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.

Chapter 3: The Soul’s Journey through Torments. The First Torment

And so Mitya was sitting and staring around with wild eyes at those present, without understanding what was being said to him.^[271] Suddenly he rose, threw up his hands, and cried loudly:

“Not guilty! Of that blood I am not guilty! Of my father’s blood I am not guilty ... I wanted to kill him, but I’m not guilty. Not me!”

But no sooner had he cried it than Grushenka jumped out from behind the curtains and simply collapsed at the feet of the police commissioner.

“It’s me, me, the cursed one, I am guilty!” she cried in a heartrending howl, all in tears, stretching her arms out to everyone, “it’s because of me that he killed him...! I tormented him and drove him to it! I tormented that poor old dead man, too, out of spite, and drove things to this! I am the guilty one, first and most of all, I am the guilty one!”

“Yes, you are the guilty one! You are the chief criminal! You are violent, you are depraved, you are the guilty one, you most of all,” screamed the commissioner, shaking his finger at her, but this time he was quickly and resolutely suppressed. The prosecutor even seized him with both arms.

“This is entirely out of order, Mikhail Makarovich,” he cried, “you are positively hindering the investigation ... ruining the whole thing ... ,”he was all but choking.

“Measures, measures, we must take measures!” Nikolai Parfenovich, too, began seething terribly, “otherwise it’s positively impossible...!”

“Judge us together!” Grushenka went on exclaiming frenziedly, still on her knees. “Punish us together, I’ll go with him now even to execution!”

“Grusha, my life, my blood, my holy one!” Mitya threw himself on his knees beside her and caught her tightly in his arms. “Don’t believe her,” he shouted, “she’s not guilty of anything, of any blood, or anything!”

He remembered afterwards that several men pulled him away from her by force, that she was suddenly taken out, and that when he came to his senses he was already sitting at the table. Beside him and behind him stood people with badges. On the sofa across the table from him, Nikolai Parfenovich, the district attorney, sat trying to persuade him to sip some water from a glass that stood on the table: “It will refresh you, it will calm you down, you needn’t be afraid, you needn’t worry,” he kept adding with extreme politeness. And Mitya, as he remembered, suddenly became terribly interested in his big rings, one with an amethyst, and another with a bright yellow stone, transparent and of a most wonderful brilliance. And for a long time afterwards he recalled with surprise how these rings irresistibly drew his eye even through all those terrible hours of interrogation, so that for some reason he was unable to tear himself away and forget them as something quite unsuitable in his position. On the left, at Mitya’s side, where Maximov had been sitting at the start of the evening, the prosecutor now sat down, and to Mitya’s right, where Grushenka had been, a pink-cheeked young man settled himself, dressed in a rather threadbare sort of hunting jacket, and in front of him appeared an inkstand and some paper. He turned out to be the district attorney’s clerk, who had come with him. The police commissioner now stood near the window, at the other end of the room, next to Kalganov, who was sitting in a chair by the same window.