Murder in Hampstead by Sabina Manea (read this if txt) 📕

At Nina’s insistence, Lucia was put up in the Chanlers’ spare room in Belgravia while the two friends struggled to make sense of the recent tragedies. To cheer them up, Walter had suggested a trip up north to Lexington Hall. They were busy packing up the car when Lucia’s phone rang.

‘I’m sorry for going AWOL. We’ve been working day and night to get to the bottom of this. Can I come over?’ Carliss’s voice sounded half adrenaline, half fatigue.

As Lucia apologetically explained the change of plan, Walter turned to his wife with a knowing smile. ‘I know what you’re like, darling. You two go ahead and catch your murderer, I’ll be just fine drinking whisky in front of the fire with your father.’

With Walter on the road, the women went back into the house and waited for the bell to ring. It didn’t take long. Nina opened the door to an exceptionally dishevelled detective, even by his standards. The three-day stubble and dark circles under his eyes, coupled with the state of his clothes, strongly suggested he had been surviving on black coffee and might not have left the office at all.

‘You look in dire need of a square meal and a bath. Can I tempt you, Inspector? You look about the same size as Walter. I’m sure he’d be more than happy to lend you something clean to wear,’ offered Nina.

‘Thanks, but I’m fine.’

Lucia could see he wasn’t fine at all – he was tormented by what might have been the avoidable death of Adam Corcoran, and it pained her. ‘Tell us everything, from the beginning.’ She led him gently to the sofa.

He had his rucksack with him, the one that only got aired when there was serious business at play. Out of it emerged a folder with painstakingly labelled tabs. He opened it at the first page and began. ‘I had this sitting on my desk all along and didn’t give it a second thought. Tell me what you see – or rather, what strikes you.’ It was a copy of Emilia’s passport.

‘Vera Emilia Poole. She uses her second name then – not unheard of. Born on the 21st of December 1982 in Brest.’ Lucia paused to think. ‘I suppose that’s not unusual. Her parents must have travelled a lot, or they could have been living in France at the time.’

She was about to carry on when the policeman interrupted her. He had a haunted look on his face. ‘And there’s the error, staring us right in the face. My error. She was born in Brest, Belarus, not Brest, France. I stared at this wretched page until the words were a blur, and then I remembered something I learned at school a long time ago. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.’

‘The end of Russia’s First World War,’ said Nina.

‘From then on, I didn’t stop until I tracked her down. The poor DS that got lumbered with me at the station really did draw the short straw – it’s been a hell of a time. It turns out that Richard and Christine Poole weren’t her real parents. She’s adopted.’

‘From Belarus, sure,’ Lucia interjected. ‘But what’s this got to do with the Professor?’

‘Oh, it gets better.’ Carliss turned the page. ‘Her entry in the Adopted Children Register confirms her country of birth. There’s only one orphanage in Brest where she could have come from, so we roped in a translator and got to work. A hell of a lot of phone calls later, she finds out it closed in 1992, so we’re back to square one. Cue some more prodding, lateral thinking, hours of waiting, you name it, we did it, and bingo – we get sent Emilia’s papers from the Brest city archive.’ He stopped for a moment to catch his breath and wipe beads of sweat from his forehead.

‘I’ll get you a glass of water,’ said Nina. ‘And slow down – I don’t want you on my conscience.’

Oblivious to the dark humour, Carliss gulped the water down in one go and clutched his well-thumbed folder. ‘Born Vera Emilia Polyakova to Nadzeya Polyakova. Father unknown. The child was registered in the orphanage records when she was five weeks old. After that, nothing, until the adoption – the first, or attempted adoption, I should say, by someone called Olga Galina, in February 1983. I can’t find any trace of the reason it fell through. The second adoption, later that year, was by Richard and Christine Poole, who took the baby back to the UK with them – and thus Emilia Poole was born.’

‘But who is Olga Galina?’ asked Lucia. ‘The name means nothing.’

‘I haven’t got as far as that. The DS and I ran out of steam,’ admitted the inspector. ‘I was hoping you two can help.’

Nina ran to fetch her laptop. They sat in a circle on the floor and got to work. Hours passed in a frenzied haze. Bottles of wine were consumed, a takeaway meal was hastily eaten and the light streaming in grew dimmer and dimmer. The screen started hurting their eyes before they noticed it was dark and switched on the sumptuous chandelier. That Olga Galina happened to be the name of a famous Russian opera singer did little to help the search.

As the clock on the mantelpiece struck one, they were on the verge of calling it a night, when Nina gave a shrill cry. ‘Look at this.’

The black and white photograph showed a group of people awkwardly clumped together against the background of a sprawling blackboard covered in equations. Allowing for minimal variations by gender, they were dressed in stern dark suits and boxy dresses. The Cyrillic writing at the bottom was faded to only just short of illegible.

‘Faculty of Applied Mathematics, Belarus State University, 1981,’ read out Nina. ‘And look at the first name on the list – Dr Olga