The Toksovo Ten

Chapter Two

The seventeen remaining party guests were all assembled in the yellow drawing room, sitting on various sofas and chairs, when the door opened and a balding middle-aged man with a full silver mustache strode in. "Hello," he said as they all looked up at him expectantly. "I am Filipp Ignatyich Rassudkin, head of the Investigative Department for the Saint Petersburg governorate, and I will be investigating this case." He settled into an empty chair and looked over them all. "Now I don't mean to alarm you, but we have confirmed that there was indeed poison hemlock in Mademoiselle Vyazemskaya's soup. We've spoken with the cook, and she insists that there was no chance of her accidentally putting poison hemlock in the soup, and that there was no leafy vegetable in the soup when she sent it out. That and the strange red 'nine' painted on the door lead us to believe that Mademoiselle Vyazemskaya's death was murder." He paused, waiting for outcries, but it seemed that the guests, who all looked rather shaken, had already come to that conclusion. "Do any of you know anything that might be of use to us?" he asked.

"Yes," Dmitri Zakharovich said, sitting up from his chair. Everyone looked over at him. "This may have nothing to do with it, it's probably just someone's joke, but it is rather odd. Someone slid a note under my door earlier tonight with the message 'you will pay for your wrongs against me– ten,' and I know several other people here got the same message."

"Sonya got one of those too," Nikolai Petrovich said in a dead voice, staring blankly at the fireplace. Several people murmured in alarm.

Rassudkin raised his eyebrows. "Did anyone– did anyone here write those notes?" he asked, but no one made any reply. "Really, if it was just some joke, please come forward now," he said, but still no one responded, though many were looking around the room to see if someone would. "Alright, who here received one of these notes?" he asked.

Darya Petrovna, Nikolai Petrovich, Stepan Kirillovich, Ekaterina Evgenyevna, Vassily Vassilyevich, Pyotr Semyonovich, Rodion Petrovich, and Dmitri Zakharovich all raised their hands. Rassudkin counted them up. He exhaled. "Eight," he said. "Does anyone have one of these notes with them?" he asked, frowning.

Pyotr Semyonovich nodded, taking his from his pocket.

"Yes, I have mine," Vassily Vassilyevich said quickly as well, and they both went to Rassudkin to give them to him. He looked at both notes carefully.

"And they're all the same then?" he asked. "They all say 'you will pay for your wrongs against me,' dash, ten?"

The other note recipients all nodded and murmured assent.

"Hmm..." Rassudkin murmured. "Well it seems to me– and this will no doubt come as a shock, and I may be making wild leaps– but it seems to me that someone, this 'ten,' is counting down nine victims, and that Mademoiselle Vyazemskaya was their first target– number nine, so to speak."

The room erupted in sound as everyone began speaking at once.

"It seems a little far-fetched," Stepan Kirillovich was saying.

"Really, this is absurd, it sounds like some sort of mystery novel," Pyotr Semyonovich was saying angrily.

"No, no, it makes sense, in fact I was just reading about monomania tonight and this fixation on numbers sounds like a classic case–"

"Oh for God's sake, Vasya, no one cares," Darya Petrovna interrupted Vassily derisively.

"Alright, alright everyone," Rassudkin spoke over them, and they fell silent. "Don't worry, I'm going to speak with each of you individually, you can all make your opinions known. Please stay here while waiting to speak with me. I'm going to send Chief of Police Avenyev in here to analyze your handwriting, see if there are any matches–"