“No, what I think is that you didn’t just make a mistake; you made a mistake on purpose. If a criminal investigator makes a mistake, it’s not an accident.”
“Then who was the killer in this case?”
“You!!”
Mr. Kamyshev looked at me in surprise mixed with horror.
“So this is it.” He went to the window.
“Sir, what kind of joke is this story,” he mumbled. He breathed nervously at the window, trying to draw something in the condensation with his finger.
I looked at his hand, a very muscular, iron-hard hand, and imagined how he had strangled the servant in the prison cell, and how he had destroyed Olga’s tender body. The figure of a murderer standing right in front of me filled me with horror. Not for myself, but for this giant, and in general for all mankind.
“You killed her!” I said.
“Then I can congratulate you with your discovery,” he said. “How did you come to this conclusion, please tell me.”
“Yes, you are the murderer.” I said. “And you can’t even hide it. It’s between the lines in your novel, and you’re a lousy actor, trying to act in front of me now. You might as well go ahead and tell me the truth—this is all very interesting, and I’d be very curious to know.”
I jumped up and started pacing the room.
Mr. Kamyshev went to the door, looked outside, and closed it very securely. This precaution gave him away.
“Why did you close the door?”
“I’m not afraid of anything. I just thought that there might be someone behind the open door.”
“And why do you need this? Tell me. Can I start an interrogation? I should warn you that I’m not a police detective and I may get tangled up in the interrogation, and mix up some things. But in any case, first of all—where did you disappear to, after you said good-bye to your friends, when the picnic was over?”
“I just went home.”
“You know, in your manuscript, the description of your route was crossed out. Did you walk across the same forest?”
“Yes.”
“And could you have met her?”
“Yes, I could.”
“And did you meet her?”
“No, I did not.”
“In the course of your investigation, you forgot to interrogate one important witness, namely, yourself. Did you meet the victim?”
“No. There you are, my friend,” he said. “You are not an expert interrogator.” At this moment I noticed that Mr. Kamyshev was smiling at me in a patronizing way, enjoying my inability to find the answers to the questions that were torturing me.
“All right then, you did not meet her in the forest. But it would have been even more difficult for Mr. Urbenin to have found her in the forest. He wasn’t seeking her there, but you—on the contrary—being drunk and excited and angry with her—you could not escape looking for her. And why did you go through the forest and not along the country road?”
“Let us imagine that what you say is true,” he admitted.
“How can we explain your crazy state of mind on the night of the event? It seems to me that it was connected with the crime that you committed earlier that day. Then, after coming to the Count’s house, instead of asking the question directly, you waited for a whole night and a day until the police arrived. This can only be explained by the fact that the victim knew the murderer, and you were the murderer.
“Further, Olga did not name her murderer because she loved him. If it were her husband, she would have told you the name at once. She did not love him; she didn’t even care about him, but she loved you and she wanted to save your life.
“And therefore, when she came to consciousness for a few moments, why did you procrastinate instead of asking her the one question that mattered, wasting her last few minutes with secondary questions that were not connected with the event? You were dragging the time out, because you did not want her to name you as the murderer. Also, you wrote in detail about the numerous shots of vodka that you drank, but the death of “the woman in red” is never described. Why?”
“Continue, continue.”
“You didn’t study the scene of the crime on the first day; you waited for the next day to come. Why? Because the night rain would wash away all your steps in the forest. Then you don’t mention interrogating the caterers and the guests who were present at the picnic. They heard Olga yelling, and you should have interrogated them, but you didn’t, because at least one of them would have remembered that you yourself had disappeared into the forest. They were interrogated eventually, but by then they would have forgotten all the details concerning you.”
“You are smart,” Mr. Kamyshev said, rubbing his hands. “Do go on.”
“Isn’t this enough? And to prove that you killed Olga, I must remind you that you were her lover: the lover whom she traded for a man she despised, the Count. If the husband could kill from jealousy, then the lover could just as easily have done it for the same reason.
“That’s enough,” Kamyshev said, laughing. “Enough. You look so pale and excited that you don’t have to continue. But you’re right. I did kill her.”
There was silence. I paced the room and he did the same.
“Very few people could have done this; most readers would not come to this conclusion. They’re not as smart as you.”
At that moment, one of my workers from the editorial board came to my study, looked carefully at Mr. Kamyshev, put some materials on my desk, and then left. Kamyshev came to the window.
“It has been about eight years, and I am still tortured by the weight of bearing this mystery. Not by my conscience. The conscience by itself is nothing—it can be dulled by logical explanations. But when logic fails, I try to kill it with wine and women. And I am still popular among women, by the way. It surprises me that for eight years, not a single person had the slightest idea that I bore this terrible secret. So I wanted to tell people about this secret of mine in a special way—can you believe it?—I did so in the form of a book. When I wrote this novel, I thought only a few people would discover the truth. Every page has a clue to the mystery, but I was writing it for an average reader.”
My secretary Andrew came in and brought two glasses of tea.
“You are looking at me as a man of mystery, and now it’s three o’clock and it is time for me to go.”
“Stop. You haven’t told me how you killed her.”
“What else do you want to know? You know what? I killed her in a state of extreme stress; I was overcome with emotion.”
“People smoke and drink when they’re stressed. Right now, you have just seized my cup of tea instead of yours, and you smoke more often because of stress. Life is stressful.”
“I did not intend to kill her as I was walking through the forest. I was only going to find Olga and tell her that she was behaving badly. But sometimes when I’m drunk, I can get aggressive. I saw her about two hundred steps from the edge of the forest. She was standing in front of a big tree looking into the sky. I called her name, and she stretched her hands out toward me. ‘Please do not scold me, I am so unhappy,’ she told me. I was drunk and I forgave her, and we embraced. She told me that she’d never loved anyone but me all her life. Then, in the middle of all this, she said the most dreadful thing: ‘I am so unhappy,’ she said. ‘If I hadn’t married Mr. Urbenin, then I could have married the Count. And we could meet secretly.’ It was like a bucket of cold water. I was filled with disgust. I took this little creature by the shoulders and threw her on the ground, as you throw a ball in a game. And then, I was in a rage at that moment. I threw her on the ground, and then I killed her; yes, I killed her, I finished her off.”
I looked at Mr. Kamyshev and saw that there was no shame on his face. His lips spoke the words ‘I killed her, I finished her off’ with no more expression than if he’d said ‘I smoked a cigarette.’ I had a feeling of disgust toward him.