Virginsky had the door open now, but a further thought detained him. He seemed unsure whether to express it.
‘Is there something else, Pavel Pavlovich?’
‘It just occurred to me. Wasn’t Oblomov’s servant called Zakhar?’
Porfiry considered the burning cigarette as he rotated it between thumb and forefinger. A full inhalation and exhalation later, his gaze once again concentrated on the cigarette, he at last said: ‘Go.’ He did not look up as Virginsky left his apartment.
*
A little under half an hour later, Porfiry was seated at the desk of his chambers, his face razor-nicked and the bottle-green frock coat of his civil service uniform flecked with ash at the cuffs and dandruff at the shoulders. He smoked in silence as he again read through the witness statements taken at the Naryskin Palace.
‘Any news of Captain Mizinchikov?’ he asked at last, without any expectation in his voice.
‘According to his orderly, he did not come home,’ answered Virginsky from the brown sofa, its artificial leather cracked and threadbare. ‘Lieutenant Salytov found no sign of him at his apartment. He did, however, find this. In a drawer in Mizinchikov’s writing desk.’
Virginsky rose and crossed to Porfiry’s desk to hand him the parcel of red silk, which he had been holding back, apparently for the pleasure of giving it to him.
Porfiry took the mysterious parcel with a puzzled and vaguely recriminatory frown. He felt its weight before placing it on his desk to unwrap it. ‘I see. How interesting.’
‘You will notice the colour of the silk,’ said Virginsky.
‘Do not fear. The colour of the silk is not lost on me.’
‘It is frayed at one edge. A number of threads are loose and some almost detached.’
‘Yes. I have noticed that too.’
‘It is curious, is it not, that this razor should be wrapped in a material consistent with a thread found on the body of a woman whose throat was cut?’
‘Curious is not the word.’
‘Of course a man may possess a razor merely to shave himself. But why keep it in the drawer of a writing desk? Moreover, Captain Mizinchikov is not a clean-shaven gentleman. But perhaps he had simply put the razor away in a drawer in expectation of the day when he would take up shaving again.’
‘But this is not the murder weapon, Pavel Pavlovich,’ declared Porfiry with quiet, almost weary, emphasis.
Virginsky seemed deflated. ‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Let me put it another way, if it is the murder weapon, then Captain Mizinchikov is not the murderer. I believe you said just now that the captain did not return to his apartment after leaving the Naryskin Palace — is that not correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then. How could he have murdered Yelena Filippovna with this razor and then placed it in his drawer? Are we to imagine that he stole into his own apartment without being seen by his orderly? And if that is the case, then one is obliged to ask the rather bigger question, why? It is usual, in my experience, for murderers to dispose of murder weapons — preferably in places where they will never be found, or at least in places where they cannot be associated with them. It is not usual for them to take them home and put them in a drawer for the police to find.’
Virginsky let out a defeated sigh. ‘So the razor is irrelevant?’
‘Of course it is not irrelevant. It is very relevant. It is a great triumph to have found it. Was anything else discovered in this drawer?’
‘These.’ Virginsky removed from a pocket the bundle of letters, which were once again tied up with the ribbon. Again he received a recriminatory spring of the brows from Porfiry. ‘They are letters to him from Yelena Filippovna.’
‘Are they indeed?’
Porfiry took the letters from Virginsky and untied them. He flicked through them and saw from the dates that they spanned a period of about a year, although by far the majority of them had been written and sent within the last two months. Then he settled down to read them through.
What emerged was the story of a love affair, or rather a story of desire, seduction, manipulation, disillusionment and rejection. It was hard to tell whether there was love involved, on either side. On the side of the party who had no voice in the narrative, Mizinchikov, his love could only be inferred, along with the pain he must have suffered, and his brief, rare, but surely intense, moments of joy. Was there ever a moment in the story when Yelena Filippovna had loved him? Certainly she seemed to profess it on occasion, though in a careless or even conflicted way.
If I do not proclaim my love for you in every line that I write — as I know you would have me — it is not because I do not love you, but rather because I naturally baulk at such a tedious task. I am a grown woman. You must believe that I love you, as much as I am able to love any man.
To the besotted Mizinchikov, ‘you must believe’ might have read as a passionate entreaty. To Porfiry’s objective eye, it had about it a little too much of a command. Similarly, the qualification ‘as much as I am able’ could be taken two ways: it could be joyously expansive, an indication that her love for Mizinchikov was bounded only by her capacity to love, which after all might be infinite; or, far more likely, it was an admission that she was incapable of loving any man, including him.
In the earlier correspondence, she certainly held out the possibility of loving him, though her preferred tone, after the first few highly formal letters, was flirtatious. She was more comfortable promising physical intimacy than emotional equivalence. Porfiry identified the point at which their relationship was consummated. A letter dated the twenty-eighth of July spoke of the heights of ecstasy to which he had taken her. It also spoke of Mizinchikov’s ‘skilful swordplay’. She declared that she eagerly awaited being ‘sweetly stabbed’ by him again. No doubt such passages gratified his male pride. No doubt they were intended to.
Soon after, her letters began to talk of their engagement and something approaching a sense of hope entered her tone. I look forward to the day when you and I will be one in law and before God, and this time of tribulations will be at an end. At times, however, a note of resignation could be detected. We deserve one another. There is no one else for each of us. And so we must learn to be content with one another. Perhaps the fire of passion does not burn as it once did. What of it? I cannot live my life in a conflagration.
But later in the same letter, she reproached him for his want of feeling. You do not love me any more, admit it. Admit it so that we may be free of one another. Is that not what you want? And a few lines later: Forgive me. I am a foolish woman. I know you love me. I have never doubted that.
Then came the final letter, in which she suddenly and irrevocably put the matter beyond either hope or doubt. I have never loved you, she had written, along with the barely mitigating proviso: any more than I have loved any man.
Something had brought a new clarity to her understanding of her feelings. Something that Mizinchikov had done. You may also consider that you have brought this on yourself. How could I love you now?
‘What did he do?’ wondered Porfiry, as he laid the last letter down on his desk, his eyes fixed on her words. ‘What was this shameful act that sullied him and insulted her?’ After a moment’s silent reflection, he turned to Virginsky, who made no attempt to provide an answer.
Porfiry lit a cigarette. ‘I begin now to understand the razor.’
‘You do?’
‘I do.’
‘Then could you explain it to me?’
‘As I have said, this razor is not the murder weapon. No, it is the tangible symbol of a possibility, perhaps of an intention. Or perhaps, by keeping this razor next to her letters, he was in fact, in some way, preventing himself from killing her. It was a kind of talisman to him. As long as he kept the razor in the drawer, she was safe. But if he took it out, he knew he would kill her.’