A Vengeful Longing: A Novel (St. Petersburg Mysteries)

by R. N. Morris

  ‘Because I am human myself.’ Porfiry’s hand probed the back of the drawer and produced another small key, seemingly identical to the first. With this he unlocked the right-hand drawer. ‘These secrets that Ruslan Vladimirovich has locked away with three keys

  . . .’ Porfiry pulled out the third key now, a long, fine-shafted object cast in brass. ‘What a burden they must place upon his soul.’

  ‘But why not destroy the journals? Isn’t he laying himself open always to their discovery?’

  ‘Because they are his soul. How could a man bear to destroy a part of his soul? However base, however humiliating, he must find a way to acknowledge it, if only to himself. Have you ever had the dream of standing before a crowded room of people, as though to deliver a lecture, only to look down and discover yourself naked? I wonder if this dream does not represent some deep-seated wish, not for literal humiliation in this way, but for our true natures to be revealed. Of course, it can never be.’ Porfiry’s tone as he said this was almost regretful.

  ‘You think Vakhramev will welcome this discovery?’

  ‘It will be very painful to him, for sure. Particularly when he realises that his daughter has been exposed to the details of his immorality.’

  Virginsky’s face opened in the shock of realisation. ‘Unless . . . unless he wanted her to find it.’

  Porfiry’s brows shot up. He pursed his lips approvingly. ‘We’ll make an investigator of you yet, Pavel Pavlovich.’

  There were two bookcases in the room. One was glass-fronted, but turned out to be unlocked. At first glance, the books it contained seemed to be innocuous. There were a few novels, various works of history, including Shcherbatov’s six-volume History of Russia. Pushkin was in evidence, as well as Levshin’s Russian Tales and the fables of Krylov. Virginsky also noticed Bishop Rudneyev’s Russian Library. By far the majority of the books it contained were homilies and saints’ lives and other books of a religious bent.

  The second bookcase appeared to be entirely open, without even glass doors. But when Porfiry tried to extract one of the many identical and unmarked books, his fingers slipped uselessly over the unmoving spines. Porfiry’s face lit up appreciatively. ‘Ah! They are false! She could have mentioned that detail. Now, let me see. It must be here somewhere.’ His probing fingers discovered one spine near the centre that swung out as though on a hinge, revealing a keyhole. Porfiry smiled to Virginsky as he fitted the key.

  The spine-covered doors swung open on rows of genuine spines, almost all in the same maroon cloth binding. ‘I see Vakhramev is a collector of Priapos editions,’ said Porfiry, shaking his head.

  Six kid-bound notebooks on the bottom shelf broke the uniformity. Porfiry crouched down and pulled them out.

  Virginsky watched the magistrate scan the pages devouringly. ‘Yes. Journals. All thoughtfully dated.’ Porfiry handed the first notebook to Virginsky as he finished with it. Virginsky gave one shake of the head, like a horse troubled by flies, and stared, appalled, back at Porfiry. Then he opened the book that had somehow found its way into his hands.

  Picked up a little whore on Sadovaya Street. Not much older than eleven.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Virginsky, dropping the book. He bent to retrieve it.

  ‘Don’t worry about that. There’s no need to read it. It pre-dates the period in which we are interested. As do these.’ Porfiry handed over all but one of the other notebooks. ‘This one is the last. The year is given as 1854. Fourteen years ago. That would be around the time that Raisa was at Madam Josephine’s. I wonder.’ Porfiry flicked through the pages rapidly. ‘Just as I thought. The very last entry. Raisa. And he is at Madam Josephine’s. This is very interesting. He says that he went there with some other men. Old school-friends. Two of them are named. Golyadkin and Devushkin. A third man is referred to only as the “Uninvited One”. It is he who goes with Raisa.’ Porfiry read on in silence for a moment, then looked up at Virginsky. ‘I confess to feeling a terrible apprehension concerning this uninvited one. I would not be surprised if we had found our murderer.’ He closed the book. ‘All we have to discover now is his identity.’ Porfiry clutched the notebook to his chest. ‘And how he was able to do it, of course.’

  7

  The Uninvited One

  The morning light through Yaroslav Nikolayevich’s drawing-room window was clear and uncompromising. The prokuror himself was pacing the room, in a manner that somehow combined anxiety with authority. He was anxious, clearly, for the whole sorry business to be over. His guest, Ruslan Vladimirovich, was seated on a sofa. Porfiry noted that Vakhramev’s remarkable imperturbability had abandoned him. His eyes stared, wild and distraught now, at the six kid-bound notebooks on the table before him.

  ‘How did you get them?’

  Porfiry weighed his choices for a moment, in which he exchanged a glance with Virginsky. ‘Your daughter alerted us to their existence.’

  ‘Tanyushka knew about them?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. She found the key to your concealed bookcase.’

  ‘No!’

  Porfiry studied the pattern in the tablecloth.

  ‘Has she, do you know, read them?’

  Porfiry nodded. Vakhramev placed his hands over his face so that the high, broken sounds of his distress snagged in his fingers.

  ‘What is left for me now?’ he said at last. Still he did not take his hands from his face.

  Porfiry looked at Yaroslav Nikolayevich, who shook his head in disapproval.

  ‘I am sorry for you,’ said Porfiry to Vakhramev, in conscious response to the prokuror’s severity.

  ‘Are you?’ As Vakhramev dropped his hands, he seemed to release a blast of bitter fury. ‘You have brought this on me. Was it really necessary to go looking for these?’

  Porfiry placed a crooked forefinger to his lips. The touch was comforting. ‘Yes. It was necessary. Besides, Ruslan Vladimirovich, you must realise that Tatyana had already read them. That was nothing to do with me. All that has changed is that you now know that she has.’

  ‘All that has changed! All that has changed is that I have nothing left to live for! She can have no respect for me. And if she has no respect for her father, how can she respect herself? I have destroyed her.’

  ‘These were not the only books we found in your study,’ said Porfiry gently.

  Vakhramev closed his eyes. His mouth stretched taut, like a child’s the moment before tears. A huge spasm worked its way through his body.

  ‘She saw those too!’

  ‘I was not referring to those books. I meant, there was a copy of the Holy Bible on your desk. You have practised the forms of religion, perhaps the time has come to open your heart to its message. The word of the Lord comes like a thief in the night.’ Porfiry shot a stealthy glance at Virginsky.

  Vakhramev opened his eyes and looked at Porfiry wildly. A sound escaped him that could have been laughter, though it was a mirthless sound, and barely human. ‘Do not mock me! I do not believe. I have never been able to believe. At least, not since I was a child. I may wish I did, but I cannot. I am a vile worm. I cannot escape my nature. The only escape’ - Vakhramev’s face seemed to sink in on itself, as if it masked a vacuum - ‘is death.’

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ said Porfiry firmly. ‘You are alive. You must carry on living. That is your duty. You will find a way to believe.’ Porfiry looked down at the notebooks. ‘You have brought this on yourself. In some part of you, you have desired this. At any rate, you always knew this day would come. Certainly, you did less than you could have to prevent it. You say you are a worm. No. That’s not the case. All these’ - he gestured at the books - ‘are the actions of a man. Face up to them. Face up to yourself. And draw a line.’

  ‘I cannot draw a line,’ Vakhramev got out desperately.

  ‘How do you think Tatyana knew where to find the key? After all, you had taken great pains to conceal it.’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Really? Her room adjoins your study,
does it not?’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  Porfiry glanced again at Virginsky. ‘Could it ever have been possible that the door to her room was left ajar, allowing her to spy on you as you went to the hidden bookcase?’

  Vakhramev’s flinching glance away contradicted his words: ‘No. I was always careful. I think.’

  ‘You think?’

  Vakhramev bowed his head. ‘Is it really possible?’

  Porfiry did not take his eyes from him. ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Am I so depraved?’ The question from Vakhramev was barely audible.

  ‘Please understand,’ said Porfiry crisply, almost impatiently now. ‘I’m not interested in moral judgements. I am only interested in the truth. Possibly that is what motivated you, too. It was not a question of wanting to corrupt Tatyana. It was rather that you wanted the hypocrisy to end.’

  ‘What good has it done me?’

  ‘I believe it was necessary.’ Again Porfiry looked at Virginsky. ‘And what is necessary is always right. Now, we must clear up a few things regarding Colonel Setochkin’s death. You know that Tatyana considers you perfectly capable of being his murderer. We must show her that you are not.’

  ‘I may as well be. To take the life of a Setochkin is a lesser crime than those she knows me guilty of.’

  ‘Nonsense. This will be painful for you, I’m sure. But we are all men here. We must talk about a certain incident related in one of your journals. The last entry, in fact, in the last book.’ Porfiry picked up the relevant notebook and found the page. ‘It is here, where you mention a prostitute called Raisa. Was this the woman whose photograph I showed you?’

  ‘It was all so long ago.’

  ‘Come now. Please. No pretence. We have gone past that point.’

  ‘No. You don’t understand. I really can’t remember. That was why I wrote it all down. So that I could forget. I was tormented by my actions. I could not get them out of my mind. And I found that as I wrote something down, my memory was cleared of it. I was able to divide that part of me from the rest of me, from the respectable Ruslan Vladimirovich Vakhramev, who was able to go about his respectable business untroubled by these . . . disreputable memories. Until of course he sinned again.’

  ‘I do understand that. But this is the last entry, dated fourteen years ago. I cannot help but feel there must have been something significant about it. I mean to say, why did you stop here?’

  ‘Because I stopped. Believe me, I have not been with a prostitute since that day. I have found other outlets.’

  ‘The Priapos books?’

  Vakhramev nodded.

  ‘What enabled you to break with prostitutes?’ pressed Porfiry.

  ‘Give me the book,’ said Vakhramev. He turned to the last entry. ‘I do not remember in all honesty whether this Raisa is the woman you showed me in that photograph. Her face did seem familiar, I confess. It awoke some memory. But there were so many of them, you know. It gives me no pleasure to say that. However . . .’ Vakhramev tapped the page decisively. ‘I do remember the night in question. There had been a dinner in honour of Devushkin, who was leaving St Petersburg the following day for the Caucasus. Myself and Golyadkin were invited, but Golyadkin turned up with this other fellow. An old schoolfriend of his.’

  ‘The Uninvited One?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was his real name?’

  ‘I don’t remember. Or rather, I’m not sure I ever knew. He called himself the “Uninvited One”, you see, out of a perverse pride. “You don’t want me here,” he said. “But here I am.” He did his best to insult us all. Particularly Devushkin, whose party it was. After the dinner, in the course of which, if I remember rightly, he as good as challenged Devushkin to a duel - Devushkin laughed it off, of course, which only infuriated him the more - yes, after the dinner, we tried to shake him off. We pretended that the party was breaking up but we met again and took a cab to Madam Josephine’s. I had never been to that particular brothel before. It was a favourite haunt of Devushkin’s. Well, somehow, he, the Uninvited One, got wind of our plot and followed us there. He had the effrontery to demand we pay his cabdriver. Strange how all the details do come back to one. Well, he was drunk. We were all drunk and getting drunker. There was a terrible scene. Madam Josephine tried to calm things down. She offered him a new girl. Or at least Madam Josephine said she was a new girl. Can one ever believe what they say? I wonder, do you have that photograph still?’

  Porfiry reached a hand into a pocket and produced Raisa’s picture.

  ‘I do believe that was her, you know. Yes, I’m almost certain of it. You have to realise that the light in those places was never very bright. But I remember how I felt looking at her - I feel the same thing now. I remember, you see, thinking at the time, “That girl is from a good family. That girl is afraid. How on earth did she end up here?” And I thought of my own daughter, Tatyana, who must have been five or six at the time. Do you know you can buy girls that young, perfectly legally, in the Haymarket?’

  ‘Please continue,’ said Porfiry.

  ‘Well, I looked at her and I looked at him, and I saw something horrible in his eyes, something that I knew was in my own eyes too. And that was when it ended. I swear to you that was when it ended.’

  ‘Do you remember if this man promised her money to buy her way out of the brothel? If he promised her a better life?’

  ‘Yes! That was it! He was determined to show himself better than us. It was a way of insulting us, that was all. He had no intention of going through with it.’

  ‘We picked up a report that this is what happened to Raisa. It would rather suggest that we are talking about the same woman.’ Porfiry’s hand delved into another pocket. He held out a photograph of Martin Meyer recovered from the escritoire in the dacha. ‘Was this the man? Is he the Uninvited One?’

  Vakhramev frowned at the picture. ‘No. Not him. I am sure of it.’

  Porfiry nodded. ‘Good. I did not think it would be, but I had to confirm it. This man is Raisa’s husband. In the event, it was he who gave Raisa the better life that the Uninvited One promised her. However, he himself claims not to have known until recently that Raisa ever worked as a prostitute. It would not fit with his story if he had in fact slept with her at Madam Josephine’s.’ Porfiry took back the photograph of Meyer. ‘Now then, your friend, Golyadkin, the schoolfriend of this mysterious individual - he must surely know the identity of the Uninvited One. Where may we find Golyadkin?’

  ‘In the Mitrofanevsky Cemetery,’ said Vakhramev. ‘He died in a boating accident three months ago.’

  Porfiry let out a sigh, in which there was more than simple disappointment. ‘I doubt very much that it was an accident. Perhaps you remember which school it was they were at together?’

  ‘It was a private boarding school in Moscow. Golyadkin talked of it often. He had a miserable time there. I don’t remember the name.’

  ‘I have only one other question. Do you happen to know what age Golyadkin was at his death?’

  ‘He had recently celebrated his forty-seventh birthday.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Porfiry, looking Vakhramev in the eye. ‘You have helped us very much. This has provided the first real breakthrough of the case and I realise that it has been hard for you to talk of these things. Allow me to shake your hand.’ Porfiry stood and held out his hand.

  A sob of gratitude shook Vakhramev. The tears sprang to his eyes as he took Porfiry’s hand.

  8

  Family obligations

  Salytov stood at the entrance to the yard, in full view, watching the boy on stilts. Every now and then Tolya would lose his balance and jump off. He would regard the lieutenant defiantly before climbing back on and resuming his strange stiff-gaited walk. Gradually, the periods between his falls lengthened, and at last he was able to totter over to Salytov. He held on to the trembling handles grimly as he looked down on the police officer.

  ‘You’re not a very good spy.’
/>
  ‘I want you to know that I have my eye on you.’

  ‘I was released. Without charge. You have no right.’

  ‘What do you know about rights?’ said Salytov.

  Without warning, Salytov swung back his boot and launched it at Tolya’s stilts. The boy fell heavily. When he picked himself up, there was horse ordure over his clothes. His hands were bleeding.

  ‘You should be more careful,’ observed Salytov.

  Tolya glared back at Salytov. ‘I have told Monsieur Ballet about this. He intends to lodge a complaint.’

  ‘Let him. I have closed his shop down once. I can do it again.’

  ‘Leave me be.’

  ‘What was that? A command? Surely you have learnt the dangers that ensue when you raise yourself above your station.’ The boy’s stilts lay one on top of the other on the ground. Salytov jumped on them, snapping one over the pivot of the other.