Usually, when there was a sequence of mysterious atrocities, the problem was that there was no reasonably plausible hypothesis. But here it was the opposite. Too many hypotheses arose. Even if one started from the basics of deduction – the two main motives that led one man to kill another: ‘cui prodest’ and ‘cherchez la femme’.
Who could have benefited from the death of the millionaire?
Well, for instance, the whole of Noah’s Ark and Mr Stern personally. Under the terms of the will, the company of actors received a substantial capital sum. That was one. The insistence with which the entrepreneur had tried to get the company to move into the cinematograph had irritated everyone and set their nerves on edge. The world of the theatre was pathological, filled with hypertrophied passions. If the character of the individual with the inclinations of a murderer had been formed in this environment (and this was almost an undoubted fact), the above reason could prove quite enough. Here one also had to take into account the psychology of the artistic criminal. This was a special personality type, for whom the ‘beauty’ of a concept could provide the impulse to commit a crime – in addition to the practical gain involved.
As for ‘cherchez la femme’, here there was no need to search for the woman. The candidate was obvious. However, if the murders had been committed because of Eliza, that threw up an entire bunch of theories.
Shustrov had proposed to a woman at whom many eyes gazed lustfully and to whom many hands reached out covetously. (It was disgusting that for a while Erast Petrovich himself had jostled in that crowd.) Madam Altairsky’s admirers could well include someone whose jealousy could lead to them committing a crime.
In this case, unlike the version with cui prodest, it was easy to add in the previous two murders. The rumours about Limbach (it was not important whether they were true) claimed that he had won Eliza’s affections. The same rumours had been spread about Emeraldov. Erast Petrovich himself had read in a revue of Poor Liza an extremely transparent hint about the ‘intense sensuality of the acting of the leading players’ not being the result of stage passion alone.
To the two basic motivations to which ordinary people were prone there should be added the exotic motivations possible only in the theatre.
In addition to amorous jealousy there was also actor’s jealousy. The leading lady in a company was always fiercely envied. Cases were known of a prima ballerina’s female comrades tipping ground glass into her shoes before a performance. Sometimes pepper was added to an opera singer’s egg-nog in order to make her lose her voice. And anything could happen in a drama theatre. But it was one thing to stick a snake in a basket of flowers and quite another to cold-bloodedly dispatch Emeraldov, slit open Limbach’s stomach and slash Shustrov’s throat to ribbons.
The sugary Captain Drissen was, of course, mistaken concerning the sequence of the cuts. Examination of the wounds had demonstrated that the fatal wound had been inflicted first. The others had been added later, after the spasms had ceased. That was clear both from the traces of blood on the floor and from the minor cuts themselves: they were neat and even, as if they had been made along a ruler. What the murderer had needed this work of art for was an open question. But the signature of all the crimes was characterised by a certain fancifulness and theatricality. Emeraldov had been poisoned with wine from Gertrude’s goblet; Limbach had been left to bleed to death in a locked dressing room; Shustrov’s throat had been lacerated with a razor after he was dead.
And concerning the matter of theatricality. In the play that Erast Petrovich had written, one character, a merchant, had his head cut off in repayment for his perfidy. Shustrov was an entrepreneur, in a certain sense also a merchant. Was there some reference to the play here? Anything was possible. It would have to be clarified if any parallels could be traced between the actions of the Moscow millionaire and the Japanese moneybags.
There was also another theory that was absolutely insane. Erast Petrovich could not get out of his mind the ‘benefit performance’ and the accursed 1s mentioned in the Tablets. He even dreamed about them at night: pointed, glowing bright scarlet and then melting away, melting away. At first there were eight of them, then seven, then two had disappeared at once and five were left. And, by the way, the slashes on the dead man’s throat had resembled scarlet 1s, one large, fat one and ten thinner ones. Eleven 1s in all and 11 was two 1s again. Raving lunacy, schizophrenia!
His head, already dulled by the humiliating torments of love, refused to perform its usual analytical work. Never before had Erast Petrovich been in such terrible intellectual form. Flowers with vipers, goblets with poison, bloody razors and fragile 1s were all jumbled up together in his brain, swirling round in absurd roundelay.
But the skills he had developed over years, his willpower and habit of self-discipline, eventually won out. The first law of investigation reads: when there are too many theories, their number has to be reduced, by first removing the most unlikely. Therefore Erast Petrovich decided first of all to get rid of the annoying 1s.
This would require identifying the joker who was making the idiotic entries in the ‘sacred book’. Taking him by the scruff of the neck (or by the elbow, if it was a lady) and demanding an explanation.
It was a rather bothersome business, but basically simple – which was another reason why Fandorin decided to start with the ‘benefit performance’.
On the evening of the tenth of November, after the performance, Erast Petrovich came to the wings to drink a glass of champagne with the company. Actors are a superstitious crowd and they take traditions seriously. So even the complete teetotallers, like Reginina or Noah Noaevich, clinked glasses with the others and took a sip of the wine. Fandorin remembered where each of them left his or her glass. When the green room was empty, he marked each one, put them all in his travelling bag and took them away with him. The buffet manager had already left, so no one would notice the disappearance until the next morning. And that night Erast Petrovich intended to come back here and put the glasses back in their places.
During the previous year, which had been devoted to studying chemistry, Fandorin had given over a lot of time to investigating blood groups, a new discovery that was of importance not only for medicine, but also for criminalistics. It promised even more interesting results in the future; however, even now the analysis of traces of blood could be of tremendous assistance to an investigator. The courts still refused to recognise this form of analysis as evidence for the prosecution, but there had already been a case in which blood analysis had helped to acquit an innocent party. A robbery and murder had been committed in a brothel. The police had discovered fresh spots of blood on the dress of one of the prostitutes who had come under suspicion, and on this basis they had decided that she was the murderer. The girl had no alibi and she had been in court before. The members of the jury were clearly inclined towards a guilty verdict. However, examination of the blood spots demonstrated that the blood belonged to a different group from that of the victim. The prostitute was released, and the hero of the day was not her barrister, but the medical expert.
Erast Petrovich had been greatly interested by this discovery and had taken it farther. In particular, he had established that the blood group could be determined from the saliva. This was the purpose for which the glasses from the theatre buffet had been temporarily purloined.
In the depths of the night in his home laboratory Fandorin took samples and performed his analysis. There were only ten glasses – he had excluded Masa and Eliza from the list of suspects. After some hesitation, he had kept Stern. Who could tell whether the director himself were not simply acting the fool – for the sake of his ‘theory of rupture’ or something else of the sort.