LITMIR.BIZ

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passed by the steps leading up to the interrogation rooms, silent at this hour, making for the stone staircase at the end of the corridor.

      She was curious to see how far she would get.

      On the floor above, she ran a short gauntlet of offices flanking a corridor before finding herself in the main lobby. There was a guard on duty at the big desk by the doors, bent over some paperwork. When she stopped to show her pass he waved her on, almost irritably, and she wondered if he too was in on it.

      Outside in the gloomy courtyard, no one paid her a blind bit of notice, not the troops huddled around the brazier, not the officer berating the two mechanics poking around in the engine of a canvas-covered truck.

      Was it really that simple? A mere slip of paper?

      There were still the sentries at the main gate to get past, but she could see freedom looming ever larger beyond the tall archway as she approached. A quick glance over her shoulder confirmed that she wasn’t being followed.

      One of the sentries unshouldered his rifle, keeping a close watch on her while the other checked her pass against a ledger in the small cubbyhole which served as their guardhouse. A bitter blast whistled through the archway, stinging her eyes. Then suddenly everything was in order. The pass disappeared into a drawer. Anna Constantinov was free to go.

      How had Tom done it? No one had really expected him to try, let alone pull it off, least of all her.

      She thrust her hands deep into her pockets and set off up the street, not quite sure what to think, what to do. She needed time to work it through in her head.

      She had taken no more than a dozen tentative steps along the icy pavement when she felt a hand land on her shoulder and heard the teasing drawl of a familiar voice close to her ear.

      ‘Going somewhere, Irina?’

      Tom lit another candle, an excuse to stretch his legs and warm his fingers over the bank of flickering flames.

      He had spent more than an hour in the Alexander Nevsky Chapel, most of it on his knees, head bowed in a show of prayer. A pew would have been nice, a stool, anything, but seating had never figured large in the thinking of the Russian Orthodox Church. It allowed them to cram the people in. Fourteen thousand souls could fit into St Isaac’s Cathedral; at least, that’s what Irina had told him when she had first taken him there, soon after his arrival in Petrograd, his raven-haired tour guide skipping her classes at the Conservatoire to show him some of the sights.

      It had been a bright June morning, the sunlight flashing off the vast gilded dome and laying bare the fussy opulence of the interior: the intricate patterning of the marble floor, the steps of polished jasper, the columns of green malachite and blue lazurite, the walls inlaid with porphyry and gemstones, and the gilded stucco and statues wherever you turned. A blaze of fragmented colour, had been Tom’s first impression, like stepping inside a child’s kaleidoscope.

      He had made the right noises, but Irina had read his thoughts, sensed his reservations.

      His church, the church of his youth, was a humble ivy-tangled affair in a village on the outskirts of Norwich, where the damp rose in waves around the bare plaster walls, and where Mr Higginbotham, the churchwarden, had once threatened to resign his post because the new altar frontal sported an embroidered hem. Tom’s father had seen that the offending article was returned to Wippell’s, who had promptly dispatched a suitably chaste replacement.

      ‘Your father is a priest?’ Irina had asked.

      ‘A vicar.’

      ‘Is there a difference?’

      ‘I suppose not. Only, I’ve never heard my father refer to himself as a priest.’

      ‘I’m surprised,’ Irina had said, tilting her head at him.

      ‘What, I give off an unholy glow?’

      It was the first time he had seen her laugh, and he could still recall how his heart had soared at the sight of it.

      How had they gone from that to this in little more than six months?

      He knew the answer, of course. A few weeks after that first visit to St Isaac’s, Tsar Nicholas and the Imperial family had been murdered, slain by the Bolsheviks (in the basement of a house in Ekaterinburg, if the intelligence report which had recently passed through his hands in Helsinki was to be believed). The real turning point, though, had been the attempt on Lenin’s life at the end of August – two bullets, one to the chest, one to the neck – as the leader of the Bolsheviks was leaving a rally in Moscow. No one had expected Lenin to survive, but even before it became clear that he would, the Red Terror had been unleashed: a brutal crackdown intended to turn back the rising tide of anti-Bolshevism in the country.

      Suspecting British involvement in the assassination plot, the Cheka had stormed the embassy in Petrograd. It was a Saturday, and Tom hadn’t been in the building at the time, but Yuri, the porter, had been. It was Yuri who had searched Tom out at the English Club and described to him the death of Captain Cromie, chief of the Naval Intelligence Department, dispatched with a bullet to the back of the skull after a fierce firefight on the main staircase. Tom’s boss, Bruce Lockhart, head of the special British diplomatic mission to Russia, had been taken into custody, and the Cheka had issued a warrant for Tom’s arrest.

      Yuri had been accompanied by a tall and taciturn Finn assigned to spirit Tom away that same evening. In spite of Tom’s protestations, the Finn had not allowed him to see Irina before leaving. Evil was in the air. And besides, there was no time. The last train from Okhta station left at seven o’clock.

      Tom’s short summer in the Russian capital had ended abruptly with that journey northwards: by rail to Grusino in a boxcar crammed with silent refugees, then a sapping foot march through the forests and bogs, dodging the patrols, tormented every weary step of the way by thoughts of the woman he had been forced to leave behind. Even when they had slipped past the border post on their bellies into Finland and freedom he had experienced no sense of elation.

      The dread prospect of repeating that same perilous journey – not only in the dead of winter, but with Irina in tow – brought Tom out of his reverie.

      His eyes darted to the bag of clothes he had secreted in the corner of the chapel, just beyond the glow of the candles. He couldn’t make it out in the shadows, but he sensed that it was there, just as he sensed the presence of someone standing behind him.

      His head snapped round expectantly.

      It wasn’t Irina; it was a young priest, not much older than Tom, and yet there was something haggard and careworn about him.

      ‘If He hasn’t heard you by now, then I doubt He’s listening.’

      Tom returned the faint smile, but said nothing.

      ‘Bad times.’

      ‘Yes, Father.’

      ‘Vade in pacem,’ the priest said softly before retiring into the gloom shrouding the main body of the cathedral.

      Maybe it was the young priest’s depleted air, but Tom felt a sudden shiver of unease pass through him. He now noticed that some of the icons were missing from the walls of the chapel. Stolen, or removed for their own protection? Either way, their absence pointed to an ominous shift in the natural order of things. A story blew into his mind, something Irina had once told him. She had been present when two hundred victims of the so-called ‘Bloodless Revolution’ had been laid to rest on the Champ de Mars. Apparently, no crosses had been carried in the procession, and no priests had been allowed to officiate at the burials.

      Irina. Was she trying to tell him something? He would normally have dismissed such a thought as superstitious claptrap, but by now the fear had lodged itself in his chest. Why had he even chosen St Isaac’s? Because it was safe? Nowhere was safe in the new Russia. There was certainly no place for obsolete notions of religious sanctuary.

      He was a fool. At the very least, he should have remained outside the cathedral, whose thick walls rising into the darkness were beginning

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