Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie
Miss Marple said in answer to Gwenda’s question, “Well, he did seem indicated, my dear. Although unfortunately there was nothing in the way of evidence to go upon. Just indications, nothing more.”
Looking at her curiously, Giles said, “But I can’t see any indications even.”
“Oh dear, Giles, think. He was on the spot, to begin with.”
“On the spot?”
“But certainly. When Kelvin Halliday came to him that night he had just come back from the hospital. And the hospital, at that time, as several people told us, was actually next door to Hillside, or St. Catherine’s as it was then called. So that, as you see, puts him in the right place at the right time. And then there were a hundred and one little significant facts. Helen Halliday told Richard Erskine she had gone out to marry Walter Fane because she wasn’t happy at home. Not happy, that is, living with her brother. Yet her brother was by all accounts devoted to her. So why wasn’t she happy? Mr. Afflick told you that ‘he was sorry for the poor kid.’ I think that he was absolutely truthful when he said that. He was sorry for her. Why did she have to go and meet young Afflick in that clandestine way? Admittedly she was not wildly in love with him. Was it because she couldn’t meet young men in the ordinary normal way? Her brother was ‘strict’ and ‘old-fashioned.’ It is vaguely reminiscent, is it not, of Mr. Barrett of Wimpole Street?”
Gwenda shivered.
“He was mad,” she said. “Mad.”
“Yes,” said Miss Marple. “He wasn’t normal. He adored his half-sister, and that affection became possessive and unwholesome. That kind of thing happens oftener than you’d think. Fathers who don’t want their daughters to marry—or even to meet young men. Like Mr. Barrett. I thought of that when I heard about the tennis net.”
“The tennis net?”
“Yes, that seemed to me very significant. Think of that girl, young Helen, coming home from school, and eager for all a young girl wants out of life, anxious to meet young men—to flirt with them—”
“A little sex-crazy.”
“No,” said Miss Marple with emphasis. “That is one of the wickedest things about this crime. Dr. Kennedy didn’t only kill her physically. If you think back carefully, you’ll see that the only evidence for Helen Kennedy’s having been man mad or practically—what is the word you used, dear? oh yes, a nymphomaniac—came actually from Dr. Kennedy himself. I think, myself, that she was a perfectly normal young girl who wanted to have fun and a good time and flirt a little and finally settle down with the man of her choice—no more than that. And see what steps her brother took. First he was strict and old-fashioned about allowing her liberty. Then, when she wanted to give tennis parties—a most normal and harmless desire—he pretended to agree and then one night secretly cut the tennis net to ribbons—a very significant and sadistic action. Then, since she could still go out to play tennis or to dances, he took advantage of a grazed foot which he treated, to infect it so that it wouldn’t heal. Oh yes, I think he did that … in fact, I’m sure of it.
“Mind you. I don’t think Helen realized any of all this. She knew her brother had a deep affection for her and I don’t think she knew why she felt uneasy and unhappy at home. But she did feel like that and at last she decided to go out to India and marry young Fane simply in order to get away. To get away from what? She didn’t know. She was too young and guileless to know. So she went off to India and on the way she met Richard Erskine and fell in love with him. There again, she behaved not like a sex-crazy girl, but like a decent and honourable girl. She didn’t urge him to leave his wife. She urged him not to do so. But when she saw Walter Fane she knew that she couldn’t marry him, and because she didn’t know what else to do, she wired her brother for money to go home.
“On the way home she met your father—and another way of escape showed itself. This time it was one with good prospect of happiness.
“She didn’t marry your father under false pretences, Gwenda. He was recovering from the death of a dearly loved wife. She was getting over an unhappy love affair. They could both help each other. I think it is significant that she and Kelvin Halliday were married in London and then went down to Dillmouth to break the news to Dr. Kennedy. She must have had some instinct that that would be a wiser thing to do than to go down and be married in Dillmouth, which ordinarily would have been the normal thing to do. I still think she didn’t know what she was up against—but she was uneasy, and she felt safer in presenting her brother with the marriage as a fait accompli.
“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.
“I think,” said Miss Marple, “that he’d definitely passed the borderline between sanity and madness by that time. And Helen, poor girl, began to realize 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. 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 so doing, 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 suitcase. A note, written and thrown in the wastepaper basket to convince Halliday later.”
“But I should have thought,” sai
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. The police might have asked a lot of awkward questions and made a lot of awkward enquiries as to times and places. No, his plan was simpler and, I think, more devilish. He only had Halliday to convince. First, that he had killed his wife. Secondly that he was mad. He persuaded Halliday to go into a mental home, but I don’t think he really wanted to convince him that it was all a delusion. Your father accepted that theory, Gwennie, mainly, I should imagine, for your sake. He continued to believe that he had killed Helen. He died believing that.”
“Wicked,” said Gwenda. “Wicked—wicked—wicked.”
“Yes,” said Miss Marple. “There isn’t really any other word. And I think, Gwenda, that that is why your childish impression of what you saw remained so strong. It was real evil that was in the air that night.”
“But the letters,” said Giles. “Helen’s letters? They were in her handwriting, so they couldn’t be forgeries.”
“Of course they were forgeries! But that is where he overreached himself. He was so anxious, you see, to stop you and Giles making investigations. He could probably imitate Helen’s handwriting quite nicely—but it wouldn’t fool an expert. So the sample of Helen’s handwriting he sent you with the letter wasn’t her handwriting either. He wrote it himself. So naturally it tallied.”
“Goodness,” said Giles. “I never thought of that.”
“No,” said Miss Marple. “You believed what he said. It really is very dangerous to believe people. I never have for years.”
“And the brandy?”
“He did that the day he came to Hillside with Helen’s letter and talked to me in the garden. He was waiting in the house while Mrs. Cocker came out and told me he was there. It would only take a minute.”
“Good Lord,” said Giles. “And he urged me to take Gwenda home and give her brandy after we were at the police station when Lily Kimble was killed. How did he arrange to meet her earlier?”
“That was very simple. The original letter he sent her asked her to meet him at Woodleigh Camp and come to Matchings Halt by the two-five train from Dillmouth Junction. He came out of the copse of trees, probably, and accosted her as she was going up the lane—and strangled her. Then he simply substituted the letter you all saw for the letter she had with her (and which he had asked her to bring because of the directions in it) and went home to prepare for you and play out the little comedy of waiting for Lily.”
“And Lily really was threatening him? Her letter didn’t sound as though she was. Her letter sounded as though she suspected Afflick.”
“Perhaps she did. But Léonie, the Swiss girl, had talked to Lily, and Léonie was the one danger to Kennedy. Because she looked out of the nursery window and saw him digging in the garden. In the morning he talked to her, told her bluntly that Major Halliday had killed his wife—that Major Halliday was insane, and that he, Kennedy, was hushing up the matter for the child’s sake. If, however, Léonie felt she ought to go to the police, she must do so, but it would be very unpleasant for her—and so on.
“Léonie took immediate fright at the mention of the police. She adored you and had implicit faith in what M. le docteur thought best. Kennedy paid her a handsome sum of money and hustled her back to Switzerland. But before she went, she hinted something to Lily as to your father’s having killed his wife and that she had seen the body buried. That fitted in with Lily’s ideas at the time. She took it for granted that it was Kelvin Halliday Léonie had seen digging the grave.”
“But Kennedy didn’t know that, of course,” said Gwenda.
“Of course not. When he got Lily’s letter the words in it that frightened him were that Léonie had told Lily what she had seen out of the window and the mention of the car outside.”
“The car? Jackie Afflick’s car?”
“Another misunderstanding. Lily remembered, or thought she remembered, a car like Jackie Afflick’s being outside in the road. Already her imagination had got to work on the Mystery Man who came over to see Mrs. Halliday. With the hospital next door, no doubt a good many cars did park along this road. But you must remember that the doctor’s car was actually standing outside the hospital that night—he probably leaped to the conclusion that she meant his car. The adjective posh was meaningless to him.”
“I see,” said Giles. “Yes, to a guilty conscience that letter of Lily’s might look like blackmail. But how do you know all about Léonie?”
Her lips pursed close together, Miss Marple said: “He went—right over the edge, you know. As soon as the men Inspector Primer had left rushed in and seized him, he went over the whole crime again and again—everything he’d done. Léonie died, it seems, very shortly after her return to Switzerland. Overdose of some sleeping tablets … Oh no, he wasn’t taking any chances.”
“Like trying to poison me with the brandy.”
“You were very dangerous to him, you and Giles. Fortunately you never told him about your memory of seeing Helen dead in the hall. He never knew there had been an eyewitness.”
“Those telephone calls to Fane and Afflick,” said Giles. “Did he put those through?”
“Yes. If there was an enquiry as to who could have tampered with the brandy, either of them would make an admirable suspect, and if Jackie Afflick drove over in his car alone, it might tie him in with Lily Kimble’s murder. Fane would most likely have an alibi.”
“And he seemed fond of me,” said Gwenda. “Little Gwennie.”
“He had to play his part,” said Miss Marple. “Imagine what it meant to him. After eighteen years, you and Giles come along, asking questions, burrowing into the past, disturbing a murder that had seemed dead but was only sleeping … Murder in retrospect … A horribly dangerous thing to do, my dears. I have been sadly worried.”
“Poor Mrs. Cocker,” said Gwenda. “She had a terribly near escape. I’m glad she’s going to be all right. Do you think she’ll come back to us, Giles? After all this?”
“She will if there’s a nursery,” said Giles gravely, and Gwenda blushed, and Miss Marple smiled a little and looked out across Torbay.
“How very odd it was that it should happen the way it did,” mused Gwenda. “My having those rubber gloves on, and looking at them, and then his coming into the hall and saying those words that sounded so like the others. ‘Face’… and then: ‘Eyes dazzled’—”
She shuddered.
“Cover her face … Mine eyes dazzle … she died young … that might have been me … if Miss Marple hadn’t been there.”
She paused and said softly, “Poor Helen … Poor lovely Helen, who died young … You know, Giles, she isn’t there anymore—in the house—in the hall. I could feel that yesterday before we left. There’s just the house. And the house is fond of us. We can go back if we like….”
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