It was written two days before, and so we know now for a fact that, forty-eight hours before the perpetration of his terrible design, the prisoner swore that, if he could not get money next day, he would murder his father in order to take the envelope with the notes from under his pillow, as soon as Ivan had left. ‘As soon as Ivan had gone away’—you hear that; so he had thought everything out, weighing every circumstance, and he carried it all out just as he had written it.
Thank you for asking for clarification. I should have provided the exact text earlier to avoid any confusion.
The note, written by Dmitri to Katerina Ivanovna, is a frantic and emotionally charged confession of his state. The devastating line that the prosecutor seizes upon is not an instruction but a conditional threat.
The actual text of the key passage in the note, as presented in the novel, is as follows:
> "If I have no money, then I shall kill myself. If I find it, I shall live, and shall be as the phoenix arising from the ashes. I won't hinder any one from doing anything. But if I don't find it, I will make away with the old man on the same day as my father comes to town. He is my enemy and he'll be ruined."
>
As we discussed, the prosecutor then combines this written threat with the fact that Ivan left town to construct his powerful (but misleading) argument that the murder was premeditated and planned in every detail.
