“I watched the lantern he was carrying disappear down the trail towards the oven.

“An hour later he was back with my brother.”

“What happened to you then?” asked Kirov.

“Nothing,” replied Anton. “My brother said he had shut the door on himself. Of course, it wasn’t even possible to lock that door from the inside. My father must have known it, but he pretended to believe my brother. All he did was make us swear never to go back to the oven.”

“And your brother? He never took revenge for what you’d done?”

“Revenge?” Anton laughed. “His whole life since he joined the Finnish Regiment has been vengeance for what happened between us.”

“I would have killed you,” said Kirov.

Anton turned to look at him. His face was layered in shadow. “That would have been less cruel than what my brother did to me.”

HALFWAY DOWN THE MINE SHAFT, PEKKALA CLUNG TO THE ROPE.

It was cold down there and damp and musty-smelling, but the sweat was coursing off his face. The walls appeared to spin around him, like a whirlpool made of stone. Memories of being in the oven swirled inside his head. He remembered reaching out into the darkness, his fingers brushing against the blunt teeth of the burner nozzles which hung from the ceiling of the oven. He had pressed his hands against them, as if to stop the flames from shooting out. At first, he had tried not to breathe the smell in, as if his lungs might filter out those particles of dust. But it was no use. He had to breathe, and as the air grew thin inside that metal cylinder, Pekkala had to fill his lungs as deeply as he could, and all the while that smell poured into him, sifting through his blood like drops of ink in water.

Pekkala looked up. The mouth of the mine shaft was a disk of pale blue surrounded by the blackness of the tunnel walls. For minutes, he fought against the urge to climb out again. Waves of panic traveled through him, and he hung there until they subsided. Then he lowered himself down to the mine floor.

His feet touched the ground, sinking into decades of accumulated dust. Pieces of rotting wooden support beams, toothed with nails, littered the floor.

Pekkala let go of the rope and kneaded the blood back into his hands. Then he took hold of the flashlight and shone it into the darkness.

The first thing he saw was a section of ladder which had fallen to the ground. It stood propped against the wall, the rusted metal glistening black and orange.

The space was wide here, but the way into the belly of the mine soon narrowed to a point where the tunnel split into two and pairs of rusty iron rails curved into blackness. Both of the tunnel entrances were blocked by walls of rock. Pekkala knew that mines were sometimes closed before they had been completely dug out. The miners had probably collapsed the tunnels on purpose, to protect whatever minerals remained in the ground in case they ever returned. The wagons which had run along these rails were parked in an alcove. Their sides showed dents from hard use, the metal smeared with whitish-yellow powder. Pekkala felt a tremor of pity for the men who had worked in these tunnels, starved of daylight, the weight of the earth poised above their crooked backs.

Pekkala played the flashlight around this stone chamber, wondering where these bodies were. It occurred to him that perhaps his brother had been wrong. Perhaps the madman had worked in this mine years before and had invented the whole story, simply to get attention. This train of thought was still unraveling in his head, when he turned, sweeping the beam into the darkness, and realized he was standing right beside them.

They lay as they had fallen, piled in a grotesque heap of bones and cloth and shoes and hair. There were multiple corpses. In such a jumble of decay, he could not tell how many.

He had come down on one side of the mine opening. The bodies must have landed on the other side.

As the flashlight’s beam wavered, like a candle flame boxed by the wind, Pekkala’s instincts screamed at him to get out of this place. But he knew he couldn’t leave, not yet, even with fear sucking the breath out of his lungs.

Pekkala forced himself to hold his ground, reminding himself that he had seen many bodies in the past, plenty of them in worse condition than these. But those corpses had been anonymous to him, in death as they had been in life. If this sad tangle of limbs did indeed belong to the Romanovs, then this was unlike anything he’d witnessed before.

A sound startled him, echoing off the stone walls. It took Pekkala a moment to realize that it was his brother’s voice, calling down from above.

“Did you find anything?”

“Yes,” he called up.

There was a long pause.

“And?” his brother’s voice came down.

“I don’t know yet.”

Silence from above.

Pekkala turned back to the bodies. Down here in the mine, the process of decomposition had been slowed. The clothing was largely intact and there were no flies or other insects, whose larvae would have eaten the corpses down to the bone if the bodies had been left above ground. Neither was there any evidence of rats or mice having gnawed upon the dead. The depth of the mine and the vertical entrance had prevented them from reaching the bodies. He did not know what had been mined here. Whatever it was might also have had a preserving effect.

The victims appeared to be partially mummified. Their skin had turned a greenish brown, nearly translucent, drawn tight over the bones and filmed with mold. He had seen corpses like this before-people frozen in ice or buried in soil with a high acid content, like peat bogs. Pekkala also recalled a case in which a killer stuffed a body up a factory chimney. Over the years in which the victim remained hidden, the body became smoked to the consistency of shoe leather. It was remarkably well preserved, but as soon as police removed it, the corpse decayed at an astonishing rate.

While these bodies remained intact in their present state, he knew that they would also deteriorate very quickly if any attempt was made to move them above ground. He was glad that the decision had been made to leave them here until a properly equipped removal team could be brought in.

At first, Pekkala touched nothing.

On the top of the pile was a woman, lying on her back with her arms thrown out to the sides. From the way she had landed, Pekkala judged that the fall would probably have killed her, but he could see clearly that she’d been dead before she fell. Her skull had been shattered by a bullet between the eyes and the base of the nose, penetrating that part of the brain known as the dura oblongata. The woman would have died instantly. Whoever did this, Pekkala realized, had known exactly what they were doing. But there was more to it than simply knowing how to kill a person. As Vassileyev had drilled into him, the way a murder was committed told a great deal about the killer. Even in cases in which bodies were horribly mutilated, usually with knives, most murderers avoided harming the faces of their victims. Those who used guns to kill their victims usually shot them several times, and most often aimed at the chest. In cases where a pistol was used by someone inexperienced with firearms, the bodies often showed multiple and random impact wounds, the shooters having underestimated how inaccurate those weapons were. Pekkala knew of people who had escaped from shots unleashed at almost point-blank range by untrained marksmen.

Killings carried out by skilled gunmen were usually classified as executions. These, too, left a particular signature. Between a man’s ears at the back of the head was a small knot of bone-the external occipital protuberance. Executioners were taught to press the muzzle of their guns exactly over that place, allowing them to kill with a single shot. Pekkala had seen many such executions, carried out by both sides during the opening stages of the Revolution. The killers left their victims facedown in fields, in ditches, or in banks of snow, hands tied behind their backs, their foreheads blown away by the exiting bullet.