‘There haven’t been any yet,’ the commissioner said with a shrug. ‘First one has to apply bertillonage to all the recidivists, and that will take years. It’s bedlam in Alphonse’s department: they bring in the prisoners in shackles, measure them up from every angle like horses at a fair, and jot down the data on little cards. But then pretty soon it will make police work as easy as falling off a log. Let’s say you find the print of a left hand at the scene of a burglary. You measure it and go to the card index.
Aha, middle finger eighty-nine millimetres long, look in section No. 3. And there you find records of seventeen burglars with a finger of the right length. After that, the whole thing is as easy as pie: check where each of them was on the day of the robbery and nab the one who has no alibi.
‘You mean criminals are divided up into categories according to the length of the middle finger?’ the Russian asked with lively interest.
Gauche chuckled condescendingly into his moustache.
‘There is a whole system involved, my young friend. Bertillon divides all people into three groups, according to the length of the skull. Each of these three groups is divided into three subgroups, according to the width of the skull. That makes nine subgroups in all. Each subgroup is in turn divided into three sections, according to the size of the middle finger of the left hand. Twenty-seven sections. But that’s not all. There are three divisions in each section, according to the size of the right ear. So how many divisions does that make? That’s right, eighty-one.
Subsequent classification takes into account the height, the length of the arms, the height when seated, the size of the foot and the length of the elbow joint. A total of eighteen thousand six hundred and eighty-three categories! A criminal who has undergone full bertillonage and been included in our card index will never be able to escape justice again. They used to have it so easy -just give a false name when you’re arrested and you could avoid any responsibility for anything you did before.’
‘That is remarkable,’ the diplomat mused. ‘However, bertillonage does not offer much help with the solution of a particular crime if an individual has not been arrested before.’
Gauche spread his arms helplessly.
‘Well, that is a problem that science cannot solve. As long as there are criminals, people will not be able to manage without us professional sleuths.’
‘Have you ever heard of fingerprints?’ Fandorin asked, presenting to the commissioner a narrow but extremely firm hand with polished nails and a diamond ring.
Glancing enviously at the ring (a commissioner’s annual salary at the very least), Gauche laughed.
‘Is that some kind of gypsy palm reading?’
‘Not at all. It has been known since ancient times that the raised pattern of papillary lines on the tips of the fingers is unique to every individual. In China coolies seal their contracts of hire with the imprint of their thumb dipped in ink.’
‘Well now, if only every murderer were so obliging as to dip his thumb into ink and leave an imprint at the scene of the crime …’ The commissioner laughed good-naturedly.
The diplomat, however, was not in the mood for joking.
‘Monsieur ship’s detective, allow me to inform you that modern science has established with certainty that an imprint is left when a finger comes into contact with any dry, firm surface. If a criminal has so much as touched a door in passing, or the murder weapon, or a window pane, he has left a trace which allows the p-perpetrator to be identified and unmasked.’
Gauche was about to retort ironically that there were twenty thousand criminals in France, that between them they had two hundred thousand fingers and thumbs and you would go blind staring at all of them through your magnifying glass, but he hesitated, recalling the shattered display case in the mansion on the rue de Grenelle. There had been fingerprints left all over the broken glass. But it had never entered anyone’s head to copy them and the shards had been thrown out with the garbage.
My, what an amazing thing progress was! Just think what it meant. All crimes were committed with hands, were they not?
And now it seemed that hands could snitch every bit as well as paid informants. Just imagine, if you were to copy the fingers of every bandit and petty thief, they wouldn’t dare turn those filthy hands of theirs to any more dirty work. It would be the end of crime itself.
The very prospect was enough to set a man’s head spinning.
Reginald Milford-Stokes
2 April 1878
18 hours, 34V2 minutes, Greenwich time
My precious Emily,
Today we entered the Suez Canal. In yesterday’s letter I described the history and topography of Port Said to you in detail, and now I simply cannot resist the temptation of relating to you certain curious and instructive facts concerning the Great Canal, this truly colossal monument to human endeavour, which next year celebrates its tenth anniversary.
Are you aware, my adorable little wife, that the present canal is actually the fourth to have existed and that the first was excavated as long ago as the fourteenth century Before Christ, during the reign of the great Pharaoh Rameses? When Egypt fell into decline the desert winds choked up the channel with sand, but under the Persian king Darius, five hundred years Before Christ, slaves dug out another canal at the cost of 120,000 human lives. Herodotus tells us that the voyage along it took four days and that two triremes travelling in opposite directions could easily pass each other without their oars touching.
Several ships from Cleopatra’s shattered fleet fled to the Red Sea by this route and so escaped the fearful wrath of the vengeful Octavian Caesar.
Following the fall of the Roman Empire, time again separated the Atlantic and Indian Oceans with a barrier of shifting sand one hundred miles wide, but no sooner was a powerful state established in these barren lands by the followers of the Prophet Mohammed than people took up their mattocks and pickaxes once again. As I sail through these dead salt-meadows and endless sand-dunes, I marvel unceasingly at the stubborn courage and ant-like diligence of humankind in waging its never-ending struggle, doomed to inevitable defeat, against all-powerful Chronos. Vessels laden with grain plied the Arabian canal for two hundred years, and then the earth erased this pitiful wrinkle from its forehead and the desert was plunged into sleep for a thousand years.
Regrettably the father of the new Suez was not a Briton, but the Frenchman Lesseps, a representative of a nation which, my darling Emily, I quite justifiably hold in the most profound contempt. This crafty diplomat persuaded the Egyptian governor to issue a firman for the establishment of The Universal Company of the Suez Maritime Canal. The Company was granted a 99-year lease on the future waterway, and the Egyptian government was allotted only 13 per cent of the net revenue. And these villainous French dare to label us British pillagers of the backward peoples! At least we win our privileges with the sword, not by striking grubby bargains with greedy local bureaucrats.
Every day 1600 camels delivered drinking water to the workers digging the Great Canal, but still the poor devils died in their thousands from thirst, intense heat and infectious diseases. Our Leviathan 15 sailing over corpses, and I seem to see the yellow teeth offleshless, eyeless skulls grinning out at me from beneath the sand. It took ten years and 15 million pounds sterling to complete this gargantuan work of construction. But now a ship can sail from England to India in almost half the time it used to take. A mere 25 days or so and you arrive in Bombay. It is quite incredible! And the scale of it! The canal is more than 100 feet deep, so that even our gigantic ark can sail fearlessly here, with no risk of running aground.