“The air-tight compartments in which each of her personalities had their separate being had broken. The result was this distracted semi-maniacal young woman who had fled from the police station to Rollo to hide. I explained all this to her and she was able to follow me in part. It was necessary to explain the thing, first, in order to give her a momentary consciousness, that is, a perspective, and, secondly, in order to assure her that craft and concealment were futile.
“Well, when I had finished she took up the story and cleared away several of the details which had bothered me. Her confession was extremely interesting from a scientific point of view.”
“She confessed the murder?” De Medici murmured. “Saying she remembered it?”
“In due time, Julien. Before reaching the murder, and in order to understand it, we must establish the scientific motive. As the morning progressed Florence, or Floria, grew calm and extremely docile. I placed the entire conversation on a scientific basis, a ruse which invariably disarms criminals of her type. For instance, I asked her if she knew when she had experienced the shock which had caused the dissociation or duality of ego. She told me the thing had happened or must have happened when she was quite a child. This, as you know, is frequently the case. Victor Ballau had once tried to kill her father, a man named Bandoux. Poor Ballau was in love with Bandoux’s wife. And Bandoux’s wife was her mother. Ballau had conceived a desperate passion for the woman. Failing somehow to kill the man, he concentrated his jealousy on the wife. In the child’s mind there came the realization that this Ballau was at the time causing her mother, whom she idolized, trouble and anguish. She told me that she remembers one night seeing her mother lying on the floor of a room and sobbing. Ballau had reviled and struck her in a jealous rage. Florence remembered also that her mother had cried out on the night she died that she would be avenged. The child was perhaps only three or four years old at the time, but the scene was sufficient to produce the shock which later brought the duality on.
“Now consider this. As a child she had always called her mother Floria. Her mother died when she was four. Ballau carried the child off and brought her to America. As she grew older the shock experienced in her childhood began to show results. The hallucination that she was her mother began to grow in her and this hallucination finally became so strong that it was able to overpower her normal self and she became Floria. Yes, Floria, the avenging mother whose life Ballau had ruined.
“As for the murder,” Dr. Lytton smiled with an air of discussing trifles, “you recall, Julien, that poor Ballau seemed nervous about the engagement. You mentioned things—suspicions—to me. Well, nervous he was. Ballau called her up that night with a very simple message. He wanted to tell her something in relation to the party he was giving. And he was also worried about her. He had noticed symptoms—telltale symptoms of her recurrent mania that day. The sound of his voice over the phone stirred her subconscious mind and brought uppermost the Floria complex. Recall, she said: ‘Yes—yes—immediately. Oh, God!’ She was merely talking as Floria. She left the theater and hurried to the apartment, determined on the vengeance that the Floria who lived in her was continually demanding.
“Jane, the housekeeper, let her in. I’ll return to this in a moment. She faced her stepfather in the library. He looked at her and knew what had happened. This was no longer Florence Ballau, but the maniac who thought herself Floria, the lady of the dagger shrieking for vengeance. Poor Ballau knew this creature. He had struggled with her before. It was the secret that he held from the world. We must picture what followed ourselves. Miss Ballau doesn’t remember. Up to this point I have quoted her confession. From here on we reconstruct the scene of the murder.
“You see how simple it all grows, Julien? Floria, the lady of the dagger, killed Ballau. She remembers dimly, she says, of striking him with a dagger. She remembers nothing after that for several minutes. Her normality gradually returned. But not entirely. She was able to realize the crime that had been committed, but she was not able to return to Florence Ballau. I neglected, by the way, to say that the purse you found was the property of her mother. And the dress as well. Both items which her maniac self treasured as souvenirs. And when she entered the apartment that night her first impulse was to dress as her mother—in these things that had belonged to the woman. Do you follow me so far, Julien?”
De Medici sighed again. The doctor’s words had continued to buzz harmlessly in his ears. His narrow eyes were glancing furtively at the horizontal pattern of the wine-colored drapes. The confusion which had come to him an hour before appeared to have lifted. Through his thought drifted the words:
“One chance. One chance it wasn’t I. All this convinces me. Yes, everything he says points to me, inasmuch as it completely exonerates her. But there’s still one chance....”