Whilst pretending to take them, he actually kept them until he had accumulated a sufficient amount and — M He spread out his hands.
“Was he so dreadfully unhappy?” “No. I do not think so. It was more, I should judge, a guilt complex, a desire for a penalty to be exacted. He had insisted at first, you know, on calling in the police, and though persuaded out of that, and assured that he had actually committed no crime at all, he obstinately refused to be wholly convinced. Yet it was proved to him over and over again, and he had to admit, that he had no recollection of committing the actual act.” Dr. Penrose ruffled over the papers in front of him. “His account of the evening in question never varied. He came into the house, he said, and it was dark. The servants were out. He went into the diningroom, as he usually did, poured himself out a drink and drank it, then went through the connecting door into the drawing-room.
After that he remembered nothing— nothing at all, until he was standing in his bedroom looking down at his wife who was dead—strangled. He knew he had done it—” Giles interrupted. “Excuse me. Dr.
Penrose, but why did he know he had done it?” “There was no doubt in his mind. For some months past he had found himself entertaining wild and melodramatic suspicions.
He told me, for instance, that he had been convinced his wife was administering drugs to him. He had, of course, lived in India, and the practice of wives driving their husbands insane by datura poisoning often comes up there in the native courts.
He had suffered fairly often from hallucinations, with confusion of time and place. He denied strenuously that he suspected his wife of infidelity, but nevertheless I think that that was the motivating power. It seems that what actually occurred was that he went into the drawing-room, read the note his wife left saying she was leaving him, and that his way of eluding this fact was to prefer to ‘ilF her. Hence the hallucination.” “You mean he cared for her very much?” asked Gwenda.
“Obviously, Mrs. Reed.” “And he never — recognised — that it was a hallucination?” “He had to acknowledge that it must be — but his inner belief remained unshaken.
The obsession was too strong to yield to reason. If we could have uncovered the underlying childish fixation — ” Gwenda interrupted. She was uninterested in childish fixations.
“But you’re, quite sure, you say, that he — that he didn’t do it?” “Oh, if that is what is worrying you, Mrs. Reed, you can put it right out of your head. Kelvin Halliday, however jealous he may have been of his wife, was emphatically not a killer.” Dr. Penrose coughed and picked up a small shabby black book.
“If you would like this, Mrs. Reed, you are the proper person to have it. It contains various jottings set down by your father during the time he was here. When we turned over his effects to his executor (actually a firm of solicitors). Dr. McGuire, who was then Superintendent, retained this as part of the case history. Your fathers case, you know, appears in Dr.
McGuire’s book–only under initials, of course. Mr. K..H. If you would like this diary — ” Gwenda stretched out her hand eagerly.
“Thank you/3 she said. (c! should like it very much.”
II
In the train on the way back to London, Gwenda took out the shabby little black book and began to read.
She opened it at random.
Kelvin Halliday had written: / suppose these doctor wallahs know their business…. It all sounds such poppycock.
Was I in love with my mother? Did I hate my father? I don’t believe a word of it…. I can’t help feeling this is a simple police case — criminal court — not a crazy loony-Inn matter. And yet — some of these people here — so natural, so reasonable –just like everyone else — except when you suddenly come across the kink. Very welly then, it seems that ly too, have a kink.
Pve written to James… urged him to communicate with Helen…. Let her come and see me in the flesh if she’s alive…. He says he doesn’t know where she is… that’s because he knows that she’s dead and that I killed her… he’s a good fellow3 but Pm not deceived… Helen is dead.