Hadfield nodded. 'The Mikhailovsky Manege.'

'Last Sunday Lord Dufferin was present at the parade with some of the other amba.s.sadors. Count von Plehve of the Justice Ministry was in the gallery too are you listening, Doctor?'

'I'm sorry, please it's nothing . . .' and Hadfield indicated with a light wave of the hand that the colonel should continue.

'The count made some pointed remarks about you.'

'What sort of remarks?'

'He mentioned a woman, a terrorist the Kovalenko woman someone you used to . . . meet . . .' The colonel was trying to be delicate.

'I have not seen Miss Kovalenko for some time.' Hadfield's thoughts were racing and he was struggling to appear calm.

'I'm sure I don't need to remind you that any suggestion of a British involvement with these people will embarra.s.s Her Majesty's government.'

'No. You don't need to remind me,' said Hadfield. 'As I informed the authorities, I met Miss Kovalenko at a clinic. She proved a capable nurse.'

'Yes. Yes. Well, I am sure a doctor is required to meet all sorts of people . . .' Gonne trailed off without conviction.

'Then if there is nothing else, Colonel, perhaps you'll excuse me?'

Colonel Gonne nodded curtly and stepped away from the window with the intention of escorting Hadfield from the room. But his sleeve caught a photograph at the edge of the desk and it fell to the floor with a splintering crash.

'd.a.m.n. Clumsy. I'm sorry, Doctor, I'm forgetting myself,' he said, bending to pick up the picture. 'My daughter.' He turned it over to show Hadfield the shattered face.

'It's only the gla.s.s . . . she's pretty.'

'Yes, well . . .' Colonel Gonne put the picture back on the table and walked over to the door. He was on the point of opening it when he turned suddenly to speak to Hadfield once more. 'Pretty girls . . . a word to the wise, Doctor. Take care. The secret police have spies everywhere.' He paused to make eye contact: 'You may not be as fortunate a second time.'

The police spy was waiting at the ice-bound pier outside the emba.s.sy, where the ferry left for the islands in spring. Hadfield did not give him a second glance. He could think of nothing but the parade at the manege, his mind swirling with the implications. That it should take a casual word from a British soldier who knew very little of the city. The emperor would pa.s.s the cheese shop on the Malaya Sadovaya before or after the parade. What were they planning? There was no need to rent a shop if they were going to shoot the tsar and they had rented bas.e.m.e.nt premises. Why? They were driving a gallery into the street. A mine. They were going to kill the tsar with a mine. He leaned back against the wall of the emba.s.sy, a cold sweat on his skin like a sickness. A mine. He was sure of it. And how many soldiers like the young Finn he had treated after the palace explosion would die this time? Head bent, fingers pressing hard on his forehead, he let out a long anguished groan.

39.

Collegiate Councillor Dobrshinsky picked up the surveillance log and, balancing it on his knee, began to turn its pages, marking pa.s.sages in pencil before transferring them to the notebook on the desk in front of him. It was after nine o'clock at night but Fontanka 16 was still bustling with agents and clerks, and through the open door he could hear the incessant chatter of the Baudot receiver with telegrams from gendarmeries all over the empire. The terrorists were summoning trusted supporters to the capital. It was gratifying in a way, because arrests in the city must have left them in a parlous state, but it was clear they were planning another attempt on the emperor's life. Barclay had extracted this piece of intelligence with a relish quite ungentlemanly from the traitor Kletochnikov. But he had not been able to supply the when and the wherefore. For now, they were obliged to rely on surveillance and informers in the hope that the fresh faces from the provinces would be careless and let something slip.

Sunday 21 February 1881 Dr Hadfield left his apartment at 12.30 a.m. He took a cab to the Nevsky Prospekt then walked down the Malaya Sadovaya and joined the crowd waiting for His Majesty. At a little before 2.00 p.m. the emperor left the manege with his escort to return to the palace. Hadfield watched him pa.s.s then walked to 24 Malaya Italyanskaya Street. An apartment in this house is occupied by an English newspaper correspondent . . .

Why was a well-to-do doctor with distinctly liberal if not republican views waiting in a frozen street on Sunday for a glimpse of the emperor? The special investigator had been concerned about security at the Sunday parade for a number of weeks, and the guard about the royal carriage had been doubled on his recommendation.

Dobrshinsky picked up a little hand bell from the desk and rang for the clerk in the outer office. 'Ask Agent Fedorov to step into my office, would you?'

'Did you organise a search of the buildings around the manege?' Dobrshinsky asked when Fedorov appeared.

'Yes, Your Honour, and in Italyanskaya Street.'

'The ca.n.a.l embankment?'

'No.'

'The Malaya Sadovaya?'

The agent shook his head.

'See to it then, as soon as possible.'

Dobrshinsky dismissed him and returned to the surveillance log on his knee. The Englishman had done nothing else of interest in the days since, and had made no effort to lose his police shadows although he was clearly aware of their presence. He turned to the previous day's report.

Sunday 21 February 1881 The suspect Trigoni was followed to Number 17 2nd Rota Izmailovsky District. He was seen leaving with a blonde woman with a big forehead. A police agent followed the girl but she eluded him on the Nevsky Prospekt. The suspect Trigoni returned to his furnished lodgings at 66 Nevsky Prospekt at 10.00 p.m. and did not leave it again that day.

The station in Odessa had warned them that Mikhail Trigoni had arrived in the city. He was another of the party's gentleman revolutionaries, the son of a general, with a weakness for expensive clothes that made him easy to follow. In his testimony, Goldenberg had referred to him by his English nickname of 'My Lord'.

Dropping the log on his desk, Dobrshinsky rose stiffly, fastidiously brushing the creases from his frock coat. This simple activity left him a little breathless, his heart beating faster than was comfortable. He was spending too many evenings at Fontanka 16 without the benefit of a soporifique. It was easier to think at home alone, easier to rest.

'Are today's reports ready?' he snapped at the clerk as he walked through his outer office.

'No, Your Honour.'

'Why not?'

Barclay was at the blackboard in the main inquiry room talking to an undercover agent. Drygin was one of the section's best, older than the rest, shrewder, with instinctive guile. He was still disguised as a country b.u.mpkin in a dirty padded kaftan, his grey beard and hair unkempt. Something in his restless movement suggested he had news of importance.

'Your Honour?' Barclay had seen him at the door. 'We have a fresh report.'

The collegiate councillor stepped over to join him at the board where the latest intelligence on the chief suspects was chalked alongside their photographs. Dobrshinsky had taken the idea of a rogue's gallery from a French crime journal and it was proving a useful tool.

'Drygin was following our friend Trigoni,' said Barclay, pointing to a fuzzy photograph of a young man in a student's uniform.

'Yes, Your Honour. A busy chap today. Really put me to the test.'

Drygin picked up his notebook and turned slowly to the correct page: 'The subject left his apartment late this morning a long breakfast in bed, perhaps then he walked along the Nevsky to a cheese shop on the Malaya Sadovaya. It is run by a couple called Kobozev. The shopkeeper is from somewhere near Voronezh-'

'The superintendent of the block says his papers are in order . . .' Barclay interrupted.

'The subject left at approximately midday and strolled over to the public library on the Bolshaya Sadovaya where he met a young woman small, about twenty-five, brown coat, brown hair, quite pretty-'

'Anna Kovalenko?' asked Dobrshinsky.

Drygin shrugged. 'She gave him a note. They were together five minutes at the most. Then I followed Trigoni to a restaurant on Nevsky where he had lunch. At about 2.30 p.m. he took a droshky to the Nikolaevsky Hospital. He gave the note to a porter, with instructions that it should be delivered at once. The porter delivered it to me first. It was addressed to a Dr Hadfield, just a couple of lines I'm sorry it's been so long. Tomorrow 22.00. With my love.'

'Good,' said Dobrshinsky. 'Then I want four of our best men with him tomorrow, and someone in the hospital. And no mistakes this time.'

The old man gave a respectful little bow then shuffled off in search of sustenance.

'I want that cheese shop searched, Vladimir Alexandrovich,' Dobrshinsky said when he had gone.

'Yes, Your Honour.'

'And I want you to take charge of Kovalenko. She's the one we want, but if we find them together we can bring him to trial too. Now,' Dobrshinsky turned back to the rogue's gallery, 'do you remember the names on the list we found in the hotel room on the Nevsky?'

'Bronstein's list? I think so: Mikhailov, Kovalenko, Morozov, Presnyakov, Goldenberg and Kviatkovsky.'

'All of them are dead or in prison except for Anna Kovalenko. Even this one,' and Dobrshinsky tapped his finger on the face of Nikolai Morozov. 'The gendarmes arrested him at the border last week. He was trying to cross into Russia on false papers.'

Barclay watched the special investigator, his chin in his hand, his little brown eyes flitting from photograph to photograph. He was greyer, thinner, wearier than when they had met over the body of the Jew in that dingy hotel room. The last two years had certainly taken their toll.

'His Majesty's still with us, of course,' said Dobrshinsky. 'For that we can be thankful. But are we any closer to winning? It isn't possible, is it?'

'It is possible to arrest the b.i.t.c.h Kovalenko,' Barclay replied. 'And there will be satisfaction in that after all this time.'

40.

Anna could not take her eyes off the jar. It was sitting on the kitchen table in front of her, the size of a small amphora of wine but with all the nitro-glycerine they needed to send the tsar and his entourage to a better place. In a few minutes one of the men would collect it and pa.s.s it with great care along a human chain to the end of the gallery. Then it would be packed between sandbags to direct the charge into the street above. The enterprise had almost come to grief more than once. The police had inspected the premises and questioned the shopkeeper and his wife, then one of the tunnellers cut a sewer pipe and flooded the cellar with effluent. The stench lingered in the shop for days.

In those fraught weeks Anna had felt too unwell to be of real service to her comrades. She had tried to hide her sickness but her room-mate had seen her more than once with her head bent over a bowl. And although she prevailed on Praskovia to say nothing, some of the others had noticed how pale she looked and that the slightest thing would bring her close to tears. No one was used to seeing Anna Kovalenko close to tears.

'You're suffering from nervous exhaustion,' they told her. 'You must rest.'

Exhaustion, yes, because they were all tired of standing at the edge. More arrests, the constant fear of informers and discovery, and security was not what it had been when Mikhailov was there to instruct them all.

'You have to say goodbye to it.' Andrei Zhelyabov had come into the room and was standing at her shoulder. His face and beard were flecked with clay, and it was caked on his shirt and trousers.

'Goodbye?' She did not understand.

'Now don't frown at me,' he said with an amused smile. 'I mean the jar. You were staring at it as if you were hoping to summon a genie.'

'Wouldn't that be wonderful,' she said with feeling. 'Then our problems would be over.'

'Can you instruct a genie to kill someone, I wonder.'

'We could magic him away.'

He pulled a chair from the table and sat beside her, placing his large mud-stained hand on top of hers: 'Are you all right?'

'I . . . yes . . .' But at the warmth of his hand, his affectionate look the easy informality of the village Anna's chin began to tremble and she had to fight the wild uncontrollable tide of emotion welling inside her. After a few seconds she was able to say in a strong voice: 'Yes, fine. Really.'

Zhelyabov gave a heartfelt sigh: 'You know, when this is done, I will escape. Go south. Rest. Spend the summer there. You should do the same.'

'Will Sophia go with you?'

'I hope so, yes. And you should take your English doctor.'

Anna bit her bottom lip hard in an effort to hold the tide again: 'Can it happen? Vera Figner will call it selfish.'

'Yes. And perhaps Sophia too. But two years of hiding, looking over our shoulders, plotting . . . there is something terrible about being a terrorist. It dominates your mind so much that it affects your freedom of judgement.' He gave her hand a squeeze. 'But it will happen. You'll see.'

Zhelyabov carried the bottle through to the tunnel entrance. The charge was packed in place and a firing line run along the length of the gallery. It would be ready for the next Sunday parade. They sealed up the wall with a board of painted plaster and rolled the cheese barrels back into place. The lookout in the street gave a knock at the window the coast was clear and alone or in pairs they left the shop, Anna with Zhelyabov. On the Nevsky he took her hand and bent to kiss her cold cheek: 'Goodbye, Anna. Be careful. Remember our promise. Summer in the south.'

She watched him walk away, collar up against the biting wind, hat pulled low, the son of the serf with his princess, prepared to break all society's codes. Would Frederick feel the same?

The droshky took her to the Nikolaevsky Station and from there she walked on by a maze of small streets, stopping at corners and in doorways to be sure there was no one d.o.g.g.i.ng her steps. The freezing air and the need for vigilance helped settle her nerves a little. The old lady had heard her footsteps on the stairs and was waiting on the landing to embrace her warmly.

'Just as well you arrived when you did or I'd have taken him for myself,' she whispered in Ukrainian, her body rocking with barely suppressed laughter. She led Anna into the room by the hand like a village bride.

Frederick was sitting at the table, playing with the wax at the base of a candle. He rose at once with a broad smile of relief and pleasure: 'Thank G.o.d. Why has it been so long?'

She stood at the door in her old brown coat and hat, waiting for him to draw her into his arms.

'I've missed you more than you can imagine,' he said, taking the hat from her and stroking her hair.

'I'm sorry. Things have been difficult . . .'

She could say no more, she was beaten, her voice strangled with emotion, the strain of the secret suddenly too much. And before he was able to kiss her, even with the old woman in the room, she burst into tears, burying her head in his shoulder.

'Darling, darling,' he whispered, kissing her hair, holding her tight. 'Shush, darling.'

He tried to wipe her tears, kiss her tears, but she did not want him to see her face. She was ashamed of her weakness.

'What is it?' he asked. 'Tell me.'

'No.'

'Tell me.'

She was not ready to tell him. Not yet. 'Things are difficult. But I'm all right.'

He tried to lift her chin and this time she let him, and he kissed her wet cheeks and eyelids and then her lips. Drawing her to the table, he made her sit beside him, her hands small between his hands.

'You look tired, have you been sleeping properly?'

No, she was not sleeping, and she admitted she had been feeling unwell.

'Then you must let me examine you,' he said. 'Your personal physician, remember?'