Page 1219 - the-brothers-karamazov

found on him, only half of it. And no doubt only at that
moment of angry silence, the fiction of the little bag first
occurred to him. No doubt he was conscious himself of the
improbability of the story and strove painfully to make it
sound more likely, to weave it into a romance that would
sound plausible. In such cases the first duty, the chief task
of the investigating lawyers, is to prevent the criminal being
prepared, to pounce upon him unexpectedly so that he may
blurt out his cherished ideas in all their simplicity, improb-
ability and inconsistency. The criminal can only be made
to speak by the sudden and apparently incidental commu-
nication of some new fact, of some circumstance of great
importance in the case, of which he had no previous idea
and could not have foreseen. We had such a fact in read-
iness — that was Grigory’s evidence about the open door
through which the prisoner had run out. He had completely
forgotten about that door and had not even suspected that
Grigory could have seen it.
‘The effect of it was amazing. He leapt up and shouted to
us, ‘Then Smerdyakov murdered him, it was Smerdyakov!’
and so betrayed the basis of the defence he was keeping back,
and betrayed it in its most improbable shape, for Smerdya-
kov could only have committed the murder after he had
knocked Grigory down and run away. When we told him
that Grigory saw the door was open before he fell down, and
had heard Smerdyakov behind the screen as he came out
of his bedroom- Karamazov was positively crushed. My es-
teemed and witty colleague, Nikolay Parfenovitch, told me
afterwards that he was almost moved to tears at the sight of

1 1 The Brothers Karamazov