In the course of my background reading about things colonial including the Proudlock murder I kept coming across the name Bruce Lockhart.

You don’t forget a name like that – and a couple of minutes with wikipedia shows him to be the same Bruce Lockhart who was a British agent in post revolutionary Russia and possible implicated in the Fanya Kaplan plot, and also helped Arthur Ransome’s (he of Swallows and Amazons fame) lover Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina who was Trotsky’s secretary leave Russia.

Tangled – from a murder on  verandah in colonial Malaya to the Lake district by way of the murder of Nicholas ii and a failed assasination attempt on Lenin …