Royal Society, just as Yudin had once been, under the name Cain. They had not met. Nor did it appear that Lee had met Aleksandr for more than one short encounter, weeks before his death. Everything else in his journal was second-hand gossip; enough to please a British audience.

Baron Korff's official rendering of events was far more detailed, but again written long after they had taken place. Its purpose was clear: to remove any lingering doubt as to whether Nikolai had had the right to succeed his brother. To that end, it did not dwell too much on the details of Aleksandr's pa.s.sing.

The most useful items were two diaries, written by Aleksandr's two personal physicians, Doctors Wylie and Tarasov. How the doc.u.ments had found their way here was hard to guess, but they provided much detail of the tsar's final hours, in little of which Yudin placed any trust. That they had been rewritten to fit the official story of events was obvious, not least because both clearly a.s.serted that His Majesty had died on 19 November 1825, which Yudin knew to be untrue. It was conceivable that the two doctors were themselves victims of the charade, but Yudin felt it unlikely.

He had never expected to find anything so direct as an account of how Aleksandr had cheated death, but after a few hours he had pieced together all he needed a list of those present at Aleksandr's pa.s.sing, at least some of whom would have been required to a.s.sist in the deception: the tsaritsa, Baron Diebich, Dr Wylie, Dr Tarasov and Prince Volkonsky. And, of course, Aleksei. And therein lay another reason to doubt the journals of Wylie and Tarasov neither of them made any mention of Aleksei's presence in the tsar's retinue during the entire length of the stay in Taganrog, or during their excursions to the Crimea. If they had managed to expurgate that from their memoirs, what else might they have missed out?

Yudin looked at the list again. It was disappointing. The tsaritsa had died within a year of her husband. That was suspicious in itself. Might her death too have been a pretence, so that she could rejoin the man she loved? Yudin doubted it, but whether she was with Aleksandr or rotting in her grave, she would be of no help with the current problem. Volkonsky was also dead since 1852. As far as Yudin could recall, Diebich was dead too. As to the doctors, he didn't know.

It took him only a little more searching to find the information he needed he was, in this library, surrounded by information. He'd been correct Diebich had succ.u.mbed to cholera in 1831. Wylie had lasted longer, dying only the previous year at the age of eighty-five. That left only Tarasov and Danilov still around to reveal to Yudin the secrets of so many years before. They were both old men now. Yudin knew Aleksei's location; four thousand versts away in Siberia. He had no idea where Tarasov was, though it was unlikely to be as remote.

But before Yudin could act, a little more research into both men was required.

Tamara saw a figure flitting among the shadows. She had heard voices earlier, but now there was silence. She looked at her pocket watch. It was heavy and would be considered ungainly for a woman. It had been Vitya's, and one of only two possessions that never left her. The other was a small, oval icon of Christ which hung around her neck on a silver chain. She'd had it since before she could remember. When she looked into the Saviour's kind eyes, it made her think of her real father, but she could not recall why. Vitya's watch told her it was almost midnight. She should have been at Degtyarny Lane keeping an eye on things, but they could manage without her. She was far happier here.

She saw the movement again and realized it could only be Gribov. He was here late too, but she was pleased he was. She rose and went over to him. By the time he had reached the point at which she had seen him, he had moved on. A moment later, she caught sight of him again. It seemed wrong to shout in the dark, studious library, and so it took her several minutes to finally catch up with him.

'Arkadiy Osipovich,' she said softly.

He turned and his face broke into a slight smile. 'Still here?' he asked. 'I take it your studies are bearing fruit.'

She smiled back. 'To a degree,' she said cautiously. 'They've led me on to another matter.'

'Indeed?'

'I take it we have records on all those involved in the Decembrist Uprising.'

'Naturally. To gather and collate information on men of their kind is the raison d'etre of this department. Such doc.u.ments receive the utmost attention.'

'Can you show me?'

He led the way, holding his lantern out in front of him, but moving with a swiftness that suggested he could have found his way about the place even if blindfolded.

'Here we are,' he said.

Tamara peered at the shelves as Gribov held up the light for her. They seemed to be well ordered, with the name of each man written on the spine of his file. She flicked through them, softly reading the names out loud. 'Grigoriev, Gusev, Demidov, Dmitriev. Oh!'

'A problem?' asked Gribov.

'It seems to be missing.' The shelf was not tightly packed, so there was no obvious gap where the file should have been. Tamara began scanning around, almost at random.

'Which name were you looking for?'

'Danilov,' she said.

Gribov went to the end of the bookcase and examined the manifest that was pinned there. 'We certainly have a Danilov listed.'

'Then where is it?' snapped Tamara, regretting that her irritation was being vented on Gribov.

'I have it.' The voice was not Gribov's it was deep and slow and calm, but still familiar. Both Tamara and Gribov turned to where the voice had come from. There was another block of shelves directly beside them, but the flicker of lamplight spilled from behind. Tamara peered round and caught sight of the man who had spoken, sitting at a table with the file in front of him.