“That is the clincher, my good man,” he answered. “It is what has caused me to keep quiet. I gave Mrs Forrester my word, and that is my bond. I dare not yield to the temptation to go blabbing—it already has been decided.”
We soon reached our destination and entered our building. I ascended the stairs ahead of Holmes, who stayed behind to check with our landlady, Mrs Hudson, to see if anyone had left a message for him. When I went into our rooms, there was a crackling fire on the grate and, spookily, the silhouetted figure of a small human in an armchair near the hearth. I hurriedly lit an oil lamp to better view the person, who spoke not a word until I demanded to know who the intruder could be.
“I have come for help from Mr Sherlock Holmes,” said the elderly, stoop-shouldered woman, whose ashen face was marked by deep wrinkles and whose thinning, snow-white hair was tucked partially under a plain black babushka.
“I am not he—I am his roommate and confidant, Dr Watson,” I informed her. “Mr Holmes will be here directly.” I asked how she got in, and our visitor confessed that she used the back door and came into our quarters through the ground-floor kitchen, then up to the first floor, where the unlocked door bore our address.
“I was chilly, so I built a fire to warm my bones and wait for the famous detective to get home,” she stated with a distinctly foreign accent. “My name is Anna Barlova Pavlovna and I am from the Russian immigrant neighborhood in the East End of London. I am a widow in desperate need of an ally.”
At that moment, Holmes appeared in the doorway, surprised to glimpse an aged female sitting in his preferred chair at that hour. “Mrs Hudson mentioned nothing about our having a guest. What is this all about, madam?” Holmes queried.
She repeated her name and situation, explaining that she had traveled to our suite under the cover of a foggy night because she was fearful that she might have been under surveillance where she lived.
“Are you afraid of the police?” Holmes wanted to learn.
“Yes, but not the local police—the Okhrana, the secret police in my motherland,” she revealed. “They rely on torture and mayhem to extract information from the innocent, and they commit atrocities in plots against their adversaries.”
“Perhaps you should tell me your whole story, from the very start,” Holmes encouraged the fidgety lady, taking up the armchair next to hers.
“I shall be pleased to do that, sir, if in the end you will consider assisting me in my mission,” Anna Pavlovna began, tugging on the sleeve of her navy-blue wool sweater and repositioning to her lap the large, brown envelope she cradled under her arm. “I was born in 1839 to parents who were serfs in Saint Petersburg, house servants to an aristocrat and treated with dignity. When Tsar Alexander II freed the serfs by decree in 1861, my family remained with the nobleman because he was so kind to us.
“One evening at a party in the household, I served sherry to the son of another aristocrat and he was attracted to me, as I was to him. I was a beautiful young woman then, and the young man very handsome. We arranged to meet at an inn for supper the next day, and later that week at a park, soon falling in love.
“He proposed marriage and I accepted, but news of our courtship presented a terrible shock to his mother and father, first because I was a Jew, and second because of my station in life. They disowned their only child and caused him to live in poverty as an apprentice to a cabinetmaker out in the countryside. He and I were wed a month later by a rabbi who took pity on us. Although we struggled to survive, we had many happy years together, until the Tsar was assassinated in 1881. His successor, Alexander III, reversed most of the progressive policies of his father and became a tyrant. My husband and I joined the revolutionary underground and were targeted for arrest by the Emperor’s Okhrana. We fled to Lithuania, and then to England, where we remained in exile under the surname of Buk until my beloved husband, Mikhail, was murdered in his cabinet shop six days ago.
“I am afraid I am next, Mr Holmes, because of the activity in which my late husband and I were engaged since our flight to this country. I am a writer of novels in my native language, political allegories that inspire the social democrats in Russia. I smuggle the manuscripts through couriers to a printer in Saint Petersburg, who is also part of the underground, and he publishes the books for distribution to our comrades throughout the Empire. I have one of those manuscripts with me tonight, and in it is the fact that the wrong men were hanged for throwing the bomb that destroyed Tsar Alexander II. It was not conspirators from the People’s Will who carried out the assassination, but rather henchmen of the nobility displeased with the Tsar’s liberal decrees. I am to rendezvous with one of my couriers after I leave you. But the East End is teeming with spies and double-agents for the Okhrana and I believe they have identified me as the author of the banned books. My husband was a financial supporter of the revolution, and I suspect that is why he was killed—his throat was slashed from ear to ear—not simply because he was the victim of a robbery, as Scotland Yard presumed. My husband’s safe was rifled when I found him, which is what led Inspector Hopkins to conclude that a bandit had done away with him. The culprit was looking for a manuscript, not money. My little house behind my husband’s shop was also torn apart while I was away at the market.
“I told Inspector Hopkins all about my husband’s involvement in the movement, but it amounted to nothing worth pursuing in the youthful policeman’s eyes. He said the Okhrana could not operate in London without Scotland Yard being aware of it, and the intelligence unit never reported the existence of any such organization.”
“I once had high hopes for Stanley Hopkins,” Holmes interjected, “yet the more I hear of his methods the less impressed I am with his results. Now tell me, Mrs Pavlovna, what would you have me do to assist you?”
“You can avenge my impending death and expose the elements of the Okhrana so that my countrymen will know even more of the regime’s evils,” Mrs Pavlovna bravely predicted. “The more the people know of the truth, the more likely the overthrow of the brutal autocrat, Alexander Alexandrovich Romanov.”
“Come now, Mrs Pavlovna, you must not consider your fate in such dire terms,” Holmes pleaded. “The danger you face might only be the theft of a manuscript, not the end of your life. Possibly your husband resisted the intruder, and that is why he died.”
“The Okhrana wish to silence me,” she responded. “And the only means they have is to eliminate me. Otherwise, I shall continue creating my tales until I am too feeble to put pen to paper.”
Holmes told her he would honour her request, then offered to accompany her safely home, to which she replied that doing so would only prolong the inevitable. “Besides,” she added, “my courier would disappear without the manuscript if he saw someone he didn’t recognise escorting me.”
I suggested a hot cup of tea to the courageous old Russian woman before she ventured into the concealment of the darkness outside, but she declined the invitation and bade us farewell. “I appreciate your hospitality, but I am already late for the appointment with my contact,” she said apologetically, then ambled down the stairs toward the rear exit, passing Mrs Hudson’s rooms unnoticed.
“I can’t imagine a more dedicated, loyal, and stoic individual,” Holmes observed after she had departed. “What do you suppose of her chances of staying alive until morning, Watson?”
“She is no doubt crafty, slipping in and out of here like a ghost, so I assume she can manage to outwit a squad of secret police and their agents,” I answered. “But what if they actually have discovered that Anna Buk is Anna Barlova Pavlovna, the originator of subversive novels?”
“In that case,” Holmes conjectured, “Inspector Hopkins could have two coincidental homicides to probe that he attributes to the work of a street thug.”
Holmes excused himself and went up to his bedroom, coming down a few moments later in his lavender dressing gown and relaxing near the fire with his Index, an encyclopedia he maintained with memoranda on the world of crime, pl
us various other topics.
“It says in here that the Okhrana has far-flung tentacles,” he apprised me. “Its influence extends to other continents, including Europe and America. So, it is altogether possible that Mrs Pavlovna’s fear is justified.”
Shortly after dawn the following day, Holmes shook me awake from a peaceful sleep and curled his bony finger to summon me out of bed. “Come, Watson, if you are wanting for another adventure to chronicle,” he beckoned. “I am anxious to determine if Mrs Pavlovna made it back to her little house last night without incident. We can eat a quick breakfast at the Lime Street Cafe en route to Aldgate Station.”
Soon we were aboard an eastbound train to Craven Street in the heart of the Russian immigrant community. Holmes, who studied under a tutor in preparation for his trip to Odessa in the Tripoff murder case, spoke a Ukrainian dialect when he sought directions to the Buk cabinet shop from a vendor selling apples from a cart. It was a long, depressing walk, past hundreds of sheds and shanties and tenements. In these hovels, the population congregated at sunset after eking out a pittance, day after grueling day, hawking food or toiling at trades that produced wares only the well-to-do from other sections of the city could afford to buy.
In better than average condition, the Pavlovna domicile was set apart from the late husband’s shop by a short gravel path that ended at the intricately carved front door, apparently the handiwork of the cabinetmaker. Mrs Pavlovna, whom we saw peeking out the kitchen window from behind the lace curtains, responded to Holmes’s knock quickly and greeted us somberly. “I am in a melancholy mood today, missing my Mikhail terribly,” she explained, and politely invited us inside. “You are here to solve his murder?”
“That is one reason,” Holmes replied, and then said he was curious to know if the manuscript was on its way to Saint Petersburg.
“Yes, it is in the proper hands, and God will see that it gets to the printer in due course,” she told him, the conversation now lifting her dampened spirits a bit.
“No one tried to harm you yet?” Holmes continued.
“Not yet, but I am still wary—and you, Mr Holmes, must be cautious asking questions, because the enemy of the people has big ears,” Mrs Pavlovna warned.
“I am always careful,” Holmes went on, “so you needn’t worry about me. Tell me, on the day your husband was killed, did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”
“I did,” she disclosed matter-of-factly. “Two men, strangers in the neighborhood, were sitting on a bench across the street from my husband’s shop when I went to the market. When I got back, they were gone, nowhere in sight.”
“Did you tell this to Inspector Hopkins?” Holmes queried.
“He never asked, and I was so grief-stricken at the time I didn’t think to mention it to him. I don’t believe he is very thorough. Or maybe the violent death of a poor man from the slums is not so important to Scotland Yard,” she blurted, covering her mouth with the palm of her right hand and widening her dark eyes.
“What did these two men look like? Describe each of them, and what they were wearing,” Holmes prodded.
“One had long legs, the other short,” Mrs Pavlovna advised. “They were not talking; they were just watching. The one with long legs was about thirty years old and had a tan coat with knickerbockers, along with a cloth cap pulled down over the bridge of his long nose. The other man was about fifty years old and had a brown waistcoat, and wore laced brown boots. He wore a derby, and he had frizzy grey hair. And he had spectacles with thick lenses.”
“Excellent, my dear!” Holmes exclaimed, and he praised her observational ability, charming her in the special way he had with women. “Is there anything else about these men that you can remember?”
“Only that the one with long legs was smoking a cigarette with a cork tip,” she added.
“You have been more than helpful,” he told her. “Try to get some rest—I can see by the shaded circles under your eyes that you haven’t been sleeping.”
“It is hard without my Mikhail by my side. I pray that I live long enough for time to heal me,” she answered.
Holmes and I left Mrs Pavlovna in a better frame of mind than when we arrived. Before we started out on our return journey, however, Holmes let himself in the unlocked cabinet shop and spent about fifteen minutes examining the scene of the crime, while I sat on the bench across the street and puffed on my clay pipe. I could see every move Holmes made inside through the two large front windows. It was a perfect vantage point if I wanted to be certain the occupant of the shop was alone.
“There wasn’t any sign of a scuffle, Watson,” Holmes related when he emerged and joined me on the bench for a smoke. “That could only mean there were two intruders, one, the stronger of the pair who would have immobilised the old man, and another who cut his throat.”
“It is probable, then, that the attackers came here with murderous intent,” I volunteered, “because a routine robbery would likely be carried out by a single assailant.”
“That is a workable theory, but we must have even more data than what I already have gathered, else we jump to the wrong conclusion,” Holmes chided.
“But if what I surmise is correct,” I persisted, “then Mrs Pavlovna’s suspicions about the Okhrana agents might be true.”
“It is surely worth considering, Watson,” Holmes intoned. “Now let’s make our next stop the headquarters of Scotland Yard to determine whether the intransigent Stanley Hopkins has made any progress in his line of inquiry.”
* * * *
We alighted from the train at Whitehall Place and, in no time at all, we were waiting in a vacant office of the Metropolitan Police Service for Inspector Hopkins to finish interviewing a witness to a different event altogether.
“I am swamped with a number of investigations all at once,” he said as he poked his head in the door and scurried down the hallway. When he returned a few moments later, he begged our pardon for his inattentiveness to our concerns. “I have never seen it so busy,” he complained, adding that current circumstances were sufficiently cooled down to allow him to devote some time to our problem.
Holmes empathised and quickly got to the point, to which Inspector Hopkins reacted with chagrin. “Your purpose puzzles me,” he said. “Why would you be interested in a simple robbery in an impoverished part of town when you have all those high-profile cases I’ve been reading about in Dr Watson’s magazine articles?”
“Not all my affairs warrant extensive publicity, Inspector, as Watson can attest,” Holmes countered. “In this instance, I am engaged to protect the widow, Mrs Buk, because she is anticipating that something dreadful could be attempted against her.”
“Oh, balderdash,” Inspector Hopkins sputtered. “All this nonsense about cloak-and-dagger enforcers of the Emperor in Russia is the product of a wild imagination. I am inclined to speculate that one of our home-grown hoodlums is responsible for what happened to her husband, which is why I have my informants pounding the cobblestones to unearth a more practical outcome.”
“But if it was a simple robbery, as you hypothesise, what cash or valuables could the thief have been after? The victim was a person of less than modest means,” Holmes challenged.
“These immigrants horde money like a squirrel hordes acorns in autumn, and the bandits know that all too well. Mr Buk had a safe, didn’t he? Something of value must have been kept in it,” the official detective contended finally.
We wished Inspector Hopkins well in his endeavours and rode in a cab back to our rooms at Baker Street, marveling at his closed mind.
When we entered our flat, Holmes tossed his cape and jacket onto the coat rack, then rolled up his shirt sleeves before he sat at the deal-topped table and ignited the Bunsen burner. “I took a sample of dried blood from a pool on the floor of the cabinet shop, and I shall analyse it, for I am convinced both killers were spattered with it. They will have the deceased’s blood on their clothing when we encounter them,” he postulated.
While Holmes was occupied with his vials and chemistry, I made notes of the developments thus far, activities which brought us to the dinner hour. I offered to pick up sandwiches at the corner shop and Holmes readily concurred. “I am not hungry enough for a full meal,” he said off-handedly, “and sandwiches will be faster. We need to be going soon. There is no time to waste.”
“Going? Where?” I wanted to know.
“To Claridge’s Hotel in the East End near the Russian immigrant community,” he apprised me.
“What do you expect to find there?” I insisted on learning.
“Our two suspects!” he barked, saying not a further word.
The adventure would prove to be harrowing, taking us to within centimeters of losing our lives.
* * * *
It was nearly nightfall when Holmes and I briskly navigated curvy Curzon Street, where Claridge’s Hotel stood with its five stories facing the intersection of Mincing Lane, a seldom-used avenue that paralleled the main road into the Russian section of the city. We went through the dim, shabby lobby to the hotel desk clerk’s station, which was unoccupied. Holmes pulled the bell rope and we heard it ring in a room behind the counter. More than a minute passed before a raggedly-dressed, middle-aged man with crumbs dangling from his black, bushy mustache opened the door to the back room and growled at us. “Seven shillings for each of you, if you share the bed,” he asserted.
Holmes dug in his trouser pocket and came up with the right amount, dropped it on the desk, and then showed the clerk a sovereign. “This is for you if you can tell us where we can find our two friends,” he said, almost whispering. He described the men Mrs Pavlovna saw on the bench.
“Number 33,” came the rapid response, and with that the clerk swept his hand across the counter and snatched the money from Holmes’s fingers, glancing around the lobby to see if any of the four men lingering there had noticed the transaction.
“We would like a room close to Number 33,” Holmes requested. Our cooperative host answered that the one across the hall was vacant, Number 32. “Go on up then—no key, there are no locks,” he snapped. Nor was there a register to sign, which disappointed Holmes, because he wanted to establish the identities of the two suspects. We climbed the steps and entered Number 32 after Holmes listened with his ear against the door of Number 33.
Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Volume 15 Page 6
