Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1

Chapter 12

And There Was No

Murder Either

‘A

LLOW me, gentlemen of the jury, to remind you that a

man’s life is at stake and that you must be careful. We

have heard the prosecutor himself admit that until to-day

he hesitated to accuse the prisoner of a full and conscious

premeditation of the crime; he hesitated till he saw that fa-

tal drunken letter which was produced in court to-day. ‘All

was done as written.’ But, I repeat again, he was running to

her, to seek her, solely to find out where she was. That’s a fact

that can’t be disputed. Had she been at home, he would not

have run away, but would have remained at her side, and so

would not have done what he promised in the letter. He ran

unexpectedly and accidentally, and by that time very likely

he did not even remember his drunken letter. ‘He snatched

up the pestle,’ they say, and you will remember how a whole

edifice of psychology was built on that pestle — why he was

bound to look at that pestle as a weapon, to snatch it up, and

so on, and so on. A very commonplace idea occurs to me at

this point: What if that pestle had not been in sight, had not