On the fourth day, a party of police unexpectedly arrives to inspect the premises. As in "The Tell-Tale Heart," when the police arrive unexpectedly, we never know what motivated the police to come on a search. And in the same way, the narrator here is overconfident; he delights in the fact that he has so cleverly and so completely concealed his horrible crime that he welcomes an inspection of the premises.
However, here, in an act of insane bravado, he raps so heavily upon the bricks that entomb his wife, that to his abject terror, a "voice from within the tomb" answered. At first, it was a muffled and broken cry, but then it swelled into an "utterly anomalous and inhuman . . . howl . . . a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation."
The police immediately began to tear down the brick wall, and they discover the rotting corpse of the narrator's wife and, standing upon her decayed head was the "hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder . . . I had walled the monster up within the tomb."
The final irony, of course, is that the cat which he had come to so despise — the cat that might have been the reincarnation of Pluto — serves as a figure of retribution against the murderer. By the end of the story, therefore, we can see how the narrator, in commenting on his own actions, convicts himself of the madness which he vehemently declaimed at the beginning of the story.
