R. Morris - A Vengeful Longing

Meyer flashed the briefest, and rawest, of looks at him. ‘He was my son.’

‘And yet. . not the son you had hoped for.’ Porfiry put this as a statement. ‘No one would blame you for feeling this way.’

‘I tried to help him, to break these habits. If only we could have ruptured the pattern of compulsion, we might have made progress.’

‘But it was hopeless? He did not respond to your treatment.’

‘Raisa Ivanovna would not support me in it. Her mollycoddling undermined my efforts.’

‘There must have been times’ — Porfiry’s voice cracked on the edge of a whisper — ‘when you thought it would have been better for Grigory if he had never been born.’

Meyer took off his spectacles and cleaned them with a handkerchief. He lifted his head as he replaced them, but did not look at Porfiry. ‘Better for Grigory? Grigory’s condition caused him no suffering. If anything, it was we who suffered more because of it.’

‘And you, most of all, I imagine.’

‘That does not mean I wished him dead.’

‘It must have been hard though, for a man such as you, with a brilliant academic record, a PhD, an intellectual, to have such a son.’

‘For all that, sometimes I envied him.’

Porfiry kinked an eyebrow sceptically.

‘Grigory was an innocent,’ continued Meyer. ‘Sometimes I wondered what it must be like to live in such a state of. . innocence, a state of grace.’

Porfiry smiled. ‘I understand. I understand completely. And yet you must have feared for him too? There would come a day when you and Raisa would no longer be able to look after him.’

‘I had thought of that, even if Raisa wouldn’t. There are provisions one can make. Institutions. As a doctor, one knows a little more about these things than a layman.’

‘You visited asylums?’

‘I went to Ulyanka. The house at the eleventh verst.’

Virginsky shot a significant, excited glance at Porfiry, who battedit away with three quick blinks.

‘When was this?’ asked Porfiry, neutrally.

‘Is it important?’ It seemed Meyer had picked up something from Virginsky’s glance.

‘It may be.’

Meyer frowned and shook his head, trying to remember. ‘I don’t know. It was in the summer. It must have been last summer.’

‘And what were your impressions?’

‘It is run in accordance with the latest scientific thinking.’ Meyer’s tone was strangely dead.

‘And what did Raisa think?’

‘She didn’t go with me. She wouldn’t countenance it. I couldn’t talk to her about the future.’ Meyer’s imploring gaze sought out Virginsky. ‘I did not wish my son dead,’ he insisted.

‘The maid, Polina,’ said Porfiry, his tone harsher now, ‘she couldn’t raise you. She said she knocked on your door and called out for you, but you didn’t answer.’

‘I was working. I told you that at the dacha.’

‘Ah, yes. Your work. It must be very absorbing work.’

‘It is.’

‘What were you doing, exactly, in your study, when the maid roused you?’

Meyer’s expression of shock at this question was almost comical. ‘I was looking at a map,’ he said at last, his voice surprised, and then defeated. He had been so taken off his guard that he had not thought to lie.

‘This was part of your work?’

‘I. . do. . need to look at maps for my work, yes.’ The answer stumbled out, Meyer’s brow creased in a frown. He was a bad liar; he was evidently struggling to comprehend his own inconsistencies.

‘Had you taken morphine?’

‘What?’

‘You heard me.’

‘It is an outrageous question.’

‘Which you haven’t answered yet.’

‘I am tired now.’

‘We will search your study anyhow.’

‘And what if you do? And what if you find morphine there? It means nothing. I am a doctor.’

‘You are a sanitation inspector. I imagine you are not often called upon to dispense morphine.’

‘I am self-medicating. I suffer from neuralgic pain.’

‘And you had medicated yourself that afternoon?’

Meyer nodded minutely.

‘It is unfortunate,’ said Porfiry. ‘Perhaps if you hadn’t, your wife and child might still be alive.’

‘Bezmygin!’ shouted Meyer. ‘Bezmygin is to blame, not me!’ His fingers curled as he clutched the edge of the table, pushing his knuckles into the tabletop. It seemed for a moment that he would hurl the table at them.

Porfiry signalled mutely to Ptitsyn.

‘So, Pavel Pavlovich. What do you make of all that?’ Meyer’s rancid aura lingered, even though he had been taken back to his cell. Porfiry, on his feet once more, lit a cigarette, as if to dispel it.

‘A connection?’ Virginsky made the suggestion tentatively.

‘A connection?’ Porfiry threw it back with sceptical emphasis.

‘With the boy Lieutenant Salytov brought in. Tolya, the apprentice from the confectioner’s.’

‘Whom we had to release because there were insufficient grounds for holding him. His passport turned out to be perfectly in order. And it is not a crime to have a suicide for a mother. Besides, a search of the workshop — and the boy’s lodging — turned up nothing.’

‘The pamphlets?’

‘If we searched your lodgings would we not find the same pamphlets? ’

‘Lieutenant Salytov is convinced he is a political agitator.’ There was something wry and teasing about Virginsky’s tone.

‘Lieutenant Salytov sees conspiracies everywhere.’

‘But what of the Ulyanka connection? The house at the eleventh verst. Did that not strike you?’

‘Yes, it struck me as quite possibly a meaningless coincidence. There are such things, you know. They serve to distract the investigator. ’

‘You said “quite possibly”. That means you equally accept that there might be something in it.’

‘Tolya’s mother was an inmate at the house at the eleventh verst three years ago, in sixty-five. Incarcerated for six months, at the end of which she hanged herself using a knotted sheet tied to a window bar. Meyer visited the place last year. The timings do not fit.’

‘But was that the first time he visited there?’

‘Ah, my young friend, be careful. Do not go chasing chimeras. Do not be led astray by random correspondences. They beguile the eye, but there is nothing to them, take it from me.’

‘Are you testing me again, Porfiry Petrovich? Is this another of your training methods?’

Porfiry smiled ambiguously. ‘That’s something you will have to work out for yourself.’

Virginsky curled his mouth into half a smile. ‘And what of this musician, Bezmygin?’

‘Poor Dr Meyer,’ said Porfiry. ‘In his eagerness to supply us with a suspect, he has provided himself with a motive.’ He took out his cigarette case and counted the cigarettes without lighting one.

They took the train from Petergofsky Station. The morning was bright and warm, the city in the full luminous grip of summer. It felt to Virginsky like they were going on an excursion. Porfiry’s cook had even prepared a lunch for them, putting a loaf of black bread, a hock of ham and some gooseberries into a small wicker basket. Porfiry had the basket on the seat next to him, as if it were the third member of their party. Most of the day-trippers to Petergof had taken earlier trains, giving Porfiry and Virginsky the whole of a second-class compartment to themselves.

The train gathered speed as it passed the Mitrofanevsky Cemetery. Virginsky watched the memorials and mausoleums flicker by, the grey palaces of the dead projecting sharply from the all-consuming earth. He remembered this was not an excursion after all.