The fog of time is thick, but it cannot hide the scent of blood forever. For three decades, a sinister shadow haunted the streets of Yekaterinburg, a phantom who dealt death in the dark alleys and left the law baffled. Now, the game is up. The constabulary and the detectives—those dogged hounds of the Investigative Committee—have finally collared the rogue.

Cast your mind back to the bleak February of 1893—or rather, the year 1993 in the modern reckoning. A quarrel broke out, sharp and sudden, between the accused and another man. The dispute ended in a slaughter. The poor wretch's body was found discarded like a piece of refuse by the steaming pipes of Dagestanskaya Street. The air was cold, the ground frozen, and the killer vanished into the smog.

But the fiend's appetite for gore was not sated. Come August of that same cursed year, a local woman met a similar, grisly fate. Her lifeless form was discovered slumped against a wall on Vladivostokskaya Street. The bobbies were on the scene, the warrants were issued, but the scoundrel had the luck of the devil—a true 'fort' that kept him out of the gallows for a generation.

For years, the case gathered dust in the archives. The detectives suspected a single hand was at work, a serial butcher lurking in the tenements, yet the trail had gone cold. The man lived as a ghost, perhaps frequenting some distant gin-palace or hiding in a wretched lodging-house, thinking himself forgotten.

Alas for the villain! The long arm of the law finally reached him in a remote hamlet of a neighbouring province. No more hiding in the shadows; no more dodging the peelers. He was seized, hauled back to Yekaterinburg in irons, and cast into a cold cell by order of the court. Justice may be slow, like a tired hansom cab in the mud, but it arrives nonetheless.