The People's Will

Chapter IX



KONSTANTIN WAS TRUE to his word, and late that evening Mihail stepped from the gates of Fontanka 16 a free man. He went straight back to his hotel, but slept badly. He lay, gazing up through the darkness towards the ceiling, trying to work out what he felt. But the answer he began with was the one he ended with. It was quite, quite simple.

He felt nothing.

Konstantin seemed an amiable enough individual. Mihail had enjoyed his company, but in his short career in the army he’d met several men he could have said that about, many he’d liked less, a few he’d liked more. Throughout his life he’d downplayed the prospect of this event. His mother had told him of his lineage as a fact, not as something in which she took joy or pride. And on top of that Mihail had always doubted that what she had said was even true.

He wished he could have the chance to apologize to her for that. He still felt a greater love for his grandfather, Aleksei, who had died before he was born, but that too came from Tamara. And Aleksei had loved his tsar – had saved him from the plans of Zmyeevich and Iuda. It would be the act of a hero to emulate him, and yet if he did so it would be for the sake of his grandfather’s memory – not out of any love for his father.

And today his task was to unearth another relative for whom he could find in himself no familial love – his brother, Luka. So why seek him out? Why add further worries to the life of this young man whose fate would seem to be to die in a failed attempt to assassinate the tsar? Even towards that, Mihail felt indifferent. In principle he loved and obeyed his tsar, but he could not stir in himself any hatred towards Luka for holding a different position. Mihail had only one hatred, for Iuda. And that was why he knew he must seek out his brother: Iuda and Dmitry had spoken of Luka. Either directly or indirectly, Luka might lead to Iuda.

Mihail walked alongside the Moika, frozen over by the January cold. The river meandered a little, always taking him in a direction that led roughly to the centre of town, but before he reached Saint Isaac’s Square he turned off and soon found himself at the address Konstantin had given him: Maksimilianovsky Lane 15, apartment 7.

He asked the dvornik whether Luka Miroslavich was in, but the man just shrugged. It was rumoured that half the dvorniki in Petersburg were in the pay of the Ohrana – they saw who came and went and knew the names of all the tenants of their buildings. It would explain how Konstantin had unearthed the information about Luka so easily.

Mihail climbed the twisting stairs up to the third floor and knocked on the door of apartment 7. The man who answered looked nothing like the picture of Luka. This one was in his late twenties, with a trimmed beard that did not cover his cheeks. He was thin and pale, with a sharp nose on which sat a pair of pince-nez.

‘Oh!’ He seemed disappointed at what he saw. Mihail had changed out of his military uniform, thinking it unwise for his sojourn in the Petersburg underworld. He hoped his profession didn’t shine through even without it.

‘You were expecting somebody else?’ Mihail asked.

‘Yes, I was rather.’

‘I’m here to see Luka Miroslavich Novikov. Is he in?’

‘He’s not here.’ The man kept glancing over his shoulder, back into the apartment. He kept the door almost closed, with his weight against it so that Mihail could not push his way through, not that he had attempted it. None of it served to convey an impression of innocence.

‘Will he be long? Might I wait?’

‘He moved out weeks ago. I don’t know where he went.’

With that the door was closed. Mihail went back down the stairs and out into the street. Not far away, on the corner, was a tavern. He ordered tea and found himself a seat by the window where he could look back towards number 15. He was the only man in the place who didn’t have a cigarette between his lips. He breathed deeply of the smoky atmosphere, the smell bringing his mother to mind. He could rarely remember her without one. In a provincial town like Saratov, it had been a minor scandal for a woman to smoke in public.

The passing minutes turned into hours as the citizens of Petersburg wandered up and down the snow-covered street. Mihail drank more tea and ate some lunch. It was already afternoon when at last two figures emerged from the building. They walked in Mihail’s direction and he easily recognized one of them as the man with the pince-nez whom he had spoken to, now sporting a shabby coat and a battered, black top hat. He did not recognize the other one, who was somewhat younger than the first, with neatly parted straight hair and a pencil moustache. There was a hint of Tartar blood to his features. It certainly wasn’t Luka. An hour later he saw a woman stop and speak to the dvornik. She clearly got a better response from him than Mihail had, because she didn’t bother to go in. She just carried on down the road in the direction of the tavern.

It was when she was about halfway towards him that he recognized her. It was Dusya, the girl he had met on the train from Rostov; the girl who had been handling explosives. Given what Mihail had learned, it wasn’t so very surprising to see her paying a visit to that particular apartment.

He turned his face away from the window, but he didn’t think she had seen him. He threw a few coins on the counter to cover his bill and then made for the door. Dusya had turned south and walked along Fonarniy Lane until she hit the Yekaterininsky Canal, where she headed east. The path of the canal twisted even more than that of the Moika. Mihail did his best to follow without being seen, but he was a stranger in the city and Dusya, he presumed, was on the lookout for any ohranik who might be on her trail. But she made no effort to lose him.

He recognized Nevsky Prospekt when they crossed it. Dusya’s path continued to follow the canal, but before long it merged with another waterway that Mihail’s understanding of the city’s geography told him was the Moika once more. They had not taken the most direct route. They followed the river a little further and Mihail found himself once again on familiar ground. They turned into a park which Mihail recognized as being the first thing he had seen on exiting the Ohrana building at Fontanka 16. This was the Summer Gardens – though it achieved an exquisite degree of beauty even in winter.

Now that they were in a more open space Mihail could – and needed to – keep a greater distance between himself and Dusya. The park was laid out in a regular grid of crossing pathways, separated by trees and hedges. Under other circumstances Mihail could have followed these at random, and not worried if he had walked past Dusya more than once, as any two people walking in a park might pass each other. But even if she saw him once, she would recognize him, and though their re-encountering one another was genuinely a coincidence, he would prefer her not to know he was there.

She did not walk through the park for long, but made directly for a bench, upon which a man was already sitting. As she approached he stood. He took her hands in his and they kissed. It was not prolonged, but tender enough for Mihail to construe the depth of their relationship. From a distance he could not clearly see the man’s face, but already he could hazard a guess as to who it was.

The couple sat down – the man making an exaggerated show of wiping the snow from the bench, even though he had evidently already done the same on his own arrival. They began to talk and Mihail realized he had been standing watching for too long. He walked away along one of the paths, but soon returned along another. Still, he was not close enough to properly see the man’s face. He took a chance. Dusya’s back was to him, and she was busily gazing into the eyes of her beloved as he spoke to her, so it was unlikely that she would turn. Mihail risked walking past them.

He kept his eyes fixed on the path in front of him, his head down as if to avoid the cold. Dusk had fallen, but there was still sufficient light to see by. Only for a moment did he look up. At the same moment the man looked at him and Mihail knew instantly that he was staring into the eyes of his brother. Whether he saw anything of Tamara in them was hard to say, but the waved hair and the moustache were just as Mihail had seen in the police photograph. In reality he was perhaps a little more handsome. It must have come from his father.

Mihail walked on as though his inspection had been merely a passing glance. He almost laughed. It seemed that the subterfuge which he and Dusya had extemporized on the train was proving to be true. Whether or not she was actually his fiancée, Dusya was most certainly a friend of his brother – and an intimate one at that.

And why should Mihail not share the joke with them? His intention when he set out that day had been to speak to Luka openly, but having followed Dusya here, he had fallen into the habit of subterfuge. It was preposterous. Dusya would be pleased to see him, and Luka more so to be united at last with his long-lost brother. Mihail almost turned to face them there and then, but still he felt the urge to be, as his father had put it, circumspect.

He turned right, right and right again, knowing that at the next junction he would be revisiting his path of moments before. Still he could not decide whether this time he would walk by or would stop and sit, and that his brother would at last become his friend.

He turned the final corner and looked, and saw that the bench was empty.

It had been many weeks since the Executive Committee had formally assembled. The chairman had not been in Petersburg, but in the meantime work had continued. Mihailov was supposed to have been in charge, but had got himself arrested. He was a pawn anyway. Now that they were all gathered there was much to be discussed. It was Sofia Lvovna who spoke first. Of all of them, she had the noblest blood in her veins. Her father was Count Perovsky, once the military governor of Petersburg, who had been forced out of office as the early liberalism of Aleksandr’s reign had begun to wither. Sofia had inherited his blue eyes and prominent forehead.

‘Towards the end of 1880 we rented a basement property on Malaya Sadovaya Street.’ Sofia’s speech was clipped and formal. ‘The owner is Countess Megdena, but she has no direct involvement with the property. It consists of three rooms: the shop, a storeroom and a living room.’

None of this was news to the chairman, but it had so far been kept secret from many of the others present. The choice of the shop had been his alone, and made carefully, but using criteria that would mean nothing to the rest of the committee. He’d already been down in the tunnels below, and made sure they led where he wanted.

‘Comrades Bogdanovich and Yakimova will run the property as a cheese shop,’ Sofia continued, ‘posing as husband and wife.’

The chairman glanced over at them. It was a sensible choice; they would not take the roles of a loving couple too far and become distracted from their work. The same could not be said of many of the People’s Will – Sofia included. The women saw it as a liberation to choose when and to whom to offer their bodies; the men took it as an opportunity.

‘We’ve taken the name of Kobozev,’ explained Bogdanovich.

‘And how’s the cheese business?’ asked the chairman.

There was general laughter.

‘Does it matter?’ asked Bogdanovich.

‘It matters if an ohranik notices a cheese shop that never sells any cheese!’ The chairman’s voice was raised.

Bogdanovich nodded. ‘We’ll keep it in mind.’

‘And what of activities beneath the shop?’

Sofia turned towards Kibalchich, who stood. He removed his pince-nez and wiped them on his shirt before returning them to his nose. Even so, he never seemed to look directly at the chairman as he spoke, or at Sofia, or anyone in the room.

‘After the failure of the explosion at the Winter Palace, I think we all realize the need for getting the correct amount of nitroglycerin in place.’ Kibalchich was making a point. For that operation he had insisted they would need more explosive to blast through two storeys of the palace and get at the tsar, but he’d been overruled. Whether it would have actually made a difference was open to debate. ‘Thankfully,’ he continued, ‘our efforts in that direction have gone well. Yevdokia Yegorovna returned to Petersburg only yesterday with the final sticks of dynamite.’

‘Where is she then? Why isn’t she here?’

All eyes turned to Zhelyabov. The big, bearded man spoke calmly. ‘My duty was to act as escort on the train and ensure the safe arrival of the dynamite in Petersburg. I’ve no idea where Dusya is now; nor Luka.’

He was right; Luka was not here either and, given their relationship, there was an obvious inference to be drawn as to the reason for their joint absence. Zhelyabov drew attention to it in contrast to his own relationship with Sofia, which neither of them ever allowed to interfere with their calling.

The chairman grunted. ‘Perhaps it’s for the best; the fewer who know exactly what’s going on at the shop the better. And what of the tunnel itself?’ he asked.

‘Since you were last down there, it’s not been so good,’ replied Kibalchich. ‘The layout is just as you said it would be, at least down below. But on the main tunnel we hit a sewage pipe which flooded back almost to the shop and we had to virtually start again. Even so, it’s not going well. Since Shiryaev was arrested I’ve had no one to consult with. To be honest, none of us really has the expertise in this sort of work, particularly not when you have to keep everything so quiet.’

‘Do we know of anyone who’s got the right experience?’

There were general shrugs, indicating an answer in the negative, and so the chairman moved on. ‘We’re sure of when the tsar will travel along Malaya Sadovaya?’ he asked.

‘We’ve been out in the city for several months watching his movements,’ explained Sofia. ‘There’s little regularity to them, except on Sundays when his return from the Manège usually takes him that way.’

‘Usually?’

‘If we don’t get him one week we’ll get him the next. More recently we’ve been watching other members of the royal family, though I think it’s better to focus on the main target.’

‘We?’

‘Rysakov’s been helping me.’

‘Is he reliable?’

Sofia was about to reply, but the chairman raised his hand to silence her. There were footsteps on the stairs outside. A second later the others heard them. All held their breath. There was a knock at the door: three raps, then one, then two. It was the correct signal. Zhelyabov was closest to the door. He unbolted it and Dusya entered, followed by Luka.

‘You’re late!’ snapped Sofia.

‘We were followed,’ Luka explained. ‘You wouldn’t want us to bring an ohranik here.’

‘You’re certain?’ asked the chairman.

‘It was me he was following, I think,’ said Dusya. ‘I don’t know where he picked me up, but he was there at the Summer Gardens. Luka saw him.’

‘Did you recognize him?’

‘I didn’t,’ said Luka. ‘But I described him to Dusya and—’

Dusya interrupted. ‘I think he’s the same man that I spoke to on the train from Rostov.’

‘Well, that’s marvellous!’ exclaimed Sofia. ‘They must know everything.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Dusya. ‘On the train he helped me – lied for me.’

‘And why would he do that?’ Sofia’s voice oozed scepticism.

‘Who knows? He’s got no love for the Ohrana, that’s for sure. Perhaps he just, you know, liked me. He was a soldier; on leave. You know what they’re like.’

‘For what it’s worth,’ added Zhelyabov, ‘that’s what it looked like to me.’

‘And it was pure coincidence that he was in the Summer Gardens today?’ asked Sofia.

‘Perhaps he wanted to take things further and decided to look me up. I told him my name.’

‘Your real name? Why would you do that?’

‘I was about to show my passport to an ohranik! You want me to get caught lying?’

‘This chap,’ interrupted Kibalchich. ‘About my height? Clean-shaven, side whiskers, curly auburn hair, brown eyes – piercing?’

Dusya nodded. ‘That’s him.’

‘He was at the apartment on Maksimilianovsky Lane. He must have watched us leave and then seen you arrive.’

‘You’re sure?’ asked the chairman.

‘I’ll check with Titov, the dvornik – he’ll have seen,’ replied Kibalchich.

‘Who else was there?’

‘Just Mihailov.’

‘Mihailov?’ The chairman tried to hide his concern. Mihailov was supposed to be rotting in a gaol cell. If he were free it would be a threat to the chairman’s position.

‘A new recruit,’ explained Sofia. ‘Just a kid. No relation to Aleksandr Dmitrievich. He might prove useful.’

The chairman grunted, then turned back to Dusya. ‘It would be easy enough for a soldier to trace you, ohranik or not.’

‘So what we have,’ said Zhelyabov, ‘is either a very subtle police spy or a soldier with some slight sympathy for our cause, and holding a candle for young Dusya here.’

‘I think, Dusya, that you’d better tell us everything you know about this man,’ said the chairman.

She sat down and began. ‘Well, he’s a lieutenant in the grenadier sappers – an engineer. Knows everything about undermining and explosives and all that sort of thing. Went on about it for ever. He’d been supervising the tunnelling in that place … you know … General Skobyelev.’

‘Geok Tepe?’ suggested the chairman.

‘That’s it,’ Dusya confirmed.

The chairman leaned back with a smile. ‘Comrades,’ he announced, ‘I think we may just have found our expert.’

Not so very far from Saint George’s Church in Esher, about eight miles away, just on the other side of Leatherhead, stood Juniper Hall. In 1792, when Richard Cain was fourteen, the hall was leased to a group of French émigrés who had fled to England to escape the terror that they correctly guessed would soon come to their homeland. For many in the area – particularly for the children – there were immediate benefits. Richard’s study of French, while moderately successful, had been limited by his hearing it spoken only by his father and other staid Englishmen at his school who regarded the French people’s pronunciation of their own language as degeneration that needed to be corrected. Once he was able to converse with those for whom French was a necessity rather than an affectation, his love for it – and for all languages – blossomed. Ever the methodical child – as his father had raised him to be – he systematically discovered and then memorized the French names of every creature he had studied and previously known only in Latin and English.

But the French occupation of Juniper Hall brought more than mere language to that corner of Surrey. It also brought death. The first body was found in the ditch beside the road from Oxshott to Chessington. The European obsession with vampires had not at the time reached England’s shores and so, while the wounds to the man’s neck were mysterious, their cause was not as immediately obvious as it might have been to a Slavic observer. The victim was never identified. In the end it was concluded that he was one of a gang of footpads who’d fallen foul of his comrades.

But Richard Cain jumped to no such precipitate conclusions. He simply noted in his journal the time, location and manner of the death and wondered – perhaps hoped – whether such a thing would happen again. He had no reason to suppose that it was anything but a solitary happenstance, but instinct told him there would soon be more of the same. His instinct proved correct. Within two months four other murders had come to light. More followed.

The locations of the deaths formed a rough circle, with reports from as far afield as Crawley and Guildford marking its extremities. He never identified Juniper Hall as the precise hub of the wheel, but was unsurprised when he learned the truth. As far as he could tell the events all occurred at weekends, on either a Friday or a Saturday night. Richard recorded them in a calendar and plotted them on a map, and slowly saw the pattern emerging.

And all this might have been spotted by others attempting to investigate the crime had it not been for a series of additional deaths, again with the same wounds to the throat. The difference, and the cause of the confusion, was that in these cases the victims were not men but animals.

Richard was not confused. He knew perfectly well there was no single killer out there, but that the killer of the animals – a dog, several rabbits, a cat and a deer – was a different creature from the killer of the men. He knew it because he had killed the animals. He had taken no pleasure in it – not in the slaughter itself – but it had been a challenge to reproduce with so great a degree of accuracy the neck wounds that were the distinctive trait of the killer.

The first step had been to get a good look at the bodies. There had been no real trouble there. Two of them had been buried in the cemetery of Richard’s father’s own church, and so it was no problem for him to borrow a set of keys and creep into the deadhouse – if the rickety shed beside the church merited such a name – to look closely at the bodies before they were interred. On many occasions, he wasn’t alone. By the age of fourteen he had acquired a number of friends, although his later understanding of human nature led him to question the term. They were the boys who in general chose not to punch him on the way to or from school. Richard soon learned that one way to maintain this peaceful state was to distract them with the sight of something gruesome. A dissected frog or a spider devouring a fly would normally be enough, but a visit to look at a corpse – particularly the victim of a murder – might keep Richard free of their unwanted attentions for a week or more. For his own part, Richard studied the wounds, took notes, made measurements – in short he behaved exactly as his father had taught him. And yet at no level did he feel that in doing so he was being a ‘good boy’. There was no self-delusion that his actions could, through misinterpretation, be justified. He knew that he was twisting his father’s wishes to an end which the rector would not have desired, and the knowledge pleased him.

It was not only the boys from school to whom Richard provided tours of his world of the macabre – there was also a girl. Susanna Fowler was the daughter of Edward and Lucy Fowler, who kept house for Richard’s father. She was a year older than him, and while in their younger days they had lived very much apart, Susanna had for several years been old enough to share much of the housework with her mother, and so she and Richard came increasingly into contact.

They often talked as friends. He would learn from her about the world outside his somewhat cloistered upbringing at the rectory, and he would tell her of his world, reading from his journals and showing her the remarkable diversity of animal life that could be found without venturing outside the churchyard. He even described to her the mechanisms of reproduction, not as handed down to him by his father – that conversation had never taken place – but from his observation of animals. He had seen what dogs and cats did, and what the oxen in the fields did, and learned from the farmers that it led to calves. He was not surprised to learn from Susanna that people procreated in much the same way. He had assumed it based on extrapolation, but was pleased to have it confirmed, and noted the discovery in his journal. He noticed, as they discussed the matter, that her manner changed slightly and that her face became a little flushed. He himself felt unusual – a little more excited than at most of his scientific discoveries. He noted down these observations too.

And so it was quite natural that Richard should show Susanna each of the two mutilated bodies that rested overnight in the deadhouse. With the boys he brought them in as a crowd, but with her it was just the two of them. On the first occasion, she remained quite calm. Richard suspected she was hiding her fear and made an effort to describe to her in detail everything he had observed about the wounds to the neck. Still she showed no outward signs of apprehension, and so he had pulled back the victim’s head, holding it by the chin, thus allowing, as he described it, a full and clear view of the damage done to the internal structures of the neck. She fled. Richard savoured the moment, enjoying the knowledge that he had managed to in some way control her, without any need for coercion or force.

She had come to ask him to show her the second body that had been laid there. Richard gladly obliged and on this occasion she seemed to have prepared herself, to have stiffened the sinews and summoned up the blood, and no amount of detail on Richard’s part had made her show any desire to flee. Even so, after they had left the deadhouse together and stood facing each other, shaded by the pale stone wall of the church, Richard had noticed a stiffness in her movements and a shortness in her speech that hinted she was still hiding her emotions. It was most enjoyable to observe.

And then, quite unaccountably, he kissed her. From where inside him the urge arose he could not say, but it could only be related to her terror. For a moment she remained very still, her fear now augmented by surprise, but then he felt her hands on his head. Her mouth opened and he felt the moisture of her tongue on his own lips. It was a kiss that he had begun, but which she had taken over. It lasted only a few seconds and then she pulled away. She looked at him, smiling, her hands still cupping his head; then she giggled and ran off. Even a century on, it remained a pleasant memory.

Richard had now gathered enough information to be able to recreate the wounds on the murder victims. Their most notable feature was that, in all the mess and devastation of the attacks, there were always two points of incision. Richard quickly came up with a mechanism to mimic the injuries. He took two knives and placed them side by side, so that their handles touched and their blades sat parallel, pointing in the same direction. He bound them together with twine. The first animal he practised on was a rabbit. The reproduction of the wounds was remarkably accurate.

Richard chose a much simpler pattern in which to lay out the corpses of the animals with which he baited his trap, one that would be easy for the genuine killer to understand. In terms of ‘when’, Richard followed the same calendar – always killing at weekends. The ‘where’ was in a circle, a much smaller circle than the killer used. This one had a radius of just a furlong, and its centre was his father’s church.

Each weekend Richard would kill an animal and place its body somewhere on that circle. Then he would return to the church and place a lighted candle in one of the arched vaults of the crypt that just managed to peep above the level of the ground. He would hide in the branches of the great yew tree that hung over the churchyard and wait.

If the killer had been only what Richard was expecting – some deranged lunatic with a lust for blood – then it was madness for a fourteen-year-old boy to try to capture him on his own. If Richard had understood what he was truly dealing with, a supernatural creature with strength ten times that of any man, he would have fled, knowing his task was hopeless. But his ignorance robbed him of fear. Perhaps on a thousand other occasions it would have been hopeless; in a thousand other worlds Richard would have lain dead, the blood sucked from his body, and he would not have grown to be the creature he was today; perhaps some malign spirit was watching over him. Whatever the cause, Richard was lucky.

It was on the seventh weekend, on the Friday night, that Richard observed the figure of a man skulking through the undergrowth, heading, by a twisting path, towards the candle that had been set to trap him. When a few yards from the opening to the crypt, the figure paused. It shouted in French: ‘Are you there?’

With no response forthcoming, the figure moved a little closer to the crypt, crouching almost on its hands and knees, and called again. It crawled further, so that it was now peering into the space beneath the church, its hand perched on the ledge. Richard moved. He covered the ground between him and the church in seconds and charged the figure with the full force of his shoulder. It was taken quite by surprise and tumbled forward into the crypt. The fall was only six feet or so, and was unlikely to harm even a man – but by the same token, even a man might quickly escape. But Richard was prepared. He slammed down the old iron grate that he had propped open when placing the candle and slipped the lock back into place. His prisoner was secure.

He peered down into the dark crypt. The candle had been knocked over and extinguished in the tussle. Outside the light of the half-moon was bright enough, but it did not penetrate far into darkness. It didn’t need to. Seconds later hands gripped the iron bars and a face appeared, twisted with rage, its lips bared in a ferocious snarl which revealed to Richard its long, sharp pointed teeth.

And at that moment, although he might not yet fully appreciate the import of the word, Richard knew that he was looking into the face of a vampire.

That had been eighty-nine years before, and now Richard preferred to call himself Iuda, and now he was a vampire, and a prisoner in a cell with only one small window high up in the wall. But he would not climb up there and snarl at those who passed by – it would do no good. Iuda had better plans for escape, perhaps even for rescue. But to get help he must be able to call for help, and there the continual tapping of the prisoners on the pipes would be his salvation.

He had analysed the signals and observed that the smallest unit of communication was a pair of numbers – tapped against the pipe with some metal object and separated by a pause. The first number was never greater than five and the second never greater than six. This gave a combination of thirty possibilities – close enough to the thirty-seven of the Russian alphabet, within which there were a number of letters that were rarely if ever used, being virtual duplicates of other letters. The whole system was ripe for revision. Thus ‘І’ could be replaced by ‘И’, ‘Ө’ by ‘Ф’, ‘Ѣ’ by ‘Е’ and ‘Ѵ’ by ‘В’. At a push, even ‘Щ’ and ‘Ш’ could be treated as a single letter. The hard and soft sounds – ‘Ъ’ and ‘Ь’ – could be ignored, and that reduced the number of letters to thirty. Iuda arranged them alphabetically on a grid.



Originally he drew it in the dust of the floor, but it was easy enough to memorize and he soon wiped it away so that no guard would see. Any letter could be transmitted by a pair of taps. 3 and 5 would signify ‘П’; 4 and 6 gave ‘Ц’. Iuda’s own name was 2,4 – 4,3 – 1,5 – 1,1. He listened to the messages coming through the pipes and analysed them. They all made sense.

Iuda picked up the tin mug that the guards had given him and threw the water from it on to the cell floor. Then he squatted down beside the pipes and began to tap out a message of his own.