Sherlock Holmes and The Shadows of St Petersburg Read online

  “These earrings do not appear to be of especially high value,” Holmes observed, “but quite capable of producing a small sum as a pledge to the pawnbroker.”

  Holmes rose and, brushing off his trousers, handed the tiny box to the Inspector “Now, Lestrade,” Holmes announced whilst the policeman was slipping the box into a side-pocket of his great coat, “to the murder scene.”

  I followed Holmes and Lestrade toward the dark stairwell, and slowly we made our way up the narrow steps. Gottfried and his wife had lived on the third storey. Flickering like votive lights, small candles sat on tiny shelves at the landings; and bony fingers clawed round the edges of nearby doors as the people within peered out between the narrow gaps to see the commotion on the stairs. The wide eyes we could discern might have belonged to frightened animals in the brush.

  A second uniformed constable braced to attention as Lestrade marched by and pushed open the door to reveal the murder scene. Immediately, the thick cloying smell of death overwhelmed all else.

  1 See “The Adventure of the Aspen Papers” in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Part I, edited by David Marcum. (DDV)

  2 See my aforementioned narrative entitled The Outrage at the Diogenes Club. (JHW)

  Chapter Two: The Scene of the Crime

  The bodies of Gottfried and his wife lay before us, their heads split open and cradled in pools of blood.

  Call me paranoiac. Or haunted. Perhaps my brain had marinated not too long but too deeply in the brine of Dostoevsky’s murderous tale. Pray, forgive me, but the horrific sight framed through the doorway seemed nothing less than a twisted restaging of the gruesome abattoir in the opening section of the Russian novel.

  The old man had fallen face down, his feet a few paces from the door, his hands stretched out above his head. I could barely make out the edge of a greying beard that extended some six inches below his chin. The woman lay on her back nearby, her features beribboned with blood. It seemed an almost perfect re-creation.

  Lestrade began to step forward; but Holmes, desirous of examining the scene on his own, extended an arm to bar the way. Even before entering, he wanted to inspect the doorway. Ironically, Dostoevsky made much of doorways and thresholds and corridors and stairs in his book, those narrow passageways where people seem forced to encounter one another.

  “Note the mezuzah,” said Holmes, pointing to a small cylinder of reddish wood that was nailed to the inside of the doorpost. The thing had been affixed on an angle, the top leaning inward.

  “Here,” said Lestrade, “I’ve seen others like that. What do they mean?”

  “Some day,” said my friend, “I shall have to write a monograph on the significance of religious trinkets. There is much to be learned from the history of objects like the Catholic rosary or the Hindu bindi.”

  “Mr Holmes!” grumbled an impatient Lestrade, “can we please get on with it?”

  Holmes waved away his complaint. “The mezuzah comes from the Hebrew for ‘doorpost’. A small scroll of holy writ resides within. The observant Jew believes that placing one of these at his door signifies that God is watching over the home.”

  “Much good that it did,” I said.

  “Mumbo-jumbo,” scoffed Lestrade. “Like those Golem murders in Limehouse a few years past.”

  Ignoring the remark, Holmes instructed us to remain in the corridor. Then he carefully entered the flat.

  From the doorway, I could see that the religious atmosphere permeated the interior as well. A pair of tall, silver candlesticks stood on the mantel (too large, perhaps, for the murderer to steal); next to them, a small, carved wooden box (for spices, I would learn later); white tendrils of fringe from the dead man’s prayer shawl worn under his shirt spilled out at his waist onto the blue carpeting. A round, black skullcap lay in a pool of gore not far from his head. The bloody cap had been sliced in half along the diameter, both pieces remaining oddly connected only at their ends. It was as if the sharp blade had split the cloth but spared the thread.

  Holmes fell to his knees again, this time to examine the floor round the dead pawnbroker. Through his glass, he observed the wood boards and threadbare rug leading from the door to the deceased. Next he ran the lens over the old man’s body. The pawnbroker was dressed in white shirt, black waistcoat, and black trousers. In particular, Holmes scrutinised the dead man’s outstretched hands and fingers.

  Minutes passed before he completed the grim task. Then, still holding the lens before him, he crawled on his knees the few feet between the pawnbroker’s body and that of the woman - Mrs Gottfried it would later be confirmed. Her wound too was the work of the axe blade, for the top of her skull was split in halves. What was left of her fractured crown was covered with a dark kerchief similarly rent in two. Her matted hair appeared to be grey, but the exact colour was difficult to determine owing to the thick clots of blood surrounding the wound.

  Holmes inspected the woman in the same fashion he had examined her husband, then stood and began surveying the room itself. He scrutinised the blood spray that mottled the walls, floor, and ceiling and viewed the tables, bookshelves, and double-globed gas lamp, which still remained lit.

  Only when he moved on to the bedroom did he motion us into the flat. Even after we had entered, however, Lestrade and I continued to watch Holmes at work. As Lestrade had reported, the bedroom had been ransacked. Nonetheless, Holmes picked his way between two fallen chairs, peered into the drawers that had been pulled out, peeked under the bed whose mattress had been awkwardly turned on its wooden frame, looked into a small metal chest that stood open on the floor near the bed, and examined the random objects on the shelves - tiny boxes, small bottles, books, and the like - most of which at had been knocked about.

  Finally, he brushed himself off again and re-entered the sitting room.

  “Well, Mr Holmes,” asked Lestrade, “what have you learned?”

  “First and foremost, Lestrade, I found that your men have marched all over the flat obfuscating most of whatever tell-tale marks the floor may have revealed.”

  “We had to determine that foul play had been committed. Without such a determination, I never would have come to Baker Street.”

  “With all this blood?” I uttered in profound disbelief. “Did you think they had taken some sort of poison?”

  Lestrade ignored my sarcasm. “What else did you discover then?” he asked Holmes.

  “I suggest to you that the killer is a young man who stands about five-foot-eight-inches high. He has little money, was probably a student, and though no doubt a deep thinker, maintains a two-sided nature, struggling between good and evil, the so-called homo duplex. At least, such a portrait is the one that our the villain would have us accept.”

  It was, of course, a perfect description of Raskolnikov, Dostoevsky’s fictional murderer, but I let that pass.

  Lestrade arched an eyebrow. “And how the deuce did you figure all that?”

  “Generally speaking, this appears to be a young man’s crime, performed by a person with enough agility and determination to wield an axe. Since no weapon has been found, I assume he brought it with him.”

  “How can you be so certain he didn’t pick up such a weapon here and take it away with him?” Lestrade wanted to know.

  Because Raskolnikov brought his own, I found myself thinking.

  Holmes smiled. “The key to it all, Lestrade, is that package you showed us in Baker Street, the one you found on the floor by the body. As Watson has already suggested, the reason it was fastened so tightly was to command the pawnbroker’s attention. The murderer knew before he ever got here how he would attack his victim. He had no choice but to bring the weapon along.”

  I appreciated the recognition from Holmes even though it was Dostoevsky who had laid out the original plan.

  “As we have already pro
posed,” Holmes continued, ‘the pawnbroker would assume something of value was inside and concentrate all his effort on untying the complicated knot. There are red fibres from the string under his nails that suggest how hard he worked at it before finally giving up in frustration and simply forcing the string to come off. Remember too that by 7 it was quite dark so that Gottfried required light to examine the pledge. Notice how his body is directed towards the lamp on the table. What is more, one can see where the package fell when he was struck.”

  My gaze followed the direction in which Holmes’ forefinger was pointing. In the midst of the blood spray, a small rectangular void clearly revealed where the dropped package had lain during the vicious attack.

  “So intent must Gottfried have been in the process of opening it that he made a fatal mistake. Turning his back on the person who had brought it allowed the villain the opportunity to land the mortal blow. The murderer’s height can be reckoned based on the placement of the strike - not atop the crown of the pawnbroker, who stood at about six feet, but slightly to the rear of the skull.”

  “The killer might simply have missed his aim,” I offered.

  “True, Watson, he might have indeed - except that the wound to the woman, who was shorter than Gottfried, is still not as high up on the skull as a taller man would have landed it. No doubt she interrupted the bloody assault upon her husband and suffered the fate of many an unlucky witness who stumbles across a crime in progress.”

  “And your remarks concerning his psychological nature, this two-sided business?” I asked.

  “One infers he was impoverished - hence, his need for a pawnbroker and the subsequent robbery. I should expect he was a regular customer of Samuel Gottfried, for why else would Gottfried have dared to turn his back? On the one hand, the killer planned at some length to commit the crime. And yet in his haste to search for loot to plunder, he overlooked a drawer at the bottom of the bureau containing a number of five-pound notes. He did locate a chest beneath the bed and managed to open it, but for whatever the reason he did not feel he could spend the time looking for more. A meticulous planner, but a distracted executioner.”

  I nodded. Raskolnikov too had stolen from a chest hidden under a bed, and he also had overlooked money kept elsewhere that would have been his for the taking. “But a deep thinker, Holmes, a student? Certainly that is quite a leap.”

  “You’ll note that atop the bookshelf in the sitting room lies a volume of lectures by Thomas Carlyle titled On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. There are fresh blood smears on the cover and on the edges of the pages, but no spray. There can be little doubt that the murderer handled the book, but not until after committing the crime. One must conclude, therefore, that it was placed atop the shelf after the Gottfrieds had been dispatched by someone familiar with the text.”

  “Surely, Holmes,” I protested, “you’re not suggesting that the killer took the time to seek out a book by Thomas Carlyle in the library of Samuel Gottfried?”

  “On the contrary, Watson. “Though a religious man might have any number of philosophical works on his shelf, I believe that in this case the book was purposely left in that prominent spot by the murderer. Curious, is it not? Insufficient time to rob the place, but opportunity enough to set out a copy of Carlyle’s lectures in a place where we could find it. Oh, I think we must credit our villain with intellectual tastes that go beyond the common workingman.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow,” said Lestrade.

  I did. Carlyle’s collected lectures promoted theories about the so-called great men of history. Even a cursory reading of Crime and Punishment would reveal Raskolnikov’s admiration for Napoleon, a figure whom Carlyle addresses in his final lecture. Thanks to Dostoevsky, the entire crime seemed straightforward to me.

  “If you say so, Mr Holmes,” said Lestrade, shaking his head. “In any case, we shall keep our eyes peeled for just such a man.”

  “And request that patrons of Mr Gottfried report to the police the outstanding pledges they have left with him. A few trinkets remain in the drawers; what is reported missing may enable you to ensnare the villain if he should be among those who show up to claim them.”

  “Thank you very much indeed, Mr Holmes,” said Lestrade. “I pride myself on recognizing the help you sometimes have to offer. I shall deposit you and Dr Watson back in Baker Street and then return to the Yard to file my report.”

  Following the Inspector’s lead, we retraced our steps down the dark stairwell. With the doors nearest the landings still cracked open as we marched past, we could sense the flat-dwellers behind them who could not refrain from peeping out again to see why the police were lingering in their building.

  An explosion of light hit us upon exiting the premises. There had been so much gloom inside that one could be excused for having forgotten that it was yet the middle of the day.

  Chapter Three: Comparisons

  Attentive readers will recall that in A Study in Scarlet, I labelled as “nil” Sherlock Holmes’ knowledge of literature. Oh, Holmes could be counted on for the odd factoid regarding important authors and their works - witness his knowledge of Carlyle at the scene of the Gottfried murders - but I would not classify him a student of belles lettres. For that matter, neither could I apply such a label to myself - at least, not yet. Of the two lodgers at 221B, however, I felt that with my first narrative to be published in less than a fortnight, I could lay greater claim to such a title than he.

  In the van carrying us back to Baker Street, therefore, I assumed it was I alone who was pondering the parallels between an active murder investigation and the horrors of the fictional work to which my friend at the library had introduced me. A dead pawnbroker and flat-mate, a murderous axe, a hurried robbery, a dropped clue, a possible student-perpetrator - even though I maintained some vague doubts, the similarities of the crimes, both fictional and real, compelled me to inform Sherlock Holmes of my conclusions.

  But did I dare? I could already fancy him describing such comparisons as the naïve ruminations of a literary traveller who had somehow got blown off course. Did I want to invite even more ridicule? Might my current supposition undermine Holmes’ faith in my insights? Such questions plagued me throughout our drive to Baker Street.

  When we returned to our rooms, Lestrade agreed to join us for a late luncheon of roast beef sandwiches supplied by Mrs Hudson. And yet no sooner did Billy place the food before us than it became readily apparent to me that my worries were interfering with my appetite. Quite simply, I had to make public my thoughts concerning the role Dostoevsky’s novel played in the macabre drama to which Lestrade had introduced us.

  “Crime and Punishment, you say?” The Inspector raised his eyebrows and lowered his sandwich. “Good title. Describes my work. But never heard of the book, I’m afraid.” What the policeman lacked in literary knowledge, however, I am pleased to say that he made up for in pertinacity. “Your conclusions may be all wrong, Doctor. This whole business might be mere coincidence. And yet the similarities you bring up do seem to raise some interesting questions.”

  Holmes’ reaction was more pointed. Shaking his head, he said, “Dostoevsky again? Really, Watson, do you think me ignorant?” He asked this last question with an amused look and biting tone. “You may take pleasure in underestimating my familiarity with literary art; but do not forget that, like you, I too have read the galleys of your account of the Lauriston Gardens murder, and so I know that you yourself employed the word ‘immense’ to describe my knowledge of sensational literature.”

  He was correct about that.

  “You might place Crime and Punishment on a lofty plane, old fellow, but I would relegate it to a more common category. Why, in a letter to his publisher, Dostoevsky himself called the book a “psychological account of a crime.” No, I believe ‘sensational literature’ is quite the accurate label.”

  Ho
lmes’ voice was spirited, but his features remained without expression. Not only did I feel corrected, but insulted as well.

  Nor was he finished. “Do you think that I had not already recognised the comparisons you bring up, Watson? Do you regard me as so obtuse? After all, I do my best to keep informed on writings - fictional or otherwise - related to the criminal world.

  “But if antecedents for these horrific crimes need be mentioned at all, let me assure you that Dostoevsky’s novel, which you deem so relevant, remains a less fruitful object of study than two real crimes that occurred the year before he completed the book. It was these criminal acts that doubtlessly formed the basis for his fictitious killings.”

  I shook my head in silent confession to being unaware of either event.

  “I refer, of course, to the 1865 murders of two old women in Moscow and another in St Petersburg. And I do not even speak of the villainous Karakozov, the sickly, failed student who attempted to assassinate the Tsar in ’66 at the very time Dostoevsky was in the midst of writing the early part of the novel - an event, I might add, that for any number of reasons, interfered with his usual production of prose. You will recall that Crime and Punishment first appeared in serial instalments.”

  I suppose I should have expected such a riposte. It was just the sort that Holmes often aimed my way following one of my ill-considered attempts to promote my knowledge. It was not unlike our discussion in the sketch I titled “A Case of Identity” involving the jilted Miss Mary Sutherland. In that exchange, Holmes vowed to keep piling fact upon fact until I acknowledged him to be right. “You see, but do not observe,” he was fond of saying to me.

  As for the Russian crimes to which Holmes had referred, I could offer only the feeblest of retorts: “But, sadly, Holmes, murders occur so frequently. How can you be certain that the particular killings you singled out actually inspired Dostoevsky?”