The Cleansing Flames (St Petersburg Mystery)

by R. N. Morris

  ‘Forgive me for saying so, but it is not felt necessary to inform you of everything.’

  ‘I should have been told.’

  ‘I hope I shall not be obliged to report to Major Verkhotsev that you obstructed us in our enquiries?’

  ‘Your Excellencies will understand that I have to be careful. I cannot let just anybody wander in and out. That would not do.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You will report that I was diligent?’

  ‘We will tell him you were an exemplary spy.’

  The yardkeeper nodded uneasily and backed out of the room, his pipe now clamped securely between his teeth.

  ‘We will have to be quick,’ said Porfiry. ‘I suspect he will be back.’

  ‘Quick?’ wondered Virginsky, casting a disparaging gaze about. ‘I see nothing to detain us further.’

  ‘The gendarmes have undoubtedly picked the room clean. Even so, they may have missed something.’

  Virginsky gave Porfiry a sceptical look.

  Porfiry began in the bedroom, peering into the glistening black remains of the mattress, his nostrils twitching all the time. ‘The worst of the fire damage is concentrated in this room.’ He glanced up at the ceiling. ‘In fact, the intensity of charring here is such that it would not be unreasonable to suspect the employment of an accelerant.’

  ‘The earthenware flagon,’ remarked Virginsky.

  Porfiry nodded. ‘By the time the accelerant had burnt out, the fire would have taken hold enough to spread to the adjoining room, but with less intensity.’

  ‘It would be interesting to see the medical examiner’s report on the body found in the bed,’ said Virginsky.

  ‘Indeed it would, Pavel Pavlovich.’ Porfiry acknowledged Virginsky’s train of thought with a smile. ‘And what question would you most like the medical examination to answer?’

  ‘Whether he died from the effects of the fire, or whether . . .’ Virginsky looked down at the remains of the mattress.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Or whether he was dead before the fire started.’

  ‘An interesting question. Though I must say it is an exceedingly difficult issue for a pathologist to settle. So perhaps we should not be too disappointed that we will never see the report.’ Porfiry cast his gaze upwards again, and kept it focused on the ceiling.

  ‘Heat rises, does it not, Pavel Pavlovich?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And with it, specks of soot and other by-products of combustion?’

  Virginsky gave his mouth a non-committal tightening.

  ‘Please, help me move the bed into this corner. The damage here is less . . .’ Porfiry broke off, squinting into an area of the ceiling that seemed to have been furthest from the heart of the fire. Virginsky tried to see what had caught the other man’s eye. Porfiry began to push the bed, but it snagged on the damaged boards. ‘If you please, Pavel Pavlovich.’

  The two men together manoeuvred the bed to Porfiry’s satisfaction. He kept looking up to compare its position to some point on the ceiling.

  ‘Your hand please.’ Porfiry held out an arm, and with Virginsky’s assistance climbed onto the metal frame. His quivering legs set off a deafening rattle. The bed seemed to be trying to jump out from beneath him. His torso swayed from side to side wildly. Virginsky pushed manfully against the latent force of Porfiry’s inevitable descent. Porfiry’s free hand flashed up towards the very corner of the room, his fingers snatching desperately. The rash movement hastened the end. Gravity prevailed. The short, plump magistrate toppled onto the taller, thinner one. The two men somehow found themselves sprawled uncomfortably across exposed beams, opposite one another.

  ‘Got it!’ cried Porfiry triumphantly.

  ‘What?’

  Porfiry opened his palm to reveal a tiny fragment of blackness, smaller than the nail of his little finger, a ragged semicircle, although with one precisely straight side. ‘I don’t know.’ He smiled foolishly at Virginsky. ‘I saw something standing slightly proud on the ceiling. That straight edge seemed peculiar and worthy of investigation.’ Porfiry turned his find over. ‘It appears to be a scrap of paper. Completely charred on one side. But it appears that something is printed on this side. Can you make it out, Pavel Pavlovich? My eyes are not up to it.’

  Virginsky hauled himself over and peered into his superior’s hand. ‘It’s just letters.’

  ‘Yes, but what letters?’ demanded Porfiry roughly.

  Virginsky reached out and turned the fragment.

  ‘Be careful! It’s very fragile,’ warned Porfiry.

  The paper was indeed flimsy to the touch. ‘It is this way up, I think,’ said Virginsky. ‘Four rows of letters. G-o. O-f, space m. S-t-i-t. N-o. Go, Of m, Stit, No. It’s obviously a remnant from a larger sheet.’

  ‘The rest of which was no doubt destroyed in the conflagration.’ Porfiry looked up to the ceiling again. ‘Or recovered by the gendarmes. Which amounts to the same thing, as far as we are concerned.’ With a strenuous grunt, Porfiry heaved himself to his feet. He squinted into his palm, as if he were intent on reading his own fortune. ‘This tiny scrap alone drifted up to adhere to the ceiling.’

  ‘Surely there’s not enough there to constitute a meaningful clue?’ objected Virginsky. And yet even as he dismissed it, he felt that the wisp of paper might contain the significance Porfiry wished to impart to it. Perhaps it was something to do with the miraculous way Porfiry had plucked it out of the ravages of the fire. Or perhaps it was because the letters that he could make out were so tantalisingly close to meaning something that he could not accept their essential randomness. There had to be a message contained there. It was simply a question of decoding it. And if there was a message, it had to have a bearing on the case. He knew of course that this final piece of reasoning was flawed. Even so, it was hard to resist. Something about those few letters resonated deep within him.

  ‘But it may be all we have, Pavel Pavlovich. And besides, I am sure that you will be able to make some sense of it.’

  ‘I?’

  Porfiry’s smile made it clear that no thanks were necessary for the generous gift he considered himself to have bestowed.

  *

  ‘Now we must pay our respects next door,’ said Porfiry quietly, as they stepped back out onto the landing.

  Virginsky froze. The door to the apartment next to Kozodavlev’s suddenly acquired a monumental presence. Glistening with fresh paint, it appeared to have been recently fitted. But there was something inhuman about its pristine edges. Given all that had happened inside that apartment, it seemed monstrous that someone had thought to repair the door, as if paint and joinery could set those horrors to rights. To Virginsky, the bright new door was a slab of desolation bearing down on him, the emptiness at the centre of the human heart. He did not want to go anywhere near it. ‘Would it not be an intrusion? At this time . . . their grief . . .’

  Porfiry gave him a curious distracted glance, as if he could not understand what Virginsky was saying, or even the language in which he was saying it. ‘We must pay our respects, Pavel Pavlovich,’ Porfiry insisted.

  Virginsky did not care to probe his reluctance. Instead, he gave in to a surge of panic-tinged antagonism. ‘All this talk of paying respects . . . that is not it at all, Porfiry Petrovich. It is unseemly. An unseemly prurience. All you want to do is goggle at their suffering.’

  Porfiry met the accusation with a mild flurry of blinking, the softest of reproaches.

  ‘Does it not seem odd to you that they have repaired the door?’ said Virginsky abruptly. Now that he had voiced it, his thought of a moment ago struck him as absurd and unfeeling. He felt the need to defend himself: ‘If I had lost five children, I would not have the presence of mind to summon a carpenter to mend a damaged door.’

  ‘What would you have them do? Besides, the door was most probably paid for by their neighbours. That is the Russian way.’ Porfiry considered Virginsky sternly. ‘It does not mean they loved their chi
ldren any less just because they have thought to replace the door to their apartment.’

  With that, still fixing Virginsky with a recriminatory gaze, Porfiry tapped his knuckles against the controversial door.

  It seemed that the old woman who opened up for them was expecting someone else entirely. An expression of joyous relief quickly collapsed into one of disappointment, which in turn sharpened into suspicion. She was wiry and angular, seemingly possessed of a stubborn strength. A black bonnet sat on loose grey curls. Her mourning dress was respectable and respectful.

  ‘Madame Prokharchina?’ The extremely sceptical emphasis in Porfiry’s voice suggested that he did not for one moment believe she was the lady in question.

  ‘No, I am Yekaterina Ivanovna Dvigailova. The landlady.’

  ‘Of course.’ Porfiry gave Virginsky a shaming glance. ‘We are magistrates. We have come to pay our respects to the family.’

  Yekaterina Ivanovna regarded him mistrustfully.

  ‘Out of common human feeling. We read about the tragedy in the newspapers. We felt compelled to pay our respects. This being Thomas Week, you understand. Tomorrow is Radonitsa. We intend to say a prayer for the little ones.’

  Virginsky stifled the cry of protest that was rising in his throat. The resultant sound resembled a sob of emotion. This seemed to decide the landlady. She pulled the door open to admit them.

  Five white coffins of varying sizes were arranged on trestles. The grimy, smoke-blackened room was crowded with the dead, who seemed to be falling over one another in their prostrate immobility. The coffins were open. Virginsky could not avoid looking into them, could not avoid engaging with the faces of the dead children. The youngest of them must have been about eighteen months old, an infant. A girl, she was dressed like a doll, in her christening gown. Her face was unbearably perfect, with no evidence of burning or scars. Unblemished, adorable, dead. A red-painted egg lay on her chest, in her cupped hands.

  It was too much for Virginsky, but everywhere he looked he saw the face of a dead child: two boys, one about five, the other seven or eight, in sailor suits; and two more girls, one about three, and the other whose age was hard to gauge: from her face, you would have said she was the eldest, but she was smaller in stature than the elder of the boys. All of them nestled their Easter eggs in limp, lifeless hands.

  A thin, washed-out woman with a black shawl pulled up over her head sat in one corner. Her lips were constantly moving, though no words could be made out, just a hoarse, soft gurgling. Her eyes were wide and raw. She turned them on Virginsky with a look that had gone beyond emotion. It asked nothing of him, but was simply a reflex turning of the head. Her face, he saw, was swollen and streaked with moisture. It was not that her expression was dazed, rather that it was emptied – spent. She had felt all that it was humanly possible to feel. Now all she could do was turn her blank, uncomprehending gaze onto whatever came within her purview. She existed as a kind of warning, and nothing more.

  ‘You won’t get much sense out of her,’ said Yekaterina Ivanovna. ‘And he’s out. At some tavern or other, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  Porfiry nodded his understanding. All the same, he took a step towards the woman in the corner. At his approach, a kind of startled horror flitted over her face. It was as if she were horrified not at Porfiry, but at the idea that someone, anyone, would want to approach her. She recoiled, withdrawing herself, buffeted by a violent repulsive force that seemed to surround her. Her chair scraped back along the floor.

  ‘Madame Prokharchina,’ said Porfiry gently. ‘We have come to offer our condolences.’ He reached a hand out towards her. The woman jerked away from it.

  ‘This is not good,’ hissed Virginsky.

  Her movements were sudden and stilted, like a captured bird. It seemed imperative to her to avoid human touch at any cost.

  Porfiry continued his efforts to reassure her. ‘We are one with you in your grief.’

  Virginsky felt a wave of anguish surge through him at Porfiry’s words, so perhaps what he had just said was true. But how could it be? How could anyone’s emotions at this moment compare with this woman’s? It was just a platitude, hypocritical and therefore abhorrent. Perhaps the anguish Virginsky felt was simply the hypersensitivity caused by an intolerable excess of embarrassment. After they – or rather Porfiry – had uttered their condolences, they would walk out of that apartment, away from the roomful of white coffins, closing the newly hung door behind them. The woman’s utterly worn-out face would fade from memory. In time, even the death-perfected faces of the children would be forgotten, or at least become harder and harder to recall.

  Virginsky imagined the woman sitting in the corner of that room, the five coffins of her children in front of her, forever.

  Suddenly he felt Porfiry’s gaze on him, as though he expected him to add a consoling sentiment. The woman too looked up at him expectantly. He looked back at them both in turn, aghast. But suddenly he felt compelled to say something. ‘I . . . I cannot imagine . . . cannot imagine . . . how . . . you bear this.’

  The woman sighed. It seemed that she had somehow found relief, if not comfort, in Virginsky’s words; that to have a stranger speak the truth to her was all that she wanted.

  Porfiry bowed and turned away from her. Virginsky continued to search her emptied eyes, as though now he was the one needing consolation from her.

  ‘It is a terrible tragedy,’ said Porfiry to the landlady.

  The landlady seemed to crumple under his fluttering gaze. ‘I am to blame!’ she suddenly cried. ‘I promised I would sit with them. I promised I would look after them.’

  ‘Now, now. Don’t torment yourself, Yekaterina Ivanovna. You were not to know.’

  ‘I only stepped out for five minutes, to answer the call of nature. And on the way back, I paid a visit on the Widow Sudbina. She lives on the third floor. Her husband died not long ago and she has been melancholy ever since. They were sleeping soundly when I left, the little ones. What harm could come to them, I thought?’

  ‘It’s not your fault. You did not set the fire.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ The landlady’s eyes stood out as if they were trying to distance themselves from what she was about to confess. ‘I locked them in! For their own safety, you understand. You don’t know who is prowling around these buildings. That yardkeeper is worse than useless. He never asks to see anyone’s passport. He admits the most unsavoury characters. I locked them in! And then they wouldn’t let me go back upstairs because of the fire.’

  It took a moment for Porfiry to absorb what the woman had told him. ‘No. You are not to blame. I repeat, you did not light the fire. You could not have known. My colleague and I are magistrates. Please rest assured that we will find the man responsible for this, and we will bring him to justice. Is that not so, Pavel Pavlovich?’

  There was undeniably a challenge in Porfiry’s question. Virginsky said nothing. He bowed his head and in so doing once again found himself looking into the face of the youngest of the Prokharchin children. He thought of the embalmer’s hands on her tiny body, and wondered at the mysterious alchemy that had been worked to bring about her lifeless preservation. In truth, it was a brutal process, a cutting open, a ripping out, a filling in, a trussing up. A violation. The eyes could not turn to him in appeal, could not implore, held no rebuke, however gentle. He willed her grip to curl and tighten around the painted egg.

  He felt certain that whoever had lit the fire, for whatever motives, had not wanted her dead. And yet the fire had been lit, and her death, however unintended, was the consequence.

  Virginsky lifted his gaze from the child. But he found nowhere else in that room for it comfortably to settle.

  13

  Radonitsa

  The solution came to Virginsky in the night while he was sleeping. He had not even started working on the problem, so it was indeed surprising that he had solved it so quickly. He woke from his dream with a start and sat bolt upright.

  Lig
hting the tallow candle by his bedside, he pulled out the tin trunk that contained his collection.

  Virginsky felt a strange sense of power, which was superseded almost immediately by one of revulsion. This was mysticism! He would not give in to it. He would not open the trunk. It was absurd to think he had dreamed the solution. He would leave the shamanism to Porfiry Petrovich.

  He felt at once relieved to have made the decision. Opening that trunk would take him into a realm he had no wish to enter.

  As soon as that realisation struck him, his relief evaporated. He stared in horror at the trunk. He imagined it containing some grisly secret: a severed body part, or the corpse of a child. The youngest of the Prokharchin children would just about fit inside it. No, it was inconceivable that he would open it. Not now, possibly not ever.

  At the same time, he could not bring himself to push it back under his bed.

  He was a rationalist. To unlock the trunk in the expectation of finding the solution he had seen in his dream was not the behaviour of a rationalist. And what if the solution turned out to be there, just as his dream predicted? The ramifications of that were devastating. He was beset by a fleeting premonition, a sense of imminent disintegration.

  If his dream were proven to be true, he would be brought to a critical moment in his political as well as his inner live, a genuine crisis. It was far better that the lid remained closed, particularly as his rationalism told him that there could be nothing in it anyhow. One did not dream the solutions to the crimes one was investigating.

  He pushed the trunk back under his bed.

  He extinguished the candle and lay back down. He closed his eyes but sleep felt a long way off now. He tried to analyse what had just happened. There must be a psychological explanation for his dream, the rationalist in him decided.

  The devastation at Kozodavlev’s apartment had naturally made him think of Easter Sunday night when he had gone to witness the fires at the vodka warehouse. Furthermore, Porfiry Petrovich’s theories about Kozodavlev’s radicalism – together with his fixation on the novel Swine – had naturally influenced Virginsky. The dream, in which Kozodavlev had made an appearance, was therefore perfectly explicable. The details were already fading but he thought that it had been to do with a revolutionary cell. For some reason, the Prokharchin children were involved too. Had they been the members of the cell? A ridiculous idea, but that was the way with dreams. And therefore, all the more reason not to act on them.