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yourselves how truthful I am, so you’ll believe all the sooner
that I didn’t murder him. Oh, in such cases the criminal is
often amazingly shallow and credulous.
‘At that point one of the lawyers asked him, as it were in-
cidentally, the most simple question, ‘Wasn’t it Smerdyakov
killed him?’ Then, as we expected, he was horribly angry
at our having anticipated him and caught him unawares,
before he had time to pave the way to choose and snatch
the moment when it would be most natural to bring in
Smerdyakov’s name. He rushed at once to the other extreme,
as he always does, and began to assure us that Smerdyakov
could not have killed him, was not capable of it. But don’t
believe him, that was only his cunning; he didn’t really give
up the idea of Smerdyakov; on the contrary, he meant to
bring him forward again; for, indeed, he had no one else to
bring forward, but he would do that later, because for the
moment that line was spoiled for him. He would bring him
forward perhaps next day, or even a few days later, choos-
ing an opportunity to cry out to us, ‘You know I was more
sceptical about Smerdyakov than you, you remember that
yourselves, but now I am convinced. He killed him, he must
have done!’ And for the present he falls back upon a gloomy
and irritable denial. Impatience and anger prompted him,
however, to the most inept and incredible explanation of
how he looked into his father’s window and how he respect-
fully withdrew. The worst of it was that he was unaware of
the position of affairs, of the evidence given by Grigory.
‘We proceeded to search him. The search angered, but
encouraged him, the whole three thousand had not been