Murder In Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie

Author:Agatha Christie [Christie, Agatha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1936-08-17T22:00:00+00:00

Nineteen

A NEW SUSPICION

We couldn’t say any more just then because Dr. Reilly came in, saying jokingly that he’d killed off the most tiresome of his patients.

He and M. Poirot settled down to a more or less medical discussion of the psychology and mental state of an anonymous letter-writer. The doctor cited cases that he had known professionally, and M. Poirot told various stories from his own experience.

“It is not so simple as it seems,” he ended. “There is the desire for power and very often a strong inferiority complex.”

Dr. Reilly nodded.

“That’s why you often find that the author of anonymous letters is the last person in the place to be suspected. Some quiet inoffensive little soul who apparently can’t say Bo to a goose—all sweetness and Christian meekness on the outside—and seething with all the fury of hell underneath!”

Poirot said thoughtfully: “Should you say Mrs. Leidner had any tendency to an inferiority complex?”

Dr. Reilly scraped out his pipe with a chuckle.

“Last woman on earth I’d describe that way. No repressions about her. Life, life and more life—that’s what she wanted—and got, too!”

“Do you consider it a possibility, psychologically speaking, that she wrote those letters?”

“Yes, I do. But if she did, the reason arose out of her instinct to dramatize herself. Mrs. Leidner was a bit of a film star in private life! She had to be the centre of things—in the limelight. By the law of opposites she married Leidner, who’s about the most retiring and modest man I know. He adored her—but adoration by the fireside wasn’t enough for her. She had to be the persecuted heroine as well.”

“In fact,” said Poirot, smiling, “you don’t subscribe to his theory that she wrote them and retained no memory of her act?”

“No, I don’t. I didn’t turn down the idea in front of him. You can’t very well say to a man who’s just lost a dearly loved wife that that same wife was a shameless exhibitionist, and that she drove him nearly crazy with anxiety to satisfy her sense of the dramatic. As a matter of fact it wouldn’t be safe to tell any man the truth about his wife! Funnily enough, I’d trust most women with the truth about their husbands. Women can accept the fact that a man is a rotter, a swindler, a drugtaker, a confirmed liar, and a general swine without batting an eyelash and without its impairing their affection for the brute in the least! Women are wonderful realists.”

“Frankly, Dr. Reilly, what was your exact opinion of Mrs. Leidner?”

Dr. Reilly lay back in his chair and puffed slowly at his pipe.

“Frankly—it’s hard to say! I didn’t know her well enough. She’d got charm—any amount of it. Brains, sympathy . . . What else? She hadn’t any of the ordinary unpleasant vices. She wasn’t sensual or lazy or even particularly vain. She was, I’ve always thought (but I’ve no proofs of it), a most accomplished liar. What I don’t know (and what I’d like to know) is whether she lied to herself or only to other people.

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