The chief of police and two witnesses, who arrived at the scene of the murder together with Mr. Post, discovered the following: a crowd of people was standing next to the house where Banks was killed. News of the murder had dispersed instantaneously across the neighborhood, and because it was the weekend, people from all the neighboring farms and villages had come to have a look. People in the crowd were talking noisily. There were several pale and crying faces. The door to Banks’s bedroom was found to be closed. The key was stuck in the lock from the inside.
“It is obvious that the thieves came into the room through the window,” said Post, when he examined the door.
They went into the garden to have a look at the bedroom window. The window looked gloomy and sinister. It was covered with a faded green curtain. One corner of the curtain was folded back a little, so they could look inside the bedroom.
“Did any one of you look through the window?” asked the police chief.
“No, sir,” said the gardener Efrem, a short, gray-haired man with the face of a retired drill sergeant. “How could we? It is none of our business, sir! We were all afraid.”
“Oh, Mark Ivanovich, Mark Ivanovich!” The police chief sighed as he looked at the window. “I told you that you would finish badly. I told you, my dear, but you did not listen to me. Dissipation is no good.”
“We have to thank Efrem,” said Mr. Post. “He gave us the idea. Without him, we would never have realized it. He was the first to notice that something was wrong around here. This morning, he came to me and said, ‘Why has our landlord been asleep for so long? He has not left his bedroom for this whole week.’ He told me this, and I became dumb as if someone had struck me on my head. It dawned upon me that he had not appeared since last Saturday, and today is Sunday. Seven days, I am not kidding!”
“Yes, poor man.” The police chief sighed again. “He was a clever young man, well educated and kind, with good manners. He was such good company, too! But he was a dissipated man, let him rest in peace! I had expected so much more from him. Hey, Stepan,” he said, addressing one of the witnesses. “Go to my office right now, and send little Andrew to the police precinct. Tell him to file a report! Tell them all that Mark Ivanovich has been murdered. And then go to the prosecutor’s office, tell the man, Why is it taking him so long? He should be here already! And then, as soon as possible, you can go to the detective Nikolai Ermolaevich, and tell him to come here. Wait, I’ll write him a note.”
The police chief put guards around the house, wrote a brief note to the detective, and went to the manager of the estate to have a cup of tea. For the next ten minutes he sat on a stool, carefully biting a lump of sugar and sipping the boiling hot tea.
“Yes,” he said to Post. “There you are. Rich and famous, a really well-off young man. ‘A man loved by the gods,’ as the poet Pushkin used to say. And what happened to him? Nothing! All he did was drinking and womanizing … and, as a result, he is dead.”
“Two hours later, the detective arrived. Nikolai Ermolaevich Rusty (this is the detective’s name) was a tall, strongly built man of about sixty years; he had worked in his profession for nearly a quarter of a century. He was well-known in the local county as an honest, clever and energetic man who loved his work. He arrived at the scene of the crime with his constant companion and assistant, the junior officer Dukovsky, a tall young man of about twenty-six years old.
“Is it true, gentlemen?” started Mr. Rusty, as he entered the Post’s room and hastily shook hands with all of them. “How is it possible? They killed Mark Ivanovich? No, I can’t believe this! It’s im-pos-si-ble!”
“Well, that’s about it.” The police chief sighed.
“Oh my God! I saw him a week ago. Last Friday, I saw him at the local country market. I have to admit, I had a shot of vodka with him!”
“So there you are.” The police chief heaved another deep sigh.
They sighed a few more times, said the few words which people usually say in such cases. Each had a cup of tea, and then they stepped out of the manager’s house.
“Make way!” the police sergeant cried into the crowd. When they entered the landlord’s house, the detective started his investigation from the bedroom door. It was made of pine, painted yellow, and it was not damaged. There were no signs or outstanding marks which could assist the investigation. They decided to break in.
“Gentlemen, please stay outside. Those of you who are not officers, please do not enter!” said the detective, when, after a long period of knocking and cracking the door was opened by dint of axe and chisel. “Please do not enter—this is in the interests of the investigation. Sergeant, don’t let anyone in!”
Rusty, his assistant, and the police chief opened the door and finally entered the bedroom, walking in an undecided manner, one step at a time. There they saw the following. A huge wooden bed with a thick feather mattress stood in front of the only window. A wrinkled blanket lay on the wrinkled mattress. The pillow, in a nice cotton pillowcase, also very wrinkled, lay on the floor. A nickel coin and a silver pocket watch lay on the bedside table. There was a box of sulfur matches next to them. There was no other furniture—only the bed, the table, and one chair. The sergeant looked under the bed and saw about twenty empty liquor bottles, an old straw hat, and a quart of vodka there. There was a boot covered with dust under the table. The detective cast a glance at the room, frowned, and then blushed.
“Scoundrels,” he mumbled, pressing his fists together.
“And where is Mark Ivanovich?” asked Dukovsky quietly.
“I told you not to interfere!” Rusty responded rudely. “You’d better study the floor. This looks like another case in my practice. Evgraf Koozmich,” he addressed the sergeant in a lower voice, “I had a similar case, it was about twenty years ago, you should remember. The murder of merchant Portraitov. The same thing: the scoundrels killed him and dragged the dead body through the window.”
Rusty went to the window, pulled the curtain aside, and carefully lifted the windowpane. It opened.
“It opens. This means it was not locked. Hmm. There are some scratches and traces on the windowsill. Do you see them? Here, a trace from somebody’s knee. Someone came from the outside. We should make a detailed examination of the window.”
“I don’t see anything special on the floor though,” Dukovsky said. “No spots, or scratches. I found only one bruised Swedish match. Here it is! As far as I remember, Mark Ivanovich did not smoke and as a rule, he used safety sulfur matches, not the Swedish ones. This match could be material evidence.”
“Oh, shut up please!” the detective shook his head. “You and your matches! I can’t put up with these clever fellows. Instead of looking for matches, you’d be better off to examine the bed.”
After the examination of the bed, Dukovsky reported:
“I found no blood, or any other suspicious spots. No torn linen either. I saw the signs of somebody’s teeth on the pillow. Besides this, on the bed, I found the remains of a strange liquid, which smells and tastes like beer. The arrangement of the objects on the bed suggests to me that some struggle was going on there.”
“I know without you that there was a struggle! Nobody is asking you about a struggle! Instead of looking for a struggle, you’d better …”
“One boot is here, the other one is missing.”
“Yes, and what?”
“This means that he was strangled when he was taking off his boots. He did not have enough time to take off his second boot, but they …”
“What are you talking about? How do you know that they strangled him?”
“Because there are traces of teeth on the pillow. The pillow itself is very scrambled and thrown two steps away from the bed.”
“You talk too much, you’re like a chatterbox! Go to the garden. You should have a good look at the garden instead of staying here, and I can examine the room better than you.”
When the investigators came into the garden, they searched the grass. The gr
ass under the window was flattened. A patch of thistles under the window was smashed. Dukovsky found several broken branches and a piece of cotton cloth on them. On one of the upturned heads of the flowers, he found a dark-blue woolen thread.
“What color were the clothes he was last seen wearing?” Dukovsky asked Post.
“Yellow.”
“Excellent. This means that they wore blue.”
Several of these thistle blossoms were cut, and carefully wrapped in paper. At that moment, two more people arrived at the scene: the court officer Svistakovsky and the doctor Tutuev. The court officer greeted them, and at the same time started to satisfy his curiosity. The doctor, a gaunt and slim man with fallen eyes, a long nose, and a sharp chin, sat on the stump of the nearby tree, greeting none and asking nothing. He sighed and said,
“And the Austrians are excited again! I don’t understand, what do they want? Well, Austria, again Austria! This is the sphere of your political influence. I hold you responsible for this tension, for this state of affairs …”
The examination of the window brought no results. But the examination of the garden and the bush next to the window gave many useful clues to the detectives. For example, Dukovsky managed to trace a long dark line on the grass. It consisted of a series of spots, and stretched for several steps in the garden. The line ended at the lilac bush with a big brown spot. It was where they found a boot, which matched the one in the bedroom.
“This is old blood,” said Dukovsky, examining the spots.
The doctor, when he heard the word “blood,” stood up lazily, and cast a fast sliding glance at the spots.
“Yes, this is blood.”
“This means that he was not strangled, if it’s blood,” said Rusty, looking mockingly at Dukovsky.
“They strangled him in the bedroom, and here they became afraid that he might come back to life. Therefore, they hit him here with a sharp object. The blood spot under the bush indicates that he was there for a rather long time, while they were looking for means to remove his body from the garden.”
“And what about the boot?”
“It supports my version that he was killed when he was taking off his boots before going to bed. He took off one boot, but the other one, I mean the one in the garden, had only been partially removed. Then it fell off his foot while they dragged the body across the garden.”
“You are smart, I can see that,” Rusty smiled. “You are very clever! And when are you going to stop talking? Instead of talking so much, you should take a sample of the blood-stained grass for analysis.”
After they made a sketch of the garden, the detective went to the estate manager to write a report and to have breakfast. There, they continued their conversation.
“The watch and the money—everything is intact,” Rusty began. “He was apparently not killed for money.”
“And he was killed by an intelligent man too,” inserted Dukovsky.
“How did you come to this conclusion?”
“I have a Swedish match as proof of this. Local farmers don’t use these matches. They are used by the local landlords, and even then, not by everyone. And there was not just one killer, but at least three of them. Two people held him, and the third strangled him. Mr. Banks was a strong man, and the killers should have known this.”
“How could he use his force, if, for example, he was asleep?”
“The killers got him when he was taking off his boots. This means that he was not asleep.”
“Don’t imagine things! Eat your breakfast!”
“It is my understanding,” said the gardener Efrem, when he put the big teapot on the table, “that this dirty deed was done by Nicholas, and none else.”
“It is quite possible,” said Post. “And who is Nicholas?”
“He is the landlord’s butler, your honor,” said Efrem. “Who else but he could do this? He looks like a real robber, your honor! He is so drunk and dissipated that all are disgusted! He always supplied the landlord with vodka, and put him to bed. Who else? And one day, he even boasted in the pub that he could kill his landlord, your honor. This all happened because of the woman named Annie. Her husband is away all the time, making money, and she was the butler’s girlfriend for a while. The landlord noticed her, he liked her, and he paid attention to her. So, Nicholas was very mad about all this. Now he is completely drunk, lying on the kitchen floor. He was crying, lying about how sorry he was that the landlord was dead.”
“And really, this woman Annie can drive everyone mad,” Post said. “She is just a farmer’s wife, a country woman, but once you’ve seen her, you will at once—Even Mark Ivanovich used to call her ‘babe.’ There is something magnetic about her, something …”
“I saw her, I know,” said the detective, blowing his nose into a red handkerchief.
Dukovsky blushed and looked down. The police chief nervously tapped at the saucer with his finger. The police officer coughed and started shuffling papers in his case. It seemed that only the doctor was impervious to the news about Annie.
The detective ordered them to bring in Nicholas. He was a tall young man; his nose was covered with smallpox scars, his chest was thin and fallen; he was dressed in an old coat given to him by the landlord. He came into Post’s room, bowed very low, and stood silently in front of the detective. His face looked sleepy, and his eyes were red from crying. He was so drunk that he could hardly keep his balance.
“Where is the landlord?” Rusty asked him.
“He was killed, your honor.” After saying this, Nicholas blinked, and started to cry.
“We know that he was killed. But where is he now? Where is his body?”
“People say that they pushed his body through the window and buried it in the garden.”
“Really? Hmm. The results of this investigation have already leaked to the servants.”
“This is bad. Please, tell us, my dear, where were you on the night the landlord was killed, that is, on Saturday night?”
Nicholas lifted his head, stretched his neck and thought for a while.
“I don’t know sir. I was drunk and I don’t remember anything.
“Alibi,” Dukovsky whispered, smiled and rubbed his hands.
“Well, all right. And why is there blood under the landlord’s window?”
Nicholas looked up and thought again.
“Think faster,” the police officer said to him.
“Wait a minute! That blood came from nothing, just from a chicken, your honor. I had to kill a chicken for the kitchen. I cut its neck, as I always do, but then the chicken got away from me, and ran across the garden. That’s where the blood came from.”
Efrem testified that Nicholas really did slaughter chickens for the kitchen, in different places every time, but no one thought that a chicken with its throat half cut could run across the garden. On the other hand, no one could deny it either.
“Alibi,” smiled Dukovsky. “And what a stupid alibi.”
“Were you close to Annie?”
“Yes, I sinned with her.”
“And did the landlord take her away from you?”
“Not exactly. Right after me, it was Mr. Post, then Ivan Mikhailovich, and then it was milord himself. That’s how I was.”
Post looked embarrassed and scratched his left eye. Dukovsky stared at him closely, read the embarrassment on his face, and trembled. He noticed dark blue pants which the manager wore, a detail to which he had previously paid no attention. The pants reminded him of the blue thread he had found on the bush.
Rusty, in his turn, looked suspiciously at Post.
“You can go,” he said to Nicolas.
“And now, may I ask you a question, Mr. Post. You were definitely here on Saturday night, weren’t you?”
“Yes, at ten p.m. I had a dinner with Mark lvanovich.”
“And what happened then?”
Post became embarrassed, and stood up from the table.
“Then—then—I don’t remember,” he mumbled. ?
??I drank a lot that day. I don’t even recall where I fell asleep. Why are you all looking at me this way? Do you think that I killed him?”
“Where did you get up the next morning?”
“In the servants’ room, in a small bed next to the oven. Anyone can testify to that. I don’t remember how I got there though.”
“Please don’t get excited. Do you know Annie?”
“There was nothing special about her.”
“Did you pass her on to Banks?”
“Yes. Hey, Efrem, bring us some more mushrooms. Do you want any more tea, Egraf Kuzmich?”
After these words, there was a heavy, horrifying silence which lasted for about five minutes. Dukovsky remained silent and stared at Post’s pale face, as if he wanted to hypnotize it with his sharp eyes. The detective broke the silence,
“We should go to the big house, and talk to Maria Ivanovna. I wonder whether she might be helpful to us.”
Rusty and his assistant thanked Post for the breakfast and went to the manor house. There, they found Maria Ivanovna, a forty-five-year-old spinster who was Banks’s sister, in the family room. She grew pale when she saw the large leather bags in the guests’ hands, and the badges on their uniform caps.
“First of all, dear lady, I must beg your forgiveness for interrupting your, so to speak, special mood,” started the old detective in a very gallant and courteous manner. “We have come to you to ask just a few questions. You must have heard about what has happened. We think that your brother was, so to speak, killed. Well, no one can escape from death, neither kings, nor peasants. Can you please help us with any advice, or explanation?”
“Oh, don’t ask me,” said Maria Ivanovna, growing ever more pale and covering her face with her palms. “I can’t tell you anything. Anything. Please, I beg you. I can’t. What can I do? Oh, no. Not a word about my brother! No, even if I have to die, I won’t tell you!”
Maria Ivanovna burst out crying, and ran into another room. The detectives exchanged glances, shrugged their shoulders, and prepared to leave.
“Damned woman,” swore Dukovsky as they were leaving the mansion.