Paying respects
That afternoon, Porfiry took a drozhki to the Koshmarov Apartment Building in Bolshaya Morskaya Street. He was accompanied by Virginsky, who could not help but notice the unusually sombre and taciturn mood of his superior.
‘What do you hope to find, Porfiry Petrovich?’
Porfiry stirred from his morose self-absorption only to shrug his shoulders. In the tight confines of the rocking drozhki, Virginsky felt himself squeezed upwards by the gesture.
‘Do you not think that the gendarmes of the Third Section will have removed any evidence from the scene?’ pressed Virginsky. ‘That is if there was any meaningful evidence left after the fire.’
Porfiry’s eyelids descended in synchrony with a slow, grave nod of agreement.
‘Then why go?’
Porfiry opened his eyes and turned the ice-grey irises to Virginsky. ‘I wish to pay my respects to the dead.’
‘I thought tomorrow was the day for that?’
‘Tomorrow, today. It makes little difference.’
Virginsky raised an eyebrow. ‘To the dead, it makes no difference.’
‘Perhaps we do not do it for them. We do it for ourselves.’
‘You betray yourself, Porfiry Petrovich. That suggests that you do not believe in the survival of the soul after death. It is the kind of thing an atheist would say. Or at the very least, a rationalist.’
‘This week is Thomas Week. St Thomas doubted, before he came to believe.’
‘And you doubt?’
‘Sometimes. When five innocents perish in a fire that may have been started deliberately. . One struggles to see God’s purpose in that.’
‘And Kozodavlev? Was he not innocent?’
‘Very well, six innocents.’
Virginsky paused a moment before resuming: ‘Do we have. . how may I put this? Do we have jurisdiction to enter the scene? We are not, after all, assigned to the case of Kozodavlev.’
‘Kozodavlev was a witness in the case we are investigating.’
‘With all respect, Porfiry Petrovich, we do not know that for certain yet, and will not do so until we have confirmation back from Helsingfors that Kozodavlev was the man watching the sailors. And even then. .’ Virginsky broke off. It seemed that Porfiry felt every word he uttered as a personal wound.
‘There will be no jurisdictional aspect to our visit. As I said, we are simply paying our respects.’
Virginsky’s mouth twisted up on one side, into a bemused smile. ‘And if the Third Section find out? I cannot believe they will not have someone watching.’
‘We have nothing to hide from the Third Section,’ said Porfiry. After a moment, he added, ‘Yet.’ For the first time on the drozhki ride, something like his old liveliness came back into Porfiry Petrovich’s eye. His eyelids oscillated frantically in celebration.
*
They had to step over the remnants of the door, which had been smashed through and lay scattered on the floor.
The pungent smell of charred wood and plasterwork mingled with a cloying dampness. The result was a peculiarly chill and despondent atmosphere. Black streaks marked where the flames had touched the walls and ceiling. The bedroom was so fire-blacked that it looked as though it had been painted that funereal colour, along with every strange, distorted object in it. The walls were gutted, deep black scars where the combusted laths had burnt through the plaster. Only the metal frame of the bed remained intact, though the mattress on it had almost completely disappeared; clumps of black matter hung together around the edges of the bed. The skeleton of a burnt-out armchair lay exposed beside a heat-contorted metal bookcase, its contents vanished. They were puzzling stumps of furniture, barely holding their form, weakened beyond all possibility of function.
Porfiry paced the empty apartment breathing the fumes of the extinguished flames. He quickly realised that he had to tread with caution. In places, where the fire had really taken hold, the boards had been burnt away, and elsewhere, those that remained were too fragile to support his weight.