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that there are basically three ways to get rich. Inherit it. Marry it. Make it at the gambling tables. Our friend has done two out of three. He inherited one heap of money from his mother. She was an American heiress whose family owned a lot of stuff in New York and Chicago. Hotels, was it? Jewellery shops? Grocers? I’m not sure. Richard Gilbert himself made another fortune at the roulette table and traded in diamonds for a while. I think he’s involved with a lot of investment trusts. Some people don’t care for him at all. They say he sails a little too close to the wind. Is that any good?’
    ‘Very helpful, William, thank you very much. Are there any children, grandchildren perhaps, running round Barnes Pond with their nannies?’
    ‘I’ve never heard of a wife and certainly never heard of any children either. Why do you ask?’
    ‘Well, it’s rather a long shot. You see, just at the moment I can’t make much direct progress with this case. I can’t talk to the man Diaghilev who runs the show. He’s disappeared. But until he gives the all-clear, I can’t talk to the dancers. I can’t even see the place where the body was hidden.’
    ‘I don’t see, Francis, what this has to do with Gilbert.’
    ‘Switch on your most suspicious mind, William. We investigators have to look for all sorts of things in our work: the how, the where, the why. In my experience, jealousy is a very potent weapon for murder, especially when love and marriage and fidelity are involved. But there’s one other motive we meet much more often.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘Greed,’ said Lord Francis Powerscourt. ‘Simple, old-fashioned greed.’

    Very few people in Paris had heard of General Peter Kilyagin. His neighbours thought he was a retired soldier. In fact, General Kilyagin was the Chief of the Okhrana, the Russian Secret Service in France. From his grand offices near the junction of the Rue de Monceau and the Boulevard Malesherbes in the fashionable eighth arrondissement, he supervised a staff of forty full-time officers and a small army of part-timers who ranged from waiters in the fashionable hotels and restaurants to the manufacturers and shops dealing with weaponry and high explosives.
    The senior ranks of the Russian military have always tolerated passions and obsessions of every sort. Mistresses, of course; hunting, music, yachting. But the General was the only one in history known for a passion for filing. This had started when he was in charge of the movement and accommodation for his regiment. Everything was carefully filed. Everything had its place. When he took on his new post with the Okhrana, he was in his element. General Kilyagin was now an expert in the alphabet soup of the Russian opposition: SDs, FDs, SPDs, old Decembrists, anarchists, syndicalists, communists, Plekhanovites, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks. He kept on file every detail his team discovered about a suspect, great or small. He could find out in a moment where Lenin last had his hair cut or the address of some minor anarchist’s mistress. He felt it was necessary, this vast network of surveillance that never slept. Russia was a verydangerous place, especially if you were a tsar or a senior government official. Tsar Alexander II, who had liberated the serfs, had been blown up by a terrorist bomb in the heart of St Petersburg. Grand Duke Serge, cousin of the present Tsar and Governor of Moscow, had been smashed to smithereens by a nitroglycerine bomb near the Nicholas Gate in the Kremlin in 1905. Only the previous year, the Russian Prime Minister Pierre Stolypin had been shot dead at the opera in Kiev. The Tsar and members of the Imperial Family were in the theatre to see him die. The opera was Rimsky-Korsakov’s
The Tale of Tsar Saltan
. General Kilyagin liked to tell the tale of Stolypin’s end. ‘We told him,’ he would say rather sadly, ‘nobody could say we didn’t tell him. We warned him not to go to Kiev. We said there was a plot to shoot him