Death Notes (A Phineas Fox Mystery) Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by Sarah Rayne from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Recent Titles by Sarah Rayne from Severn House

  The Phineas Fox Mysteries

  DEATH NOTES

  The Nell West and Michael Flint Series

  PROPERTY OF A LADY

  THE SIN EATER

  THE SILENCE

  THE WHISPERING

  DEADLIGHT HALL

  THE BELL TOWER

  DEATH NOTES

  A Phineas Fox Mystery

  Sarah Rayne

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2016 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  This eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2017 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

  Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Rayne.

  The right of Sarah Rayne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8660-6 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-762-3 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-828-5 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  ONE

  ‘I do not want,’ said Phineas Fox, ‘to take a commission involving researching the life of a nineteenth-century murderer. I don’t care how gifted a musician Roman Volf was, he was hanged for murder and I don’t want him. Give him to somebody else.’

  ‘But it’s for a TV documentary, Phin,’ said his agent in a wail down the phone. ‘Hugely prestigious. All factual, but probably with some of those reconstruction scenes woven in. They want dark romance and mysterious tragedy, and … No, I didn’t make that up, hold on and I’ll forward the email to you.’

  ‘You can’t romanticize Roman Volf,’ said Phin. ‘Not even darkly. He was a villain and a womanizer and he was hanged for helping to assassinate a Russian tsar.’

  ‘Nicholas?’

  ‘No, an earlier one. Alexander II. 1880 or thereabouts. Roman was hanged in St Petersburg, and it was all very squalid.’

  The forwarded email pinged in at that point. It did indeed refer to dark romance and wistful tragedy, and it said that the programme’s editor very much hoped Phineas Fox would be available, because he had been highly recommended and he was their first choice. Phin tried not to feel too flattered by this.

  ‘And have I mentioned,’ said his agent persuasively, ‘the very generous fee they’re offering?’

  ‘You haven’t mentioned a fee at all, but I still don’t want … How much did you say?’

  ‘Very nice, isn’t it?’ said his agent, gleefully. ‘It’d be useful with you having moved to that new flat, I should think.’

  Phin had recently moved to a large, and worringly expensive, flat, which took up about one fifth of a huge old Victorian house. He had done so on a wave of fiscal euphoria following a lucrative research project into the energetic amours of an eighteenth-century composer, but a disconcertingly protracted period of silence from commissioning editors and music biographers had followed, and he was starting to wish himself back in his studio apartment in Bayswater.

  As well as that, the wall of the study, which he had enjoyed furnishing and lining with all his books, had turned out to back on to the bathroom of a lively neighbour, who had the amiable habit of singing rugby songs to start the day. Phin had realized after the first week that he would have to build in some kind of sound-proofing across that wall in order to blot out the strains of ‘If I Were the Marrying Kind’ and ‘Oh, Sir Jasper’ when the neighbour was in the shower. He thought the first song dated to the fifteenth century, but while it was interesting to find such an old song surviving, he did not want to hear it at half-past seven every morning, except for Sundays when the rugby player was usually sleeping off the excesses of Saturday night.

  He brought his attention back to his agent, who was explaining who had recommended Phin for the Roman Volf project.

  ‘It’s that Canadian editor you worked with on the Oscar Peterson tribute a couple of years back. She seemed to think rather highly of you.’

  ‘She was just a work colleague.’

  ‘Red hair and long legs, I heard. She’s supposed to have said something about you having silver eyes. Still, you know editors, they like to wax lyrical from time to time. What about this Roman Volf thing? Will you accept it?’

  Phin thought for a moment, then said, ‘I’ll have a look at him and phone you tomorrow.’

  A good researcher should be able to plumb the depths of all kinds of darknesses and remain objective. Especially when his bank balance is dwindling with alarming rapidity, and even more especially with the looming prospect of either sound-proofing half of his flat at his own expense, or moving to another one and hoping for quieter neighbours.

  Accordingly, after his agent’s phone call, Phin plundered his extensive bookshelves for references to Roman Volf and the infamous assassination of the tsar.

  The first mention he found was couched in colourful terms, and said, ‘Roman Volf was a virtuoso violinist – charismatic and brilliant. But a dark and suffocating web of tragedy wove itself around the last months of his life, and it was believed by some that his descendants would be trapped in the spider-strands of that dark web for many years into the future …’

  This had been written by a Russian journalist called Feofil Markov, and a footnote explained it had been translated from the original Russian, and that most of Mr Markov’s articles had been for the Russian political and literary newspaper, Golos. The book’s author could attest that the words were Feofil Markov’s, but regretted that it had not been possible to verify the truth of any of the content, and added that Markov’s imagination had been known to be
lively.

  Phin accorded this warning a mental nod, and read the rest of the article.

  ‘Two days after the official announcement of the tsar’s death,’ wrote Feofil, ‘Roman Volf led an exultant midnight march of the rebels across the Pevchesky Bridge and along the banks of the Catherine Canal. He played his violin as he went, the anarchists and rebels prancing along behind him, as if he were some fantastical Scaramouche incarnation or a latter-day Pied Piper.’

  No other reports referred to this incident. Most focused on Roman’s part in the assassination, with some saying he had been a minor player in the plot, but others stating he had master-minded it. The date of the assassination had been March 1881, and Phin was pleased to find his memory had only been one year out.

  He wondered if that extraordinary Pied Piper march could be verified. Because if so – and always supposing he accepted the TV commission – it would make a terrific dramatic reconstruction. Could he draft a possible screenplay? He would need more verification, of course, and he would also need to know the music Roman had actually played. He burrowed into several more books, and finally found a further snippet – again from the ubiquitous Mr Markov – who said that the maestro’s choice of music on that march had been outrageous.

  ‘He played Berlioz’s “The Brigands’ Song” – that celebration of the freedom of life enjoyed by outlaws,’ wrote Feofil, ‘and followed it with the “March to the Scaffold” from Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. It was not until one o’clock in the morning that the Russian police, along with a number of imperial Cossacks, finally surrounded him on the Pevchesky Bridge. They arrested him, and took him to the dread Peter and Paul Fortress – the “Russian Bastille”.’

  And, thought Phin, as far as Roman Volf was concerned, that was the day the music died.

  At the end of the article Feofil had written, ‘Roman Volf faced Death disdainfully, as if he was auditioning it to provide accompaniment for one of his performances. Throughout the trial he protested his innocence, although no one believed him. His judges certainly did not.’

  Phin closed the books, having marked the places, and set out to trawl his favourite antiquarian bookshops. There would be plenty of material about Roman on the internet, but he enjoyed secondhand bookshops and there was nothing quite like holding a leather or vellum-bound book in your hands, and knowing that the last person to do so might have lived half a century earlier. It was a pity that the old bookshops were gradually vanishing from the landscape and that the Charing Cross Road was not what it had once been in this respect.

  He began with a tucked-away shop in a small courtyard two – or was it three? – turnings off St Martin’s Lane. Phin always suspected the shop might stand on time-slip land – that this was a sliver of London that straddled the centuries. The shop had an unobtrusive façade, as if it did not especially want to be noticed, and it was narrow and cluttered in a Dickensian kind of way. It specialized in Russian literature and it was said to have originally been bought and run by an aristocratic Russian émigré immediately after the 1917 Revolution. Its more romantically inclined clientele liked to spin improbable tales about refugee Romanovs having started the business with the proceeds of imperial jewels smuggled out of the Winter Palace. On occasions the Anastasia legend was inevitably dragged out for an airing, although Phin suspected this story might have been fostered by the original owners as a marketing ploy.

  He nodded to the proprietor, who was involved in a discussion with two academic-looking gentlemen, and moved slowly along the shelves. Most of the books were in Russian, but Phin thought he would at least recognize Roman’s name. After a fruitless hour, he found his way down to a semi-basement, which housed a section of books on architecture.

  There was only one English title – Lost Buildings of Old Russia – and the book resided so unassumingly at the end of the shelf that Phin nearly missed it. Remembering this afterwards he almost felt sick. The book was cloth-bound and worn, and its spine was so cracked that it was in danger of disintegrating altogether. When Phin opened it, it emitted the dry, brown scent peculiar to all old books, but the pages fell apart at a section where several black and white photographs were reproduced. There were blurred shots of places with onion spires, but on one of the pages was a large, surprisingly clear image. It showed a burned-out building, clearly once massive and elaborate, and the caption identified it as the Skomorokh Theatre near Tchaikovsky Street in Odessa. The theatre, it seemed, had been almost completely destroyed by a fire in 1878, and this was a photograph of the ruined façade and shell, taken in 1881. Preliminary talks were apparently about to commence for the possible rebuilding of the theatre – a grant had been promised from an anonymous donor.

  The anonymous donor could have been anyone, but the year was 1881. The year of the tsar’s assassination. Phin’s mind sprang to sharper attention, and he studied the photograph more closely, seeing for the first time that a figure stood in the foreground. It was a man with strong, slanting cheekbones and narrow, slightly tip-tilted eyes, as if the cheekbones had pushed the eyes up slightly at the outer edges. A man with dark hair, a little too long and somewhat untidy, as if he often pushed it back impatiently. Such as when he was playing a violin in a crowded concert hall or opera house …?

  It was Roman Volf. There could be no mistake. Phin would check up on the Skomorokh Theatre and its exact location, but there was no reason to doubt what the caption said. Which meant that in 1881 Roman had been in Odessa.

  It proved nothing – the assassination had been on 13 March, and Roman could have been at the burned-out Skomorokh Theatre in Odessa on any day before then, and still been in St Petersburg to help kill the tsar. But it was worth looking into, and Phin carried the book to the cash desk, and handed over the modest £15 requested. He made his way back to his flat, barely aware of crowded tubes and jostling, impatient people, at intervals patting his jacket pocket to make sure the book was still safely there, and had not been filched by an enterprising street thief in quest of a wallet.

  Back in his flat, he examined the photograph more closely. Was there anything in the shot that might pinpoint the exact date it had been taken? He searched the flat for a magnifying glass, finally finding one at the back of his sock drawer. Focused on the photograph, the glass brought Roman Volf’s features into sharp clarity. Even like this, even from an era when photography was basic and chancy, the magnetism of the man was evident. No wonder he was said to have had numerous mistresses, and thousands of adoring followers. He was wearing a dark jacket with the collar turned up, and under his left arm – the arm nearest the camera – he was carrying something white. Phin tilted and rotated the magnifying glass every possible way, until he could make out what it was. A newspaper, folded over. And newspapers had dates on them. It might not be possible to make that out, of course, even if the paper was folded to show the date. And the paper would be a Russian one anyway …

  The print was tiny, but after a bit more manipulating of the magnifier, it was possible to see that the newspaper was called Golos, and the date was 13 MApTA 1881. Golos was the magazine Feofil Markov had written for – it translated as The Voice. The date hardly needed a translator, but Phin made quick use of an online translation website. Sure enough, it was 13 March 1881. The day of Alexander’s murder.

  He stared at the grainy images, then a spike of doubt suddenly raised itself, a spike adorned with the words ‘Gregorian Calendar’. There had been two weeks or so around the end of the 1800s and the start of the 1900s when dates and calendars had been adjusted because people – countries – were switching from the old, imprecise Julian calendar to the more exact Gregorian one. What if 13 March was one of them? What if this was the thirteen-day gap, and it was 1 March when Roman had been in Odessa?

  Phin carried the book over to his desk, booted up the computer, and typed in a series of search requests for Julian and Gregorian dates. It took a few moments, but eventually he found what he wanted and sat back with a huge breath of relief. Russi
a had not adjusted its calendars to catch up on those lost thirteen days until 1918. So the date on Roman’s newspaper really had been 13 March – the day Alexander II had been murdered.

  Could the photo have been taken a day or two after the 13th, with Roman holding an old newspaper? No, it could not, because he had been in St Petersburg by the night of the 15th – he had led that bizarre midnight procession over the Pevchesky Bridge, pouring defiant, near-treasonous music into the night. In the early hours of the 16th, he had been arrested and taken straight to the Peter and Paul Fortress. Could he have travelled from Odessa on the 13th and been in St Petersburg on the 15th? Phin called up a map website, typing in a request for details of the journey between the two places. The distance was just over 1,000 miles and, on today’s roads, it would take approximately twenty-two hours of driving. How long would that journey have taken in 1881? Two days at least – probably nearer three. On that basis Roman would have had to leave Odessa on the 11th. And if this photo had been taken on the 13th, Roman could not have been in St Petersburg on the day the tsar was murdered.

  It did not prove his innocence. He could have been involved up to his sardonic eyebrows in the plot, and deliberately been 1,000 miles away when the deed was done. And yet …

  Was it possible that the photo had been faked? But that would only have been done with the aim of proving his innocence, and it would have been put forward at the trial as an alibi. At the very least it would have raised a massive doubt as to Roman’s guilt. It might have transmuted the death sentence to life imprisonment.

  Or had the imperial, imperious Romanovs wanted scapegoats at any cost and seized on Roman as one of those scapegoats? Phin wondered how difficult it would be to get hold of a transcript of Roman’s trial, and if such a transcript still existed.

  The Lost Buildings book had been published in 1920 – forty years after the assassination. By then nobody would have been particularly interested in a forty-year-old murder, even though it was the murder of an imperial ruler. Another assassination had happened in 1914, a Great War had been fought as a result, and in 1917 a Revolution had toppled the Russian Imperial House, ending the line of the Romanovs. The story of Alexander II and Roman Volf had faded. The Skomorokh photo had probably turned up in some obscure library or collection, and been included without the publishers even realizing what it was or what it suggested.