Sherlock Holmes and The Shadows of St Petersburg by Daniel Victor (bookstand for reading TXT) 📗

am sure you know, Doctor - innocent people confess. Remember house-painter Nikolay in book. After he confess, he try to hang himself. Who knows why they do this? Maybe religious Russians like Nikolay have need to suffer. It must be same in England. These confessors - they cannot know true facts - they were not there - heh, heh, heh - but still they confess. Iss why we want to hold back details. I tell untruth to Fyodor Mikhailovitch and newspapers - I say axe blade used for only one killing. Is how we know who lies.”

“Righto,” said Lestrade with an appreciation of the Russian’s professionalism. “We do the same.”

Porfiry Petrovitch laughed again. “I say, we want to hold back details. We try. But Fyodor Mikhailovitch demand Truth. Wise man. He know I hide important facts. Complain. All the time, Dostoevsky complain. Finally, I tell him - blade used in both murders - but not to say in book.”

“Wait a moment,” cautioned Lestrade. It was only then that the logic of the whole business finally dawned on him. “Both Cheek and Arbuthnot knew about the events only as they were described in the Roosian book. They both agreed that the sharp edge killed only the pawnbroker’s sister. In our murders, both victims were struck by the blade.”

“Precisely,” said Holmes. “That is why I asked the two young men to describe the crime as they knew it - that is, as Dostoevsky described it based on the false information Porfiry had fed him. Recall that most of the novel appeared in monthly instalments before Raskolnikov actually confessed. Apparently, once the killer was apprehended, Dostoevsky saw no need to correct the false information about the blades that he had already announced at the request of the police.”

I could understand the author’s thinking. Whether one or two wretches had been struck by the blade edge of the axe made no difference to his plot.

“But the police knew the true story,” Holmes explained, “and when Ilya Petrovitch heard Raskolnikov confess to using the blade on both of the victims - not just the pawnbroker’s sister - he knew Raskolnikov was telling the truth.”

“Then,” and here Lestrade cast his eyes on the police informer sitting across the table, “then the Assistant here-”

Suddenly, the man in question grabbed his cap, sprang to his feet and ran towards the door. He never made it through, however. For just as he reached for the doorknob, the white-bearded gentleman who had been sitting quietly near the exit all this time, extended his foot. The escaping Russian tripped right over it and fell flat on his face. The rumpus brought in the constable who had been positioned just outside.

“Grab that man!” shouted Lestrade, pointing at the fallen informer, “and bring him back to this chair.”

As the constable wrestled the Russian into his seat, the man with the white beard rose and commanded our attention.

“Gentlemen,” said Porfiry Petrovitch calmly, “may I present to you Mr Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov.”

Chapter Eleven: Confessions

“I am Raskolnikov,” the man announced in a thick Russian accent, “I am murderer Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoevsky wrote about.” Pointing at the Assistant, he added, “I am man who confessed my crime to him.”

“You - you are actually real?” I could not prevent myself from asking. Though I may have come to accept that Dostoevsky’s murder plot was true, it still seemed hard to believe, even with the evidence quite literally standing before me.

“Da,” he answered.

To spare the reader my inept recreation of Raskolnikov’s broken English, I offer the following summary: For the murder of the pawnbroker and her sister, Raskolnikov was sentenced to ten years of hard labour in a frigid Siberian prison - two years longer than Dostoevsky had predicted in the epilogue to Crime and Punishment. As the novel reports, Sonia did follow him to Siberia and settle in a nearby village where she tended to him and to other prisoners as best she could. Dostoevsky accurately if ambiguously predicted Raskolnikov’s future - what Whishaw translated as the man’s “slow progressive regeneration” - when the narrator announced, “this may well form the theme of a new tale.”

What we learned from Raskolnikov that day in Scotland Yard suggests the basis for that new tale, which Dostoevsky himself never reported. Released from prison after the allotted ten years, Raskolnikov remained exiled from St Petersburg. In spite of the cruel conditions in that part of the country, he married Sonia; and the two spent the next five years in Siberia, he working the barren fields, she taking in clothes for mending.

At the end of that period, the courts mercifully - and perhaps following the advice offered by Porfiry Petrovitch - granted Raskolnikov permission to return to St Petersburg. Happily, his old friend Razumihin, now married to Raskolnikov’s sister Dounia, offered him a job in Razumihin’s successful publishing firm. Raskolnikov requested a minor position - nothing too cerebral, nothing too demanding. Reviving the linguistic skills he had employed in his former life, he devoted his time to translating German texts into Russian. Like Lazarus, to whom Raskolnikov never tired of comparing himself, he had been resurrected.

It was in Razumihin’s publishing house that Porfiry Petrovitch found Raskolnikov - though the Russian detective had never really lost touch with the young man. As Porfiry Petrovitch had reassured him many times during their cat-and-mouse encounters, the policeman genuinely liked Raskolnikov. As a result, it did not require a great deal of persuasion to convince the reformed criminal to travel with the Russian detective to London. And why not - when the reason consisted of helping rid British society of a madman murdering people in the old style of Raskolnikov himself?

Once order had been restored in the room, Lestrade formally addressed Ilya Petrovitch: “Did you murder the pawnbroker called Samuel Gottfried and his wife Sarah Gottfried?”

The Assistant sat quietly. Though he had clearly tried to escape, as yet he had confessed to nothing. His face may have been turning red, but his only movement was an