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

I followed Holmes and Lestrade toward the dark stairwell, and slowly we made our way up the narrow steps. Gottfried and his wife had lived on the third storey. Flickering like votive lights, small candles sat on tiny shelves at the landings; and bony fingers clawed round the edges of nearby doors as the people within peered out between the narrow gaps to see the commotion on the stairs. The wide eyes we could discern might have belonged to frightened animals in the brush.

A second uniformed constable braced to attention as Lestrade marched by and pushed open the door to reveal the murder scene. Immediately, the thick cloying smell of death overwhelmed all else.

1 See “The Adventure of the Aspen Papers” in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Part I, edited by David Marcum. (DDV)

2 See my aforementioned narrative entitled The Outrage at the Diogenes Club. (JHW)

Chapter Two: The Scene of the Crime

The bodies of Gottfried and his wife lay before us, their heads split open and cradled in pools of blood.

Call me paranoiac. Or haunted. Perhaps my brain had marinated not too long but too deeply in the brine of Dostoevsky’s murderous tale. Pray, forgive me, but the horrific sight framed through the doorway seemed nothing less than a twisted restaging of the gruesome abattoir in the opening section of the Russian novel.

The old man had fallen face down, his feet a few paces from the door, his hands stretched out above his head. I could barely make out the edge of a greying beard that extended some six inches below his chin. The woman lay on her back nearby, her features beribboned with blood. It seemed an almost perfect re-creation.

Lestrade began to step forward; but Holmes, desirous of examining the scene on his own, extended an arm to bar the way. Even before entering, he wanted to inspect the doorway. Ironically, Dostoevsky made much of doorways and thresholds and corridors and stairs in his book, those narrow passageways where people seem forced to encounter one another.

“Note the mezuzah,” said Holmes, pointing to a small cylinder of reddish wood that was nailed to the inside of the doorpost. The thing had been affixed on an angle, the top leaning inward.

“Here,” said Lestrade, “I’ve seen others like that. What do they mean?”

“Some day,” said my friend, “I shall have to write a monograph on the significance of religious trinkets. There is much to be learned from the history of objects like the Catholic rosary or the Hindu bindi.”

“Mr Holmes!” grumbled an impatient Lestrade, “can we please get on with it?”

Holmes waved away his complaint. “The mezuzah comes from the Hebrew for ‘doorpost’. A small scroll of holy writ resides within. The observant Jew believes that placing one of these at his door signifies that God is watching over the home.”

“Much good that it did,” I said.

“Mumbo-jumbo,” scoffed Lestrade. “Like those Golem murders in Limehouse a few years past.”

Ignoring the remark, Holmes instructed us to remain in the corridor. Then he carefully entered the flat.

From the doorway, I could see that the religious atmosphere permeated the interior as well. A pair of tall, silver candlesticks stood on the mantel (too large, perhaps, for the murderer to steal); next to them, a small, carved wooden box (for spices, I would learn later); white tendrils of fringe from the dead man’s prayer shawl worn under his shirt spilled out at his waist onto the blue carpeting. A round, black skullcap lay in a pool of gore not far from his head. The bloody cap had been sliced in half along the diameter, both pieces remaining oddly connected only at their ends. It was as if the sharp blade had split the cloth but spared the thread.

Holmes fell to his knees again, this time to examine the floor round the dead pawnbroker. Through his glass, he observed the wood boards and threadbare rug leading from the door to the deceased. Next he ran the lens over the old man’s body. The pawnbroker was dressed in white shirt, black waistcoat, and black trousers. In particular, Holmes scrutinised the dead man’s outstretched hands and fingers.

Minutes passed before he completed the grim task. Then, still holding the lens before him, he crawled on his knees the few feet between the pawnbroker’s body and that of the woman - Mrs Gottfried it would later be confirmed. Her wound too was the work of the axe blade, for the top of her skull was split in halves. What was left of her fractured crown was covered with a dark kerchief similarly rent in two. Her matted hair appeared to be grey, but the exact colour was difficult to determine owing to the thick clots of blood surrounding the wound.

Holmes inspected the woman in the same fashion he had examined her husband, then stood and began surveying the room itself. He scrutinised the blood spray that mottled the walls, floor, and ceiling and viewed the tables, bookshelves, and double-globed gas lamp, which still remained lit.

Only when he moved on to the bedroom did he motion us into the flat. Even after we had entered, however, Lestrade and I continued to watch Holmes at work. As Lestrade had reported, the bedroom had been ransacked. Nonetheless, Holmes picked his way between two fallen chairs, peered into the drawers that had been pulled out, peeked under the bed whose mattress had been awkwardly turned on its wooden frame, looked into a small metal chest that stood open on the floor near the bed, and examined the random objects on the shelves - tiny boxes, small bottles, books, and the like - most of which at had been knocked about.

Finally, he brushed himself off again and re-entered the sitting room.

“Well, Mr Holmes,” asked Lestrade, “what have you learned?”

“First and foremost, Lestrade, I found that your men have marched all over the flat obfuscating most of whatever tell-tale marks the floor may have revealed.”

“We had to determine that foul play