Nicholas turned to look at his family. According to one report he cried, ‘What? What?’ before Yurovsky drew a pistol and shot him at point-blank range in the chest.He fell straight away, killed outright. The women crossed themselves as the guards began shooting, each at their designated target. A shot to Alexandra’s head blew off part of her skull. Alexei remained rigid with shock in his chair, soaked in his father’s blood, unable to try and save himself. His sisters fell to the floor, where they lay stunned and moaning in pain. The jewels they had sewn into their gowns deflected the bullets so they were badly injured but not killed. Some tried to crawl away but there was nowhere to hide in that bare room.
The air filled with smoke, making it difficult to see, and the guards panicked. They began stabbing viciously with bayonets to finish off their victims, turning the scene into a bloodbath. Some of the girls were murmuring prayers, others screaming. Bullet after bullet was pumped into little Alexei. Tatiana was shot in the back of the head as she and Olga huddled in a corner, her brain tissue spattering Olga’s face. Anastasia survived longer than the others and pleaded for her life but was finished off by frenzied bayonet thrusts.
It was an unrelentingly horrific way to die. Kitty thought of the last entry in Tatiana’s diary: although it was pessimistic, she could never have predicted such barbarity, the terror they must have experienced, the agony of the slash wounds.
Kitty’s hand shook and she put down the book. She felt sticky and could almost smell the choking fog of blood and gunpowder. Suddenly she rose and ran into the lake, wading out deep and diving beneath the surface. The water was refreshing and she felt it easing a knot of headache in her temple. She turned to float on her back under the white pulsating sun.
Could Dmitri possibly have been there when the Romanovs were killed? If so, was there nothing he could do to stop them? She thought back through his novels, searching for clues to the nature of her great-grandfather. He was obviously articulate, very romantic, and prone to melancholy. She realised there was a theme running through the novels of a terrible wrong committed in the past which overshadows his characters’ lives. Could Dmitri have been haunted by a sin he committed? She desperately wanted her great-grandfather to have been a hero, but what if he was complicit in murder? It would be horrible to learn that her ancestor had been involved in this evil assassination of innocents.
When she emerged from the water, Kitty twisted her hair into a ponytail and squeezed the water from it then sat down and read about Yurovsky’s bungled attempts to dispose of the bodies:
Out in the remote countryside, when the guards stripped the family of their clothes, they found myriad priceless jewels stitched into their seams and linings. The Tsarina had rows of fine pearls in a belt around her waist … The corpses lay, blood-soaked, limbs askew, on the boggy ground. Yurovsky ordered his men to throw them down an old mineshaft where he hoped they would be concealed, but it was soon apparent that it was too shallow. His men doused the bodies with vats of sulphuric acid, and the air filled with the smell of burning flesh, but Yurovsky had failed to realise that acid would not dissolve teeth and bones. In desperation he threw a couple of hand grenades into the mine, hoping the shaft would collapse and cover the bodies, but they did not detonate properly in such an enclosed space. At last he realised he would have to remove the family and bury them elsewhere before suspicious local people came across the hideous scene …
Kitty read that when the graves were eventually discovered in 1979, there was a jumble of bones and teeth all mixed up together and it took researchers a long time to identify them. By then there had been more than six decades of controversy about whether all the Romanovs had perished, a debate fuelled by the fact that the evidence was contaminated by scientists who handled it over the years, and that Anastasia and Alexei were in separate graves some distance away. It was only in 2008 that DNA testing proved conclusively all five Romanov children, both their parents, and three household retainers had been massacred. Scientists took a DNA sample from Britain’s Prince Philip, husband of the Queen, who was a close living relative of the Romanov family, for comparison.
Kitty closed the book and stood up. She needed to drive into town before the stores closed as she’d run out of wine. The quantity she was drinking had sneaked up during her stay until she was polishing off a bottle of a rather pleasant Californian Chardonnay every evening. Chilled in the water beneath the jetty, it slipped down like lemonade after a long day in the sun. She never had a hangover so reckoned her body could cope with that amount. Everyone knew those government guidelines were ridiculously cautious.
In the supermarket, she decided to buy a case of wine – twelve bottles in all – to save her having to come back so often.
‘You having a party tonight?’ the checkout girl asked, and Kitty smiled and said, ‘Yes, something like that.’
In the early hours of the morning Kitty woke abruptly from a nightmare. All she could remember of it was the presence of something dark and evil in a house where she was trapped, possibly as a prisoner, although she never saw her gaolers.
She lay, heart beating hard, trying to adjust her eyes to the darkness, when suddenly she became aware of a faint movement in the far corner of the cabin. Terror gripped her. She pulled herself to a sitting position and groped for a box of matches. She couldn’t hear any sounds now except the ones she was making, but it still felt as though something was in the room with her. The thought crossed her mind that it could be Dmitri’s ghost, then she shook herself. Stupid girl. No such thing as ghosts. She struck a match but her hand was shaking so badly she couldn’t get the wick of the oil lamp to take the flame and had to strike a second one.
A pool of flickering light spread round the room and she looked into the corner where she had been convinced she heard a noise: nothing but bare wood. She stood up, back to the wall, peering round and listening hard. She was covered in a film of sweat, her hand still shaking, so the lamplight shifted and swung.
Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, she saw something coming towards her. She screamed and almost dropped the lamp in panic before realising it was a large white moth, drawn to the light. Its wings flapped and it smacked against the glass of the lamp. Instantly Kitty realised that was the sound she had heard earlier in the darkness; it must have flown into a window.
‘You idiot!’ she whispered, still feeling shaken. She walked across the floor and opened the cabin door, placing the lamp on the porch so the moth would follow it out. The night air was cool and she padded barefoot down to the water’s edge, feeling the sweat evaporating on her skin. There was just a sliver of moon among hosts of faraway stars in an ink-black sky, and the water and trees were utterly still. An owl hooted, breaking the silence.
Suddenly there was a loud, distinctive rustling in the trees to one side of the cabin, and the terror returned. Kitty rushed to the end of the jetty, ready to dive into the lake if a wild animal ran out. What creatures might there be? Most likely it was a deer, she told herself. They wouldn’t have bears or wolves by the lake – or would they?
She crouched on the end of the jetty, scanning the forest, alert for any further rustling sounds. The distance to her cabin door seemed huge. Something might pounce on her as she crossed the space. Her heart was racing. What if she were mauled to death by a wild animal out there miles from anywhere? It would be days before her body was found. She would die alone, in pain and terror. She hoped at least it would be quick, unlike the gruesome deaths of the Romanovs.