Sleeping Murder - Agatha Christie [68]
Miss Marple coughed.
“As a matter of fact, I saw Edith Pagett again. She remembers that there was early supper that night—seven o’clock—because Major Halliday was going to some meeting—Golf Club, she thinks it was, or some Parish meeting. Mrs. Halliday went out after supper.”
“Right. Helen meets Erskine, by appointment, perhaps, on the beach. He is leaving the following day. Perhaps he refuses to go. He urges Helen to go away with him. She comes back here and he comes with her. Finally, in a fit of frenzy he strangles her. The next bit is as we have already agreed. He’s slightly mad, he wants Kelvin Halliday to believe it is he who has killed her. Later, Erskine buries the body. You remember, he told Gwenda that he didn’t go back to the hotel until very late because he was walking about Dillmouth.”
“One wonders,” said Miss Marple, “what his wife was doing?”
“Probably frenzied with jealousy,” said Gwenda. “And gave him hell when he did get in.”
“That’s my reconstruction,” said Giles. “And it’s possible.”
“But he couldn’t have killed Lily Kimble,” said Gwenda, “because he lives in Northumberland. So thinking about him is just waste of time. Let’s take Walter Fane.”
“Right. Walter Fane is the repressed type. He seems gentle and mild and easily pushed around. But Miss Marple has brought us one valuable bit of testimony. Walter Fane was once in such a rage that he nearly killed his brother. Admittedly he was a child at the time, but it was startling because he had always seemed of such a gentle forgiving nature. Anyway, Walter Fane falls in love with Helen Halliday. Not merely in love, he’s crazy about her. She won’t have him and he goes off to India. Later she writes him that she will come out and marry him. She starts. Then comes the second blow. She arrives and promptly jilts him. She has ‘met someone on the boat.’ She goes home and marries Kelvin Halliday. Possibly Walter Fane thinks that Kelvin Halliday was the original cause of her turning him down. He broods, nurses a crazy jealous hate and comes home. He behaves in a most forgiving, friendly manner, is often at this house, has become apparently a tame cat around the house, the faithful Dobbin. But perhaps Helen realizes that this isn’t true. She gets a glimpse of what is going on below the surface. Perhaps, long ago, she sensed something disturbing in quiet young Walter Fane. She says to him, ‘I think I’ve always been afraid of you.’ She makes plans, secretly, to go right away from Dillmouth and live in Norfolk. Why? Because she’s afraid of Walter Fane.
“Now we come again to the fatal evening. Here, we’re not on very sure ground. We don’t know what Walter Fane was doing that night, and I don’t see any probability of ever finding out. But he fulfils Miss Marple’s requirement of being ‘on the spot’ to the extent of living in a house that is only two or three minutes’ walk away. He may have said he was going to bed early with a headache, or shut himself into his study with work to do—something of that kind. He could have done all the things we’ve decided the murderer did do, and I think that he’s the most likely of the three to have made mistakes in packing a suitcase. He wouldn’t know enough about what women wear to do it properly.”
“It was queer,” said Gwenda. “In his office that day I had an odd sort of feeling that he was like a house with its blinds pulled down … and I even had a fanciful idea that—that there was someone dead in the house.”
She looked at Miss Marple.
“Does that seem very silly to you?” she asked.
“No, my dear. I think that perhaps you were right.”
“And now,” said Gwenda, “we come to Afflick. Afflick’s Tours. Jackie Afflick who was always too smart by half. The first thing against him is that Dr. Kennedy believed he had incipient persecution mania. That is—he was never really normal. He’s told us about himself and Helen—but we’ll agree now that that was all a pack of lies. He didn’t just think she was a cute kid—he was madly, passionately in love with her. But she wasn’t in love with him.