Sleeping Murder (Miss Marple 13)

Then he particularized his final theory.

“If you’ll only convince Gwenda that that’s the only way it could have been.”

Miss Marple’s eyes went from him to Gwenda and back again.

“It is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis,” she said. “But there is always, as you yourself pointed out, Mr. Reed, the possibility of X.”

“X!” said Gwenda.

“The unknown factor,” said Miss Marple. “Someone, shall we say, who hasn’t appeared yet—but whose presence, behind the obvious facts, can be deduced.”

“We’re going to the Sanatorium in Norfolk where my father died,” said Gwenda. “Perhaps we’ll find out something there.”

Ten

A CASE HISTORY

I

Saltmarsh House was set pleasantly about six miles inland from the coast. It had a good train service to London from the five-miles-distant town of South Benham.

Giles and Gwenda were shown into a large airy sitting room with cretonne covers patterned with flowers. A very charming-looking old lady with white hair came into the room holding a glass of milk. She nodded to them and sat down near the fireplace. Her eyes rested thoughtfully on Gwenda and presently she leaned forward towards her and spoke in what was almost a whisper.

“Is it your poor child, my dear?”

Gwenda looked slightly taken aback. She said doubtfully: “No—no. It isn’t.”

“Ah, I wondered.” The old lady nodded her head and sipped her milk. Then she said conversationally, “Half past ten—that’s the time. It’s always at half past ten. Most remarkable.” She lowered her voice and leaned forward again.

“Behind the fireplace,” she breathed. “But don’t say I told you.”

At this moment, a white uniformed maid came into the room and requested Giles and Gwenda to follow her.

They were shown into Dr. Penrose’s study, and Dr. Penrose rose to greet them.

Dr. Penrose, Gwenda could not help thinking, looked a little mad himself. He looked, for instance, much madder than the nice old lady in the drawing room—but perhaps psychiatrists always looked a little mad.

“I had your letter, and Dr. Kennedy’s,” said Dr. Penrose. “And I’ve been looking up your father’s case history, Mrs. Reed. I remembered his case quite well, of course, but I wanted to refresh my memory so that I should be in a position to tell you everything you wanted to know. I understand that you have only recently become aware of the facts?”

Gwenda explained that she had been brought up in New Zealand by her mother’s relations and that all she had known about her father was that he had died in a nursing home in England.

Dr. Penrose nodded. “Quite so. Your father’s case, Mrs. Reed, presented certain rather peculiar features.”

“Such as?” Giles asked.

“Well, the obsession—or delusion—was very strong. Major Halliday, though clearly in a very nervous state, was most emphatic and categorical in his assertion that he had strangled his second wife in a fit of jealous rage. A great many of the usual signs in these cases were absent, and I don’t mind telling you frankly, Mrs. Reed, that had it not been for Dr. Kennedy’s assurance that Mrs. Halliday was actually alive, I should have been prepared, at that time, to take your father’s assertion at its face value.”

“You formed the impression that he had actually killed her?” Giles asked.

“I said ‘at that time.’ Later, I had cause to revise my opinion, as Major Halliday’s character and mental makeup became more familiar to me. Your father, Mrs. Reed, was most definitely not a paranoiac type. He had no delusions of persecution, no impulses of violence. He was a gentle, kindly, and well-controlled individual. He was neither what the world calls mad, nor was he dangerous to others. But he did have this obstinate fixation about Mrs. Halliday’s death and to account for its origin I am quite convinced we have to go back a long way—to some childish experience. But I admit that all methods of analysis failed to give us the right clue. Breaking down a patient’s resistance to analysis is sometimes a very long business. It may take several years. In your father’s case, the time was insufficient.”

He paused, and then, looking up sharply, said: “You know, I presume, that Major Halliday committed suicide.”

“Oh no!” cried Gwenda.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Reed. I thought you knew that. You are entitled, perhaps, to attach some blame to us on that account. I admit that proper vigilance would have prevented it. But frankly I saw no sign of Major Halliday’s being a suicidal type. He showed no tendency to melancholia—no brooding or despondency. He complained of sleeplessness and my colleague allowed him a certain amount of sleeping tablets. Whilst pretending to take them, he actually kept them until he had accumulated a sufficient amount and—”

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 dining room, 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 ‘kill’ her. Hence the hallucination.”

“You mean he cared for her very much?” asked Gwenda.

“Obviously, Mrs. Reed.”

“And he never—recognized—that it was a hallucination?”

“He had to acknowledge that it must be—but his inner belief remain

ed 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 father’s 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,” she said. “I 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:

I 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 loonybin 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 well, then, it seems that I, too, have a kink….

I’ve 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 fellow, but I’m not deceived … Helen is dead….