“Something else may have happened after he left here. We’ll never know. Norma told me that his secretary hadn’t noticed anything unusual. She isn’t a perceptive woman; he kept her on because he wanted to be left alone.

“A mood could come up on him like a sea squall. It must have happened that afternoon. It may be that he found himself thinking of the goodness of his marriage and contrasting it with what he thought of himself at that moment. It came up once in a while; I was afraid of it, but not enough. If he felt hatred, it was for himself. He killed himself in despair. I’m as certain of that as I am that he was not in the grip of vivid homosexual desires—he could run from them; he was familiar with them. When he had knocked the boy down the night before he had said to him, ‘I could kill you now, you know.’ It was not a threat; it was a statement of fact. In the office here Colin saw that he had considered his words. He never felt real remorse over Leikman or Tesla. If you don’t understand that, we may as well stop now—”

“Go on.”

“Colin wanted me to understand something about the things he felt. You heard him say that he was glad when he killed Leikman. That’s not quite correct. By then the consequences of the act were moving in on him. He only glimpsed the unconscious relief that rose to the surface later. He felt something else: the residue of the sick thrill he’d had at the prospect of killing a man. The fight took less than two minutes, as he reconstructed it. When he saw that the one sure escape from the consequences of hitting Leikman was in killing him, the thrill, the morbid, twisted thrill, was in him, like that, as fast as the thought. He wanted me to understand that. It was the key to his despair. He killed Leikman because it would satisfy him, no matter what he could see intellectually about the meaning or the penalties for doing murder. He made me understand that he knew in advance that killing Leikman would be difficult, that he would have to hit him time after time, literally beat the life out of him, and that the result would be the horrible scene that you found—remember, Colin looked at it, too. But before, while the fight was still on, while he was in the act of murder, he wouldn’t let himself think of all that. If anything, running away from the thought made him act faster and more decisively.