The Last Train to Kazan. Stephen Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ find the register, he just gives me the keys because I yell at him a little.’ He fumbled through the keys.

      ‘Look at this,’ Nametkin said, pointing to the sheen of a cartridge case in the mud outside. Ryzhkov bent to pick it up; much stepped on, clotted with mud and sand. The brass case from a pistol cartridge; he put it in his pocket and stepped back to better appreciate the side wall of the house. There was a short stairway down to the basement doors, a single window looking out from what was supposed to be a storeroom, or perhaps it had once been a bedroom for a servant that had been added on.

      Giustiniani had trouble with the lock and Ryzhkov stepped in to help; the old key to the door turned the opposite way. The door creaked open and they hung there on the threshold of the dark room, blinded a little because of the sunshine outside. They pushed the doors open wider to reveal a completely bare space.

      And then he saw the bullet holes.

      Obviously the shots had come from where they were now standing, their impacts clustered in the wall directly opposite the doorway. There were single holes and then a flurry of others. A lot into the floor as well – too many to count. There should have been blood but there wasn’t, so Ryzhkov walked over to the corner and got down on his knees.

      ‘It’s been cleaned, I think, yes?’ Strilchuk asked, sniffing.

      ‘It’s all very tidy,’ Nametkin said. Ryzhkov patted his pockets, and then asked if either of them had a knife. Strilchuk reached into his pocket and came out with a blade.

      Ryzhkov used it to winkle a strip of moulding off the floor, a long piece that had come awry, shattered at one end by a bullet. It broke away and he picked it up and carried it to the sunlit doorway.

      ‘Yes, all cleaned up,’ he said, showing the dark band of blood to Nametkin.

      ‘I suppose we don’t want to take it apart just yet, eh?’ Strilchuk said, looking around at the room.

      ‘No, we can wait, but it should be sealed, eh?’ Ryzhkov said.

      ‘I wouldn’t trust these people to seal a stamp,’ Giustiniani said.

      ‘How much blood is it, do you think?’ Nametkin asked him.

      ‘It’s impossible to say. It’s been well cleaned. When you get in the corner you can really smell it. Vinegar too, but there’s the other smell. In this weather you can’t get rid of that. And from the number of bullet holes, it’s more than one person for sure,’ Ryzhkov said.

      ‘He says eleven,’ Nametkin said, waving the paper at him. ‘He says everybody.’

      ‘Good God.’ Ryzhkov turned and looked at the room, trying to imagine the press of eleven people gathered in there to be killed – the Tsar, the Tsaritsa, the boy, the four girls. Eleven?

      ‘Who were the others?’ Strilchuk asked.

      ‘Their servants. Loyal retainers,’ Giustiniani said in a voice that dripped cynicism.

      Ryzhkov tried to imagine the scene. Eleven people, then. Plus, jammed in at the doorway there would have had to be the firing squad. A tightly packed little room. Maybe they’d been done in smaller groups. It would have been easier that way. He started to ask Nametkin about the other victims, but the prosecutor had turned and gone back outside.

      Ryzhkov stood there for a few more moments, looking around the storeroom, the crazy splattering of bullet holes, the faint swirls where they’d mopped the floor with vinegar and sand, a sliver of broken threshold – the wood clean and yellow-brown. All of it lit by single barred, dirty window, and the flare of sunshine from the open door.

      A collection of rosy shadows across the cheap wallpaper, the faint whiff of cleaning fluid and death.

      The end of an empire.

      

      The rest of the day was taken up with a parade of witnesses, a whirl of testimony and common police work. From birth it seemed to be a stuttering, confused murder investigation, pulled administratively between the Czech military under General Golitsyn, and Nametkin’s bosses, the civilian ‘government’ – Kolchak’s dictatorship with its green and white flag. Giustiniani added to the confusion by ratifying everything with a wave of his hand, keeping absolutely no paper record, and referring to Ryzhkov variously as ‘investigator’, ’secretary’ and ‘aide’. In practice Ryzhkov did whatever was required and additionally tried to provide anything Nametkin needed.

      Besides Strilchuk, the ‘investigators’ were combined from what was left of the Yekaterinburg police, a sub-standard force of malcontents and traitors who’d found protection by banding together, and augmented by a detachment of soldiers.

      Ryzhkov kept his eye on Strilchuk, who went about his work with a set jaw and a stare that never wavered. Giustiniani had also noticed his hard edge. By the afternoon Strilchuk had been moved to the front desk in the office and been given responsibility for coordinating the day-to-day logistics of the investigation.

      In the afternoon Ryzhkov took a breather, walked out onto the steps, fished around in his pockets for a smoke, realized he had none, and cadged one off an officer who was standing there. Only a moment later Volkov, the young corporal who was filling in as their secretary, brought him back to the office to hear what a courier from the hospital had to say.

      Apparently a Russian officer had turned up at the hospital and demanded to see the commander immediately. His story was that he’d been hiding in the woods, dressed as a peasant, near Koptiaki, a little town only four miles north of Yekaterinburg on the edge of the lake. Early on the morning of 17 July the villagers had been rousted out by Bolshevik guards from the hovels where they had been camped. They’d been told differing stories: the Czechs were coming, there was a dangerous demolition exercise planned for the area, all sorts of things. When morning came and the Bolsheviks had left, they all went back to the site.

      When they got there they saw that there had been a fire, and when they poked about in the ashes they discovered charred clothing and several pieces of jewellery.

      ‘Where is this place?’ Ryzhkov asked.

      ‘It’s the Ganin pit. That’s the name he told us, Excellency,’ the courier said.

      ‘Near Koptiaki,’ Strilchuk said. ‘Not far.’

      ‘Do you know it?’ Giustiniani demanded.

      ‘Yes. It’s a mine. They are all through the woods, here. An open mine where the coal is close to the top layer of the soil. The peasants dig them. You have to be careful in the woods. You can easily fall in,’ Strilchuk said.

      ‘Can you take us there?’ Giustiniani pressed Strilchuk.

      ‘Sure,’ he said, not really deferring to Giustiniani in the way he said it. ‘It’s between here and Koptiaki. You cross the tracks –’

      Giustiniani had turned on the courier. ‘Where is this officer now?’

      ‘Lt Sheremetevsky,’ the courier said, reading from a piece of card, ‘is on the way here, sir. The doctors could not keep him.’

      ‘And the jewels, the various items, what was it exactly?’

      ‘A jewelled cross and a brooch,’ the boy read out СКАЧАТЬ