“I only found out recently that my father worked at the Ipatiev House,” she said. “I think he must have stolen some of the Romanovs’ possessions from there. I have a photograph album back in Australia, along with a sketchbook and some icons.” She described them, and Stepan listened carefully, occasionally nodding his head.

“You say your father worked at the Ipatiev House. Do you mean he was a guard?”

She nodded, ashamed. “He was a complex man,” she said. “Not a great father. He never talked about his early life in Russia. I think he must have been traumatized by his experiences.”

“What was his name?” Stepan asked.

There was utter silence in the room as Val weighed up whether or not to tell him. “Anatoly Bolotov,” she muttered at last.

Stepan scraped back his chair on the parquet floor. Val looked up to see that his entire expression had changed.

When he spoke, his voice was frosty. “Bolotov was one of the killers,” he told her.

“No!” Val exclaimed. “That’s not possible.” And then the memory flashed into her mind of her father in the nursing home repeating “I didn’t want to kill her” and talking about all the blood.

“Yurovsky, the commandant at the house, named him in his written testimony.”

Val clasped her chin in her hands in dismay. “But he was only nineteen!”

“Age was no barrier. One of the other killers was only seventeen.” Stepan was staring at her now, his dark eyes boring into her.

“Has Yurovsky’s testimony been published anywhere?” she asked. “I’d like to read it for myself.”

“It is only available in Soviet archives.” His tone was definitely unfriendly; she wasn’t imagining it.

“Is it possible to get a copy?”

“No.”

Val was stunned. “So you drop this bombshell that my father was a murderer then tell me I can’t even read the evidence against him. I just have to live with it?”

“Sometimes that’s the only thing we can do,” he said, standing up, clearly keen to end their conversation. “Do you want me to return the photographs to you? If so, tell me the name of your hotel.”

Val shook her head. “No. Please keep them. Thank you for the tea. I’m sorry.”

Stepan didn’t offer to shake her hand as she left. She wandered out into the hall to look for Bill and Nicole, not sure what she had apologized for. Because her father had helped to kill their royal family? Sorry didn’t even begin to cover it.

Chapter 59