A Vengeful Longing

3

Her hair was dark and loosely suggested the coiffeured rings that had shaped it the night before. Traces of cosmetic showed on her face, which appeared pale. She pouted and glared at Salytov.

‘Ilya Petrovich, kindly escort the young lady back to the bedroom and allow her the opportunity to make herself decent.’

‘I fear that is something she will never be able to do,’ said Salytov. This provoked a torrent of French: apparently the girl in the throw’s understanding of Russian was greater than she had led Salytov to believe. Porfiry understood her to insist that she was a good girl.

Porfiry reassured her, also in French, that he believed her. He invited her to join him in the drawing room as soon as she was dressed. ‘Je dois vous demander quelques questions.’

Salytov led her out, though she refused his offered hand. Porfiry looked back at the couple at the kitchen table. The stupefaction on their faces seemed genuine. So, he thought, they did not know she was there either.

An hour later, freshly perfumed and newly made-up, a necklace of pearls at her throat, her hair restored to a fragile magnificence, the unidentified French woman swept into Setochkin’s tiny drawing room almost filling it with the layers of lace and pink satin of her décolleté gown. She held a Chinese fan, decorated with peacocks, which she agitated constantly, as if it were a living thing that depended on this movement to keep it alive. She was utterly unabashed; in fact, her gait was stiff with outraged dignity. Porfiry found himself in the extraordinary position of admiring her.

With its pretty figurines, floral drapes and delicate watercolours on lilac-papered walls, the room revealed an unexpectedly feminine side to Setochkin’s taste, unless he had surrendered the furnishing of it to someone else, a sister perhaps, or his mother, or even — and more probably — a mistress. The young woman seemed perfectly at home there. Doubtless she had sat in similar rooms in similar apartments, and had possibly even advised on the furnishing of them.

‘What is this about?’ she demanded in French, as she snapped the fan shut with callous finality. It seemed she needed both hands to scoop her skirts to sit.

Porfiry answered her in French. ‘We are investigating the death of Colonel Setochkin.’ Virginsky winced at the bluntness of the statement, which was not softened by the filter of another language.

‘Alyosha? Alyosha is dead?’ The pearls at her throat rose and fell. The fan snapped open again. And now the impression was that it was the fan that caused her hand to move, and that without her holding on to it, it would flutter up to the ceiling. She controlled it enough to bring it close to the fresh flush of her throat. She showed no other sign of emotion; the powder on her face was perhaps too thick to allow it.

‘Are you sure? He was perfectly alive the last time I saw him.’

‘And when was that, mademoiselle?’

‘Really, monsieur, when do you think?’

‘Do you always sleep so late?’ Somehow, this was not the question Porfiry had meant to ask.

‘It had been an exhausting night. As I said, Alyosha was full of life. How did he die?’

‘He sustained a gunshot wound. It seems likely that that was the cause of his death.’

‘Ah, poor Alyosha. What a tragedy.’ The French woman rose from her seat and took two or three paces forwards, as though to the front of an imagined stage.

‘What is your name, mademoiselle? And how did you come to be in Colonel Setochkin’s. . apartment?’

‘My name is Alphonsine Lambert. I am here because Alyosha brought me here. We came by cab. How did you get here?’

‘It is really for me to ask the questions.’ Porfiry bowed in gentle remonstration. He angled his head to look at her, smiling indulgently. ‘Mademoiselle Alphonsine, my dear. . this may prove to be quite painful for you. Perhaps more so than you are prepared to admit. How long have you known Colonel Setochkin?’

‘He is an old friend.’ The fan swept wildly around her, almost escaping her grasp.

‘I see. And were you in the habit of returning with him to spend the night in his apartment?’

‘Please. You are not my mother. And even if you were, you would not take that tone.’ Alphonsine’s laughter was deep and disquieting. Porfiry took a cigarette from his brightly enamelled case and lit it. He was about to put the case away when Alphonsine said: ‘Don’t be a brute, darling. Won’t you let me have one?’

He offered the case without a word and lit her cigarette for her.

‘How did you meet Alyosha?’

‘The usual way. He came to see me.’ At Porfiry’s puzzled frown, she explained: ‘At the theatre.’

‘You’re an actress?’

‘Hardly, darling. How would I manage the lines?’ More deep laughter rippled the pearls of her necklace. ‘Unless it were Racine, of course,’ she added seriously. ‘Or Molière.’ Her naked shoulders shook in an inexplicable convulsion. ‘No. I’m a dancer. There’s no need to look like that. But, yes, there comes a point in a girl’s career when she must start to think about retirement.’

‘And Alyosha was your future, after retirement?’

‘He was one possible future, I suppose.’ Alphonsine seemed to regard Porfiry with a deeply thoughtful gaze. ‘Do you like the dance, darling?’

‘We are not here to talk about me,’ said Porfiry, managing somehow not to look at Virginsky.

‘I used to do many dances for Alyosha alone.’

‘Do you know a friend of Colonel Setochkin’s by the name of Tatyana Vakhrameva?’

Alphonsine clicked her tongue distastefully. ‘Did she kill him? I would not be at all surprised. She was very jealous.’

Now Porfiry allowed himself to look at Virginsky, who nodded slightly back.

‘And such a temper on the girl!’ Alphonsine was evidently encouraged by the effect of her words on the two men.

‘I see. And did you ever witness any scenes between Colonel Setochkin and Tatyana?’

‘There were always scenes. Last night, for example. After the show, Alyosha and I were dining in a private room at a restaurant.’

‘Which restaurant?’

‘The Cubat on Bolshaya Morskaya Street.’

‘And what happened?’

‘It was all too ridiculous.’ Alphonsine became fascinated by her cigarette.

‘Please.’

She blinked irritably and at last met Porfiry’s eye. ‘Somehow she found out where we were. She burst in and. . it is sufficient to say, the waiters had to be called to remove her.’

‘She became violent?’

‘Not violent. Just ridiculous.’ After a beat, she added, ‘Which is far worse.’ She hid her smile in her colluding fan.

‘Good God!’ said Virginsky, inflating his cheeks. He flinched away from the source of the stench that assailed them, the three leaking barrels standing against one wall of the courtyard. The well was filled with intoxicated flies that buzzed angrily at them, jealous and protective.

‘What a rare privilege,’ said Porfiry, ‘to have a balcony overlooking this.’ He looked up at the back of Setochkin’s apartment building, at the one wall from which a few rickety-looking wrought-iron balconies projected. Streaks of rust marked the masonry beneath them. ‘It is something in which we specialise in Petersburg, concealing decaying yards behind splendid facades.

Perhaps it stands as a metaphor for something peculiarly Russian.’ He pointed up at a fourth-floor balconied window in which one pane was open. ‘That must be his.’ There was a balcony on the window next to it, and balconies on the two windows above them, but none beneath.

‘What are we looking for?’

‘It is important to get the lie of the land, to consider every means of access to and from a murder scene.’

‘But the balcony door was locked from the inside. Surely that rules out the possibility of the murderer escaping through it?’

Porfiry did not answer immediately. ‘Oh, incontestably,’ he replied at last. He shook his head despondently when he turned back to Virginsky. ‘We have no choice but to take him in. Of all the imaginable explanations, it is the least impossible.’