But gone there he had. And Eusden followed. He stepped into the entrance porch and was greeted by a volunteer guide. When he explained he was a friend of the man who had died there the day before, he was directed to the woman behind the sales desk. She, he was told in hushed tones, ‘knew all about it’.

This, it transpired, was because it was in the porch, rather than the main body of the cathedral, that Marty had collapsed. The sales lady, a kindly middle-aged woman with a ready smile, identified by her badge as Jette, had seen it happen.

‘He had just come in and bought a ticket and a guidebook. He asked me about Princess Dagmar, mother of the last Tsar of Russia. She was Danish, you know, and was buried here. Until last September, that is, when she was moved to St Petersburg. He wanted to know where her coffin had been. I showed him on the map inside the guidebook. We have postcards of it.’ She plucked a card from the rack and showed it to Eusden. Dagmar’s large, handsomely carved wooden coffin was pictured in its appointed corner of the crypt, flanked by icons and glowing candles. ‘He bought one of these also.’

‘How did he seem?’

‘A little… shaky. I noticed he was… sweating, although it was really quite cold. And he kept rubbing his head, as if it ached. But he had a lovely smile. You knew him a long time?’

‘From childhood.’

‘Oh dear. You must be very upset.’

‘Yes. I am.’

‘Is your name Coningsby?’

‘Sorry?’

‘He wanted to send a message to someone called Coningsby. It was the last thing he said, while he was lying there.’ She pointed towards the door into the nave. ‘He had only gone a few steps from here when he stopped and bent his head. He reached out as if he was trying to find something to hold on to. But the wall was too far away. I realized he was not well and went to help him, but he fell on to the floor before I could get to him. Some other visitors came over to help also. We held up his head. I’m not sure he could see us. His eyes were… strange. And it was difficult for him to speak.’

‘But he did speak.’

‘Yes. He asked us to give a message to Coningsby. Then he… died.’

‘I’m Coningsby. It’s not my name. But… it’s what he sometimes called me.’

‘Then the message is for you.’

‘Yes.’ Eusden nodded. ‘What is it?’

‘“Tell Coningsby the babushka was right.” ’

The babushka. Of course. Eusden had forgotten all about her. Until now.

‘Does it mean something?’

‘Oh, yes. It certainly does.’

THIRTY

September, 1976. The burnt-out end of a blazing summer. Gemma suggested a trip to Paris as an enjoyable way to fill the gap between their holiday jobs and the start of the Michaelmas term at Cambridge. She roped in a schoolfriend of hers called Pamela and made all the arrangements. They were to meet at Portsmouth and catch the ferry to Le Havre.

The day before setting off, Richard accompanied his mother, for want of anything better to do, on one of her monthly shopping trips to Southampton. Browsing in Gilbert’s Bookshop, a multi-floored repository of literary riches to which he always gravitated, he made, as usual, an impulse buy. The File on the Tsar by Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold, hot off the press.

Marty picked up the book whenever Richard put it down during the Channel crossing and rail journey to Paris. Soon they were both talking of little else, much to Gemma’s annoyance. Foot-slogging round the Louvre at Pamela’s insistence, they were taken to task for neglecting the artworks in favour of arguing about whether the women of the imperial family could have been secretly evacuated from Ekaterinburg to Perm, as the authors suggested, before the night of the alleged massacre.

Marty rapidly developed a conspiracy theory fingering Lord Mountbatten as orchestrator of a plot to deny Anastasia her inheritance: millions of pounds supposedly salted away in the Bank of England by the Tsar. He was excited to discover that Mathilde Kschessinska, the elderly ballerina who had been the Tsar’s mistress prior to his marriage and had subsequently married one of his cousins, lived in Paris. She had given an interview on French television in 1967, when she was ninety-five, supporting Anna Anderson’s claim. Gemma, forced to read the relevant passage in the book, pointed out that if Mathilde was still alive she would have to be well over a hundred, but Marty was undaunted in his enthusiasm for tracking down the old lady.

Gemma had earmarked their last morning in Paris for a visit to Les Invalides, but Marty had other ideas. In the end, the girls went to see Napoleon’s tomb on their own, while he and Richard headed for Little Russia, the area around Alexander Nevsky Orthodox Cathedral where Russian exiles had settled after the Revolution. There was nowhere better, according to him, to ask after surviving Romanovs and gauge opinion.

The results were disappointing. The haughty proprietor of a Russian bookshop informed them that the ‘Grand Duchess Mathilde’ was dead. He cast a scornful eye over their by now dog-eared copy of The File on the Tsar and said there were ‘many, many lies’ told about the imperial family. Marty had also failed to check the opening times of the cathedral. They had come on a day when visitors were not admitted.

Recrimination threatened to break out as they stood in front of the cathedral, gazing at its golden domes and firmly closed door. Then Marty noticed an old woman dressed in threadbare clothes pinning up an advertisement on the noticeboard attached to the wall of the diocesan office. She was clad entirely in black. Her face, peering out from a tightly fastened headscarf, was lined like a dried riverbed. Her advert was in Russian and French. It offered her services to the local community as a clairvoyant. Marty tackled her in English to no avail, but he and Richard managed to communicate with her eventually in rudimentary French. Had she known the Grand Duchess Mathilde? Yes. Also Mathilde’s son, her husband and assorted cousins. Did she know anything about the woman who claimed to be Anastasia? Yes again. She knew much, which she was willing to share with them – if they were willing to stand her a meal. She was poor, hungry, neglected – and a fount of information.

Information the babushka, as Marty later dubbed her, undeniably possessed. And she purveyed a great deal of it while slurping soup and sipping vodka in a nearby bar, where she was clearly viewed with well-entrenched suspicion by the staff. Unfortunately for Marty and Richard, the portion they could actually understand of what she said added little to the sum of their knowledge. Mathilde’s husband, the Grand Duke Andrei, had also expressed his belief in Anna Anderson and that was good enough for the babushka, who had once shaken his hand and held it long enough to sense, as she had informed him, that his son would betray him. Sure enough, the son, Vladimir – ‘la vipère Vova’, as she called him – had gone over to the other side and denounced Anna as an impostor. Why? ‘Pour l’argent. Toujours pour l’argent.’ It was, she flatly declared, the real ruin of the Romanovs. ‘La cupidité.’ Greed. ‘Thanks for the startling insight,’ murmured Marty as she downed another vodka.

Sensing perhaps that she had inadequately repaid their generosity, the babushka concluded by offering to read their palms. Richard declined, but Marty submitted gleefully. He was rewarded with vague predictions of good fortune and wealth which so dissatisfied him that he demanded to be told how long he was going to live. Longer than her, the babushka cutely replied, adding, almost as an afterthought: ‘Vous mourrez dans un endroit sacré.’

Marty laughed at the idea that he would die in a holy place. Gemma, when told the story later, remarked that he would be lucky to be buried in a holy place, let alone die in one. They were at the top of the Eiffel Tower at the time, admiring a smudge on the horizon that Pamela insisted was Chartres Cathedral. ‘I hate cathedrals,’ Marty whispered to Richard, ‘and now I’ve got the perfect excuse to avoid them.’