Plain Murder by C. S. Forester

Author:C. S. Forester
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780141971353
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2011-11-25T02:15:47+00:00

11

It is very difficult after the event to reconstruct the character of a criminal. The people one consults who came into contact with him are biased one way or the other, and they like to believe in their own perspicacity. One man will say, ‘It was obvious from his expression,’ and another will tell you that ‘he was a plausible scoundrel, very plausible. He would have taken almost anybody in, but he didn’t deceive me. There was something about him—something not quite trustworthy. It might have been in the way he looked at you, or the way he spoke. I had my doubts about him from the very first.’ And another, more honest, will say, ‘I don’t believe he was guilty at all. He was always very nice to me.’

So that the truth is hard to come by. As far as Mrs Morris is concerned, she never had any suspicion of her husband until the end, even if she did then. But, then, Mrs Morris loved her husband in a queer cross-grained way; moreover, the changes which might have been observable in Morris were mere accentuations of his outstanding characteristics, and could have been attributed quite plausibly to other factors, such as his promotion in the office. He used to come home more tired, for instance—exhausted would be a better word, perhaps. But, then, he was working harder. He was surer of himself, he carried himself with more dignity, he was vainer—but that could be readily explained by his responsible position in the Universal Advertising Agency. He may have been a trace more irritable, less tolerant of the noises his children made, but that was not a very noticeable difference from what he had been before. He was undoubtedly more taciturn toward his wife, but she, poor woman, was more likely to attribute that to a natural waning of his affection for her than to the fact that he had committed a crime.

Morris, indeed, began to treat his wife with a lofty indifference which was only slightly paralleled by his previous behavior. His idea of his own importance was inflating daily; partly this was because of the ambitious dreams which he was dreaming, partly it was a result of his late marvelous successes, and partly because he had had to take more interest than usual in the significance of his own actions and demeanor, and consequently bulked larger in his own world than he had done before. His belief and pride in himself, indeed, began to approach in degree the enormous egoism of a lunatic; other people to him were beginning to appear as insignificant as ants; they were mere tools and instruments which he could use and throw aside. The main characteristic of a criminal, the sine qua non in any definition, is an unusual idea of the importance of his own well-being compared with the importance of the well-being, or the opinions, or the ideals of other people. Morris would not have killed Harrison had he not thought

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