Sherlock Holmes and The Shadows of St Petersburg by Daniel Victor (short novels to read TXT) 📕

Gardens, I cabled the police in Petersburg. My friend on the force confirmed for me what the world will soon discover with the publication of A Study in Scarlet-that it was indeed from Petersburg that Jefferson Hope, just as he reported to us, had left for Paris on the trail of Drebber and Stangerson.”

“I had no idea you contacted the Russian police.”

“I could offer you my friend’s real name,” Holmes said, “but I should imagine you would like to employ the appellation bestowed upon him by Dostoevsky. After all, it was Dostoevsky who dramatised his most celebrated case, Raskolnikov’s axe murders.”[1]

“Not Porfiry Petrovitch!” I cried out. “Why, I remember him from the book.”

“Exactly, old fellow! Porfiry Petrovitch was thirty-five when he arrested Raskolnikov for those killings. He is now sixty-six - still short, plump, and balding. Perhaps even a little more so in all three areas.”

“Then to Porfiry,” I said, raising my glass.

“Porfiry Petrovitch,” Holmes corrected. “The Russians do love their patronymics.”

“To Porfiry Petrovitch then,” and the two of us finished our brandies.

“Porfiry is very different from me, Watson,” said Holmes, already disregarding the patronymic in the name of friendship. “You know my methods. I rely on facts. He believes that facts are the very details that lead one to false conclusions. No, for Porfiry Petrovitch, psychology is the thing. He ensnares his prey with a wink and a smile. Why, without revealing an ounce of evidence - evidence he claimed to possess - he predicted to Raskolnikov that the man’s psychological nature would drive him to confess. And the villain soon did.”

“Marvellous.”

“Indeed,” said Holmes. “Though Porfiry’s manner of doing things is not my own, I never hesitate to call on the man for help.[2] On this last occasion, I met him in his office at the station house, a pale-yellow building fronted with greying white pilasters and cornices. It was particularly cold the day I arrived - close to freezing, in fact - and I was happy to go inside.

“The police bureau is a network of small offices on the fourth floor, and to reach it I had to climb a steep set of stairs teeming with all manner of people - not only official clerks and uniformed police, but also the wretches who live in the numerous flats on the lower floors. Porfiry’s digs are attached to his office. In fact, he likes to joke that his flat is not unlike a prison-cell since both are funded by the government.”

“A wry sense of humour,” I noted, “especially for a policeman.”

“Just so. In that part of the city I fancy it stands him in good stead. The area remains one of the most squalid and violent parts of Petersburg. And yet, though Porfiry knew I wanted to see the lodging house that Raskolnikov occupied at the time of the murders - in fact, only a quarter-mile from the police station - my friend had too much pride in his city not to take a detour to point out the sights. Standing at a railing by the Neva, we gazed at the lengthy green-and-white façade of the Winter Palace and the stately mansions and manicured gardens along the Promenade des Anglais, the so-called English Embankment, further west.”

“Sounds beautiful,” I said.

“True, Watson, but like all great metropolises, Petersburg is a city of contrasts; and just minutes after showing off the magisterial residence of the Tsars, Porfiry Petrovitch was guiding me through the chaotic Haymarket to Raskolnikov’s shabby neighbourhood. Raskolnikov lived near Stoliarny Place not far from the Kokushkin Bridge that spans a foul-smelling canal south of the river.

“From Raskolnikov’s run-down, yellow-brick building, we marched fewer than a thousand paces - Dostoevsky numbers them at seven hundred thirty - to the site of the axe murders themselves, a building of greyish-yellow colour in Srednaya Podyacheskaya Street on the other side of the small Voznesensky Bridge.”

I stared blankly at the growing list of awkward-sounding names.

“No matter the specific locations today,” said Holmes with a dismissive wave, “since none of the major players, with the exception of Porfiry Petrovitch himself, lives there anymore. Yet he says the whole area looks much as it did twenty years ago.

“The nearby Haymarket is still known as the underbelly of the city; and with its wild assortment of costermongers, beggars, and livestock, it is quite the hurly-burly. A group of erstwhile musicians with concertina and tambourines produced discordant sounds in the hope of raising money, and drunks staggering about joined in song. And the smells! - the animal waste, the rotten food, the sweat of humanity. I tell you, Watson, it is not unlike some Byzantine bazaar. Think of our own Spitalfields Market.”

I understood Holmes’ reference to the raucous marketplace in the East End, but somehow the turmoil of a Russian setting swarming with foreigners seemed much coarser than any British scene I could conjure.

“Let us also not forget,” said he, “the taverns, brothels, and dosshouses that one expects to find adjacent to any such vanity fair. I should fancy that the prostitutes with their yellow tickets of legality are quite adept at catering to the workers and farmers and thieves who frequent the place. Is it any wonder that Dostoevsky’s murderer believed he could escape detection in such an atmosphere?”

I nodded my head at the obvious.

“You do realize,” said Holmes, pointing the stem of his pipe in my direction, “that at some point Dostoevsky actually lived not far from where the murders in the novel occurred, a fact that speaks for the book’s authenticity. Because Dostoevsky’s rooms were also near the police station, it was as a neighbour that he came to know Porfiry Petrovitch and from the detective himself that he acquired the gruesome details he recreated in his novel, details he sought to publish as quickly as possible.”

With the publication of my own work coming so soon, I could well understand Dostoevsky’s eagerness.

“Porfiry Petrovitch,” he continued, “brought me to a tavern that Raskolnikov had visited, a rundown place called the Crystal Palace. We were