The news reached us like a cold draft in a drafty tenement: a Russian subject has met a dismal end in the sultry heat of Thailand. The grim discovery was made within the walls of a lodging-house in the Kathu district of Phuket, as reported by the local gazette, The Phuket News.

For three long days, the man’s companions had found no answer to their calls. Suspicion, that old familiar ghost, began to haunt them. They marched to his chamber and hammered upon the door, but the silence that answered was heavier than a fog over the Thames. Peering through the gap beneath the door, they beheld a sight to freeze the blood: the man lay sprawled upon the floor, motionless as a stone in a churchyard.

The local constabulary, acting as the detectives of that distant shore, believe the poor wretch had been dead for two days ere he was found. No signs of a struggle were evident; no broken furniture, no blood-stained linens—the room was as orderly as a counting-house. Thus, the inspectors lean toward the melancholy conclusion of suicide. His acquaintances whisper that the man had fallen into a profound depression, spending his hours in a wretched solitude that no amount of tropical sun could pierce.

An official inquiry has been dispatched to the Consulate of the Russian Empire in Phuket to unravel the final threads of this tragedy.