Boris Akunin - Special Assignments

Erast Petrovich was in an unfamiliar state quite untypical of him: he could not think what to do.

Masa came in. Snuffling, he dragged in a rolled-up carpet and covered the terrible blotches on the floor, then he set about furiously scraping off the bloodstained wallpaper. That was right, the Collegiate Counsellor thought remotely, but it hardly did any good.

After a while Angelina also arrived. She put her hand on Erast Petrovich's shoulder and said: Anyone who dies a martyr's death on Good Friday will be in the Kingdom of Heaven, at the side of Christ.'

'That is no consolation to me,' Fandorin said in a dull voice, without turning his head. And it will hardly be any consolation to Anisii.'

But where was Anisii? It was already the middle of the night, and the boy hadn't slept a single wink last night. Masa said he'd called round without his cap, in a great hurry. He hadn't said anything or left a note.

It didn't matter: the later he turned up, the better.

Fandorin's head was absolutely empty. No surmises, no theories, no plans. A day of intensive work had produced very little. The questioning of the detectives who were keeping Nesvitskaya, Stenich and Burylin under surveillance, together with his own observations, had confirmed that, with a certain degree of cunning and adroitness, any one of the three could have slipped away and come back unnoticed by the police spies.

Nesvitskaya lived in a student hostel on Trubetskaya Street that had four exits or entrances, and the doors carried on banging until the dawn.

Following his nervous fit, Stenich was holed up in the Assuage My Sorrows clinic, to which the detectives had not been admitted. There was no way to check whether he had been sleeping or wandering round the city with a scalpel.

The situation with Burylin was even worse: his house was immense, with sixty windows on the ground floor, half of them concealed by the trees of the garden. The fence was low. It wasn't a house: it was a sieve, full of holes.

It turned out that any one of them could have killed Izhitsin. And the most terrible thing of all was that Erast Petrovich, convinced of the ineffectiveness of the surveillance, had cancelled it altogether. This evening the three suspects had had complete freedom of action!

'Don't despair, Erast Petrovich,' said Angelina. 'It's a mortal sin, and you especially have no right. Who else will find the killer, this Satan, if you just give up? There is no one apart from you.'

Satan, Fandorin thought listlessly. Ubiquitous, could be anywhere, anytime, slip in through any opening. Satan changed faces, adopted any appearance, even that of an angel.

An angel. Angelina.

Freed from the control of his torpid spirit, his brain, so accustomed to forming logical constructions, obligingly joined the links up to form a chain.

It could even be Angelina - why couldn't she be Jack the Ripper?

She had been in England the previous year. That was one.

On the evenings when all the killings had taken place, she had been in the church. Supposedly. That was two.

She was studying medicine in a charitable society and already knew how to do many things. They taught them anatomy there too. That was three.

She was an odd individual, not like other women. Sometimes she would give you a look that made your heart skip a beat -but you couldn't tell what she was thinking about at such moments. That was four.

Palasha would have opened the door for her without thinking twice. That was five.

Erast Petrovich shook his head in annoyance, stilling the idling wheels of his insistent logic machine. His heart absolutely refused to contemplate such a theory, and the Wise One had said: 'The noble man does not set the conclusions of reason above the voice of the heart.' The worst thing was that Angelina was right: apart from him there was no one else to stop the Ripper, and there was very little time left. Only tomorrow. Think, think.

But his attempts to concentrate on the case were frustrated by that stubborn phrase hammering in his head: He won't survive this, he won't survive this.

The time dragged on. The Collegiate Counsellor ruffled up his hair, sometimes began walking around the room, twice washed his hands and face with cold water. He tried to meditate, but immediately abandoned the attempt - it was quite impossible!

Angelina stood by the wall, holding her elbows in her hands, watching with a sad insistence in her huge grey eyes.

Masa was silent too. He sat on the floor with his legs folded together, his round face motionless, his thick eyelids half-closed.

But at dawn, when the street was wreathed in milky mist, there was the sound of hurrying feet on the porch, a determined shove made the unlocked door squeak open, and a gendarme officer came dashing into the room. It was Smolyaninov, a very capable, brisk young second lieutenant, with black eyes and rosy pink cheeks. 'Ah, this is where you are!' Smolyaninov said, glad to see Fandorin. 'Everybody's been looking for you. You weren't at home or in the department, or on Tverskaya Street! So I decided to come here, in case you were still at the scene of the murders. Disaster, Erast Petrovich! Tulipov has been wounded. Seriously. He was taken to the Mariinskaya Hospital after midnight. We've been looking for you ever since they informed us; just look how much time has gone by ... Lieutenant-Colonel Svershinsky went to the hospital immediately and all his adjutants were ordered to search for you. What's going on, eh, Erast Petrovich?'

Report by Provincial Secretary A. P. Tulipov Personal Assistant to Mr E.P. Fandorin Deputy for Special Assignments of His Excellency the Governor-General of Moscow

8 April 1889, half past three in the morning

I report to your Honour that yesterday evening, while compiling the list of individuals suspected of committing certain crimes of which you are aware, I realised that it was absolutely obvious that the crimes indicated could only have been committed by one person, to whit, the forensic medical expert Egor Willemovich Zakharov.

He is not simply a doctor, but an anatomical pathologist -that is, cutting out the internal organs from human bodies is his standard, everyday work. That is one.

Constant association with corpses could have induced in him an insuperable revulsion for the whole human race, or else, on the contrary, a perverted adoration of the physiological arrangement of the human organism. That is two.

At one time he was a member of the Sadist Circle of medical students, which testifies to the early development of depraved and cruel inclinations. That is three.

Zakharov lives in a public-service apartment at the police forensic morgue at Bozhedomka. Two of the murders (of the spinster Andreichkina and the unidentified beggar girl) were committed close to this place. That is four.

Zakharov often goes to England to visit his relatives, and he was there last year. The last time he came back from Britain was on 31 October last year (11 November in the European style) - that is, he could quite easily have committed the last of the London murders that was undoubtedly the work of Jack the Ripper. That is five.

Zakharov is informed of the progress of the investigation, and in addition, of all the people involved in the investigation, he is the only one who possesses surgical skills. That is six.

I could carry on, but it is hard for me to breathe and my thoughts are getting confused ... I had better tell you about recent events.

After not finding Erast Petrovich at home, I decided there was no time to be lost. The day before I had been at Bozhedomka and spoken with the cemetery workers, which could not have escaped Zakharov's notice. It was reasonable to think that he would feel alarmed and give himself away somehow or other. To be on the safe side I took my gun with me - a Bulldog revolver that Mr Fandorin gave me as a present on my name day last year. That was a wonderful day, one of the best days in my life. But that has nothing to do with this case.