“Kelvin Halliday was very friendly to Kennedy and liked him. Kennedy seems to have gone out of his way to appear pleased about the marriage. The couple took a furnished house there.
“And now we come to that very significant fact — the suggestion that Kelvin was being drugged by his wife. There are only two possible explanations of that–because there are only two people who could have had the opportunity of doing such a thing. Either Helen Halliday was drugging her husband, and if so, why? Or else the drugs were being administered by Dr.
Kennedy. Kennedy was Halliday’s physician as is clear by Halliday’s consulting him. He had confidence in Kennedy’s medical knowledge — and the suggestion that his wife was drugging him was very cleverly put to him by Kennedy.” “But could any drug make a man have the hallucination that he was strangling his wife?” asked Giles. “I mean there isn’t any drug, is there, that has that particular effect?” “My dear Giles, you’ve fallen into the trap again — the trap of believing what is said to you. There is only Dr. Kennedy’s word for it that Halliday ever had that hallucination. He himself never says so in his diary. He had hallucinations, yes, but he does not mention their nature. But I dare say Kennedy talked to him about men who had strangled their wives after passing through a phase such as Kelvin Halliday was experiencing.” “Dr. Kennedy was really wicked,” said Gwenda. cc! think,” said Miss Marple, “that he’d definitely passed the borderline between sanity and madness by that time. And Helen, poor girl, began to realise it. It was to her brother she must have been speaking that day when she was overheard by Lily. ‘I think I’ve always been afraid of you.’ That was one of the things she said. And that always was very significant. And so she determined to leave Dillmouth. She persuaded her husband to buy a house in Norfolk, she persuaded him not to tell anyone about it. That in itself, you know, was a very curious point. The secrecy about it was very illuminating. She was clearly very afraid of someone knowing about it — but that did not fit in with the Walter Fane theory or the Jackie Afflick theory — and certainly not with Richard Erskine’s being concerned. No, it pointed to somewhere much nearer home.
“And in the end, Kelvin Halliday, whom doubtless the secrecy irked and who felt it to be pointless, told his brother-in-law.
“And in doing so, sealed his own fate and that of his wife. For Kennedy was not going to let Helen go and live happily with her husband. I think perhaps his idea was simply to break down Halliday’s health with drugs. But at the revelation that his victim and Helen were going to escape him, he became completely unhinged. From the hospital he went through into the garden of St. Catherine’s and he took with him a pair of surgical gloves. He caught Helen in the hall, and he strangled her. Nobody saw him, there was no one there to see him, or so he thought, and so, racked with love and frenzy, he quoted those tragic lines that were so apposite.” Miss Marple sighed and clucked her tongue.
“I was stupid—very stupid. We were all stupid. We should have seen at once.
Those lines from The Duchess of Malfi were really the clue to the whole thing.
They are said, are they not, by a brother who has just contrived his sister’s death to avenge her marriage to the man she loved.
Yes, we were stupid — ” “And then?” asked Giles.
“And then he went through with the whole devilish plan. The body carried upstairs.
The clothes packed in a suit-case. A note, written and thrown in the wastepaper basket to convince Halliday later.” “But I should have thought,” said Gwenda, “that it would have been better from his point of view for my father actually to have been convicted of the murder.” Miss Marple shook her head.
“Oh no, he couldn’t risk that. He had a lot of shrewd Scottish common sense, you know. He had a wholesome respect for the police. The police take a lot of convincing before they believe a man guilty of murder.