Look to the Wolves Read online

  Reilly would transfer the enquiry to one of his other contacts, no doubt. He’d need to know about Lapin anyway, they’d surely have more irons in the fire together than this one of Temple’s. Sidney Reilly was a fairly bizarre character, himself. But presumably he was on the right side, could be trusted. Making him, if this was the case, more or less unique. But that was for Temple’s judgement, not one’s own.

  All the bedroom doors on the first landing were shut, and stayed shut as he padded past them. Climbing again: hoping to God he wasn’t in for another session of French small-talk with Nyeporojhnii. But their door was shut too, and the wide landing was empty. Thanks to the Ukrainian girl, he thought: Madame Nyep wasn’t giving hubby any rope when that one was on the loose.

  Her door was shut too. Really shut – not just pulled-to, as for a moment he’d thought it might be.

  Wishful thinking… But – coming to earth and practicalities, as he shut his own door quietly – it was about five now: so two hours’ sleep, then a quick wash and shave, and if he was down there to connect with the cruiser’s first boat inshore he’d be on board in time to cadge a decent breakfast.

  2

  ‘Tell me, Cowan.’ In Caledonian’s wardroom her navigator, a lieutenant-commander by name of Hackett, had nodded off over his after-lunch coffee, had actually been snoring at one stage; now he’d stirred, was blinking across at Bob from the depths of the Admiralty-issue, horsehair-stuffed armchair. ‘About these young ladies – governesses, you said…’

  It was three days since the encyphered signal had been tapped out to Constantinople. Bob was spending as much time as possible on board – including nights, sleeping in the captain’s sea-cabin, a sort of tin dog-kennel in the bridge superstructure which wasn’t used when the ship was in harbour and had been offered to him as an alternative to the hazards of the Kist. And this was the best place to be; as a matter of routine the ship’s telegraphists were keeping round-the-clock listening watch, sooner or later Colonel Temple had to come up with some reaction to the report of the courier’s death, and it would save time and trouble if one was on the spot to get it.

  If there was to be an answer. If this wasn’t a dead end…

  ‘Cowan?’

  He’d been scanning a two-months-old copy of the Morning Post. References in its pages to Britain’s involvement in this civil war included reports of military withdrawal from Archangel and Murmansk, and of 47 Squadron RAF’s spectacular performance in support of General Wrangel’s advance through Tsarytsin to Kamyshin. There was also coverage of the Prince of Wales’ tour of Canada and the United States, and a somewhat ambiguously-phrased review of Lady Astor’s chances of becoming Britain’s first woman Member of Parliament. Having finished this, Bob lowered the paper and focused on the navigating officer’s pale face and puffy eyes.

  ‘Sorry… What about them?’

  ‘Well. Suppose the monkey who got shot the other night had managed to reach you with whatever information he was bringing—’

  ‘Might not have had any. I don’t know, but I think he may have been coming to Sevastopol anyway.’

  ‘Do you know where from?’

  Thumbing tobacco into a pipe, he shook his head. ‘Not the foggiest.’

  ‘Well. Couldn’t be from any great distance, could it? Seeing that nobody can get in or out of the Crimea, as things stand at present?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know. But a man of his kind – may well have had a foot in both camps. Spies and so on do manage to come and go, don’t they?’

  ‘Ah. Ah, well… Those Johnnies at the Kist might have had reasons of their own for shooting him.’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Yes. Yes… What thrilling times we live in, don’t we?’ Hackett yawned. He’d been to a party in the Australian destroyer Yarra the previous night. ‘Anyway – I know curiosity killed the cat, but – what I’m really asking, I suppose, is if he’d got to you and told you where the girls are, what would you have done about it?’

  Striking a match. Then – between huffs – ‘Depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On what he had to tell us, of course.’ Hackett wasn’t too bright, he thought – even allowing for a touch of thick head. He glanced round, down the length of the rectangular wardroom with its low, white-enamelled deck-head, chairs and sofas at this end and dining-table at the other. Almost emptied now, as the ship’s afternoon routine got under way. He looked back at the navigator: ‘Where they are, and in what circumstances – and whether they’d come away voluntarily. There’s nothing we could do about it, incidentally, if they didn’t want to.’

  It was a reasonably good bet, he thought, that they’d be somewhere in the Crimea, and most likely on this coast. Between say Poros and Theodosia, probably. At least, if they’d had any choice in the matter. They’d hardly be on the wrong side of the mountains, in biting winds and driving snow, if they’d had the option of that sheltered, sunshine coast. Another guess was that there might be a man or men involved. But not necessarily: a military nurse’s training would be no joy-ride, and these were young girls – in their twenties, Temple had said – who were used to soft living. They might have volunteered as nurses without much forethought, even in total misconception of what they’d be getting into, and been appalled at the realities.

  Hackett said, checking the time, Anyway, you’ve come all the way from Constantinople, just on the assumption you’ll find them here?’

  ‘Hope, I’d say, more than assumption. But why not? Unless they’re dead or someone’s spirited them away, they must be – well, I mean, it should be within our powers to find them. And they’re British citizens, you know, they’re entitled to our protection. What’s more – and this is a very big factor, obviously – you know as well as I do that we may have to pull out of here at short notice and quite soon. Eh?’

  ‘Well – yes, that is a point…’

  ‘Isn’t it, just… And imagine – if the worst did come to the worst, and we hadn’t done whatever we could to find them?’

  ‘H’m…’ Hackett frowned, staring at his own outstretched legs, well-boned halfboots gleaming like patent leather. ‘I do take the point. But – if you’d allow me to say this – I suppose it’s part of what rather puzzles me – an officer of your seniority, sent all this way just for – well, for instance, couldn’t Ashmore have taken care of it?’

  ‘You’re raising more than one point there. One, Ashmore has his hands full – most of the time – and this might well entail chasing off somewhere – along the coast, or – God forbid – up to Simferopol, for instance. Ashmore couldn’t do that, his job’s here. Incidentally, I hear he’s on his way back… But point two, my seniority – they only gave me the half-stripe a few months ago, and as a bribe at that. I was in at the start, straight out of P & O, so I’m entitled to discharge now any time I want. But we’re short of Russian-speakers, and as it happens I’m in no hurry to get back to civvy street, so I allowed myself to be – persuaded.’

  ‘In right from the beginning, you say—’

  ‘August ’14. A minesweeper to start with, then destroyers. Dover Patrol, and the Harwich flotilla.’

  He knew what Hackett’s puzzle was: that he, Bob, looked older than he was. He was twenty-eight, but Hackett probably saw him as a man well into his thirties; Hackett himself being nearer forty – half bald and with a stomach on him. He’d obviously have been passed-over for promotion to commander years ago; and wouldn’t ever make it now, having failed to do so even with four years of war to help him.

  Hence the addiction to gin. There were a lot of Hacketts in the Navy, especially in battleships and cruisers.

  ‘What’ll you do, when you do take your bowler? Back to the old P & O?’

  ‘No. I’ve other plans. But that’s the whole story – I was persuaded to stay on, I was in the Caspian flotilla at the time but by then we were pulling out, having done what we went there for, and – cutting it short, I wound up in Constantinople as a sort of
odd-jobs man. Dogsbody to Colonel Temple, Staff Officer (Intelligence). And when this business of the governesses came up – well, there I was… Make sense to you now, does it?’

  Colonel Temple had decided Bob was the ideal man to deal with it: effectively, to take this particular problem off his own back. Bob could see him now: the lean, tanned face, bristling black-and-grey moustache, blue eyes gleaming with enthusiasm as he explained, ‘Not just because you’re bilingual, Cowan. Thing is, when we know where these females are, someone’s going to have to go and fetch ’em – by the scruffs of their necks, if necessary! And you’ve already proved yourself over that sort of country – what?’

  Bob had glanced down, at the littered desk between them. Knowing what the man was talking about, of course. Temple meanwhile prompting, ‘A hundred miles behind enemy lines – up the Volga?’

  He’d nodded. ‘But only sort of by accident, sir. We’d put our man ashore, then the boat came to grief – I was stuck there, stuck with him, so—’ He paused, shook his head. ‘It became largely a matter of survival.’

  ‘Well, it may interest you to know that I’ve seen a copy of SNO Caspian’s report on that exploit of yours. You and Count Thingummy – yes, I remember that bit. Your CMB hit a mine, didn’t it? But everything beyond that was entirely due to your personal efforts – to what I call guts and gumption. Eh? You brought out that fellow’s sister with you – and another young woman – some princess, was it?’

  Nadia. Who’d now married ‘Count Thingummy’ – Nicholas Solovyev. Which was the real reason Bob had agreed to stay on out here, instead of taking his discharge as he could have done.

  Not that staying on could change anything. But it was how you felt, not how you reasoned. When he had to go home he’d go, but for the time being he didn’t have to, and he felt better staying than he would have done if he’d turned his back and walked away.

  He hadn’t said anything to Temple about Nadia and her new sister-in-law having gone back to nursing, although at the time of that conversation there’d seemed to be some element of coincidence. In fact there was no real parallel between two young English girls who’d failed to stay the course and Nadia and Irina who’d worked together in a military hospital before he, Bob, had known of their existence and who might by now be virtually anywhere in south Russia. Simferopol – the base hospital where these other girls had been in training – was a possibility; but they might be with Wrangel’s army, or on the Don front where Sidorin commanded, or with Mai-Maievsky’s Volunteers. She – and Irina – might have gone (or tried to be posted) wherever Nikki Solovyev had been going; Nadia had written, in that part of her long, anguished letter,

  So with Nikki leaving at once for the Front I cannot remain here. Irina is of the same mind, and we are going together. The reasons – my own, anyway – are similar to those which I have been trying so hard to explain to you in the foregoing pages; that I am very conscious of being Russian through and through, to the last drop of my blood, and just as Nikki would be broken in his heart and spirit if I had held myself back from his long-held expectation that I would marry him, I would be in torture if I had to wait in safety and simply lazing time away while he and others work and fight and face death in defence of everything that I too love and value.

  Indeed, some foretaste of this was forced on me in April when her Majesty the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna embarked in your battleship HMS Marlborough at Sevastopol for passage to Constantinople and – Maria Feodorovna herself – to Malta. As you will remember, we came here to join her entourage at Kharaks, in accordance with the invitation which she had extended to Irina and Nikki’s mother; you will remember that Maria Ivanovna had been Lady in Waiting to the Empress. So we were with them all at the time and went to the harbour to see them leave and wave our farewells as that huge ship departed. There was Maria Feodorovna herself, also the Grand Duchess Xenia and her family, the Grand Dukes Nicholas and Peter with their wives and children, and Prince Youssoupov – the slayer of Rasputin – and his wife. And a few others also. I can tell you, strictly between ourselves my dear, dear Bob, that seeing them all depart the soil of Russia, possibly for ever, I was asking myself how could they – whether in their place one might not feel even that death would be preferable. And from this point of recollection, you see, I ask myself whether if I had kept to the understanding which I had shared with you that we would eventually be reunited in your country and spend the remainder of our lives there, whether it would have been fair to you, knowing that however perfect our life might have been in every other way there would have been times when I should have felt myself to be a traitress, and through my own guilt and sadness made you miserable too.

  There were nine pages of it altogether, in her angular Cyrillic script, by far the longest letter he’d had from her. Several of its paragraphs were repetitious, in what had clearly been a desperate anxiety to make her feelings clear to him.

  * * *

  There was a two o’clock boat into the dockyard, and he went in it, telling the officer of the watch that he wouldn’t be out of the ship for long. He needed to collect some gear from the Kist, and to check that there were no emergencies in Ashmore’s office, which was a small room on the hotel’s ground floor. When it was locked up, messages were left with the manager or pushed under the door. In fact the next British ship scheduled to call at Sevastopol on her way west after off-loading war supplies at Novorossisk wasn’t due for at least a week, and Ashmore would be back before that, in plenty of time to settle any problems.

  The swing door’s top section had been covered with a sheet of plywood, and the vigilante behind the Lewis gun this afternoon was a former Imperial Army cavalryman, completely bald but with a heavy white moustache. Bob had forgotten his name, but remembered his claim to have served in the legendary Dikaya Divizia – the Wild Division, a formation of Caucasians said to have been led originally by the Tsar’s brother, in which all ranks had taken an oath either to kill or be killed.

  Bob nodded to him. ‘Good day, Captain.’

  ‘Major!’

  ‘Oh – of course. Forgive me.’

  ‘Been away, Commander, have you?’

  ‘Well.’ A gesture, towards the anchorage. ‘Yes…’

  The manager had no messages. Nor – he said, in answer to Bob’s enquiry – had anyone learnt anything about the late Alexis Lapin. A shrug: An assassin, evidently…’ One might guess that no further questions would be asked – let alone answered. But everything seemed to be in order in the poky little office – in which all Bob had been doing anyway was keeping the paperwork sorted into one pile that might call for action and another – a larger one – that didn’t.

  He had to pass through the foyer again en route to the stairs, and the old cavalryman stopped him.

  ‘Should have mentioned. The young lady’s been asking for you. Where you’d got to, when were you coming back.’

  ‘Young lady?’

  Knowing damn well…

  ‘The one who hangs round the Frenchman’s neck. Isn’t her name Lyashkova?’

  ‘Oh – that one.’

  ‘And now you’ve been warned.’

  He smiled at the old man. ‘Yes. Thank you, Major.’

  Passing her door, he wondered what she’d want with him. Because while it would have been very nice to have thought of her interest in him as personal – kindled perhaps by her having noticed his interest in her the other night – caution or realism told him this was unlikely, that there’d surely be some much less romantic, less self-flattering explanation.

  Although – when, so to speak, the chips were down, would one accept the risk, swallow the bait?

  Yes. Probably. Here and now – yes.

  He opened his own door, went in and pushed it shut behind him. Quite noisily. If she was in her room, he thought she’d have heard.

  Meanwhile – looking around – nothing in here seemed to have been touched. Although it probably wouldn’t have been done so clumsily as to be obvious�
�� But it would be surprising if someone hadn’t had a snoop round, on the off-chance of finding some item of interest – interest to themselves, or saleable to others. It was simply a matter of recognizing how things and people were, in this place and present circumstances. Aksana Lyashkova, for one – if she did have some interest in him, and had known the coast was clear…

  So work it out. What kind of interest might it be?

  To start with, there was the French angle. That individual – her friend whom the old man downstairs had mentioned – that fellow made a lot of money out of the refugees, not just accepting bribes but unashamedly insisting on being paid before he’d add a name to the waiting-list for a berth in a French ship. And nowadays there were more British ships than French in transit westward; so if his lady-friend could get herself into a position from which she could exert persuasion on the British Naval Liaison Officer to release berths in Red Ensign ships to French-sponsored refugees, obviously he’d be doing a lot more business.

  An extra dividend – with a strong appeal to a Frenchman, of course – would be to leave the British looking like bribe-takers.

  But why in any case would she be working for or with this Frog?

  Standing near the window, with a shirt in one hand and socks in the other, forcing the grey-matter into action – albeit in unfamiliar territory – he decided that a better, more fundamental question would be why, if as Ashmore contended she was a spy, she’d have come to Sevastopol in the first place.

  Well, she was Ukrainian. That had to be the clue: an excellent one, making the rest quite easy. There was a Ukrainian separatist movement, a Ukrainian nationalist army led by a man called Simon Petlyura. His troops had been threatening Odessa not long ago, had only been driven off by Denikin’s Volunteers supported by French naval bombardment. Petlyura’s army was still very much in being, a ‘third force’ opposed to both the Bolsheviks and the Whites, and one might guess that (a) if Ashmore was right the Lyashkova girl was more likely to be spying for Petlyura than for anyone else, (b) Petlyura might well be seeking some kind of accommodation from the French.