Sleeping Murder - Agatha Christie [77]
“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.