‘Who were the letters from?’
‘A guy called Hakon Nydahl. Captain – or Kaptajn – Nydahl, as he signed himself. Ever remember Clem mentioning the name?’
‘No.’
‘Nor me. What about Copenhagen? Did he ever admit to going there?’
‘Not sure. There weren’t many European cities he didn’t claim to have visited at some point.’
‘True. But we know he was corresponding with someone in Copenhagen, so it seems a good bet, doesn’t it? As to what they were corresponding about, you’d need a Danish translator to tell you that. Werner’s probably contacting one even as we speak.’
‘Why’s it so important?’
‘Ah, that brings us to Werner’s father: Otto Straub. Thanks to him we know Clem came to Hamburg in the spring of 1960. It’s not something I ever remember my parents talking about. Maybe he didn’t tell them where he was going, or even that he was going. But yes. Clem was here. And why? To testify in a court case Otto was covering for his paper. Clem let us believe he came just after the War, if you remember, before he retired from the police. But that was eyewash. He’d have been seventy-three in 1960.’
‘What was the court case about?’
‘Anastasia.’
‘Sorry?’
Marty chuckled. ‘You heard.’
TEN
Anastasia. A legend in her own death-time. Eusden knew what history said of her. Born 1901, fourth and youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II. Murdered by Soviet revolutionaries in 1918, along with her parents and siblings. He also knew of the persistent legend that she had survived the climactic massacre at Ekaterinburg. A woman claiming to be Anastasia popped up in Berlin a few years later and spent the rest of her life convincing many and failing to convince others, notably most of Anastasia’s surviving relatives, that she was indeed Her Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna. Opinion was still divided when Anna Anderson, as the woman came to be known, died in 1984. But it hardened in the 1990s, when the remains of the imperial family were excavated from their burial site near Ekaterinburg and verified by DNA analysis, a test which Anna Anderson’s remains subsequently failed. Seventy years’ worth of books, films, lawsuits and conspiracy theories foundered on a simple matter of genetics. The claimant to Anastasia’s identity was found to have been a fraud.
This much Eusden remembered, though he was aware there was also much more he had forgotten. He had read a book on the subject, seen a couple of television documentaries purporting to tell the full story, flicked through several magazine articles probing the mystery and scanned various newspaper reports of twists and turns in the affair. He well recalled swapping theories with Marty after they had speed-read a sensationalist work called The File on the Tsar, published while they were at Cambridge, even though he could not recall what those theories were. Their interest had been heightened by Clem’s airy claim to have met Anastasia – the real Anastasia – during his brush with the Russian imperial family in Cowes in August 1909. He had supposedly visited the imperial yacht to receive the thanks of the Tsar and Tsarina for saving their eldest daughters, Olga and Tatiana, from assassination and Anastasia had briefly spoken to him. ‘A forward little girl’, was his later summation. She would have been eight years old at the time, so perhaps it was not surprising he had no more to say about her than that.
But perhaps, Eusden was now forced to consider, Clem’s dismissive attitude was a smokescreen. It was otherwise hard to account for his presence in Hamburg in the spring of 1960 as a witness in Anna Anderson’s civil action for recognition as sole surviving child of the last Tsar of All the Russias.
‘I had no idea trying to find out who Clem’s mysterious Danish pen pal was would lead to Anastasia,’ said Marty as he lit a third Camel from the end of the second. ‘I was just looking for something to take my mind off… well, death, frankly; specifically, my own. Anyway, I went to Copenhagen to get the goods on Hakon Nydahl. He was a Danish naval officer who graduated to a number of confidential court appointments. Gets a shortish write-up in the Danish DNB. Born 1884, which makes him just a few years older than Clem. His bit-part in history comes in 1920, when the Tsar’s mother, the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, arrived back in her native Denmark, where she was known by her original Danish name, Dagmar. She’d been in the Crimea when the Soviets started rounding up royals after the October Revolution and was evacuated on a British warship. Her sister was Edward the Seventh’s widow, Queen Alexandra. After staying with her for a while, Dagmar headed for Copenhagen and moved into a house in the seaside resort of Klampenborg, which she and Alexandra kept as a holiday home. King Christian the Tenth, her nephew, appointed Nydahl to manage her affairs. And that’s what he did, dutifully and diligently, until her death in 1928. Anna Anderson had gone public with her claim to be Anastasia by then, but Dagmar dismissed her as an impostor without even bothering to meet her. There’s not much more to say about Nydahl, if you trust the official accounts. He died a bachelor in 1961, aged seventy-seven.’
‘How come he was in touch with Clem, then?’ asked Eusden, when no explanation was immediately forthcoming.
‘That’s what I wondered, obviously. There’s no apparent connection. But clearly there was one. Why else would Clem go to the bother of learning Danish?’
‘Why would he anyway? A courtier like Nydahl must have spoken English.’
‘Secrecy, maybe? Clem could be sure no one in our family – or in Cowes, come to that – was going to be able to read letters written in Danish.’
‘But what was there to be secret about?’
‘That’s what I tried to find out. I hit a brick wall at first. Then I did what I should have done earlier: look for Nydahl on the Web. He gets a single mention, in one of the hundreds of Anastasia-related sites. Needless to say, there are a lot of people out there in cyberspace convinced she was the genuine article and the DNA results were faked. I put out some feelers and Werner responded. It was my name that did it. He’d been trying to discover who Clem Hewitson was for years because of his father’s account of Clem’s mysterious participation in the Anna Anderson court case. Apparently, the judges wanted to hear testimony from Nydahl about Dagmar’s attitude to the claimant. Nydahl said he was too ill to appear, but suggested Clem could tell them all they needed to know. Otto Straub, like most other observers, couldn’t understand what this retired British police officer had to do with it. And they never found out. Because, when Clem came over, he was heard in camera. To this day, no one has any idea what he said.’
They left the café and, at Marty’s suggestion, walked up to the ring road skirting the city centre, on the other side of which, beyond a stretch of landscaped greenery, stood Hamburg’s courts complex: three mansarded neo-Gothic blocks, with modern extensions. The view was blurred by mist and sleet, dampness deepening the prevailing chill, the stud-tyred traffic rumbling rhythmically past.
‘That’s where it all happened in the Anna Anderson trials,’ said Marty. ‘I expect you’ve forgotten the ins and outs of her story. I certainly had. She burst on to the public stage in 1922 and spent the next ten years or more badgering members of the Romanov family for recognition and living off supporters who were either genuine believers or after what they hoped to get out of her. Berlin, Paris, New York, assorted German Schlosses: she was always on the move, charming and convincing some, offending and alienating others. She also fitted in a lot of physical and mental illness. There were several interludes in hospitals and asylums along the way. Finally, in 1938, she instituted legal proceedings in Berlin to claim any money left by the Tsar in German bank accounts. There was certainly some, possibly a lot. If she’d succeeded, she’d no doubt have moved on to other countries. The Bank of England, for instance, was rumoured to be holding a sizeable sum deposited by the dead but officially merely missing Tsar.’