“Certainly not. Utterly unlike him. Anyhow, why does your mind turn immediately to that? I told you he was murdered.”

“But no evidence of murder was found.”

“How do you know?”

“I had Dr Tschudi’s report about you, and I asked the librarian at our Neue Zürcher Zeitung to check their archive. They did report your father’s death, you know; he had connections with several Swiss banks. The report was necessarily discreet and brief, but it seemed that suicide was the generally accepted explanation.”

“He was murdered.”

“Tschudi’s report suggests you think your stepmother had something to do with it.”

“Yes, yes; but not directly. She destroyed him. She made him unhappy and unlike himself. I never suggested she drove him off the dock. She murdered him psychologically—”

“Really? I had the impression you didn’t think much of psychology, Mr Staunton.”

“Psychology plays a great part in my profession. I am rather a well-known criminal lawyer—or have you checked that, too? I have to know something about the way people function. Without a pretty shrewd psychological sense I couldn’t do what I do, which is to worm things out of people they don’t want to tell. That’s your job, too, isn’t it?”

“No. My job is to listen to people say things they very badly want to tell but are afraid nobody else will understand. You use psychology as an offensive weapon in the interest of justice. I use it as a cure. So keen a lawyer as yourself will appreciate the difference. You have shown you do. You think your stepmother murdered your father psychologically, but you don’t think that would be enough to drive him to suicide. Well—I have known of such things. But if she was not the real murderer, who do you think it might have been?”

“Whoever put the stone in his mouth.”

“Oh, come, Mr Staunton, nobody could put that stone in a man’s mouth against his will without breaking his teeth and creating great evidence of violence. I have tried it. Have you? No, I thought you hadn’t. Your father must have put it there himself.”

“Why?”

“Perhaps somebody told him to do it. Somebody he could not or did not wish to disobey.”

“Ridiculous. Nobody could make Father do anything he didn’t want to do.”

“Perhaps he wanted to do this. Perhaps he wanted to die. People do, you know.”

“He loved life. He was the most vital person I have ever known.”

“Even after your stepmother had murdered him psychologically?”

I was losing ground. This was humiliating. I am a fine crossexaminer and yet here I was, caught off balance time and again by this woman doctor. Well, the remedy lay in my own hands.

“I don’t think this line of discussion profitable, or likely to lead to anything that could help me,” I said. “If you will be good enough to tell me your fee for the consultation, we shall close it now.”

“As you wish,” said Dr von Haller. “But I should tell you that many people do not like the first consultation and want to run away. But they come back. You are a man of more than ordinary intelligence. Wouldn’t it simplify things if you skipped the preliminary flight and continued? I am sure you are much too reasonable to have expected this kind of treatment to be painless. It is always difficult in the beginning for everyone, and especially people of your general type.”