Past two in the morning, Raskolnikov wakes on his sofa when the drunks come out of the taverns, and everything returns in one flash. Fever shakes him as he strips his clothes hunting for blood. He finds congealed drops on his trousers, cuts away the threads, then remembers the stolen trinkets still in his pockets and stuffs them into a hole under the wallpaper. For a moment he feels triumph, then horror: Is that hidden? Is that the way to hide things? He destroys the axe noose, finds more stains on pocket lining and sock, and spends hours unable to move or dispose of the rags.
Nastasya and the porter knock with a police summons. Raskolnikov opens the door clutching the cut cloth in his fist. She giggles at the rags he sleeps with like treasure, and he hides them under his coat, praying she does not mean arrest. The notice orders him to the district office at half past nine. He dresses in fever, almost confessing on the stairs, then walks to the station expecting the murder to be known, even thinking he might simply tell. He arrives at twelve though the notice said half past nine, and the assistant superintendent is already aggrieved. His nickname in the regiment was the Explosive Lieutenant. Raskolnikov finds a sudden pleasure in being angry, then a sudden desire to say something exceptionally pleasant to them all.
Relief crashes over him when the complaint is only an I O U from his landlady. It is certainly not that, he thinks, and joy makes him reckless. He snaps at the explosive assistant superintendent Ilya Petrovitch for shouting and smoking, then watches as Ilya berates the German landlady Luise Ivanovna over a drunken author. Nikodim Fomitch calms the scene and Raskolnikov pours out a story about poverty, his mother and sister, and broken promises. Then, dictating his debt declaration, he overhears officials discuss the pawnbroker murders: Koch, the student witness, the unfastened door, the house like a regular Noah's Ark. Zametov is among the clerks. They talk of blood and of someone who must have been in the flat.
He nearly confesses to Nikodim Fomitch, stands, faints, and wakes to sharp questions about going out yesterday around seven. The head clerk had looked at him very hard in the sudden silence. Released, he hears them still debating the case, Nikodim Fomitch's questioning voice still rising, and hurries home repeating: a search, there will be a search at once. In the street the faintness passes completely. The brutes, they suspect. His former terror masters him again. He hurries as if the search party were already on the stairs behind him, and every face on the pavement feels like a witness he cannot name.
Coming Up in Chapter 9
What if there has already been a search? The room will be empty, the loot still in the wall. He will line his pockets with eight articles and the purse, then walk out leaving the door open, hunting for a place to bury them.
