The Brothers Karamazov

“But, I shall be told, perhaps he pretended to be sick precisely so that no one would suspect him, and informed the defendant about the money and the signals precisely to tempt him into coming and killing him himself, and, don’t you see, when he has killed him and leaves, taking the money with him, perhaps while doing so he will make some noise and clatter, awaking witnesses, and then, you see, Smerdyakov can also get up and go—well, what will he go and do? Why, he will precisely go and kill his master a second time, and a second time take the already-taken money. Do you laugh, gentlemen? Personally I am ashamed to make such suggestions, and yet, just imagine, this very thing is precisely what the defendant asserts: after me, he says, when I had already left the house, knocked Grigory down and raised the alarm, he got up, went in, killed, and robbed. I will not even ask how Smerdyakov could have calculated all this beforehand and foreknown it all as if on his fingers, I mean, that the furious and exasperated son would come with the sole purpose of peeking respectfully in the window, though he knew the signals, and then retreat, leaving him, Smerdyakov, with all the booty! Gentlemen, I put the question to you seriously: where is the moment when Smerdyakov committed his crime? Show me that moment, for without it there can be no accusation.

“But perhaps the falling fit was real. The sick man suddenly came to, heard a cry, went out—well, and what then? He looked around and said to himself: why don’t I go and kill the master? But how would he know what was going on, what was happening there, if he had been lying unconscious up to then? No, gentlemen, fantasy, too, must have its limits.

“‘Well, sir,’ subtle people will say, ‘and what if the two were accomplices, what if they murdered him together and divided the money—what then?’