Crooked House - Agatha Christie [36]
The Old Man went on:
“I don’t know if I’m the right person to ask. I could put you on to a couple of the tame psychiatrists who do jobs for us. They’ve got it all cut and dried. Or Taverner could give you all the inside dope. But you want, I take it, to hear what I, personally, as the result of my experience of criminals, think about it?”
“That’s what I want,” I said gratefully.
My father traced a little circle with his finger on the desk top.
“What are murderers like? Some of them”—a faint rather melancholy smile showed on his face—“have been thoroughly nice chaps.”
I think I looked a little startled.
“Oh yes, they have,” he said. “Nice ordinary fellows like you and me—or like that chap who went out just now—Roger Leonides. Murder, you see, is an amateur crime. I’m speaking of course of the kind of murder you have in mind—not gangster stuff. One feels, very often, as though these nice ordinary chaps had been overtaken, as it were, by murder, almost accidentally. They’ve been in a tight place, or they’ve wanted something very badly, money or a woman—and they’ve killed to get it. The brake that operates with most of us doesn’t operate with them. A child, you know, translates desire into action without compunction. A child is angry with its kitten, says ‘I’ll kill you,’ and hits it on the head with a hammer—and then breaks its heart because the kitten doesn’t come alive again! Lots of kids try to take a baby out of a pram and ‘drown it,’ because it usurps attention—or interferes with their pleasures. They get—very early—to a stage when they know that that is ‘wrong’—that is, that it will be punished. Later, they get to feel that it is wrong. But some people, I suspect, remain morally immature. They continue to be aware that murder is wrong, but they do not feel it. I don’t think, in my experience, that any murderer has really felt remorse … And that, perhaps, is the mark of Cain. Murderers are set apart, they are ‘different’—murder is wrong—but not for them—for them it is necessary—the victim has ‘asked for it,’ it was ‘the only way.’”
“Do you think,” I asked, “that if someone hated old Leonides, had hated him, say, for a very long time, that that would be a reason?”
“Pure hate? Very unlikely, I should say.” My father looked at me curiously. “When you say hate, I presume you mean dislike carried to excess. A jealous hate is different—that rises out of affection and frustration. Constance Kent, everybody said, was very fond of the baby brother she killed. But she wanted, one supposes, the attention and the love that was bestowed on him. I think people more often kill those they love than those they hate. Possibly because only the people you love can really make life unendurable to you.
“But all this doesn’t help you much, does it?” he went on. “What you want, if I read you correctly, is some token, some universal sign that will help you to pick out a murderer from a household of apparently normal and pleasant people?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Is there a common denominator? I wonder. You know,” he paused in thought, “if there is, I should be inclined to say it is vanity.”
“Vanity?”
“Yes, I’ve never met a murderer who wasn’t vain … It’s their vanity that leads to their undoing, nine times out of ten. They may be frightened of being caught, but they can’t help strutting and boasting and usually they’re sure they’ve been far too clever to be caught.” He added: “And here’s another thing, a murderer wants to talk.”
“To talk?”
“Yes; you see, having committed a murder puts you in a position of great loneliness. You’d like to tell somebody all about it—and you never can. And that makes you want to all the more. And so—if you can’t talk about how you did it, you can at least talk about the murder itself—discuss it, advance theories—go over it.
“If I were you, Charles, I should look out for that. Go down there again, mix with them all, and get them to talk. Of course it won’t be plain sailing. Guilty or innocent, they’ll be glad of the chance to talk to a stranger, because they can say things to you that