“Rubbish!” Stepan shouted at the set. Ludmilla was in the kitchen talking to their daughter Anna, now in her fifties, and their granddaughter Eva, aged thirty-two, who were cooking the evening meal.

He had kept up to date with the research on the graves over the years and was scathing about the amount of misinformation the reports contained. These scientists with their fancy computers and DNA technology knew nothing at all. The bones had been separated, manhandled, and sent to laboratories across Russia, the UK, and America, in the process becoming so contaminated that they could have belonged to Stalin, Hitler, or Genghis Khan, for that matter.

Stepan had often discussed their Romanov heritage with his children and grandchildren. If any of them decided they wanted to reveal their ancestry, he would not try to stop them, but he warned it would be an uphill struggle to make anyone believe them, despite all the fuss about DNA. So far all had decided not to bother.

That Australian woman Val had written a thesis in the 1980s suggesting that Maria had escaped from Ekaterinburg. Stepan had come across it through a footnote in an American author’s book, and his grandson Misha had downloaded a copy from the Internet. He had read it with interest, not least because it contained more information about the strange life of Anatoly Bolotov, including extracts from ledgers he had kept, detailing his efforts to find Maria over the years. He had traveled all over Russia, and had monitored the letters received by Peter’s family; Stepan realized he had clearly been a man obsessed.

Val’s thesis had attracted only minimal interest from Romanov scholars, although she was a professor of history at Sydney University. The truth did not sound plausible, Stepan mused. Experts wanted a neat ending with all the royal family in one place. To his knowledge, no books or theses had been published that so much as hinted at the fate of Tatiana. No one would ever know what happened to her after she left the Ipatiev House on July 15, 1918.

One summer he had gone to Sverdlovsk with Ludmilla to try looking for the Vasnetsov family, but they had also disappeared into thin air. He had applied for information on Yuri Koshelev, the NKVD officer who had taken Mikhail and Katya on the Ice Road, but his file simply said that he died in 1942. Some people could never be found.