Curtain - Agatha Christie [69]
‘One of the most significant things you told me was a remark about him having been laughed at at school for nearly being sick when seeing a dead rabbit. There, I think, was an incident that may have left a deep impression on him. He disliked blood and violence and his prestige suffered in consequence. Subconsciously, I should say, he has waited to redeem himself by being bold and ruthless.
‘I should imagine that he began to discover quite young his own power for influencing people. He was a good listener, he had a quiet sympathetic personality. People liked him without, at the same time, noticing him very much. He resented this – and then made use of it. He discovered how ridiculously easy it was, by using the correct words and supplying the correct stimuli, to influence his fellow creatures. The only thing necessary was to understand them – to penetrate their thoughts, their secret reactions and wishes.
‘Can you realize, Hastings, that such a discovery might feed a sense of power? Here was he, Stephen Norton whom everyone liked and despised, and he would make people do things they didn’t want to do – or (mark this) thought they did not want to do.
‘I can visualize him, developing this hobby of his . . . And little by little developing a morbid taste for violence at second-hand. The violence for which he lacked physical stamina and for the lack of which he had been derided.
‘Yes, his hobby grows and grows until it comes to be a passion, a necessity! It was a drug, Hastings – a drug that induced craving as surely as opium or cocaine might have done.
‘Norton, the gentle-hearted, loving man, was a secret sadist. He was an addict of pain, of mental torture. There has been an epidemic of that in the world of late years – L’appétit vient en mangeant.
‘It fed two lusts, the lust of the sadist and the lust of power. He, Norton, had the keys of life and of death.
‘Like any other drug slave, he had to have his supply of the drug. He found victim after victim. I have no doubt there have been more cases than the five I actually tracked down. In each of those he played the same part. He knew Etherington, he stayed one summer in the village where Riggs lived and drank with Riggs in the local pub. On a cruise he met the girl Freda Clay and encouraged and played upon her half-formed conviction that if her old aunt died it would be really a good thing – a release for Auntie and a life of financial ease and pleasure for herself. He was a friend of the Litchfields, and when talking to him, Margaret Litchfield saw herself in the light of a heroine delivering her sisters from their life sentence of imprisonment. But I do not believe, Hastings, that any of these people would have done what they did – but for Norton’s influence.
‘And now we come to the events at Styles. I had been on Norton’s tracks for some time. He became acquainted with the Franklins and at once I scented danger. You must understand that even Norton has to have a nucleus on which to work. You can only develop a thing of which the seed is already present. In Othello, for instance, I have always been of the belief that already present in Othello’s mind was the conviction (possibly correct) that Desdemona’s love for him was the passionate unbalanced hero-worship of a young girl for a famous warrior and not the balanced love of a woman for Othello the man. He may have realized that Cassio was her true mate and that in time she would come to realize the fact.
‘The Franklins presented a most agreeable prospect to our Norton. All kinds of possibilities! You have doubtless realized by now, Hastings, (what anyone of sense could have seen perfectly plainly all along) that Franklin was in love with Judith and she with him. His brusqueness, his habit of never looking at her, of forsaking any attempt at courtesy, ought to have told you that the man was head over ears in love with her. But Franklin is a man of great strength of character and also of great rectitude. His speech is brutally unsentimental, but