Dmitri was staring at him. His expression was as he so often remembered it: earnestly seeking approval. Ruzsky locked hands with him and tried to return his desperate affection, recalling Dmitri’s distress on the night of their brother’s death: the urgency with which he clutched him on the way down to their father’s study; the gabbled assertion that he had been too far away to reach Ilusha, and had shouted and shouted in an attempt to stop him.

Ruzsky withdrew his hand. The intervening years suddenly fell away.

“I’ll do anything to help, Sandro. Anything at all.”

15

R uzsky was glad of the time alone with Pavel on the train to Tsarskoe Selo. For most of the way, they sat in companionable silence, looking out at the pine forests and fields covered in a thick blanket of snow. Ruzsky watched a woodsman clambering up toward the track. He carried an ax and had a stack of firewood on his back, snow and ice in his beard, and thick leather skins wrapped around his feet and shins.

Pavel was a comforting presence. Ruzsky envied the way he kept his life simple, envied his unwavering loyalty to the people and causes he believed in.

It did occur to him, however, that his friend wasn’t quite his old self. He appeared more nervous and defensive, but perhaps it was just a sign of the times.

Perhaps Pavel was right; the case was best ignored. But Ruzsky knew it had moved well past the stage where he could forget it. He’d once told Irina in an argument that the foremost talent an investigator could possess was persistence-to be like a dog with a bone.

Persistence is not a talent, she had replied, and I don’t want to be a bone.

“When you’re on the run,” Ruzsky said, “you surely don’t head for the most aggressive police state in the world? If you’re an American, I mean, like this man White.”

Pavel didn’t answer.

“What do you think?” Ruzsky asked.

“You know what I think. It stinks. You know it, I know it. That’s why Morris behaved the way he did.”

Pavel turned and stared out of the window at the frozen landscape.

At the Alexander Palace, a servant took their coats and led them into an ornate antechamber. Pavel looked immediately ill at ease. “Don’t gawp,” Ruzsky whispered.

“It’s all right for you. You were born into this.”

“Hardly.” Ruzsky walked to the windows. The children were skating on the ornamental lake. He could see the grand duchesses, but not the Tsarevich.

The Tsar’s daughters were wearing tight-fitting dark overcoats and fur hats. They were hitting a ball to each other across the ice with sticks under the careful watch of two men seated on the bank. Ruzsky wondered how much they knew of the politics of the empire their brother would inherit.

The scene felt more normal to him than it had on his first visit, but Pavel looked dumbstruck.

Although he had once told his father during an argument that it was inevitable, Ruzsky found it hard to imagine life without a tsar.

He turned to see a tall man striding across the room toward them. The head of the palace household was in uniform and wore a monocle, an officer of the old school. To his chest was pinned the dark blue ribbon and silver star of the Order of the White Eagle, marking him out as being of the highest rank of the civil service, not that there would have been any doubt.

“You are Ruzsky?”

“Yes.”

“How can I help you?”

“You are Colonel Shulgin?”

“Yes.”

“I am the chief investigator for the Petrograd City Police; here is my deputy. One of your employees was murdered three nights ago. Her body was found in the center of the Neva.”

“A former employee.”

“So I gathered from the Empress.”

Colonel Shulgin pursed his lips. “It was most unfortunate and inappropriate that you came to interrogate Madam Vyrubova. You should have approached me.”

Ruzsky gave a tiny bow. “My apologies, Your High Excellency,” he said, using the correct form of address. “Our inquiries led me to discover that the dress the girl was wearing was made for Madam Vyrubova. I followed my nose.”

Shulgin glanced from Ruzsky to Pavel and back again. “Yes,” he said. “Unfortunately, I do not believe we can help you in this case. All matters pertaining to members of staff are naturally confidential.”

Ruzsky took out and glanced at his pocket watch, to give himself a moment’s pause for thought. Shulgin was clearly going to concede nothing easily.

“The girl and her companion were murdered, Colonel. Very brutally.” Ruzsky lowered his voice. “In the climate of the times, out there, in front of the Winter Palace…” He inclined his head. “And the victim a palace employee. Naturally, it troubles us.”

Shulgin eyed them cautiously. “If there was a suggestion of…” he chose his words carefully, “political motivation, then one would expect to be dealing with the Okhrana.”

But Ruzsky could tell from the old man’s face that Shulgin had no desire whatsoever to deal with Vasilyev’s men.

Shulgin hesitated for a few moments more and then pointed at two stiff-backed chairs pushed up against the wall. He pulled another over from the table in the center of the room. “I have only a few minutes,” he said.

They faced each other in silence.

“Ella was dismissed,” Ruzsky offered.

Shulgin did not answer.

“If you do not mind me asking, Your High Excellency: why?”

The colonel stared at his highly polished boots. “That, I think, must remain a matter for the palace alone.”

“For stealing?”

Shulgin looked surprised.

“Madam Vyrubova told us as much.”

“Madam Vyrubova?”

“And Her Imperial Highness.”

Shulgin hesitated, clearly still appalled at the way in which Ruzsky had been able to converse with the ruler of Russia, but once again unwilling to dismiss the pair of them. “Stealing. Yes. A disgraceful episode.”

“How much money did the girl steal?”

Now the colonel looked confused. “Money?”

“Isn’t that what she stole?” Vyrubova had told Ruzsky it was money, even if he had not wholly believed her. Now it looked as if his hunch had been right. Shulgin had frozen and appeared ready to ask them to leave, so Ruzsky changed tack. “The girl worked in the nursery.”

Shulgin hesitated again. He was trying to work out how much they had already been told. “That is correct, yes.”

A maid in a blue uniform with a starched white front came in with a single porcelain cup on a silver tray. Shulgin took it, stirred its contents with a silver spoon, then put it to his lips.

Ruzsky took the two photographs from his pocket. “These are only head and shoulders… The man was stabbed seventeen times, the girl once. The murderer followed them out onto the ice…”

Shulgin stared intently at the image of the man. He looked up. “Who was he?”

“We were hoping you might be able to tell us.”

Ruzsky watched Shulgin’s face for any reaction, but the official simply shook his head. “No, I’ve never set eyes on him.”

Shulgin reminded Ruzsky of his father: obstinate and opinionated, but honest.

“Could you give us a few more details about the girl. When she was employed, where her family lives, and so on.”

Shulgin stood. “Give me a minute, please.” He marched abruptly out of the room, then returned, holding a file, which he was reading as he walked. He sat down and continued to examine it, flicking through a series of loose sheets of paper until he found what he was looking for. “Ella was from Yalta,” he said. “She was twenty-two.” He ran his finger down the page. “She started work at Livadia. She was employed to work in the nursery there in the summer of 1910. She would have been fifteen.”

“Nineteen ten?”

“Yes. Her father died the following year and her mother moved to stay with her sister here in Petersburg. Ella asked to be transferred.”