by R. N. Morris
She rose warily, smoothed her apron with flattened palms and nodded once more. Porfiry let her lead the way out, noticing another flash of interest pass between her and Virginsky.
Porfiry gestured away the men on the veranda with a single back-sweep of his hand. They shuffled and clumped to the periphery.
‘So, Polina, could you tell me what happened here today?’
The girl’s eye-line dipped down, to the bodies, then swooped away quickly, repelled. She chose to settle her gaze on the comparatively neutral surface of the table. But something troubled her there. The vomit, perhaps, thought Porfiry. Or those sheets of paper, with that strange, tight handwriting on them.
‘I brought the samovar out for Raisa Ivanovna.’
‘I see. What time was this?’
‘Two o’clock. I had not long taken away the lunch things. And Dr Meyer had just come home.’
‘Was Dr Meyer out here on the veranda?’
‘No. He was in his study.’
‘So, Raisa Ivanovna took her tea at two o’clock.’
‘I always bring it out to her at two.’
‘Yes. Good. I see. And what did they eat today? For breakfast, let’s say?’
‘Sour cream and caviar. With coffee.’
‘I see. And did Dr Meyer eat the same?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is there any of this sour cream and caviar left?’
‘Do you want some?’ she asked, incredulously.
‘No!’ Porfiry laughed. ‘It’s just that we will need a sample, to have it analysed.’
‘You think I poisoned them?’ Her eyes flashed outrage.
Porfiry threw up his hands. ‘At this stage, all we are trying to do is eliminate possibilities. What did she and her son eat for lunch? Did you prepare lunch?’
‘They had some bread. And pickled mushrooms.’
‘Again, I will need samples if there is any left. Did you have the same lunch?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Dr Meyer?’
‘No. He wasn’t here.’
‘Where was he?’
‘At work. He left for work after breakfast.’
‘But came back just after lunch, and just before you took the samovar out? I see. What else did Raisa Ivanovna and her son eat today, do you know?’
‘The chocolates.’
‘These?’ Porfiry indicated the near-empty box on the table. ‘Where did these come from, do you know?’
‘He brought them for her.’
‘Dr Meyer?’
The girl nodded.
‘They both ate them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you have any?’
‘She offered them to me. But no.’
‘Did Dr Meyer have any of the chocolates?’
The girl shrugged.
‘How long have you been in the Meyers’ employ, Polina?’
She thought for a moment, her large dark eyes rolling upwards as she calculated. ‘Since just before Christmas last.’
‘About six months then.’ Porfiry nodded reassuringly, as though she had given the correct answer. ‘Can you describe to me exactly what happened? You brought the samovar out and — ?’
‘Grigory was working away on his copying. He likes to copy from the newspaper. It’s something he does. Did, I mean.’
‘This is his handiwork here?’
Polina nodded as Porfiry bent over to look more closely at the sheets.
‘Interesting.’
‘He is. . was not. . Not quite right. In the head. Grisha.’
Porfiry looked at her closely as she struggled to make this pronouncement. He detected a certain element of distaste in her expression.
‘They had no other children, the Meyers?’
Polina shook her head vehemently. ‘He was enough. They didn’t want another like him.’
‘So. You brought the samovar out. Served tea. Oh, did Grisha and Raisa Ivanovna both have tea?’
‘I gave only Raisa Ivanovna tea.’
‘Very well. Carry on.’
‘I went back inside. There was nothing else for me to do out here.’
‘So when did you discover the bodies?’
‘Well, she was screaming.’
‘She was still alive, therefore?’
Polina nodded nervously. She looked to Virginsky for succour. ‘It’s all right, my dear,’ he said. ‘You’re doing very well.’
Porfiry compressed his lips. ‘So, she called for help? And Grisha? Was he still alive at this point?’
Polina’s face rippled with tension. A tight anguished nod came out of the convulsion.
‘What did you do?’
‘I. . went to fetch Dr Meyer.’
‘Of course,’ put in Virginsky. He reached a hand out towards her to comfort her. Porfiry shook his head forbiddingly. Virginsky moved the hand up to his chin, as though he had always intended to make this self-conscious gesture of thoughtfulness.
‘And what did Dr Meyer do?’
‘Well, you see. .’ Polina bit her bottom lip uncomfortably. ‘He wouldn’t come.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Not at first. I was hammering on his door for an age. He wouldn’t answer it. I shouted to him as well.’
‘You communicated to him the distress of his wife and son?’
‘Yes!’
‘And he ignored your cries?’
Polina nodded sadly and looked down. Porfiry and Virginsky exchanged significant glances.
‘Let me see if I understand you correctly,’ continued Porfiry. ‘Dr Meyer refused to come to the aid of his wife and child?’
Polina shifted her feet uneasily. ‘Well, I don’t know. It wasn’t exactly that he refused. Sometimes he gets carried away with his work. He doesn’t hear. It’s quite often difficult to get him to come for meals.’
‘To come for meals is one thing. But you were raising the alarm because his wife and child were dying out here. You were hammering on his door. How is it possible he didn’t hear you?’
The girl flinched under the force of Porfiry’s exasperated disbelief. Her expression became resentful.
Porfiry blinked his eyelids rapidly, in a spasm of self-control. He smiled soothingly at the girl. ‘Forgive me if I have frightened you, my dear. I am not such a fearful ogre as I seem.’
Polina smiled, almost sardonically.
‘You’re doing very well, Polya. Now, please, if you would be so good, tell me in your own words what happened when you knocked on Dr Meyer’s door. I would very much like to hear it from you before we talk to Dr Meyer.’
‘He came to the door eventually. But. . he didn’t seem to understand what I was saying. He seemed. Ill. In himself. His eyes. He couldn’t look at me. His face. . was blank. There was nothing there.’
‘So, his demeanour struck you as out of the ordinary?’
Polina considered the question, or perhaps she was thinking carefully about her answer. Before she was able to give it, they heard footsteps approach the veranda. Meyer was standing in the doorway. ‘What’s going on here? You can’t talk to her without my permission. I forbid you to talk to her.’
‘My dear sir, I can. And I have,’ said Porfiry. ‘You may go inside now, Polina.’
The maid did not look at the master as she pushed past him, although it seemed that there was, in the tension of his body, a desire to reach out and stay her.
‘Dr Meyer,’ began Porfiry, ‘I understand that you bought these chocolates for your wife?’
‘I buy my wife chocolates every week.’
‘Always from Ballet’s?’
‘It is a habit we have fallen into. Perhaps it was time we broke it.’
Porfiry widened his eyes at the casual cynicism of the remark. ‘Did you eat any of these chocolates yourself?’
‘No.’
‘And neither did your maid. When did you buy the chocolates?’
‘Today.’
‘You came
directly home with them?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Your maid, Polina, says that she had trouble rousing you from your study.’
‘I was working. When I am working I become lost in my thoughts.’
‘What work, exactly, are you engaged in?’
‘I am a sanitary inspector. The summer is a very busy time. The cholera, you understand.’
‘How interesting!’ Porfiry’s gaze became almost devouring as he looked at Meyer. He nodded thoughtfully a couple of times. ‘You know, we have a public health problem at the bureau. The Yekaterininsky Canal is a disgrace. The water is running with human excrement. You can imagine the stench. And the flies. I have been trying to get one of you chaps to come over and inspect it for weeks. I wrote a letter. Nothing was done. I was not even granted the courtesy of a reply.’
‘Do you know how many sanitary inspectors there are in St Petersburg?’
Porfiry shook his head and frowned, sensing the gist of what was coming.
‘Six. If you arrest me it will be five.’
‘What makes you think I want to arrest you?’
‘Oh come now. I know the way you policemen’s minds work.’
‘I’m not a policeman, Dr Meyer. I am a magistrate.’
‘Even so.’
‘I will not be arresting anyone until I have determined what killed your wife and son. That will require a medical examination of the bodies. I will have this remaining chocolate analysed too, of course. As well as samples of everything else Raisa and Grisha ate today. But tell me, as a doctor, what do you make of their symptoms? The vomiting? I believe there was loss of bowel control too. Did you notice the eyes? The pupils, dilated. And, of course, the sudden and painful death. Do you recognise here the pathology of any natural disease?’
Dr Meyer’s expression was stripped of hope. He surveyed the veranda with an appalled gaze. ‘No.’
‘So what, Dr Meyer, in your opinion, could have killed them?’
‘A toxic agent of some kind. That is to say, poison. And judging by the violence of their reaction to it, I would have to say a particularly virulent agent. Probably an alkaloid. Aconite, for example.’
‘Aconite? An interesting suggestion. As far as I know, there is no reliable test for it.’
‘It is impossible to detect. However, its presence can be inferred, if other poisons are ruled out.’
‘It is part of your job, as a sanitary inspector, to be well-versed in toxic materials, I imagine?’
‘There is some call for expertise in that field.’
‘And access too? I am thinking of the control of pests.’
‘It is true. I know where to lay my hands on certain substances not generally accessible to the public.’
‘Thank you. You have been most helpful.’
‘Are you sure? I mean to say, have I incriminated myself enough?’ A snarling leer disfigured Meyer’s face, from which strained high-pitched laughter was expelled, as if under pressure.
‘Is there anything else you would like to add?’ asked Porfiry, smiling with uncomfortable amusement.
‘Perhaps you would consider it relevant that I took my PhD in toxicology?’
‘I shall make a note of it.’ Porfiry bowed politely, and began to feel the need for a long-deferred cigarette.
4
Examination and elimination
The room was in the basement of the Shestaya Street police station: whitewashed brick walls, no windows, the light instead provided by a series of oil lamps hanging from a beam across the ceiling. Stacked on a pallet in the corner were barrels of ice hacked from the Neva in the winter, covered in a tarpaulin. The ice was there to keep the temperature down. It is occasionally useful, in a police station, to have a cold room on hand in the height of summer, for certain aspects of investigative work. However, Porfiry had the impression that the air would have been just as chill without the ice.
The bodies were laid out side by side on a broad table in the centre, beneath the lamps. A doctor who had been called in from the Military Hospital in the Vyborg district was stooped over the first of them, that of Raisa Ivanovna. He was absorbed in the task of cutting away the clothing with shears. The two official witnesses stood to one side, watching with expressions of rebuked awe. Retired civil servants of vertiginous rank, they had entered the room medals first, talking loudly and self-importantly about past glories and mutual acquaintances. But a stern glance from the surgeon, who had been waiting impatiently for their arrival with implements in hand, silenced them. This doctor, one Feuerbach, a German like Meyer judging by his name, was a taciturn but efficient technician. The air in the room was chastening, too. Despite the temperature, there was a faecal ripeness to it, which outdid anything the Ditch could muster.
The corset snapped apart. The dead woman’s flesh sprang out and absorbed the glare of the oil lamps with a sullen coveting.
Porfiry gave a pained wince. He cast an absent-minded glance at Virginsky, as if he regarded the young man as an irksome responsibility he believed he had shaken off. He had a vague sense that he owed him some kind of explanation.
The doctor continued to work away methodically at the clothes. It was when the cadaver was finally stripped bare, the layers of clothing splayed around it, that Porfiry felt the strongest inclination to turn to Virginsky. For now, he resisted.
The skin was smooth and bloated, the colour of grubby linen. He could not help assessing the shape of her body, in a way that appalled him, even as he did it. He tried instead to imagine how she must have felt about her body. She would not have been happy with it, he believed. Or perhaps that was a presumption on his part. Looking down at the amorphous spread of her trunk, the bulges of her abdomen, the two swollen capsules of her thighs, which were smeared with the soiling of her last evacuation, he had more the sense that she did not care about any of it. Her physical form, even perhaps her physical existence, was almost a matter of indifference to her. If this were so, he wondered when and how it had come about. Her face, he felt, had the potential to be counted beautiful. But if happiness and goodness are necessary elements of beauty, he wondered if he would have found them on her living features.
The doctor examined the surface of the body and made notes in silence. His scrutiny was almost unseemly in its scientific rigour. Porfiry knew that it was necessary, but he could not help feeling a proxy outrage at the way the man laid claim to the flesh with probing gaze and fingers. She was exposed, but no longer vulnerable. A doctor who deals in the dead has no need to make his touch gentle, or his manner deferential; the normal proprieties can be dispensed with. Porfiry sensed a shifting of discontent from the others watching. He remembered Virginsky, and at last half-turned in his direction.
He took in the complexity of Virginsky’s expression immediately: his mouth rose at one side, as if in a snarl, or in preparation for a cry of protest; but his eyes were rapt. Porfiry recognised the appetite in those eyes. Virginsky was in his early twenties, and yet the knowledge of death and evil was already there in him. Porfiry knew that once that knowledge has been awoken, there is no going back. The witnessing of one horror can produce a taste for more.
There was a relaxation in Virginsky’s face. Porfiry looked back to the examination table. The doctor had made the first incision, the right arm of a Y that began at the collarbone.
‘It is the contents of the stomach that we are particularly interested in,’ Porfiry said, feeling the redundancy of his words. The doctor said nothing, barely nodded an acknowledgement.
And now it began. The final conversion of Raisa Ivanovna Meyer from a human being to an assemblage of matter. It was not enough to strip away her clothes, her skin had to be removed, in an exposure beyond nakedness. There was no howl of pain or protest, just the soft, adhering sounds of a body unravelling.
Porfiry looked again at Virginsky, whose head was now rocking in a compulsive nod. He touched the younger man’s shoulder. Virginsky met his eye with startled resentment. He look
ed down at the hand on his shoulder as if that were more repulsive than the spectacle on the table. Porfiry removed it. Virginsky had stopped nodding.
If Porfiry was only interested in the stomach, Dr Feuerbach showed an admirable impartiality towards all the internal organs, each of which he held up as if it was a trophy won from bloody battle, before handing it to his Diener for weighing. The stench from the body increased with each unpacking.
‘Here is your stomach,’ he said at last, holding the loose livid sac, its breaches secured with metal clips, towards Porfiry.
Porfiry raised a hand in demurral. ‘Would you be so good as to decant the contents into a bottle? And do the same with the other stomach. Then, if you please, have them delivered to Dr Pervoyedov of the Obukhovsky Hospital. He is currently analysing the food samples and vomit taken from the Meyers’ dacha.’
Dr Feuerbach’s brows clenched in a bemused frown, which somehow conveyed that this was the most ridiculous and incomprehensiblesuggestion he had ever heard. He turned his back on Porfiry with a shrug and barked commands at his Diener in German.
In his laboratory at the Obukhovsky Hospital, Dr Pervoyedov held a magnifying glass to a chocolate. The chocolate, which was by now losing its smooth, spherical perfection, was placed on a circle of filter paper. If he needed to move the sweet, he would handle it only with tongs. For one thing, he didn’t want the heat of his fingers to accelerate its melting. He was also aware that certain poisons can be absorbed through the skin. Until he had determined what had killed Raisa Ivanovna Meyer and her son, he would take every precaution.
At the other end of the long table, two dozen white mice huddled and shivered in their cages. Occasionally one would break free to scurry and defecate in the sawdust, the sudden motion causing the bars to rattle and sing.
Through the lens, beads of fatty sweat stood out on a surface of tiny pits and pores. He held the point of a scalpel to each of these imperfections in turn, trying to get some sense of their scale. There was one point in particular where the chocolate dipped sharply, although when he looked at it without the magnifying glass the dip disappeared. Dr Pervoyedov located it again and pushed his scalpel into it. He then cut in the opposite direction.
