The fog of time had nearly swallowed a most heinous crime, but the truth, like a stubborn street-urchin, refuses to be silenced. We speak of a horror that transpired in the year 1897—or rather, the nineties of the modern era—in the desolate reaches of Gubkinsky. A home turned into a slaughterhouse: a poor child of five years, Adlen, strangled in his bed, while his grandparents were dispatched with the cold precision of lead and the jagged edge of a blade. A scene of such butchery that it would make the most hardened constable shudder in his boots.

For years, the mother, a grieving woman named Svetlana, wandered the streets of sorrow, her cries for justice falling on deaf ears. The case lay dormant, gathered dust in some damp cellar of the archives, until the scribes of the press cast a piercing light upon the mystery.

Now, the Great Investigator himself, Alexander Bastrykin, has awakened from his slumber. He has demanded a full account! He has summoned the local detectives—those regional counterparts to our own Scotland Yard—ordering them to produce a report on every clue pursued and every lead followed. The High Commissioner will no longer permit this blood-stain to remain unwashed.

But mark my words, the plot thickens like a pea-soup fog. There was a stir in the rookeries of the law some months ago. One Andrey Yelchaninov, a former chief of the detectives—a man who once held the keys to the city's locks—was hauled before the magistrates. A suspect! A traitor in the ranks! Yet, in a turn of events that smells of a crooked game, the prosecution refused to keep him in the iron grip of the gaol. He was let loose, walking free as a bird while the ghosts of the murdered continue to howl for vengeance.