A Vengeful Longing pp-2 Read online

  ‘Petrovsky Island.’

  Virginsky came to a halt. ‘That was where. .’

  ‘Yes. Where it all began the last time you and I met. However, this is a new case.’

  Virginsky ran to catch up. ‘The place does not have happy associations for me.’

  ‘Nor for me. In fact, there are few places remaining in St Petersburg that I can go to without being reminded of some tragedy.’

  ‘Surely Petrovsky Island is outside the jurisdiction of the Haymarket District?’

  ‘That is so. But the Department of the Investigation of Criminal Causes is at the service of the whole of the St Petersburg police force. There are certain cases that are recognised at the outset to be rather more challenging than the usual. Or possibly it is due to the seriousness of the crime. In this case, a suspected double murder. Earlier today, the wife and son of one Dr Martin Meyer collapsed and died, simultaneously, at the family’s dacha.’

  ‘I see. And you suspect the doctor?’

  ‘My dear Pavel Pavlovich! It is assuredly too early to make such pronouncements.’

  Virginsky noticed the way ahead was blocked by a man in a civil service uniform, who was holding his ground in the centre of the corridor, instead of stepping to one side as Porfiry rushed towards him. Porfiry had his head down and seemed not to be aware of the other man. The civil servant in question was of average height and build: a nondescript individual. It seemed he would inevitably be knocked down by Porfiry’s flying bulk.

  ‘Porfiry Petrovich! Watch out!’

  Virginsky uttered his cry just in time. Porfiry teetered forwards and then back on his heels. He looked up at the human obstacle.

  ‘Sir, you will kindly give way.’ Porfiry’s politeness hardly masked his fury.

  ‘I give way? No sir. You will give way,’ said the other.

  ‘I have an important case to attend to.’

  ‘Ah! And so my duties are unimportant!’

  ‘It is surely a simple matter for you to step to one side.’

  ‘An equally simple matter for you!’

  ‘You must surely agree that I am the one who is in a hurry, the one running along the corridor, while you were the one who was standing there like a. . like a. . like a. .’

  ‘Like a what, may I enquire?’

  ‘Like a dummy, sir!’

  ‘A dummy! You are calling me a dummy!’

  ‘You pressed me to complete my comparison.’

  ‘Will you take it back?’

  ‘I don’t have time to take it back. Simply get out of my way and let’s have an end to this nonsense.’

  The other man drew himself up. ‘Sir, we are coming close to the point where I will be compelled to demand satisfaction.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I am a magistrate. You are in a police station. You cannot possibly challenge me to a duel.’

  ‘Ah! You are admitting that one cannot expect honour from a magistrate!’

  ‘I am simply pointing out that duelling is against the law. Now kindly step to one side. You have made your point. You are my equal. You yield to no one. As far as all that goes, I agree in principle with your position. However, as a matter of practical necessity, I urge you to get out of my way, sir!’

  The civil servant seemed momentarily confused by this. He frowned and drew in a deep breath, as if preparing to frame a question. But instead, the back of one hand shot up to his forehead, and a sinuous swoon seemed to come over him. He fell back against the wall.

  Porfiry nodded tersely and stormed on, closely followed by Virginsky.

  ‘It is my vertigo!’ cried the civil servant. ‘I have not given way to you!’

  Porfiry shook his head. ‘They are always hypochondriacs,’ he muttered. They reached the stairs. The soles of his shoes slapped rapidly as he skipped down.

  3

  A Russian beauty

  They stepped out into a cloud of red dust, their ears assaulted by the clamour of destruction. A wall had just come down, on a site being cleared for building work. The gritty particles revolved in the sunlight, uplifted, celebrated, unstoppable. Porfiry coughed, and instinctively felt for his cigarette case.

  ‘What are they building now, I wonder?’

  The city, in summer, was a transitional place. A temporary population of migrant labourers, peasants from the outlying country-side, displaced the regular inhabitants and reshaped the city’s fabric with casual vigour. Their indifference was brutal: without a flinch, hardly pausing to wipe the sweat from their eyes, they would tear down a house here, throw up a new one there, or mask familiar landmarks with novelty. There was the sense that there was no one to stop them; that the permanent citizens would return dismayed and disorientated by the changes wrought in their absence. And so, over the years, their city would become unrecognisable, and they would be left strangers in it.

  The workmen whistled and shouted through the kerchiefs over their faces. Their eyes never sought to meet the eyes of any residents who were left to witness their vandalism. If accidental eye-contact was ever made, as happened now between Porfiry and one of the hammer-wielding demolition workers, a momentary flicker of defiance or suspicion was all that was exchanged.

  Porfiry hailed an empty drozhki that was coming over Kokushkin Bridge. There was a flash of welcome and complicity in the driver’s sidelong glance as he half-turned to watch them climb in. His eyes were squeezed almost shut from blinking out the sweat and sunlight.

  ‘Petrovsky Island. As quick as you can.’

  Porfiry fell back into his seat with a grimace of pain as the cab lurched away, the driver standing to whip and threaten his horse.

  ‘Does it not occur to him that his horse would live longer if he whipped it less?’ said Virginsky.

  ‘Be careful,’ Porfiry muttered warningly as he shifted his position on the bouncing seat.

  ‘What?’ Virginsky stiffened.

  Porfiry raised his eyebrows and smiled, but wouldn’t be drawn.

  It wasn’t long before they were driving alongside St Isaac’s Cathedral, whose gilded dome blazed in the sun’s profligacy. Virginsky turned a sullen gaze towards the church.

  ‘Imposing, isn’t it?’ commented Porfiry, smiling watchfully.

  ‘What has always struck me about it is its proximity to the War Office.’

  ‘It is just as well to have God on your side before you go into battle.’

  Visible now ahead of them, the broad surface of the river glistened and beckoned, alive with teeming craft. A barge hugged the granite embankment, drawn by a team of peasants, who leant and strained and pushed into their harnesses.

  As they passed the equestrian statue of Peter the Great, his great bronze horse rearing in the direction of the Neva, the serpent trampled beneath its hooves, Porfiry cast a provoking look at Virginsky, as if to say, ‘Well, and what do you have to say about him?’

  The drozhki thundered on to the temporary pontoon bridge, its boards reverberating under the hooves and turning wheels. Porfiry felt a sudden lightening of his mood, an almost festive impatience. It was summer, and he was crossing the river to the islands. The cool breeze of movement, the water’s freshness, lifted him.

  Two more bridges later, and they were on Petrovsky Island. As they raced through the park, Porfiry was aware of a desire to slow the drozhki. The easy, squandered greenness around him had a clinging appeal. He looked with an envious nostalgia at the parties singing folksongs around samovars and smiled at the couples strolling and the children chasing the breeze along the paths. He remembered the island’s winter desolation, and it seemed like a duty to make the most of these few green months.

  They could tell which dacha it was from a distance: the only one in its group with a cluster of carriages and men around it.

  Porfiry tapped the driver. The horse snorted and slowed, released from constant curses and lashes. Its gait became complicated and tripping.

  Porfiry took in the details of the house. He saw the crudely rendered horse’s head, cut
from a plank and projecting from the apex of the eaves. It was there both to celebrate and ward off the unruly forces of nature. To Porfiry’s eye, no doubt influenced by his knowledge of the two dead bodies within, the dacha’s prettiness was entirely without charm, though he acknowledged that the boards were well maintained.

  The dacha creaked in protest as they set foot on the veranda.

  The uniformed men there straightened protectively. Porfiry recognised a kind of jealousy in their faces. The scene, and its contents, belonged to them, and they resented the newcomers’ intrusion.

  Porfiry noticed the smell immediately. It was that that drew his gaze down to the two bodies on the decking. He turned solicitously to Virginsky. ‘Are you all right?’

  Virginsky’s nod was barely perceptible, a mere bob in the aftermath of closing his eyes. ‘You forget. I have seen the dead before.’

  Porfiry regarded the young man closely, the face drained of colour, the line of the mouth thin and tight, his eyes held closed. ‘That’s what concerns me. You may wait outside if you wish. But I must go in.’

  Virginsky’s eyes now flashed defiance. ‘I would not miss it for the world,’ Virginsky hissed through clenched teeth. He minutely signalled the other men watching them. Porfiry swivelled his body to follow his glance, then turned back and tilted his head away from Virginsky. His look was assessing, almost disapproving.

  ‘I understand. However. This is a serious business. There is no place for bravado here. We are all men, that is to say, human beings. No one will think any the less of you.’

  ‘It is something I have to do. And besides, if not now, when?’

  Porfiry conceded with a nod.

  A young politseisky whom Porfiry recognised had been following their exchange with interest. His face was open and bright, his eyes sympathetic.

  ‘Ptitsyn, isn’t it?’ said Porfiry, remembering the officer’s name.

  ‘That’s right, Your Excellency.’ He was all eagerness and energy, a puppy of a man.

  ‘So, who have we here, Ptitsyn?’ Porfiry’s face became duly solemn, indeed pained, as he looked down at the bodies. His eye in passing took in the pools of vomit.

  ‘The woman is Raisa Ivanovna Meyer. The boy is her son, Grigory.’

  Raisa’s body lay face down, partially covering Grisha, as if to shield him. The boy’s face was staring straight up, orange vomit smeared around the uncomprehending O of his mouth. His pupils were unusually dilated as his eyes held on to their final panic.

  ‘Who discovered them?’

  ‘The maid. Polina Stepanovna Rogozhina.’

  ‘And the husband? Dr Meyer, isn’t it? Where was he when this happened?’

  ‘Working in his study, apparently.’

  ‘Was he not able to help them? He is a doctor, after all.’

  Ptitsyn shrugged. ‘Would you like to ask him yourself?’

  ‘All in good time.’ Porfiry continued to survey the veranda. ‘Are there any other members of the household?’

  ‘No. The maid does everything for them.’

  ‘This is vomit?’

  ‘Yes. It would seem so.’

  ‘And that smell?’

  ‘They crapped themselves — begging your pardon, Your Excellency.’

  Porfiry bent down and sniffed the one chocolate remaining in the Ballet’s box. ‘There will have to be a medical examination, of course. But it seems obvious that we are dealing with a case of poisoning here. Whether accidental or deliberate, that is the question we must determine.’

  ‘You have made your mind up already, Porfiry Petrovich?’ asked Virginsky with a frown.

  ‘Well, something must have killed them. Some substance has disrupted these organisms to a fatal degree. If it is a case of accidental food poisoning, then it is surely the most virulent and severe incidence that I have ever encountered.’

  ‘You do not think it is accidental then?’

  ‘As I said, there will have to be a medical examination.’ Porfiry dropped to the floor and prostrated himself alongside the corpses. Raisa Meyer’s cheek lay on her son’s shoulder. Porfiry looked into her face. It was a singular intimacy, that between the living and the dead, unreciprocated and presumptuous. This woman in life, only hours ago in fact, would not have suffered such proximity, such a probing gaze, from a strange man. Her eyes looked nowhere, and however much he tried he could not make them meet his. The pupils, he noticed, were dilated in the same way as her son’s. He could think — inappropriately, and with a tingle of shame — of only one other situation in which a man attends so closely to, and expects so much from, a woman he doesn’t know. She was wearing make-up, he noticed. The kohl around her eyes was streaked from tears. Her mouth was stretched out of shape by the pull of embrace; the orange mess around it made her resemble an infant after feeding. She would not want to have been seen like this, not for the most fleeting of instants, let alone laid out and displayed. He was touched by the pathetic sprawl of her arms, her fists clenched uselessly, her elbows angled with despair and rage. Her whole body was contorted by a fierce but ineffectual determination.

  Porfiry stood up. ‘She was a beauty. Once. I imagine.’

  ‘Really?’ Virginsky’s surprise seemed almost insulting.

  ‘Death is always ugly. But I see strength in her. And love. These are qualities I associate with beauty. And remember, a face, a living face, is made up of a succession of fleeting expressions.’ Porfiry made a series of faces to illustrate his point, moving through rapid transitions from respectful solemnity to a buffoonish leer. His face then snapped into an expression of deadpan neutrality. ‘Even the most beautiful of women is capable of looking ugly, at least for an instant, when taken off her guard. And nothing is more prone to take us off our guard than sudden death.’ Porfiry turned his head towards the door leading to the interior of the dacha. ‘We will talk to the maid now.’

  ‘She’s inside,’ said Ptitsyn. ‘Do you want me to bring her out?’ He was looking down at the havoc on the floor.

  Porfiry seemed to consider his question. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘There’s no need for that. Just yet.’

  Porfiry paused on the threshold to take in the interior of the dacha. He was aware of the two people seated at opposite ends of the room, the man in an armchair, the young woman on a divan, but he did not turn to either of them until he had finished a slow, systematic scan that seemed to search into every corner. It was a familiar enough setting, a dacha in the chalet style: birch-plank walls, covered with folk art, rag rugs on the floor, old and mismatched furniture, draped throws to conceal the ruptured upholstery. There was an upright piano against one wall, lid lifted, an album of Russian folk songs open on the music rest. The whole was suffused with a soft golden light, which completed the contrived bucolic effect. The heavy tick of a cherry grandfather clock measured out time into stilted units.

  He turned his attention decisively to the pale, bespectacled man in the armchair — an archetypal intellectual, slightly built and high browed. ‘Dr Meyer?’

  The man looked as though he had just been, or was just about to be, sick. His eyes swam without focus.

  ‘You have my condolences,’ continued Porfiry.

  At last Dr Meyer’s gaze latched on to Porfiry, as if he had only just connected the sounds he had heard with this entity before him. Almost immediately he looked away, it seemed in disappointment: had he expected something more than condolences?

  ‘This must be a difficult time for you.’

  Now Meyer’s expression became suspicious. ‘Who are you?’ His voice was high and harsh.

  ‘My name is Porfiry Petrovich. I am the investigating magistrate. This is Pavel Pavlovich. He is assisting me.’

  ‘Why do you offer me your condolences?’

  ‘Because you have today lost your wife and son.’

  ‘What is it to you? What do you care?’

  ‘I am capable of human sympathy.’

  ‘I know why you are here. I know what you really think. I do
not believe in your condolences.’

  ‘I have a job to do, Dr Meyer. You must understand that.’

  Meyer did not reply. He seemed to have lost interest in Porfiry. His eyes flitted about the room as if it was unfamiliar to him.

  Porfiry looked at the girl now. He was taken aback to see her scowling ferociously at Meyer. Glancing at Virginsky to have his surprise confirmed, he saw that the younger man’s gaze was locked on her face in bashful appreciation.

  Of course! thought Porfiry, she is pretty!

  Perhaps she was even beautiful; if so, it was a fiery and forceful beauty. Evidently, she was Virginsky’s type.

  She had a proud face; the pride was there in the dark glower she was directing towards the doctor. A long straight nose, deeply recessed cheeks, full lips, quick to pout — how haughty they could be, these peasant girls. Porfiry smiled, thinking of Virginsky’s democratic principles. Was it these that drew him to her, or their opposite: the vestigial sense of aristocratic privilege?

  ‘You must be Polina?’

  Somehow she damped the fire in her eyes. Her expression became shy, self-effacing. Ah! So she can act, this one! She bowed her head and barely managed to meet Porfiry’s eye. He noticed, however, that she flashed a glance at Virginsky. Was that a little smile that played on her lips?

  ‘It must have been very distressing for you, to find your mistress and the young master like that?’

  She nodded tensely, then looked quickly — was it warningly — at Dr Meyer.

  ‘Perhaps you would care to step outside with me, on to the veranda. There are some questions I would like to ask you concerning what happened when you found them.’

  Again Polina looked towards Meyer, though this time it seemed she wanted reassurance from him. But he was lost to her.

  ‘Outside? Where they are?’

  ‘Yes. I’m afraid so. It will help if you can show me how things were.’