‘You must go home, darling. Can you not read? There is no school today.’
‘She will come back. She will not leave us.’ The girl turned back to face the front.
Porfiry and Virginsky exchanged a look of understanding and left her to her expectancy.
They found the priest, Father Anfim, coming out of the other classroom.
‘Where is Maria Petrovna?’
‘You have just missed her,’ said the priest.
‘And Perkhotin?’
‘He has gone too.’
‘Where have they gone?’
‘I do not know. Neither Maria Petrovna nor Apollon Mikhailovich saw fit to share that information with me.’
‘They left together?’
‘Yes. I arrived for an unscheduled inspection. The two of them pushed past me on the stairs. I came up to find the children running riot in both classrooms. I have just sent the last of them home — apart from that rather simple girl in Maria Petrovna’s classroom, who simply refuses to go. She is convinced Maria Petrovna will return. I never would have expected such conduct from Maria Petrovna. Apollon Mikhailovich is another matter. He is a fowl of different feathers. Him I consider capable of anything.’
‘I share your fears, Father. And unless we find Maria Petrovna, I fear it may be the end for her too. Did she or Perkhotin say anything to you on their way out?’
‘He told me to get out of his damn way. I told him to go to Hell. He laughed and said that was precisely where he intended to go.’
‘I see. And did Maria Petrovna say anything?’
‘She … was more polite. She begged me not to be cross. Nor to be afraid, which I thought extraordinary, I must say. It had not occurred to me to be afraid. She said that something very urgent had come up and she had to go with Apollon Mikhailovich. The life of a friend depended on it, she said.’
‘The life of a friend? What could she have meant by that?’ wondered Porfiry.
‘Where do you think they went?’ Virginsky’s eyes locked on to Porfiry’s. There was a note of touching dependence in his voice. It really did seem that deep down he believed Porfiry capable of answering any question asked of him.
‘Perhaps we will find some clues in Perkhotin’s classroom.’
This answer seemed to satisfy Virginsky, or at least hold his burgeoning panic at bay. Without the animation of the children who cascaded daily into it, the classroom seemed stale as well as still. There was an air of abandonment to it. The figures in the illustrated alphabet on the wall were frozen and mute, giving the impression that the room had been locked into one moment of time.
The priest had followed them into the room and was watching closely as the two magistrates cast about, straining for a significant detail to jump out at them.
A line of text was written on the blackboard, partially smudged as if someone had half-heartedly attempted to erase it; or rather, not so much to erase the words, as to add a flourish to them.
‘Out of the … something, the something?’ read Virginsky, quizzically.
‘Out of the eater, the eaten,’ supplied Porfiry. ‘You must recognise it, Father Anfim.’
‘It is Samson’s riddle to the Philistines,’ confirmed the priest. ‘Out of the eater, the eaten. Out of the strong, the sweet.’
‘Of course. You see, you needn’t have worried. Your atheist Perkhotin was teaching scripture.’
‘I do not believe that!’ blustered Father Anfim.
‘To be honest, neither do I. Do you see that, Pavel Pavlovich? The pattern made by the movement of the eraser across the board? A line moving diagonally up and down in a zig-zag.’
‘The letter M! Just like on the mirror!’
‘I feel certain we have found our accomplice.’
‘Perkhotin?’
‘We know that he taught Maria Petrovna at the Smolny Institute. He must also have made the acquaintance of the Polenov sisters too.’ Porfiry was standing in front of the blackboard, peering into its dust-smeared surface as if into a fog from which he expected figures to emerge. ‘Now all we have to do is work out what he means by this. Samson fought the lion. He ripped it apart with his bare hands. A nest of bees settled inside the lion’s carcass and Samson ate their honey. Is that not the story, Father Anfim?’
‘Yes, that’s correct. Judges, chapter fourteen.’
‘You could take it as a religious text, or equally a revolutionary one. The lion is the state. Samson is the revolutionary fighter, Perkhotin in this case, who brings about a sweet boon through a cataclysmic destructive act.’
‘This does not help us!’ cried Virginsky. ‘It doesn’t tell us where he has taken her.’
‘In these situations, it is imperative to remain calm. We are attempting to navigate the unfathomable pathways of the mind, and of a very peculiar type of mind too. It is possible that, like the two-headed eagle, this message has a double valence. It may be that he has inadvertently betrayed himself in writing this. Or perhaps he has left it here intentionally for us to find. It may be that he wishes to lead us to him. If I am not mistaken about his character, it is dominated by vanity. This is always the case with men such as Perkhotin. School masters, I mean. They put themselves in a position where they are cleverer than everyone around them. I feel he is testing us. Are we clever enough to solve his riddle?’
‘I considered becoming a school master,’ said Virginsky with sullen resentment. ‘If my life had followed a different path — one that did not bring me into contact with you — that may very well have been the career I would have chosen. I do not consider it a profession for the vain. Humility and dedication to service are rather the qualities I would associate with it.’
‘I apologise, Pavel Pavlovich, to you and all school masters. No doubt you are right. No doubt it is my own vanity that induces me to view others through the distorting prism of that defect. I will hazard that there is no vainer class of professional man than the investigating magistrate. And that is why I am determined to solve his riddle. Indeed, I feel that it is already solved in my mind.’
‘So? What is the solution?’
‘The children who were murdered by Aglaia Filippovna … what links them?’
‘They were all pupils at this school?’
‘What else?’
‘They were all factory workers.’
‘Yes. Factory workers. To be more precise, they all worked, in fact, at foreign-owned factories.’
‘That is true. But what of it?’
‘Samson’s riddle. Why think of Samson’s riddle now? Unless a certain address in St Petersburg put Samson’s name into his mind and suggested the riddle, which is particularly apt to his intentions.’
‘Samsonyevsky Prospekt.’
‘Very good, Pavel Pavlovich. Samsonyevsky Prospekt. There is, I believe, a prominent foreign-owned factory that lies between Samsonyevsky Prospekt and the Vyborgskaya Embankment. On Samson’s Quay, in fact.’
‘The Nobel Factory! You think he has taken her there? But why?’
‘Time is of the essence, Pavel Pavlovich. Let us find a drozhki. We can talk on the way.’
43 Three hundred foxes
The air was crystalline. A piercing winter clarity assailed their eyes and sharp particles of frozen moisture stung their faces. Sensing their urgency, the driver stood and whipped his horse mercilessly. The drozhki swung precariously from side to side, as fragile as an empty acorn shell tossed on the wind. At times it seemed to leave the ground.
Porfiry shouted to be heard over the roar of conveyance. ‘News of Aglaia Filippovna’s miraculous recovery no doubt reached him. He must have realised that once she was up and out of his control, it was only a question of time before we came after him. And so, perhaps, he wishes to make one final grand gesture.’
‘What?’ The word came out sharply and was whipped away by the wind.
‘His plan was to incriminate the Tsarist regime — to make the public believe that a member of the Romanov family was capable of child murder, or at the very least to prove that the Tsar was incapable of protecting the empire’s most vulnerable children, thereby propagating revolutionary sentiments to the wider populace. Aglaia Filippovna’s motives may well have been different. Her action was driven by her monstrous jealousy of her sister. She wished to harm all who loved Yelena. That is why she attacked the pupils of Maria Petrovna’s school. To attack Maria Petrovna, whose love for her sister was the most unconditional and unquestioning of all. And of course, Aglaia Filippovna’s jealous rage culminated in her actually destroying her hated sibling. This no doubt created difficulties for Perkhotin. He was forced to help her cover up an essentially personal murder, which he attempted to pass off as political. The two-headed eagle again.’