House of the Hanged

He had a street number and an apartment number, but no name. Markku had told him that the name was of no importance; the one he knew her by was probably false anyway.

‘It’s a woman?’ Tom had enquired.

‘It’s something close,’ had been Markku’s enigmatic reply.

The problem lay in slipping past the concierge un noticed. It was well known that the building caretakers of Petrograd were rapidly becoming the unofficial eyes and ears of the Cheka. It was even rumoured that some made false denunciations of their residents, leaving them free to pillage the apartments once the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ had been carted off.

Seeing an elderly woman rummaging for her key at the entrance door, Tom hurried across the street, arriving as the door was swinging shut behind the woman. He stopped it with his hand, waited a few moments, then slipped inside.

The cavernous entrance hall was dark and deserted. He heard the woman puffing her way up the stone staircase, and through the glazed doors directly ahead of him he could see a man shovelling snow in the courtyard.

The apartment was on the third floor, towards the back of the building. He knocked, and was about to knock again when he heard a female voice.

‘Who is it?’

‘Markku sent me,’ he replied, in Russian.

‘I don’t know anyone called Markku.’

‘He told me to say that you make the best pelmeni in all Russia . . . after his mother’s.’

Three locks were undone before the door was opened as far as the guard chain would permit. A small woman, a shade over five feet, peered up at him defiantly. Her black hair was threaded with silver strands and pulled back tightly off her lined face. Her dark eyes were clear and hard, like polished onyx. They roamed over him from head to toe, then past him, searching the corridor behind. Only then did she release the chain.

Tom followed her along a corridor into a large and extravagantly furnished living room. The rococo divans, Persian rugs and gilt-framed portraits – one of a booted general, another of some high-bosomed ancestress – had obviously been intended for a far nobler space than this; here, they looked awkward and overblown, eager to be elsewhere.

Tom turned and found himself staring into the barrel of a handgun.

‘Take off your coat,’ said the woman. ‘Take it off and throw it on that chair there.’

There was nothing strained or hysterical in her voice. She might just as well have been a doctor inviting him to remove his clothes in a consulting room.

Tom did as she requested, unquestioningly, watching while she searched the coat, knowing what she would find. Her eyes only left his momentarily, to glance down at the revolver as she pulled it from one of the pockets.

‘This is a Cheka weapon,’ she said, levelling her own gun at his head.

Tom cowered. ‘It was. Until last night.’

‘You’re not Russian.’

‘I’m English.’

She switched effortlessly to English, with just the barest hint of an accent. ‘And where were you born?’

‘Norwich.’

‘A flat and dull county, Norfolk.’

‘You obviously don’t know it well.’

‘Sit down. Hands on your knees.’

Tom deposited himself on a divan. The woman remained standing.

‘Who are you?’ she asked.

‘Tom Nash. I was part of the Foreign Office delegation sent over here last summer.’

‘A little young for that sort of thing, aren’t you?’

‘It was my first assignment after joining.’

‘You knew Bruce Lockhart?’

‘Of course, I worked for him here.’

‘Lockhart was lucky to get away with his life.’

‘So was I. It was Markku who got me out of the country after they stormed the embassy.’

‘And how is Markku?’ she demanded flatly.

Tom and the tall Finn had become fast friends since their escape from the capital. They’d had little choice in the matter; the Consulate in Helsinki had lodged them in the same room at the Grand Hotel Fennia.

‘Stuck in Helsinki,’ said Tom. ‘Frustrated. Drunk most of the time.’

‘He’s still one of the best couriers we’ve got. So why, I’m wondering, do they send us a boy from the Foreign Office?’

‘I’m with the Secret Intelligence Service now.’

‘Is that right?’ She made no effort to conceal her scepticism.

‘I was seconded when I got to Helsinki.’

This wasn’t quite true. Tom had pushed for a transfer to the SIS in Helsinki, anything that would keep him close to Petrograd, to Irina. A desk job back in London hadn’t been an option in his own mind, and he had managed to persuade others that his skills as a Russian-speaker would be best served closer to the front line.

‘Prove it,’ said the woman.

‘I can’t.’

‘I suggest you try.’

Tom hesitated before replying. ‘ST-25.’

‘That means nothing to me,’ she shrugged.

But she was lying; he had seen the faint flicker in her obsidian eyes. She knew as well as he did that ST-25 was the codename for the sole remaining SIS agent in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks had brutally broken the American spy network over the autumn, and they were close to achieving the same with the British. The elusive ST-25 remained a thorn in their side, though. The Cheka had even set up a special unit devoted to hunting him down.

‘You want his real name?’ said Tom. ‘I can give it to you if that will help.’

‘She doesn’t need to know my real name.’

The voice was low and steady, and it came from behind Tom.

He turned to see a man of middle height step into the room. It was hard to judge his age – early thirties maybe – the thick dark beard blunting his handsome features showed no signs of grey.

‘Katya, I think our friend here could do with a hot drink . . . and maybe a piece of bread, if you can spare it.’

Katya eyed Tom with all the warmth of an attack dog called to heel by its master. Handing over the two guns, she disappeared into the kitchen.

‘Paul Dukes?’ asked Tom.

Dukes nodded and settled into an armchair. It was a moment before he spoke. ‘What happened to your wrist?’

It was tightly bound with the leather belt he’d brought along for Irina. ‘I think it might be broken.’

Dukes released the barrel of the revolver and checked the cylinder. ‘She’s right,’ he said. ‘Why did Leonard send you?’

Leonard Pike was chief of SIS operations in northern Russia, calling the shots from the embassy in Stockholm. Although Tom had never met him, it was Leonard who had agreed to take him on in Helsinki.

‘He didn’t send me,’ Tom replied. ‘I’m sailing under my own colours.’

Dukes snapped the barrel shut and looked up, intrigued. ‘Go on.’

Tom told him everything: of his relationship with Irina, his forced flight from Russia, and his work for the Secret Intelligence Service in Helsinki, which had involved deciphering many of Dukes’s own intelligence reports. Helsinki was a mess, a sinkhole of desperation and duplicity, swarming with émigrés and spies. Information and disinformation were the twin orders of the day in the Finnish capital, and Tom’s other duties had entailed trawling the city’s restaurants, hotel bars and drawing rooms, keeping an ear out for anything of value.

This wasn’t how he had got wind of Irina’s arrest, though; that news had come to him via Markku, who had heard it from one of the other couriers, along with the small but devastating detail that Irina was pregnant. Tom didn’t reveal this to Dukes, if only because the notion that he’d fathered a child was still too big to grapple with on his own, let alone share with a stranger. Besides, at the time it hadn’t coloured the decision he’d arrived at with Markku’s encouragement and assistance.

Both men knew that Bayliss, the SIS station chief in Helsinki, would never have sanctioned a rescue attempt, so the plan had been hatched in secret, with Markku providing false documents, detailed instructions on a number of routes in and out of the country, as well as the names of a few reliable contacts in Petrograd. The sixty thousand roubles which Markku estimated would be required for bribes had proved much harder to come by. In the end Tom had been left with no other choice but to ‘borrow’ it from the SIS slush fund.

Dukes had been listening attentively throughout, but now broke his silence with the bleak observation, ‘That’s going to cost you your job, and probably a lot more.’

‘I don’t care. It all went wrong last night.’

He described how the band of Chekists had shown up at St Isaac’s Cathedral in place of Irina, and how he had only just managed to slip through their fingers.

Dukes got to his feet and wandered to the fireplace. He poked at a burning log with the toe of his boot. There was something ominous in his studied silence.

‘I’m going to tell you this now,’ he said eventually, turning to face Tom. ‘Because if you don’t hear it from me, you may never hear it at all.’ He paused. ‘She was executed last night.’

Tom felt a cold hand settle on his heart. His words, when they came, sounded distant, hollow.

‘How do you know?’

‘Console yourself with the fact that they would have killed her anyway. You see, I never met her myself, but I know of people she helped. We were aware of her . . . predicament.’

Her predicament? He made her sound like a debutante torn between two evening gowns in Harrods.

‘How do you know?’ demanded Tom, more forcefully this time.

‘I had it on good authority early this morning.’

‘Good authority?’

‘A very reliable source, I’m afraid.’

‘Who?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘I have a right to know.’

‘And I have a duty to protect his identity. If you’re captured by the Cheka they will make you talk. Don’t look so affronted – everyone talks. Do you want him to lose his life too?’

At that moment Katya returned bearing a tray, which she placed on a low side table. She must have been eavesdropping from the kitchen. It wasn’t just the misting of pity in her hard eyes; before pouring the tea she handed Tom two tablets and a glass of water.

‘Aspirin. For your wrist.’

The tea cups matched the antique porcelain pot, and Dukes savoured a first, warming sip before continuing.

‘Look, believe me, I’m sorry. We’ve all lost friends, good friends, and I daresay we stand to lose many more. But you shouldn’t have come here. Markku should not have given you this address. There’s nothing we can do for you.’

‘I didn’t come here for me, I came here for you – to warn you.’

He explained that Markku had put him in contact with a man named Dimitri Zakharov. It was Zakharov who had organized the escape, Zakharov who had betrayed him to the Cheka.

Dukes and Katya exchanged a brief look. ‘I doubt that very much,’ said Dukes. ‘Zakharov gave them a description of me. I overheard them say it.’

Dukes hesitated. ‘If he did, then it was tortured out of him.’

‘He didn’t look too distressed when I saw him leave his apartment an hour ago.’

Dukes was clearly taken aback by this news. ‘Maybe we’re talking about another Zakharov.’

‘How many Zakharovs does Markku know who live on Kazanskaya?’

‘Katya . . .?’

For once she looked shaken. ‘Anything is possible. We both know that.’

Dukes turned his attention back to Tom. ‘I was wrong. You were right to come here.’ He handed the revolver back. ‘I’m surprised there are still six bullets left in the cylinder.’

Tom had indeed trailed Zakharov for a good few streets, imagining the moment – the muzzle of the gun planted at the base of the traitor’s neck, or maybe a swift tap on the shoulder first with the barrel so that Tom could carry with him the flash of recognition, of terror, in the other man’s eyes as a future balm for his soul. In the end, though, he had allowed Zakharov to slip away from him.

Maybe it had been cowardice, the knowledge that retribution would surely come at the cost of his own life, or maybe the calculating pragmatist in him had prevailed over base emotion. Either way, he was alive, and the information he had just handed on might even save lives. It clearly had value; he could see its worth reflected back at him in Dukes’s eyes.

‘This changes everything,’ said Dukes. ‘We can’t stay here. Katya, you also have to leave.’

‘No.’

‘You must.’

‘Not if I don’t know where you’re going.’

‘Katya –’

‘Do I know?’ she insisted.

Dukes shook his head solemnly.

‘Then go,’ she said. ‘Both of you. What are they going to do with an old woman like me?’

Her life had been reduced quite enough already to this: this queer museum of displaced artefacts. The barbarians might be hammering at the gates of the city, but the curator had no intention of abandoning her post.

It took Dukes a few minutes to gather his belongings together, and all the while he was issuing instructions to Tom. Katya accompanied them downstairs as far as the first-floor landing. Pressing something into Dukes’s hand, she said, ‘It was my mother’s.’

Tom also received a parting gift – a jewelled gold locket on a chain.

‘You are a brave boy,’ said Katya, ‘and you deserve to live. But remember . . . keep back one bullet for yourself.’

She shooed them off down the stairs like a mother sending her two sons out to play.

Tom left the building first, turning up his collar and heading south on Liteiny Prospekt. Dukes went north. Ten nerve-racking minutes later they reconvened, as arranged, in front of a haberdashery on Nevsky Prospekt. There was no acknowledgement; it was an opportunity for each of them to determine if the other was being followed. Dukes had said he would stamp the snow from his boots if he felt they were safe to proceed. This he now did, before setting off once more at a brisk pace. Tom tailed him at a distance, his fingers closed around the revolver in his pocket, unsure of their destination.

He tried to remain alert, but his grief came at him in waves. He had walked this same route with Irina, idly strolling in the summer heat, stopping every so often to peer into a shop window, the scarlet trams rattling back and forth nearby.

He choked back a sob and felt the heat of anger rising in his belly. He didn’t fight to suppress it; he let it spread through him, into his chest, along his limbs, warming him.

It came to him quite suddenly what he would do and how he would do it.

It was a religious building of some kind, set well back from the street behind a high wall at the southern end of the Nevsky. Beyond the imposing entrance gate the trees rose tall and bare on either side of the pathway. Dukes cut left almost immediately into the trees, taking a well-trodden trail through the deep snow. It led to a cemetery deep in the wood, a bosky burial ground for the wealthy, sparsely populated with the dead. Large free-standing tombs were scattered around a frozen lake, like temples in some eighteenth-century garden.

The packed snow of the snaking pathways suggested that many others had visited in recent days, possibly paying a final tribute to their ancestors, it occurred to Tom, before fleeing the country for good. Right now, though, the two Englishmen found themselves alone. The purpose of their own pilgrimage was still no clearer to Tom, even when Dukes made for a tomb pushing four-square through a deep drift.

No larger than a garden shed, it was maybe twice as tall, its roof crowned with a Russian cross. The pale green stucco of its outer walls had crumbled in parts, revealing the bare stone blocks beneath. Its door was of solid wood and firmly locked.

Dukes was still struggling with an iron key when Tom joined him. The lock finally emitted a rasping groan and the door swung open on rusty hinges. The moment they were inside, Dukes shouldered it shut behind them.

The only illumination came from a small lunette above the door, and it was a few seconds before Tom’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, by which time Dukes was already on his knees before the altar. For a worrying moment it looked as though he was praying, but he was working away at one of the flagstones, prising it up with a pocket knife. Buried in the packed earth beneath was an old cigar box. It contained a wafer-thin package wrapped in waxed paper.

‘Here,’ said Dukes. ‘Take it with you.’

Tom had handled enough of Dukes’s coded intelligence reports in the past to know what it was.

‘Tell them I need more money – a lot more.’ Replacing the flagstone, Dukes got to his feet and stamped it down. ‘Deal directly with Leonard. I wouldn’t trust Bayliss with anything more than a cocktail shaker.’

‘You’re staying?’ asked Tom, incredulously.

‘It’s not over yet.’

‘But what about Zakharov?’

‘You think he’s the first to betray us?’

The weary fatalism of the statement grated. It suggested that the Zakharovs of the world were an unavoidable irritant to be endured, like mosquitoes, or people coughing in the theatre.

Tom removed his cap and pulled some banknotes from the lining. ‘It’s all I have left.’

Dukes riffled through the money, clearly delighted. ‘How much do you need?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure.’

Dukes pocketed most of the cash and handed the rest back. ‘This should see you back to Helsinki.’

These weren’t the last words the two men exchanged. As they parted company outside, Tom asked, ‘How do you live like this?’

Dukes hesitated before replying. ‘I was here when the Revolution broke, when we turned the Tauride Palace into an arsenal. You see, I once believed in the New Jerusalem. Maybe I still do. But this isn’t it. This . . . this is Abaddon.’

He touched Tom lightly on the arm. ‘Tell Leonard from me that it’s not too late.’

‘For what?’

‘He’ll understand.’

As Tom watched the slight, anonymous figure shuffle off down the pathway, something told him that this would be his last ever glimpse of the man.

Abaddon, the place of punishment.

A fitting analogy, Tom reflected, his thoughts turning once more to Zakharov, the betrayer.

Chapter Two

Toulon, France. July 1935. Sixteen years later.

The porters were already in place, ranged along the platform like a guard of honour, when the train pulled into Toulon station. The heat was oppressive, and they fidgeted in their brass-buttoned tunics. A few of them crushed their cigarettes underfoot as the train shuddered to a halt and the carriage doors swung open.

Lucy was one of the last to descend. She had cut her hair short, and Tom might not even have recognized her had she not spotted him and waved.

Seeing her at a distance lent a new perspective. He realized, with a touch of sadness, that although she had lost none of her coltish grace she was no longer a girl. She had become a woman. It wasn’t just her new coiffure, or even her elegant organdie summer frock, it was the way she carried herself, the easy manner in which she proffered her hand to the guard who helped her down to the platform, the casual comment which set the fellow smiling.

Tom fought his way through the throng, arriving as her Morocco travelling bags were being loaded from the luggage car on to a trolley.

She might have changed, but she was still happy to launch herself at him and hug him tight, limpet-like, as they had always done. She smelled of roses.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘For what?’

She tilted her head up at him. ‘For the nice man at Victoria station who showed me to the first-class carriage, and the other nice man in Paris who showed me to my own sleeping compartment.’

‘An early birthday present. Don’t assume I’m setting a precedent.’

Releasing him, she looked around her. ‘Where’s Mr H?’

It was her name for Hector, his flat-coated retriever, his shadow for the past four years.

‘Missing.’

‘Missing?’

‘Since yesterday.’

‘Oh, Tom . . .’

‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ he replied with as much non chalance as he could muster. ‘Maybe he needs a holiday too.’

But it wasn’t like Hector to go off for more than an hour or so, and only then to scrounge scraps from the customers at the bar in Le Rayol. Hector was a big coward at heart, although like all the best cowards he cloaked his fears in bold and boisterous behaviour.

‘It’s not the first time he’s done a disappearing act. I’m sure he’ll turn up as soon as he knows you’re here.’

Lucy looked unconvinced but was happy to play along if it spared them both the discomfort of any further discussion.

‘So, what do you think?’ she said brightly, flicking her fingers through her cropped hair and throwing in a theatrical little pout for effect.

‘I think your mother’s going to need a very stiff drink.’

‘That wasn’t the question.’

‘I think,’ Tom intoned with deliberation, ‘that you are more beautiful than ever.’

Lucy smiled. ‘Spoken like a true godfather.’

Tom’s car was parked out front in the shade of a tall palm. The porter set about loading the bags into the boot.

‘A new car,’ Lucy observed.

‘Not new, just different.’

‘It’s a lot smaller than the last.’

‘Ah, but this one doesn’t break down.’

‘Where’s the fun in that?’

She was referring to the previous summer and the day-trip with her family which had turned into a two-day-trip when the big Citroën had resolutely refused to start, stranding them as the sun was going down at a remote beach on the headland beyond Gigaro. There had been just enough food left in the picnic hamper to cobble together a simple supper and they had hunkered down for the night. Lucy’s half-brothers, George and Harry, had slept in the car, the rest of them under the stars around a driftwood fire, cocooned in Persian rugs. Leonard had embraced the setback with his usual sunny good humour, and even Venetia, who relished her creature comforts, had entered into the spirit of the occasion, leading them in a repertoire of Gilbert and Sullivan numbers, which had set Hector howling in protest. Remarkably, Leonard and Venetia had gone a whole evening without arguing, although they had bickered like a couple of old fishwives during the long and dusty march back to Gigaro the following morning.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Tom, ‘I’ve already planned another night at the same beach. It’s on the itinerary.’

‘Ahhh, the famous Thomas Nash itinerary.’

‘Would you have it any other way?’

‘Of course not,’ said Lucy, hugging him again. ‘I need someone to take command of my miserable existence.’

‘Oh dear, are the hardships of student life taking their toll on poor little Lucy?’

She pinched his arm and recoiled. ‘Well obviously you’re too old to remember, but Oxford’s not all honey and roses.’

‘Okay, what’s his name?’ asked Tom wearily.

Lucy looked convincingly aghast for all of a second before her face fell. ‘Hugo Atkinson . . . although I now have a whole bunch of other names for him.’

‘Didn’t he like your hair?’

‘This wasn’t done for him!’ she protested, a touch too vehemently.

Tom was suddenly aware of the porter regarding their little theatre with curiosity. He paid the man off handsomely and opened the passenger door for Lucy.

‘You can tell me all about the bounder over lunch, but I think I might have found just the thing to help you get over him.’

‘Oh God, please, not another Italian lawyer.’

‘Francesco, I admit, proved to be something of a disappointment.’

They both laughed at the memory of the disastrous dinner last summer. Two cocktails on the terrace at Les Roches had revealed Francesco to be a pompous and pugnacious bigot, and even before their entrées had arrived he’d been making eyes at one of the waiters.

In the ordinary course of events Tom would have driven directly from the station to the old port, where a stroll along the bustling waterfront would have been followed by lunch at the Brasserie Cronstadt. That was his customary routine when guests arrived on the late-morning sleeper from Paris. But he had others plans for Lucy, and they involved driving straight to Le Lavandou, skirting the hilltop town of Hyères before dropping down through the pine forests towards the coast.