by R. N. Morris
‘Impossible.’
‘Yes. I am inclined to agree with you. Here is the mystery. If there was a letter, how was it transported from the room? And if it wasn’t Vakhramev who discharged the gun, who then was it and how indeed did they effect their escape? Surely not through the single small pane that was left open.’
‘There! You see! It must be him,’ cried Yegor.
‘There is one other thing I would like to ask you. Could you tell me of anything else out of the ordinary that has happened here today? However trivial.’
‘You mean apart from His Honour being murdered? Is that not unusual enough for you?’ Inexplicably, Yegor was shouting. Dunya placed a hand on one of his agitating arms and whispered something soothing. Yegor began to sob.
‘He loved the colonel,’ said Dunya to Porfiry. She squinted as if into the sun.
‘Yes,’ said Porfiry.
‘What will he do now?’ Dunya asked the question flatly, almost without any emotion at all.
‘Please, any small detail that you can remember may prove crucial, ’ insisted Porfiry. ‘For example, were there any other visitors today?’
Dunya whispered something to Yegor again. The butler grew calmer and dabbed his eyes with a large grey handkerchief. ‘The colonel had no visitors before that man. He was abed all the morning. There was some fellow, a public health inspector, who came to look into the quality of our water. It is something to do with the cholera epidemic. Not that we have had any cases here, I hasten to add. But he has been going in and out of all the apartments for the last few days.’
‘And he came to this one?’
‘Yes, but that was hours ago. Long before the colonel was up and about.’
‘I congratulate you,’ said Porfiry. ‘We have been trying to induce a sanitary inspector to look into a similar problem we are having at the bureau. We too have had no cases of cholera yet, just an almighty stink. So far, despite a strongly worded letter signed by myself, we have been unsuccessful.’
‘You do not need to be a sanitary inspector to discover the problem, ’ put in Virginsky, the force of his sudden contribution taking Porfiry by surprise. ‘At Stolyarny Lane, it is caused by the proximity of a canal that is used as an open drain for raw sewage. I imagine that the stench here is the result of the widespread practice of storing barrels of human excrement in yards in the height of summer. Such a practice is fine in the winter, when the waste matter freezes, but in the summer? The wonder is that there are not more cases of disease.’ Virginsky’s little speech was met with silence. He himself pinched the bridge of his nose and winced in embarrassment. He did not seem to know where to put himself.
Porfiry placed his palms together and rested his nose on the tips of his forefingers. It was a conscious effort to refocus. His thoughts were interrupted, however, by a commotion in the hall. He could make out Lieutenant Salytov’s raised voice but there was another voice, raised even higher, that he did not recognise. Before he had the opportunity to speculate further, the door opened and Salytov burst in, pushing before him a young woman, who appeared to be naked apart from the counterpane she held about her with both hands.
‘I found her in Setochkin’s bed,’ said Salytov gleefully. ‘She doesn’t speak a word of Russian.’
3
The girl in the counterpane
Her hair was dark and loosely suggested the coiffeured rings that had shaped it the night before. Traces of cosmetic showed on her face, which appeared pale. She pouted and glared at Salytov.
‘Ilya Petrovich, kindly escort the young lady back to the bedroom and allow her the opportunity to make herself decent.’
‘I fear that is something she will never be able to do,’ said Salytov. This provoked a torrent of French: apparently the girl in the throw’s understanding of Russian was greater than she had led Salytov to believe. Porfiry understood her to insist that she was a good girl.
Porfiry reassured her, also in French, that he believed her. He invited her to join him in the drawing room as soon as she was dressed. ‘Je dois vous demander quelques questions.’
Salytov led her out, though she refused his offered hand. Porfiry looked back at the couple at the kitchen table. The stupefaction on their faces seemed genuine. So, he thought, they did not know she was there either.
An hour later, freshly perfumed and newly made-up, a necklace of pearls at her throat, her hair restored to a fragile magnificence, the unidentified French woman swept into Setochkin’s tiny drawing room almost filling it with the layers of lace and pink satin of her décolleté gown. She held a Chinese fan, decorated with peacocks, which she agitated constantly, as if it were a living thing that depended on this movement to keep it alive. She was utterly unabashed; in fact, her gait was stiff with outraged dignity. Porfiry found himself in the extraordinary position of admiring her.
With its pretty figurines, floral drapes and delicate watercolours on lilac-papered walls, the room revealed an unexpectedly feminine side to Setochkin’s taste, unless he had surrendered the furnishing of it to someone else, a sister perhaps, or his mother, or even - and more probably - a mistress. The young woman seemed perfectly at home there. Doubtless she had sat in similar rooms in similar apartments, and had possibly even advised on the furnishing of them.
‘What is this about?’ she demanded in French, as she snapped the fan shut with callous finality. It seemed she needed both hands to scoop her skirts to sit.
Porfiry answered her in French. ‘We are investigating the death of Colonel Setochkin.’ Virginsky winced at the bluntness of the statement, which was not softened by the filter of another language.
‘Alyosha? Alyosha is dead?’ The pearls at her throat rose and fell. The fan snapped open again. And now the impression was that it was the fan that caused her hand to move, and that without her holding on to it, it would flutter up to the ceiling. She controlled it enough to bring it close to the fresh flush of her throat. She showed no other sign of emotion; the powder on her face was perhaps too thick to allow it.
‘Are you sure? He was perfectly alive the last time I saw him.’
‘And when was that, mademoiselle?’
‘Really, monsieur, when do you think?’
‘Do you always sleep so late?’ Somehow, this was not the question Porfiry had meant to ask.
‘It had been an exhausting night. As I said, Alyosha was full of life. How did he die?’
‘He sustained a gunshot wound. It seems likely that that was the cause of his death.’
‘Ah, poor Alyosha. What a tragedy.’ The French woman rose from her seat and took two or three paces forwards, as though to the front of an imagined stage.
‘What is your name, mademoiselle? And how did you come to be in Colonel Setochkin’s . . . apartment?’
‘My name is Alphonsine Lambert. I am here because Alyosha brought me here. We came by cab. How did you get here?’
‘It is really for me to ask the questions.’ Porfiry bowed in gentle remonstration. He angled his head to look at her, smiling indulgently. ‘Mademoiselle Alphonsine, my dear . . . this may prove to be quite painful for you. Perhaps more so than you are prepared to admit. How long have you known Colonel Setochkin?’
‘He is an old friend.’ The fan swept wildly around her, almost escaping her grasp.
‘I see. And were you in the habit of returning with him to spend the night in his apartment?’
‘Please. You are not my mother. And even if you were, you would not take that tone.’ Alphonsine’s laughter was deep and disquieting. Porfiry took a cigarette from his brightly enamelled case and lit it. He was about to put the case away when Alphonsine said: ‘Don’t be a brute, darling. Won’t you let me have one?’
He offered the case without a word and lit her cigarette for her.
‘How did you meet Alyosha?’
‘The usual way. He came to see me.’ At Porfiry’s puzzled frown, she explained: ‘At the theatre.’
‘You’re an actress?’
�
��Hardly, darling. How would I manage the lines?’ More deep laughter rippled the pearls of her necklace. ‘Unless it were Racine, of course,’ she added seriously. ‘Or Molière.’ Her naked shoulders shook in an inexplicable convulsion. ‘No. I’m a dancer. There’s no need to look like that. But, yes, there comes a point in a girl’s career when she must start to think about retirement.’
‘And Alyosha was your future, after retirement?’
‘He was one possible future, I suppose.’ Alphonsine seemed to regard Porfiry with a deeply thoughtful gaze. ‘Do you like the dance, darling?’
‘We are not here to talk about me,’ said Porfiry, managing somehow not to look at Virginsky.
‘I used to do many dances for Alyosha alone.’
‘Do you know a friend of Colonel Setochkin’s by the name of Tatyana Vakhrameva?’
Alphonsine clicked her tongue distastefully. ‘Did she kill him? I would not be at all surprised. She was very jealous.’
Now Porfiry allowed himself to look at Virginsky, who nodded slightly back.
‘And such a temper on the girl!’ Alphonsine was evidently encouraged by the effect of her words on the two men.
‘I see. And did you ever witness any scenes between Colonel Setochkin and Tatyana?’
‘There were always scenes. Last night, for example. After the show, Alyosha and I were dining in a private room at a restaurant.’
‘Which restaurant?’
‘The Cubat on Bolshaya Morskaya Street.’
‘And what happened?’
‘It was all too ridiculous.’ Alphonsine became fascinated by her cigarette.
‘Please.’
She blinked irritably and at last met Porfiry’s eye. ‘Somehow she found out where we were. She burst in and . . . it is sufficient to say, the waiters had to be called to remove her.’
‘She became violent?’
‘Not violent. Just ridiculous.’ After a beat, she added, ‘Which is far worse.’ She hid her smile in her colluding fan.
‘Good God!’ said Virginsky, inflating his cheeks. He flinched away from the source of the stench that assailed them, the three leaking barrels standing against one wall of the courtyard. The well was filled with intoxicated flies that buzzed angrily at them, jealous and protective.
‘What a rare privilege,’ said Porfiry, ‘to have a balcony overlooking this.’ He looked up at the back of Setochkin’s apartment building, at the one wall from which a few rickety-looking wrought-iron balconies projected. Streaks of rust marked the masonry beneath them. ‘It is something in which we specialise in Petersburg, concealing decaying yards behind splendid facades.
Perhaps it stands as a metaphor for something peculiarly Russian.’ He pointed up at a fourth-floor balconied window in which one pane was open. ‘That must be his.’ There was a balcony on the window next to it, and balconies on the two windows above them, but none beneath.
‘What are we looking for?’
‘It is important to get the lie of the land, to consider every means of access to and from a murder scene.’
‘But the balcony door was locked from the inside. Surely that rules out the possibility of the murderer escaping through it?’
Porfiry did not answer immediately. ‘Oh, incontestably,’ he replied at last. He shook his head despondently when he turned back to Virginsky. ‘We have no choice but to take him in. Of all the imaginable explanations, it is the least impossible.’
4
The bachelor diary
‘Congratulations!’ Chief Superintendent Nikodim Fomich Maximov gave his face an ironic smile as he poked it around the door to Porfiry’s chambers.
‘For what?’ Porfiry looked up from behind his desk with an expression of genuine confusion.
‘For solving two murder cases in as many days.’
‘For one thing, it has been longer than two days. And for another, I am not convinced they are solved.’
Nikodim Fomich’s ironic smile widened into a beaming grin. ‘I knew I could count on you.’
‘What are you implying, Nikodim Fomich?’
The policeman looked over his shoulder gleefully then came into the room, closing the door behind him. His open, amiable face registered good-natured surprise when he saw Virginsky on Porfiry’s fake leather sofa. ‘Good morning to you, Pavel Pavlovich. I heard you had joined the service. A case of poacher turned gamekeeper, is it?’
‘I cannot imagine what you mean. Your jest makes it sound as if I was once a criminal. I was never charged with any crime, merely suspected. And wrongly arrested.’
‘Of course, of course. A very important distinction, I’m sure,’ said Nikodim Fomich, winking at Porfiry. ‘One can always count on you, Porfiry Petrovich, to eschew the obvious in preference for the obscure.’
‘On the contrary, as I have explained to my young colleague here, the obvious should never be overlooked. I would be perfectly happy to accept both Dr Meyer and Ruslan Vladimirovich Vakhramev as the culprits in their respective cases were it not for a rather singular coincidence. As you know, I do not believe in coincidence. That which appears to be a coincidence very often turns out to be a connection.’
‘And what is the coincidence linking these two cases?’
‘Each of the suspects was sent an anonymous letter maligning their victim.’
‘But you found no such letter in Setochkin’s study,’ Nikodim Fomich pointed out. His tone was blithe, untouched by any real perplexity. ‘Are we not forced to conclude that Vakhramev invented this detail?’
‘Why should he?’ objected Porfiry. ‘And besides, even if it is invented, it is still a coincidence - that he should choose to invent the existence of an anonymous letter.’
‘But if there was a letter, how was it removed from the room? That is the heart of the mystery, is it not?’
‘I have no theory as to that,’ Porfiry answered forlornly. ‘I expect that there will turn out to be some perfectly simple and even prosaic explanation. Of course, it could still be in the room. It is simply that your officers have not found it.’
‘If it is there, I feel sure Lieutenant Salytov will uncover it. Whatever else one may say about the Firecracker, he is a first-rate man to have on a crime scene.’
‘I grant you that. However, sometimes, the hardest objects to find are those that are hidden in the open.’
‘Did you not look for it yourself?’ Nikodim Fomich asked disingenuously.
‘I preferred to leave it to the police officers on the scene. There were enough of them, after all.’
‘Someone took it then. That is the obvious inference. But who? The manservant?’
‘It is possible,’ conceded Porfiry doubtfully. ‘If he killed Setochkin, he would naturally want to incriminate Vakhramev. The removal of the letter casts doubt on Vakhramev’s testimony. He cannot be believed about the letter, because there plainly is no letter. Therefore he cannot be believed about anything, including his denial of murder.’
‘So it was the manservant?’
‘I sincerely doubt it. He was in the kitchen with the cook when the gun was fired.’
‘Ah, but there could be a conspiracy here.’ Nikodim Fomich’s eyes narrowed with cunning.
‘I agree, they do seem rather close. However, I am not convinced. ’
‘Well, at least you found a letter at the Meyers’,’ said Nikodim Fomich brightly. ‘Or rather, young Ptitsyn found it.’
‘He was lucky,’ said Virginsky.
‘I hear he is very often lucky. It is a useful talent for a policeman - or an investigating magistrate - to cultivate. Any news on the substance that was found with it?’
‘According to Dr Pervoyedov, the bottle contained morphine. It was as I thought,’ said Porfiry.
‘Pity. It would have been more helpful had it turned out to be aconite.’ Nikodim Fomich’s expression remained cheerful as he expressed his disappointment.
‘There was never any aconite in the doctor’s study,’ said Porfiry forcefully. ‘I do not
believe Dr Meyer needed to kill his wife. He had already shut his marriage up in a drawer. I am not sure his wife existed for him any more. Perhaps the same could also be said for his son.’
‘You and your psychology, Porfiry Petrovich. So it was that Bezmygin fellow who killed them?’
‘No!’ cried Porfiry in despair. ‘That is to say, I don’t know. We must probe the connections.’
Nikodim Fomich was no longer paying attention. A new thought was distracting him. ‘Ah, but what about that French woman? Naked, I hear, apart from a counterpane. That will provide a colourful detail for your memoirs, Porfiry Petrovich.’