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‘And how did the Tsarina make contact with the Germans?’

‘Through her uncle, the Grand Duke of Hesse. He guaranteed their safety, provided that they could be delivered across the border. He also assembled members of the German government and military, who might listen to the Russian peace proposal.’

‘But how did she propose to deliver the Russian emissaries without alerting the Tsar, or anyone else, for that matter?’

‘They had to be smuggled in.’

‘By whom?’ asked Pekkala, thinking of his own journey from Moscow to Helsinki and the shadowy Hokkanen who had led him through the forest. Such guides were not impossible to find, but these men and women usually operated under the protection of one and sometimes both governments simultaneously. No border could ever be completely secured, even in wartime, and the shifting boundaries between mortal enemies were never more than porous screens, through which brave travellers might pass, provided they could find someone to show them the way.

‘I don’t know who smuggled them across the border. What I do know is that they demanded a great deal in payment.’

‘I am not surprised,’ remarked Pekkala, ‘given the risks they were taking, but surely the amount would not have been hard to come by for the Tsarina. We are talking about the one of the richest families in the world, after all, at least at the time.’

‘Normally, the money would not have been an issue,’ agreed Vyroubova. ‘Romanov bank accounts held more than enough to meet the demands of the guides, but to withdraw funds from these accounts, especially such a large amount, would not have gone unnoticed by the Tsar.’

Pekkala knew she was telling the truth. The Tsar kept a very close eye on his personal finances. He met once a month with his financial adviser to discuss the family budget, with which he was notoriously frugal. If the Tsarina had made even a modest withdrawal, questions would have been asked.

‘But the smugglers had to be paid,’ continued Vyroubova, ‘which is how we come to
The Shepherd
. That icon was the price they demanded.’

‘I find that hard to believe,’ said Pekkala, ‘given the importance she placed on its powers.’

‘Which only goes to show that perhaps you did not know her as well as you thought. Yes, she gave them the icon. I think she would have given more than that if it meant saving the lives of thousands of soldiers on the battlefield, German and Russian alike. If her plan had worked . . .’ Her voice trailed off.

‘What happened, Anna? Why did it go wrong?’

‘The delegations never even met,’ she explained. ‘On the way there, our emissaries first had to travel through territory which was held by the Austro-Hungarian Army. And that is as far as they got. They made it through several checkpoints, but eventually had to turn back.’

‘Because they were discovered?’

‘No, because the area through which they were travelling came under Russian attack. So you see, Pekkala, it all came to nothing.
The Shepherd
might as well have been burned, after all, instead of just given away.’

‘Surely these guides, whoever they were, must have known that they could never make a profit from the icon. They could never sell it, and they would have been discovered if they tried.
The Shepherd
was too well known.’

Vyroubova shrugged. ‘I don’t know what they were thinking. The Tsarina didn’t tell me anything about them and she warned me not to ask. It was for my own good, she said, and I believed her.’

‘How did she find them in the first place?’

‘That I
do
know!’ she laughed. ‘They came on the recommendation of our dear departed friend, Rasputin. He arranged the whole thing, even the theft of the icon from his house.’

‘And Father Detlev?’

‘Chosen by Rasputin himself to carry out the robbery.’

‘Did Grigori honestly think that the negotiations would work?’

‘Probably not,’ answered Vyroubova, ‘but he knew that once the Tsarina’s mind was set upon a course, she would throw her whole life into it, no matter what the cost. I think he was trying to protect her, so that when the plan failed, her good intentions would not recoil upon her head, and the heads of the Tsar and their children, as they surely would have done if news of the mission came out. The loss of one icon, precious as it may be, was a small price to pay for the lives of the people Grigori had grown to love. That’s why he chose people who knew how to keep their mouths shut. Whoever the Tsarina gave the icon to, they never breathed a word about it, at least not to me or anyone I knew. If you ask me, you’re lucky you got one word out of Father Detlev, even after all this time.’

‘For what it’s worth,’ said Pekkala, ‘I think it did him good to talk. I hope it does some good for you as well.’

Vyroubova set the tip of her cane upon the ground and rose unsteadily to her feet. ‘Maybe it will, in time,’ she told him. ‘It has taken me years to chase away the ghosts of the past, but they never stay away for long. All it needs is a word, or a sound or a smell, or,’ she jerked her chin at him, ‘the sight of a familiar face, and they all come howling back into my mind.’

‘You are not the only one with ghosts,’ Pekkala told her.

‘I did not doubt that for a second.’ In an unfamiliar moment of kindness, she reached out and touched his hand. ‘Take heart, Pekkala! Maybe one day we’ll wake up and find they’re gone for good.’

Pekkala smiled. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘but I doubt it.’

‘If the truth be told,’ replied Vyroubova, gently releasing his hand, ‘so do I.’

‘A package has come for you, Father!’ Clutching a cardboard box, Prison Warder First Class Turkov opened the gate to Detlev’s garden. With the toe of his boot, he nudged aside the priest’s pot-bellied pig, who had emerged from its straw-padded lean-to in order to see if there was anything to eat.

Detlev had been taking a nap, as he did most afternoons after his lunch. He appeared in the doorway, blinking the sleep from his eyes and his face crumpled like a piece of old brown paper.

‘This doesn’t happen every day,’ remarked Turkov as he placed the box into Detlev’s outstretched hands.

‘Not any day,’ Detlev corrected him, ‘and I see it hasn’t been opened for inspection.’

Turkov brushed aside the comment. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. We already know who it’s from.’

‘We do?’

‘Of course. Inspector Pekkala has sent it. Look here. It has a Moscow postmark. That’s where Pekkala lives, and who else do you know from Moscow?’

Detlev peered at the blurred black ovals which had covered the postage stamps. ‘But why would he have sent me this?’

‘I’m sure it’s just Pekkala’s way of saying thank you for your help with the investigation. Whatever it is, I expect it’s something nice.’ Turkov sounded as happy as if he had received the package himself.

‘Probably,’ said Detlev, and there seemed to be the faintest trace of annoyance in his voice.

‘Well, aren’t you going to open it?’ asked Turkov, smiling expectantly.

‘All in good time,’ answered Detlev. Then he turned and walked back into his house and closed the door.

‘Well I . . .’ Turkov mumbled as the smile faded slowly from his face. ‘I suppose I’ll be going then,’ he announced to the door.

Father Detlev watched him depart, peering through a crack in the door. He had always resented Turkov’s nosiness, even if his curiosity never seemed to contain any particular malice. In fact, it struck Father Detlev that he had been singled out by Turkov for better than average treatment. If their situations had been different, Detlev felt they might even have become friends. But he had learned in his years as a convict that the relationship between a prisoner and his guard could never be based on anything more than mutual mistrust. Turkov’s enquiries about Detlev’s health, his willingness to linger and converse, even the occasional present, such as a much-coveted sewing needle and thread, or an extra loaf of the dark
paika
bread given out to each prisoner as part of the daily rations – all these things only served to make Detlev more suspicious about Turkov’s motives.

But there was another reason why he did not want to open the package in front of Turkov. He did not want to share the surprise of what it contained. There were, as a rule, no surprises in his life. Even the monthly surprise inspections did not surprise him any more and he wanted this to belong to him alone.

Detlev turned back to the box, which was waiting on his kitchen table. He did not open it at first, but smoothed his hands over the paper wrapping. He admired the stamps, some depicting Lenin and Stalin, their profiles placed side by side, as if they were almost the same person. Others showed battle scenes, in which Red Army soldiers bayoneted barely human shapes beneath a red sky emblazoned with the hammer and the sickle.

The pig, whose name was Tolstyak, nudged open the door and trotted over to Father Detlev.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Detlev told the pig.

Tolstyak, who would have been just as happy to eat the box as anything it might contain, stared longingly at the package.

Detlev tore open the paper wrapping, then prised apart the flaps of the cardboard box. At first, the inside appeared to be filled entirely with straw. Detlev sank his hand into the dry, blond stalks and fished about until his fingers closed upon an object. He lifted it out, scattering straw on the floor, which the pig immediately investigated with his flat, twitching nose.

It was a small metal bottle, about the length of Detlev’s hand, sealed with a cork which had been coated with red wax. On the bottle was a brightly coloured paper label, showing the Virgin Mary set against an orange sunset, and two people kneeling before her with crutches laid upon the ground beside them. The writing on the bottle was not in the Russian alphabet, but Detlev could tell that it was in several languages. He could make out French, German and finally English, of which he spoke a little. And what he deciphered were the words ‘Lourdes Holy Water’.

Detlev gasped. He shook the bottle and heard its contents slosh about inside. ‘Thank you, Inspector,’ he whispered. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’

He considered not opening the bottle and instead keeping it safe upon the shelf until the day might come when its powers would be needed. But then he laughed to himself at such foolishness. I am almost seventy years old, he thought. I have spent more than half my life in Karaganda Prison. There is no better time than now.

With his thumbnail, Father Detlev carved away the wax around the cork, watching it crumble on to the table. After mouthing a silent prayer of gratitude, he uncorked the bottle, and poured its contents over his head.

The liquid smelled of flowers, reminding Detlev a little of rosewater, with which his mother used to scent her pocket handkerchiefs. No sooner had this thought entered his head than he began to feel dizzy. And then nauseous. He put the bottle down upon the table. His hands began to tremble. All around him, it grew suddenly dark, as if a storm had swept in from the forest. His breathing became laboured and he tried to sit down, but misjudged the location of the chair and fell upon the floor.

Convulsions racked the old man’s frame as spasming muscles writhed beneath his skin. A foamy white fluid, like frogspawn, poured from his mouth and his nose. His pupils had contracted into pinpricks. The last thing he saw was the nose of the pig, sniffing at his face.

For several minutes, Father Detlev’s body twitched uncontrollably, as if it were being subjected to violent electrical charges. Then, at last, he lay still. In his lower legs, a bluish haze appeared beneath the skin. The haze spread through his limbs, until his whole body had turned a smoky, lavender colour.

Beside him lay Tolstyak the pig, as dead as its owner, pieces of half-chewed straw bristling from its mouth.

‘Inspector,’ said Kirov, holding the phone out towards him. ‘A call has come in from Karaganda.’

Pekkala looked up from his desk, where he was writing a report on his visit to Vyroubova, from which he had only just returned.

‘The guard there wants to know if you sent a package to Father Detlev.’

‘No,’ answered Pekkala. ‘Why?’

Kirov pressed the phone back to his ear. ‘He says no. Why do you ask?’

Pekkala was watching Kirov, trying to figure out the meaning of this call. He saw a shadow pass across the major’s face, and he knew that the news was not good.

Kirov replaced the receiver. For a moment, he just stared at his desk.

‘What is it?’ asked Pekkala.

‘Father Detlev is dead.’

Pekkala set down his pen. ‘When did this happen?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘And how did he die?’

‘The guard didn’t want to tell me over the phone.’

‘Why not?’

Kirov shook his head. ‘All he told me was that we’d better come and see for ourselves.’

‘Again?’ asked Zolkin. He stooped over the bonnet of the Emka, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and braces stretched tight across his shoulders. In his hand, he held a cloth with which he had been waxing the car.

At his driver’s urging, Kirov had rented a small garage for the Emka just across the road from their office. At first, the major had refused, saying that the Emka could continue to live in the alleyway outside their building, just as it had always done. But on their next trip to the Kremlin, Zolkin took a detour through the city, and Kirov could not help but notice the cars, many of them Emkas, that had been stripped by gangs of thieves. On some cars even the wheels had been taken, leaving the vehicles balanced on blocks of wood brought along by the thieves for that purpose. Zolkin did not have to say a word. By the end of that day, Kirov had rented the garage.

It had a rolling steel door which padlocked at the base, and a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling inside. There was no window. The walls were painted concrete and the ceiling had been constructed from wood so old that the marks of an adze could be seen where some long-dead carpenter had trimmed the boards. Although it was spartan, even by the standards of Pekkala, Zolkin was content to spend his time there. The rusty, oil-dripping parts which he had scrounged from various junkyards on the outskirts of the city had been installed inside the engine and even Pekkala, who had previously paid little attention to the quality of their transport, remarked that the car was running more smoothly than it had ever done before. Kirov, who had previously been in charge of the car, remarked grumpily that it seemed a remarkable coincidence that Zolkin would have known the exact location of so many of the city’s pillaged Emkas, and wondered if they owed their upgraded performance to some of those other vehicles.

‘You can’t be serious about driving all the way back to Karaganda!’ protested Zolkin, pausing to wipe the sweat from his forehead. ‘I’ve just finished cleaning the car. Look at how it shines!’ He gestured pitifully at the gleaming radiator grille. ‘It took me two days to scrape away the mud!’

‘It can’t be helped,’ Pekkala told him gently.

Zolkin sighed and shook his head. ‘When do we leave, Inspector?’

‘Immediately,’ said Kirov, and as he spoke, he noticed, on the otherwise bare walls, a heavy sailcloth flap hanging by two iron rings from an iron hook embedded in the concrete wall. ‘What is that thing?’ he asked.

‘Oh, that!’ Zolkin squinted at the canvas, as if he had just noticed it himself. ‘Well, to tell you the truth, Major, that is my bed.’

‘Your bed?’ Kirov echoed, his voice rising in disbelief.

‘It’s a hammock,’ explained Zolkin, as he lifted one of the rings, stretched it over to the other wall and replaced it on a second hook. Now they could see it clearly. The ends of the canvas had been fitted with strings, attached by brass grommets and woven together to form a mesh which came together around the anchoring ring. To illustrate, Zolkin hopped up into the hammock, rolling his body into the envelope of dirty white cloth. Then he grinned down at the two men.

‘But why are you sleeping in here?’ demanded Kirov? ‘I found you a place at the Lubyanka barracks.’

‘With all due respect, Major,’ said Zolkin, ‘it’s hard to get a good night’s sleep at Lubyanka.’

‘Why?’ asked Kirov. ‘Is it too noisy?’

‘No,’ replied Zolkin, ‘it’s the silence that keeps me awake.’

When the Emka pulled up once again before the gates of Karaganda, it was in even worse condition than after its previous trip. All trace of Zolkin’s hand-polished wax finish had been obliterated in a pointillist spray of multi-coloured filth. Having been ordered by Kirov to stop his complaining, Zolkin had begun speaking to himself in his native Ukrainian dialect, but after the windscreen was cracked by a stray pebble thrown up from the wheels of a passing army truck, the driver had lapsed into such a menacing silence that both Kirov and Pekkala felt obliged to engage him in conversation, since he now seemed on the verge of total madness.

While Zolkin was left to contemplate his misfortune, Warder Turkov escorted Kirov and Pekkala to the prison morgue.

It was a single-storey building just behind the prison hospital, which doubled as a place where services were held for the dead, as well as a crematorium, its underground vent pipe emerging in the forest just beyond the prison wire. Having risen into the air, the cremation ash sometimes blew back over the prison, covering everything with a fine greyish-white powder, known to the inmates as ‘dead man’s snow’.

On their way, Turkov explained about the package, and why he had assumed it was a gift from Pekkala. He struggled to describe what he had found in Detlev’s hut when making his rounds the following morning.

‘I knocked on the door and there was no answer,’ said Turkov, still clearly upset by what he had witnessed. ‘I knew that Father Detlev sometimes slept in late, so I was about to walk on and leave the old man in peace when I smelled something peculiar. It reminded me of freshly cut grass. I opened the door and there he was. Him and his pot-bellied pig.’

‘They were both dead?’ asked Kirov.

‘Oh, yes,’ confirmed Turkov. ‘And then I started to feel ill.’

‘It is a natural response,’ Pekkala tried to reassure him.

‘That’s not what I mean, Inspector. The smell, whatever it was. That’s what made me feel ill. By the time I arrived at the prison hospital, I could barely walk. My vision was blurred. But the doctor gave me a shot,’ Turkov continued, ‘and in an hour or two, I was fine again.’

‘Was there any sign of violence on Detlev’s body?’ Pekkala asked the prison guard.

‘Not that I could see,’ replied Turkov.

By now, they had passed through the double steel doors of the morgue and were in a low-ceilinged hallway. To the left was a small room filled with metal chairs, where funerals were held for the dead inmates. Beyond, through another steel door, was the mortuary itself.

‘I’ll leave you here,’ said Turkov. ‘I have seen what you’re about to see, and once is more than enough.’

Inside the mortuary, they were met by a slim, dignified man wearing steel-rimmed spectacles and an apron made of brick-red, rubberised cloth over his suit, along with a pair of gloves, made from the same material as the apron, which came up almost to his elbows. He introduced himself as Dr Tuxen. ‘I hope you both have strong stomachs,’ he said.

With those words, he turned and pulled the handle of a large metal drawer, one of several which were set into the wall. The drawer slid out, revealing a body draped with a white cloth. Grasping the sheet with both hands, he carefully folded it back, disclosing the head, shoulders and stomach of the dead man.