R. Morris - A Vengeful Longing

‘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.

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.