by June Thomson
‘The other two were women and they came to my notice for quite different reasons, Rosa Zubatov because she was an example of the Russian “New Woman” movement* which I had read about. In the manner of that sisterhood, she had adopted the fashion of short hair and free manners, the latter to the extent of smoking black Russian cigarettes and refusing to help with the housework on the basis, so Dmitri informed me, that women should not be exploited domestically.
‘Dmitri disapproved of her presence in the house. He was convinced she was a Nihilist and suspected her of being the assassin who had made an attempt on the life of the Odessa Chief of Police. However, according to the résumé of her background, she was a student from St Petersburg who had done nothing more subversive than distribute copies of a banned liberal periodical.
‘With her short, blonde, curly hair and fair skin, she was a striking-looking young woman and attracted the notice of Vladimir Vasilchenko but, true to her “New Woman” beliefs, she spurned his attentions and he advanced no further than indulging in long discussions with her late at night by the kitchen fire which, judging by their earnest gestures and unsmiling faces, were political in nature. There is nothing quite like politics, Watson, to take all the humour out of a conversation.
‘The other female lodger who came to my attention, or who rather forced her presence upon me, was Olga Leskova, a fat jolly woman. Since Anna Poltava’s murder, she had been put in charge of the cooking under Dmitri’s direction. Although I was accepted by the other lodgers with varying degrees of tolerance, it was she who took me under her wing. She seemed to consider I was too thin and tried to fatten me up like a goose for Christmas. She was constantly setting plates of bortsch or pancakes filled with sour cream in front of me which she urged me to eat with much nudging of my shoulder and smacking of her lips. She also had the most trying habit of shouting at me in Russian at the top of her voice in the belief that she would eventually penetrate my supposed deafness. By so doing she nearly caused me an actual loss of hearing. Under this double onslaught, it was only with the greatest difficulty that I managed to maintain the inane smile which I had assumed as part of my character as Misha.
‘On the subject of this disguise, let me say in parenthesis that, although it was not the most elaborate I have ever assumed, it was the hardest and most wearisome to maintain, depending as it did not upon such devices as wigs and makeup but on the day-to-day preservation of a certain expression which I dared not let slip in the company of others.
‘Have you ever observed a totally deaf man, Watson? There is about his features a look of vacancy which, as soon as anyone approaches, becomes both anxious and eager, as if, as he scans the faces of others, he is straining to understand what they are saying. Moreover, he responds to nothing audible. A sudden loud knock upon a door, the crash of fallen china, an outburst of angry voices, are nothing to him. So I, too, had to control my own involuntary reactions to any unexpected noise.
‘To return to my narrative. In addition to the lodgers I also had to keep up my assumed character in front of the police who, for the first few days of my tenancy in Stanley Street, remained on the premises concluding their investigation into the murder. The weather was wet and windy and, from time to time, they sought shelter from the elements in the kitchen, there to enjoy the quite unofficial pleasures of a seat by the fire and a pipe of tobacco.
‘Having been told by Dmitri that I was a deaf-mute, they made no effort to lower their voices in my presence and I was therefore able to overhear some of their conversations.
‘Inspector Gudgeon, a thick-necked, bullying man with too high an opinion of himself, was convinced, as Count Nicholai had informed me, that the murder was the work of an outsider and his suspicions were directed at one particular gang of ruffians, the Masons, so-named after their leader, a dangerous and cunning villain called Jed Mason. The gang’s forte was burglary, mostly of business premises although they had been known on occasion to rob private houses, and they were not averse to attacking the householder if disturbed. At least one murder could be laid at their door, that of the elderly proprietor of a coffee house who had been bludgeoned to death. Mason, who was known to disguise himself, had since disappeared from his usual haunts.
‘From Gudgeon’s remarks, I understood that Mason, if wearing a false beard, could have answered the description given by Moffat, the porter.
‘Because Anna Poltava’s bedroom was out of commission, having been sealed off by the police while they continued their inquiries, I was given a room opening off the kitchen, little bigger than a cupboard. Here a folding bed was set up for me and there I stowed Misha’s pitiable possessions, taking care to place the photograph in a prominent position so that it was visible to anyone passing the doorway. The ikon was put to more practical use to cover up a small hole I had bored in the plaster partition between the kitchen and my room. It was a most uncomfortable billet but, as later events were to prove, was in an advantageous position for I was able to watch through my spy-hole the comings and goings of the various lodgers and to witness in particular the behaviour of one certain individual which was to prove decisive in the solution of the case.
‘On my third day at the Stanley Street house, the police withdrew, Inspector Gudgeon announcing to Dmitri that their investigation of the immediate scene of the crime was finished although they would be continuing their inquiries elsewhere, presumably into the whereabouts of Mason. I was therefore at liberty to inspect Anna Poltava’s bedroom which I did within the hour of their departure, taking with me a broom as if I had been sent by Dmitri to prepare the room for a new tenant.
‘How exceedingly unobservant the official police are, Watson! If ever I were to be placed in charge of their training – which God forbid! – the cornerstone of my instructions to them would be “Look about you.” For at most scenes where a crime has been committed there will be some clue which will point to the manner in which it has been carried out if not to the identity of the actual perpetrator.
‘No sooner had I stepped inside Anna Poltava’s bedroom than I saw at once that her murder was not the work of an intruder but of someone inside the house and that Inspector Gudgeon was wasting his time seeking the Mason gang.
‘Facing me was a window which looked out into the backyard and, dangling loose against the frame on the right-hand side, was a length of broken sash-cord.
‘Have you ever tried to push up the lower sash of a window of which the cord is broken? It is extremely difficult to do and impossible to achieve silently. And yet Gudgeon was prepared to believe that Anna Poltava’s murderer, having forced open the window and climbed in over the sill, had smothered her as she lay in bed, before making his escape by the same route, taking her purse with him.
‘You will recall, Watson, that Count Nicholai had informed me that part of Anna’s duties was to act as concierge to the tenants and to admit them into the house after the doors were locked at eleven o’ clock. If she could be roused from sleep by someone knocking at the door, she would certainly have been woken by the sound of her window being forced open a mere few yards away from her bed. Having established to my satisfaction that the murderer must be one of the lodgers, I then examined the room more carefully for other clues which Inspector Gudgeon and his men had also overlooked. Working on the premise that the murderer had not entered through the window, I therefore turned my attention to the only other means of access, the door.
‘Even without the aid of my pocket lens, I was able to discern fresh scratches upon the escutcheons of the lock where someone, presumably working in the dark, had made several attempts to insert a picklock. There was also a smear of oil round the keyhole, suggesting that the murderer had first made sure that the wards would yield silently when the lock was finally and successfully picked. Moreover, I discovered on examining the back door, as I went out into the yard, ostensibly to fetch coal, that the lock and bolts on that, too, had been recently oiled.
‘The bed was immediately inside the door, to
the left. Anyone entering the room had only to stretch out an arm, take the pillow from under the old woman’s head and press it down over her face. It would have been the work of a moment, giving her no opportunity to cry out and rouse the household.
‘After removing the purse to make the motive for the crime appear robbery, the murderer had then left the house by the back door, faked the marks of entry on the outer frame of the window with a knife and then had loitered about at the entrance to the alley-way where he was seen by the witness, Moffat.
‘I admit I was still puzzled by this last piece of evidence. Why had the murderer troubled with this stratagem, rather than returning immediately to the house? It seemed superfluous to his needs unless it was to suggest that the murder and robbery were the work of an outsider. Was it to throw suspicion on Vladimir Vasilchenko? If that had been his intention then it had been singularly unsuccessful for Moffat had failed to identify him. Or was it to confuse the police into hunting for a bearded man?
‘My own suspicions were later to fall on Vasilchenko despite Moffat’s assurance that he was not the man he had seen. Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable and moreover Moffat had glimpsed the man only briefly in the feeble light of a gas lamp. It was possible that he had been mistaken and that the man he had seen had indeed been Vasilchenko.
‘It was Vladimir’s subsequent behaviour which inclined me to think he was guilty for reasons which I shall shortly explain.
‘One of my duties was to collect up the dirty linen and deliver it to a local washerwoman and then to distribute the clean laundry to the various rooms. Because of my supposed deafness, Dmitri instructed me by means of his system of signs, the only form of communication that we could use in front of the others, not to enter unannounced but to knock on the door and wait until the occupant opened it before handing over the clean linen. This task fell on the Monday morning, after I had been in the house for four days. Most of the tenants answered promptly but Vladimir Vasilchenko kept me waiting outside for several moments. Despite my assumed disability, my hearing is, in fact, particularly acute and I was aware, even through the closed door, of a series of hurried and furtive movements inside the room of papers being rustled together and a drawer being opened and closed. When Vasilchenko came at last to the door, a little out of breath and relieved, or so it seemed to me, that his visitor was only the deaf-mute peasant from the Urals, it was quite obvious what activity he had been so surreptitiously engaged in. The chair set carelessly to one side at the table where he had risen hastily from it, the ink-well with its lid still open and the fresh ink stains on the fingers of his right hand indicated quite clearly, even though the papers had been put away, that he had been engaged in writing.
‘As I handed over the bed linen and gave him the foolish, vacant grin which I had assumed as part of my disguise, I considered what these documents he was so anxious to conceal might be. Was Vladimir Vasilchenko an agent provocateur, introduced into the household by the Okchrana in order to report on his fellow-lodgers? Or was he the Nihilist assassin who had attempted to shoot the Odessa Chief of Police and who was now writing seditious pamphlets in order to bring about the violent overthrow of the Imperial Russian Government?
‘Either explanation might have provided a motive for the murder of the old woman. As for opportunity, his room was on the first floor, immediately above Anna Poltava’s. It would have taken him no more than a few minutes to commit the crime and return to his bed.
‘The following day, I had the opportunity to observe Vladimir Vasilchenko more closely. I had been sent by Dmitri to chop firewood in the coal-shed which stood in a corner of the yard when I saw Vasilchenko leave the house by the back door. His manner was so furtive that I decided to follow him. Moreover, a bundle of papers was protruding out of his pocket.
‘So intent was he upon his errand that he failed to notice either me or Rosa Zubatov who, moments after Vasilchenko had disappeared down the short alley which led into Stanley Street, also emerged from the back door of the house, a shawl about her head and shoulders, and who, to my astonishment, set off in pursuit, for what purpose I could not guess unless, like me, she suspected him of Anna Poltava’s murder and was carrying out her own investigation.
‘I fell in behind them. We made a curious procession as we turned into Commercial Road, Vasilchenko striding along at the head of it, a striking figure with his black hair and beard, Rosa Zubatov lurking about twenty paces behind him on the other side of the street, her shawl drawn close about her head, and I bringing up the rear.
‘One of the secrets of a successful disguise, Watson, is the ability to alter one’s appearance in an instant without having to resort to a change of clothing or the adoption of other outward devices. The easiest transformation is in the style of one’s physical stance and bearing. As the deaf-mute, Misha, I had adopted an awkward, shambling gait which seemed appropriate for his character. By merely pulling back my shoulders and assuming a brisk manner, I threw off Osinsky’s personality and assumed that of an alert young working man, dressed in a cap and shabby clothes.
‘Indeed, Vladimir looked back over his shoulder several times as if fearful of being followed but failed to observe me a few yards behind him among the other passers-by who thronged the street.
‘His first destination was a cheap eating-house a little further down Commercial Road, a favourite meeting-place for Russian émigrés, where he went to the counter and bought himself a large brandy which he drank straight down as if to give himself courage. Rosa, meanwhile, had halted on the other side of the road and appeared to be intent on studying a pawnbroker’s window. I decided on a bolder approach. Sauntering past the open door of the eating-house, I was able to observe Vladimir’s actions more closely. Although I could not see exactly what coin he handed over to pay for the brandy, from the amount of change he received, I deduced that it was almost certainly a half-sovereign. You will no doubt recall, Watson, that there were two half-sovereigns in the purse which was stolen from Anna Poltava’s bedroom on the night of her murder.
‘I truly believed that I had my man. For how else was Vladimir Vasilchenko in possession of so large a sum of money when he appeared to have no means of earning it?
‘My suspicions were further aroused when, on leaving the eating-house, he turned into a nearby side-street and entered a small, shabby shop, ostensibly a second-hand clothes’ dealer’s from the various articles of apparel displayed in the window or hanging from hooks outside the door. However, from the events that followed, I had reason to believe that the premises served merely as a cover for a more clandestine enterprise.
‘As soon as Vasilchenko disappeared inside the shop, Rosa crossed the street and walked past, glancing in at the window as she did so before continuing on down the road, leaving the way clear for me to make my own examination of the premises which I did in a more leisurely manner, using the hanging clothes as concealment.
‘I observed Vladimir deep in conversation with the secondhand dealer. Soon afterwards they were joined by a third man who emerged from a back room and who, from his leather apron and his ink-blackened hands, I took to be a printer, a deduction which was proved correct when Vladimir, reaching into his pocket, took out the bundle of papers and handed them over to this man who examined them, nodded as if satisfied and carried them off to the back room.
‘Vasilchenko then turned towards the street door as if about to depart. I, too, took my leave and hurried ahead of him back to the lodgings where fortunately no one had noticed my absence. By the time Vasilchenko entered the yard, I had resumed my task of chopping firewood. He passed me without giving me a second glance.
‘I was now convinced that not only had I identified the murderer but that I knew his motive. Anna Poltava, whom Count Nicholai had described as a shrewd old woman, had discovered Vasilchenko’s contact with the clandestine printer and he had killed her in order to silence her. The Count was correct. It had been a political crime. But whether Vladimir was an Okchrana spy or
a Nihilist subversive had yet to be proved. As for Moffat’s inability to identify Vladimir, I put that down to his unreliability as a witness.
‘I believe I may have expressed to you before, my dear Watson, that in the business of detection one never ceases to learn.* I was then a mere novice but it was a lesson which was brought home to me most forcibly that very evening.
‘As I have explained, my room opened off the kitchen and by applying my eye to the spy-hole I had made in the wall I was able to observe the behaviour of the other tenants without their knowledge. That same evening, having made up my mind that Vladimir Vasilchenko was guilty, I heard someone enter the kitchen and, hoping that it was Vladimir whom I could keep under further observation, I took down the ikon and prepared to keep watch.
‘To my disappointment, it was only the young woman, Rosa Zubatov. Taking a chair, she sat down upon it by the fire and proceeded to light one of her Russian cigarettes.
‘Have you ever observed a woman lighting a cigarette, Watson? It is not a common sight, I confess, although smoking has become more fashionable among young ladies, especially those members of what is known as the “fast set” who make up the Prince of Wales’s rather raffish group of friends and who even include, I understand, other men’s wives. When women do indulge in the habit, they invariably strike the match away from their persons. Men generally do the opposite. You may take my word for it if you have not yourself observed the distinction.
‘As Rosa Zubatov lit her cigarette, I perceived that she struck the match towards her.
‘It was enough.
‘Within seconds, I was out of my room and into the kitchen to seize her by the hair, much to her consternation and the amazement of Vladimir Vasilchenko who had that moment entered and who thought I had gone suddenly mad.
