A different hand had written notes in the margins of the typed text. Watching Lily, Joe was aware that her breathing was increasing in speed as she read. He listened to her sighs and the small noise of pity that caught in her throat.

‘Are we beginning to see it, Wentworth – the motive for the wholesale slaughter of a section of the British Establishment?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Lily scanned quickly through the text again. ‘Am I to gather that her whole family was killed off? Anna is the last remaining?’

Keeping his voice level, Joe replied briefly. ‘It seems so. Apparently the family behaved with great courage. Father, mother, the girl Anna and two younger brothers followed the Romanovs into detention in Tobolsk in Siberia. Many – about fifty – of their devoted courtiers made the move with them. They tried to follow when the royal family were suddenly entrained and sent off south and east to Ekaterinburg. Fearing the worst, Anna’s father made a fuss and the local soviet, with the loss of temper and discipline that characterizes these people, had the whole family arrested – with others – and taken off by their guards. Seems to have been a favourite trick of the Bolsheviks – throwing families down mine shafts … alive …’

‘And dropping grenades on top of them? Until the screaming stopped?’ Lily’s voice was tight with horror.

‘The investigators report that some managed to crawl away down side shafts where they lived on for hours, perhaps even days, before succumbing to their wounds. Or starvation. When the bodies were recovered by a contingent of the White Army that swept through the region, Anna’s was missing.’

‘And all this happened in the dead of night. I can’t begin to imagine …’

‘That’s the way they do things. In the confusion and struggling … the father had armed himself and defended his family with some spirit … no one noticed that Anna was being bundled offstage by one of the guards. A young and impressionable lad.’ Joe sighed. ‘Had he fallen for Anna, are we to suppose? Some of the Bolshevik guards were anything but the sadistic fiends they have been portrayed as … One of the Romanov guards, in Ekaterinburg, with starvation stalking the streets, got hold of the wherewithal to bake a birthday cake for the archduchess Maria’s nineteenth birthday. She was a bonny lass, Maria, flirtatious and friendly. The guard was discovered being given a kiss of thanks and the poor lad was sent off to the front. To certain death.’

‘Our Anna may well now wish she had gone to certain death with her family in the pit,’ was Lily’s comment as she turned the page and read on. ‘I don’t much like the sequel to this tale.’

‘It gets worse. Hardly a romance, is it? A lost year spent hiding in a village somewhere in Siberia in the family of this young ruffian. He claimed to have married her, but she denies this and says she was raped, kept as a slave, overworked and beaten by the members of the family. Finding herself with child, she chose to stay until the baby was born and then escaped and somehow made her way north to Murmansk on the coast. The consul secured her a passage aboard Captain Swinburne’s gunboat – we keep a snarling presence in those waters – and fetched up in London. Where she rejoined her compatriots, nursing her hatred to her bosom.’

‘Not her baby. Left behind? Perished?’

He flipped through the notes again, checking. ‘We don’t know. And Anna’s not saying, apparently. This stage of her life seems to have been reconstructed from accounts of her friends who have chosen to follow a less secretive way of life in their adopted country. Two or more accounts, all telling the same tale.’

‘And after her harrowing time she learns that not only is her own family dead, but Alexei too and her friend Tatiana. But, perhaps most shocking of all for a Russian of her class, the Tsar – “the anointed of God”! He was more than a man, more than a king. By the grace of God, he personified the Russian people. All things considered, this was a crime of heinous proportions.’

‘Proportions big enough to unseat you from your moorings, would you say, Wentworth?’

Lily nodded, her face glacial. ‘I’d go looking for my gun,’ she said quietly. ‘And a target for my rage.’

They were both silent for a moment, Joe turning back instinctively to look once again at the photograph of the five lovely girls in their white silks and satins.

‘She must have asked what the British monarchy did to help their cousins,’ Lily said. ‘I’ve heard the question asked – were the forces of the British Empire not equal to the task of rescuing one small family? They had over a year to plan and effect their removal. They can send in gunboats to save nations – surely a horse and cart to fetch out seven people could have been managed?’

Joe resented her implied criticism but replied mildly enough. ‘King George had his hands full at the time, you might remember, fighting the Germans to a standstill in the last stages of the war.’

‘I don’t think that would have weighed heavily with a Russian aristocrat. She would have focused her bitterness very precisely on the ones who had washed their hands of the Romanovs in their hour of need. Shall I speak their name? On the Windsors, I mean. Is this what’s staring us in the face? Vengeance? An eye for an eye. A prince for a prince? Her own prince was lying dead in an unmarked grave in a Russian forest. Ours is alive and well and being fêted wherever he goes. On a polo field, in a night club, down a coal mine – wherever he finds himself, the reaction is the same: unthinking adulation. He was engaged in a triumphal tour of India soon after she arrived here. Sporting and popular. Everyone’s blue-eyed boy. It must have rubbed salt in the wound. She was going to make him atone with his life.’

‘I fear you may be right, Wentworth. And will she stop at one? More royal figures may follow if we don’t lay hands on her. They’re safely up in Norfolk for the moment but they won’t stay there for ever. They work hard, they travel around the country. They have their seasonal movements, their social demands. And I’m quite sure they feel themselves inviolable. They’ll soon break out of my protective ring. It can only be a matter of time and patience on an assassin’s part.’

‘But I have to ask because I don’t understand – why the admiral, sir? What’s the link? Is there a link?’

‘Where, indeed, does poor old Dedham feature in all this? An opportunistic coup? I don’t think so. I fear there may be a link to chill the blood, Wentworth. There had been a series of crimes by the IRA … Scotland Yard itself had survived an attempted bombing. It was expected in the press that national figures were in line for assassination. What better cover for our Anna than the admiral dying spectacularly on his own doorstep at the hands of a pair of Irishmen only too happy to confess their patriotic motives to the waiting press? We all had Dedham marked down as number four in a series of IRA attacks. Clearly, the next attempt was going to be politically motivated also. And the one after that. And everyone knew the Prince of Wales was an Irish target.’

‘She’s not intent on martyrdom, then, sir? She hasn’t shot and surrendered. Or topped herself.’

‘Which can only mean, if I read her desperate mental state aright, that she wants to stay at liberty long enough to slay others. Covering her killings with the blanket of Irish nationalism. My God! We can expect more of the same. She’s going for the whole family!’

‘Sir? We’re thinking that this woman sacrificed Admiral Dedham as no more than a smokescreen for her further activities? A murder to conceal the motive for further murders? It’s insane …’ There was horror in Lily’s voice.

‘Quite.’ Joe hoped he could trust her to toe the line he was about to draw. ‘Listen, Wentworth – Cassandra must never find out. A hero’s widow should not be burdened with the knowledge that her husband’s death was no more than a distraction, a diversion from the main business … a cover for a thrust of mad, venomous spite directed at a completely different target.’