The Winter Queen Read Free Page B

from the leather blotter.
    Pyotr Kokorin
    The first thought to strike Erast Fandorin was that the letter did not appear to have been written in a state of emotional distress.
    “What does this mean about the blotter?” he asked.
    Ivan Prokofievich shrugged. “He didn’t have any blotter on him. But what could you expect, the state he was in? Maybe he was meaning to do something or other, but he forgot. It seems clear enough he was a pretty unstable sort of gentleman. Did you read how he twirled the cylinder on that revolver? And, by the way, only one of the chambers had a bullet in it. It’s my opinion, for instance, that he didn’t really mean to shoot himself at all—just wanted to give his nerves a bit of a thrill, put a keener edge on his feeling for life, so to speak, so afterward his food would have more savor and his sprees would seem sweeter.”
    “Only one bullet out of six? That really was bad luck,” said Erast Fandorin, aggrieved for the dead man. But the idea of the leather blotter was still nagging at him.
    “Where does he live? That is, where did he…”
    “An eight-room apartment in a new building on Ostozhenka Street, and very posh too.” Ivan Prokofievich was keen to share his impressions. “Inherited his own house in the Zamoskvorechie district from his father, an entire estate, outbuildings and all, but he didn’t want to live there, moved as far away from the merchantry as he could.”
    “Well then, was no leather blotter found there?”
    The superintendent’s assistant was astonished at the idea. “Why, do you think we should have searched the place? I tell you, I’d be afraid to let the agents loose around the rooms of an apartment like that—they might get tempted off the straight and narrow. What’s the point, anyway? Egor Nikiforich, the investigator from the district public prosecutor’s office, gave the dead man’s valet a quarter of an hour to pack up his things and had the local officer keep an eye on him to make sure he didn’t filch any of his master’s belongings, and then he ordered me to seal the door. Until the heirs come forward.”
    “And who are the heirs?” Erast Fandorin asked inquisitively.
    “Now, there’s the catch. The valet says Kokorin has no brothers or sisters. There are some kind of second cousins, but he wouldn’t let them inside the door. So who’s going to end up with all that loot?” Ivan Prokofievich sighed enviously. “Frightening just to think of it…Ah, but it’s no concern of ours. The lawyer or the executors will turn up tomorrow or the next day. Not even a day’s gone by yet—we’ve still got the body lying in the icehouse. But Egor Nikiforich could close the case tomorrow, then things will start moving all right.”
    “But even so it is odd,” Fandorin observed, wrinkling his brow. “If someone makes special mention of some blotter or other in the last letter he ever writes, there must be something to it. And that bit about ‘an absolute swine’ is none too clear either. What if there is something important in that blotter? It’s up to you, of course, but I would definitely search the apartment for it. It seems to me that blotter is the very reason the note was written. There’s some mystery here, mark my words.”
    Erast Fandorin blushed, afraid that his impetuous suggestion of a mystery might appear too puerile, but Ivan Prokofievich failed to notice anything strange about the notion.
    “You’re right there. We should at least have looked through the papers in the study,” he admitted. “Egor Nikiforich is always in a hurry. There’s eight of them in the family, so he always tries to sneak off home as quick as he can from inspections and investigations. He’s an old man—only a year to go to his pension—so what else can you expect…I’ll tell you what, Mr. Fandorin. What would you say to going around there yourself? We could take a look together. And then I’ll put up a new seal—that’s easy enough. Egor