‘You’re right, Miss Beauclerk,’ the Serbian assured her. ‘His funeral pyre was set ablaze in public so that all might see with their own eyes that the beast had at long last been annihilated. I was unfortunate enough to be of the company that witnessed the spectacle. The horror! Many swooned.’
He glanced around the table, gathering the earnest expressions silently urging him to reveal more. Sure of his audience, he lowered his voice and went on: ‘In the middle of the flames, the corpse began to sit up. Rasputin drew his knees to his chin and then, slowly, his torso began to rise upright.’
‘Golly gosh!’ breathed Connie, clutching her bosom. Edward leaned over and patted her shoulder, throwing a concerned and warning look at the Serbian.
‘Perfectly understandable,’ said Tuppy drily. The Navy man seemed to have taken a dislike to this dark foreigner whose eyes were as wintry and unfathomable as the ice holes he conjured up. ‘Clearly some careless funeral parlour operative forgot to cut the tendons. In the heat, they shrink, you know, and pull the limbs about in a disturbingly life-like movement.’ He gave a hearty bellow. ‘Ha! I’ve seen corpses get up and dance!’ Enjoying the surprise, he added: ‘Not just a matloe! I was a medic with the Navy before I inherited my father’s London practice. Travelled a lot, saw a lot of strange burial customs. Oh, I say — have I ruined your story, old man?’
Gustavus turned to glower at Tuppy. The sailor’s cheery confidence deflected the look, unaffected, but Lily, catching it, had to repress an instinctive shudder. The Serbian’s reaction to the set-down was one of anger barely held in check. He had enjoyed the fencing with Rupert but a trip-up by a medical man had fired his wrath. He breathed deeply, chewed his lips and, mastering himself, decided to reclaim the attention of the table. He raised his glass and admired the colour of the red wine against the candlelight. ‘It was such a strong wine as this that he was given the night he entered the trap we’d set for him at the palace on the waterfront,’ he recollected. ‘A wine laced with enough fast-acting poison to kill ten men.’
‘What on earth was the poison?’ Tuppy asked. ‘Rat poison? Digitalis? Arsenic? Strychnine? Forgive my curiosity — a physician is always interested in extending his knowledge.’
The Serbian paused for a tantalizing second, apparently quite aware that Tuppy had offered him a test: a menu of poisons from which to choose the correct one. Finally, he replied: ‘None of those. It was potassium cyanide.’
‘Makes sense. Not difficult to get hold of, and a minuscule amount will kill a man. Less than a gram would do for a twelve-stone chap. I understand that one gram is standard issue in the glass suicide capsules we dole out to our secret servicemen.’ His cheery gaze, which had been taking in the whole company at the table, skipped lightly past Rupert, Lily noticed, at the mention of the service. Another man in the know, she concluded. ‘Though for an ox of a man — as you describe him — perhaps you’d need a little more,’ Tuppy added sagely. ‘And a little research might have told those amateurs that baking it up in a cake is a pretty feeble way of going about things. It’s the heat, don’t you know. It vaporizes the noxious element. It’d take more than a slice of Victoria sponge to lay low a chap like Rasputin.’
‘Well, I’ve never heard of the stuff, and I read all the whodunits,’ said Connie. ‘I bet you couldn’t just stroll into Boots the Chemist and ask for an ounce, as you can with arsenic.’
‘Anything is obtainable. Anywhere. If one has the right connections,’ Gustavus told her. Judging, rightly, that his listeners were ready for some relief from the drama, he raised his glass again and proposed a further toast. ‘Let us repeat the word that was on every Russian’s lips on hearing of his death. In the street, strangers shouted it to each other in their joy and relief that justice had been done. Ubili! Ubili! “They have killed!”’