The Brothers Karamazov

It was decided to act energetically. The assistant police chief was immediately ordered to round up as many as four witnesses, and, following all the rules, which I am not going to describe here, they penetrated Fyodor Pavlovich’s house and carried out an investigation on the spot. The district doctor, a hot and new man, all but invited himself to accompany the commissioner, the prosecutor, and the district attorney. I will give only a brief outline: Fyodor Pavlovich turned out to be thoroughly murdered, his head having been smashed in, but with what?—most likely with the same weapon with which Grigory had also been struck later. And just then they found the weapon, having heard from Grigory, to whom all possible medical help was administered, a quite coherent, though weakly and falteringly uttered, account of how he had been struck down. They began searching near the fence with a lantern and found the brass pestle, thrown right on the garden path for all to see. No unusual disorder was noted in the room where Fyodor Pavlovich was lying, but behind the screen near his bed they picked up a big envelope from the floor, made of heavy paper, of official size, inscribed: “A little treat of three thousand roubles for my angel Grushenka, if she wants to come,” and below that was added, most likely later, by Fyodor Pavlovich himself: “And to my chicky.” There were three big seals of red wax on the envelope, but it had already been torn open and was empty: the money was gone. They also found on the floor a narrow pink ribbon with which the envelope had been tied. One circumstance among others in Pyotr Ilyich’s evidence made an extraordinary impression on the prosecutor and the district attorney: namely, his guess that Dmitri Fyodorovich would certainly shoot himself towards dawn, that he had resolved to do it, spoken of it to Pyotr Ilyich, loaded his pistol, and so on and so forth. And that when he, Pyotr Ilyich, still unwilling to believe him, had threatened to go and tell someone to prevent the suicide, Mitya had answered him, grinning: “You won’t have time.” It followed that they had to hurry there, to Mokroye, in order to catch the criminal before he perhaps really decided to shoot himself. “That’s clear, that’s clear!” the prosecutor kept repeating in great excitement, “that’s just how it is with such hotheads: tomorrow I’ll kill myself, but before I die—a spree!” The story of his taking a lot of wine and provisions from the shop aroused the prosecutor even more. “Do you remember, gentlemen, that fellow who killed the merchant Olsufyev, robbed him of fifteen hundred, and went at once to have his hair curled, and then, without even hiding the money very well, almost holding it in his hand in the same way, went to the girls?” They were detained, however, by the investigation, the search of Fyodor Pavlovich’s house, the paperwork, and so on. All this needed time, and therefore they sent to Mokroye, two hours ahead of them, the deputy commissioner, Mavriky Mavrikievich Shmertsov, who had come to town just the previous morning to collect his salary. Mavriky Mavrikievich was instructed to go to Mokroye and, without raising any alarm, to keep watch on the “criminal” tirelessly until the arrival of the proper authorities, as well as to procure witnesses, deputies, and so on and so forth. And all this Mavriky Mavrikievich did, preserving his incognito, and initiating only Trifon Borisovich, his old acquaintance, and then only partially, into the secret of the affair. This coincided precisely with the time when Mitya met the innkeeper in the darkness on the porch looking for him and at once noticed a sudden change in Trifon Borisovich’s face and tone. Thus neither Mitya nor anyone else knew that he was being watched; his case with the pistols had long since been spirited away by Trifon Borisovich and hidden in some safe place. And only after four o’clock in the morning, almost at dawn, did all the authorities arrive, the police commissioner, the prosecutor, and the district attorney, in two carriages drawn by two troikas. The doctor stayed behind in Fyodor Pavlovich’s house with the object of performing a postmortem in the morning on the body of the murdered man, but above all he had become particularly interested in the condition of the sick servant Smerdyakov: “Such severe and protracted fits of the falling sickness, recurring uninterruptedly over two days, are rarely met with: this case belongs to science,” he said excitedly to his departing companions, and they laughingly congratulated him on his find. At the same time the prosecutor and the district attorney remembered very clearly the doctor adding in a most definite tone that Smerdyakov would not live till morning.

Now, after a long but, I believe, necessary explanation, we have returned precisely to that moment of our story at which we stopped in the previous book.