House of the Hanged. Mark Mills
Crucifixion, stoning and impalement were commonplace, and in Orel they liked to pour water over their victims, leaving them to freeze outside overnight into crystal statues.
This is what the Revolution had brought out in men: not the best, but the very worst, the stuff of bygone eras, when Genghis Kahn and his blood-thirsty hordes had run merry riot through the Steppes.
In no way could Tom be held accountable for the dark state of nature that lurked in men, but he was to blame for choosing to gamble with it, and losing. How would things have turned out for Irina if he hadn’t tried to intervene? She might have weathered the incarceration, the torture, and been released. What if he had underestimated her? Should he not have had more faith in her resilience?
These were the questions that had kept him awake in the coal cellar, and he couldn’t imagine a time when they wouldn’t plague his thoughts. If he had come here to this grim apartment building on Liteiny Prospekt, it was only with a view to dragging some small consolation from the disaster.
He had a street number and an apartment number, but no name. Markku had told him that the name was of no importance; the one he knew her by was probably false anyway.
‘It’s a woman?’ Tom had enquired.
‘It’s something close,’ had been Markku’s enigmatic reply.
The problem lay in slipping past the concierge un noticed. It was well known that the building caretakers of Petrograd were rapidly becoming the unofficial eyes and ears of the Cheka. It was even rumoured that some made false denunciations of their residents, leaving them free to pillage the apartments once the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ had been carted off.
Seeing an elderly woman rummaging for her key at the entrance door, Tom hurried across the street, arriving as the door was swinging shut behind the woman. He stopped it with his hand, waited a few moments, then slipped inside.
The cavernous entrance hall was dark and deserted. He heard the woman puffing her way up the stone staircase, and through the glazed doors directly ahead of him he could see a man shovelling snow in the courtyard.
The apartment was on the third floor, towards the back of the building. He knocked, and was about to knock again when he heard a female voice.
‘Who is it?’
‘Markku sent me,’ he replied, in Russian.
‘I don’t know anyone called Markku.’
‘He told me to say that you make the best pelmeni in all Russia . . . after his mother’s.’
Three locks were undone before the door was opened as far as the guard chain would permit. A small woman, a shade over five feet, peered up at him defiantly. Her black hair was threaded with silver strands and pulled back tightly off her lined face. Her dark eyes were clear and hard, like polished onyx. They roamed over him from head to toe, then past him, searching the corridor behind. Only then did she release the chain.
Tom followed her along a corridor into a large and extravagantly furnished living room. The rococo divans, Persian rugs and gilt-framed portraits – one of a booted general, another of some high-bosomed ancestress – had obviously been intended for a far nobler space than this; here, they looked awkward and overblown, eager to be elsewhere.
Tom turned and found himself staring into the barrel of a handgun.
‘Take off your coat,’ said the woman. ‘Take it off and throw it on that chair there.’
There was nothing strained or hysterical in her voice. She might just as well have been a doctor inviting him to remove his clothes in a consulting room.
Tom did as she requested, unquestioningly, watching while she searched the coat, knowing what she would find. Her eyes only left his momentarily, to glance down at the revolver as she pulled it from one of the pockets.
‘This is a Cheka weapon,’ she said, levelling her own gun at his head.
Tom cowered. ‘It was. Until last night.’
‘You’re not Russian.’
‘I’m English.’
She switched effortlessly to English, with just the barest hint of an accent. ‘And where were you born?’
‘Norwich.’
‘A flat and dull county, Norfolk.’
‘You obviously don’t know it well.’
‘Sit down. Hands on your knees.’
Tom deposited himself on a divan. The woman remained standing.
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘Tom Nash. I was part of the Foreign Office delegation sent over here last summer.’
‘A little young for that sort of thing, aren’t you?’
‘It was my first assignment after joining.’
‘You knew Bruce Lockhart?’
‘Of course, I worked for him here.’
‘Lockhart was lucky to get away with his life.’
‘So was I. It was Markku who got me out of the country after they stormed the embassy.’
‘And how is Markku?’ she demanded flatly.
Tom and the tall Finn had become fast friends since their escape from the capital. They’d had little choice in the matter; the Consulate in Helsinki had lodged them in the same room at the Grand Hotel Fennia.
‘Stuck in Helsinki,’ said Tom. ‘Frustrated. Drunk most of the time.’
‘He’s still one of the best couriers we’ve got. So why, I’m wondering, do they send us a boy from the Foreign Office?’
‘I’m with the Secret Intelligence Service now.’
‘Is that right?’ She made no effort to conceal her scepticism.
‘I was seconded when I got to Helsinki.’
This wasn’t quite true. Tom had pushed for a transfer to the SIS in Helsinki, anything that would keep him close to Petrograd, to Irina. A desk job back in London hadn’t been an option in his own mind, and he had managed to persuade others that his skills as a Russian-speaker would be best served closer to the front line.
‘Prove it,’ said the woman.
‘I can’t.’
‘I suggest you try.’
Tom hesitated before replying. ‘ST-25.’
‘That means nothing to me,’ she shrugged.
But she was lying; he had seen the faint flicker in her obsidian eyes. She knew as well as he did that ST-25 was the codename for the sole remaining SIS agent in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks had brutally broken the American spy network over the autumn, and they were close to achieving the same with the British. The elusive ST-25 remained a thorn in their side, though. The Cheka had even set up a special unit devoted to hunting him down.
‘You want his real name?’ said Tom. ‘I can give it to you if that will help.’
‘She doesn’t need to know my real name.’
The voice was low and steady, and it came from behind Tom.
He turned to see a man of middle height step into the room. It was hard to judge his age – early thirties maybe – the thick dark beard blunting his handsome features showed no signs of grey.
‘Katya, I think our friend here could do with a hot drink . . . and maybe a piece of bread, if you can spare it.’
Katya eyed Tom with all the warmth of an attack dog called to heel by its master. Handing over the two guns, she disappeared into the kitchen.
‘Paul Dukes?’ asked Tom.
Dukes