Dmitri and the Milk-Drinkers

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 1997 by Collins Crime

Copyright © Michael Pearce 1997

Michael Pearce asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content or written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual or technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780008259358

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2013 ISBN: 9780007483082 Version: 2017-09-12

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Michael Pearce

About the Publisher

Dmitri Kameron, Examining Magistrate, was walking along the corridor of the Court House when a woman came out of a door ahead of him.

‘Help me, please!’ she said.

Dmitri, a sympathetic young man fresh from law school and therefore lacking the consciousness of his dignity seen in the provinces as proper to his post, paused politely.

The girl was fair and well spoken; a bit above the run of women usually seen in Kursk, never mind the Court House, and Dmitri was impressed.

Later, he came to think he had been intended to be.

‘Could you take me to the yard, please? I need some air.’

‘Of course!’

He offered her his arm. Things, thought Dmitri, were improving.

‘I felt faint,’ she said.

‘Oh, it’s stifling in the Courtroom. They haven’t caught up with the fact that it’s spring yet. The heating’s still going full blast. And then, of course, there are so many people.’

‘I felt faint,’ she said again.

‘A breath of fresh air will put you right!’

But would she find it in the yard? There would be horse-shit everywhere, prisoners coming and going who, after long confinement, smelled worse than the horse-shit, the rank tobacco of the guards, and the dubious smell that came from the open drains. He had been meaning to speak about that to someone ever since he came, but the rooms used by the lawyers were at the front of the building and it was easy to forget what went on at the rear.

He stopped abruptly.

‘I wonder – might it not be better if we went out by the front door? The air would be fresher. We could go for a walk in the park.’

And sod the case he was working on! They’d called the interval hadn’t they? Well, they’d just have to wait.

‘No, no, please! The yard!’

‘Are you sure? I could – ’

‘Quite sure.’

She walked determinedly on.

In the yard it was as bad as he had feared. The carts had come for another convoy and their heavy wooden wheels had churned the usual mud of the yard to a deep bog into which the horses sank up to their fetlocks. The drivers were finding it impossible to turn the carts and everywhere men were shouting and swearing and there was a continuous spray of mud.

‘Honestly – ’ Dmitri began.

‘I’ll be all right. Really!’

He looked around for somewhere she could stand.

‘This will be all right. Truly! But could you fetch me some water, please?’

He left her standing in the doorway while he went to find the water. There was a well in the yard, but he certainly was not going to wade across to that. He tried some of the rooms nearby and did indeed find a pail of water which might have been intended for drinking. But he couldn’t find a cup and had doubts about the water anyway, so went on further. In the end he had to go all the way back to the lawyers’ chambers at the front of the building before he could find a respectable cup and some trustable water.

When he came back he found her gone. It had taken him some time and no doubt she had got bored waiting. All the same he felt a little aggrieved.

‘But you were the last person who saw her!’ said Peter Ivanovich accusingly.

‘Surely not. The ushers – ’

He remembered now, however, that the corridor had been empty. All the courts had been in session and the ushers preoccupied with their duties.

‘Someone in the yard – ’

No one in the yard. Everyone very keen to distance themselves as far as possible. They had all been busy with the carts – Dmitri Alexandrovich had seen for himself – and had had no time to notice anything. Had Anna Semeonova gone into the yard anyway? When Dmitri Alexandrovich had last seen her she had been standing in the doorway. Was it likely that a decent, well-bred girl like Anna Semeonova would go out with all that filth, with all that language – Excuse me, Your Honour? A thick veil of mud lay over everything.