The horses were terrified, their heads twisting, their eyes rolling back in fear of the baying creatures behind the sleigh. Scarcely daring to look, Dmitry counted seven — now eight — of the wolves, swarming so close that he could feel their hot breath on the icy rushing air. He glanced down at the terrified child in his arms and pulled the bearskin more tightly around her deathly pale face.
‘We’ll never make it in time,’ cried Yusupov, ‘it will be dark before we reach Pokrovskoye.’
They could see the black outline of the town on the horizon, but already the sun was dropping below the tops of the trees. The sleigh clattered and crunched its way across deep-frozen cart tracks, swaying perilously, the wolves howling close behind, falling over each other in their efforts to keep up. One of the largest, a fearsome yellow-eyed beast the size of a Great Dane, suddenly threw itself forward and seized Dmitry’s scarf-end in its jaws. The wool pulled tight, choking him as he clawed at his throat. Yusupov yanked it away from his brother’s neck and pulled hard, feeling the weight of the animal on the other end. ‘See, Dmitry,’ he cried, ‘look in the eyes of our pursuer now!’
He released the scarf sharply and the creature fell back, tumbling over itself. But it had his scent, and would follow the sleigh into the darkness until its jaws were filled. Dmitry cradled the infant in his arms, protecting her from buffets as the sleigh hammered over a ridge of ice. They had taken her hostage to effect their escape from the private apartments of Rasputin himself, but now they no longer had need of her. After all, the casket was now in their possession, and its value was beyond calculation. He knew that Yusupov was thinking the same thing. Behind them, the wolves were becoming braver, jumping at the rear of the sledge, trying to gain a hold with their forepaws. Thick ribbons of spittle fell along the crimson velvet plush of the seat-back as the animals yelped and barked in frustrated relay.
‘They will not stop until they feed,’ he shouted. ‘We must use the child. She slows us down.’
‘But she is innocent!’
‘If we fail in our mission, many thousands of innocents will perish.’
‘Then do it and be damned!’
Dmitry slipped the wild-eyed girl from the bear-fur. In one scooping motion he raised her above his head, then threw her over the end of the sleigh. She had only just begun to scream as the wolves imploded over her, seizing her limbs in their muscular jaws. The two young Bolsheviks watched for a moment as the animals swarmed around their meal, the sleigh briefly forgotten. The child’s cries were quickly lost beneath the angry snarling of the feed. A sudden splash of blood darkened the evening snow. The driver huddled tighter over his reins, determined not to bear witness to such events. The next time he dared to look back, all he could see was a distant dark stain against the endless whiteness, and the sated wolves slinking away with their heads bowed between their shoulders, ashamed of their own appetites.
Yusupov studied the horizon once more, trying to discern the lights of the approaching town. He was twenty- three, and had already felt the hand of death close over him. He prayed that Casparov would be waiting at the bridge, that he had found a way of evading their pursuer. It was essential for them to find a hiding place for the casket in Pokrovskoye.
‘Perhaps we are safe now,’ said Dmitry as the sleigh turned towards the smoking chimneys of the town. ‘May we have the strength to do what must be done.’
‘Our story begins in the reign of Tsar Nicholas II, in the year 1908,’ said Dr Harold Masters, studying his uninterested students as they lolled in their seats. ‘Starving Bolsheviks fled across Russia with a precious cargo; a jewelled casket fashioned by Karl Faberge and stolen from Rasputin himself, its contents unknown — and yet the men in the sleigh were willing to die to preserve it. Their flight from Rasputin’s secret shrine at St Petersburg was doomed, but before they were brutally murdered in mysterious circumstances, we know that the casket was passed on, to make its way in time to New York.
‘In the late 1920s a family of wealthy Franco-Russian emigrants who had escaped to America on the eve of the October revolution sailed on the SS
The sun had set an hour ago, but the sea was still blacker than the sky. Alexandrovich Novikov stood watching the churning wake of the ship, his gloved left hand clasping the wooden railing. Powerful turbines throbbed far beneath his feet, and he rode the waves, balancing as the liner crested the rolling swell of the sea. Back in the state room his wife, his brother and his children chattered excitedly about their new life in England, trying to imagine what, for them, was quite unimaginable. They would have new names, he had decided, European names that others would be able to pronounce without difficulty. They were being given a second chance, and this time the family would prosper and grow. There remained but one task for him to accomplish; the removal of the final obstacle to their safety. He reached inside his coat and withdrew the Faberge casket. The value of the jewelled casing meant nothing to him, for its loss was but a small price to pay for the safekeeping of his family.
He weighed it in his hand, worried that the rising wind might catch and smash it against the side of the ship. He had drawn back his arm, ready to hurl it into the tumbling foam below, when someone snatched at his coattail, spinning him around and causing him to lose balance on the tilting wet deck. Before he could draw breath, the stars filled his vision and he saw the railing pass beneath his legs, then the great black steel side of the ship, as the sound of the monstrous churning propellors pounded up around him.
Sinking into the ocean, Alexandrovich Novikov was dragged under by the great spinning blades and cleft in two, the pieces of his body lost for ever in the frothing white foam. On the deck he had left, the unthrown casket slid beneath a stairwell with the rolling of the ship and was retrieved by a passing steward, whereupon the alarm was raised and a frantic search begun for its missing owner.
‘And so we arrive in London,’ continued Dr Masters. ‘The bereaved Franco-Russian family who moved there from Liverpool in 1928 planned to build property in the city — but their assets were badly damaged in the financial crash of the following year. The headquarters of their empire, a magnificent building on the north bank of the Thames designed by the great Lubetkin, went unfinished. There, the trail of Rasputin’s jewelled box finally goes cold. We have to presume that it was sold off to the owner of a private collection as the family fought debts and a series of appalling personal tragedies. ’
The building beside the old Billingsgate Market had never been properly finished, and now its poorly-set foundations had been pulled up to clear the site and make way for a new Japanese banking syndicate. It was during the third month of digging, just prior to the new concrete foundations being poured into their moulds, that the little casket, wrapped in an oilskin cloth and several layers of mildewed woven straw, was unearthed. The find was briefly mentioned on the six o’clock news that night, and excited speculation from experts about what might be discovered inside.
Before the box could be opened, however, it was sent to the British Museum to be cleaned and X-rayed. From the ornamentation of an exposed corner section of the casing it was already assumed to have been manufactured by a Russian jeweller, possibly the great Faberge himself, which made it extremely valuable and placed it in the ownership of the royal court of Tsar Nicholas. It was, perhaps, too early to hope that the box might contain documents pertaining to that fascinating, tragic family.
The casket was entrusted to an unlikely recipient, a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Amy Dale who worked at the museum. In usual circumstances such a high-profile find would have been offered for examination to one of the more experienced senior staff, but Amy was having an affair with a hypertense married man named Miles Bernardier who functioned as the present director of the excavation, and Miles was able to take a procedural shortcut that allowed him to assign the find himself. This was not as dishonest as it sounds, for Amy was fast becoming recognized as a luminary in her field, and as her own department head was overseas for two months advising an excavation in Saudi Arabia, the pleasurable task of uncovering the casket’s secrets fell to her.
The night before Amy was due to have the casket X-rayed, a supposedly psychic friend from the Mediterranean ceramics department seized her hands in the Museum Tavern and warned her that something strange was about to happen in her life. She pushed a hand through her frizzy blonde hair, laughing off his prediction, and ordered up another round of drinks. While they drank and chatted, the mud-encrusted casket, sealed in a large Ziploc bag, sat in a basement vault of the British Museum waiting for its secrets to be exposed to the
