Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie Page B

background. No, everything was the children. Their feeding, their clothing, their playing, everything to do with them. Far too much was done for them. The thing she didn't give them and that they needed, was a little plain, honest-to-goodness neglect. They weren't just turned out into the garden to play like ordinary children in the country. No, they had to have every kind of gadget, artificial climbing things and stepping stones, a house built in the trees, sand brought and a little beach made on the river. Their food wasn't plain, ordinary food. Why, those kids even had their vegetables sieved, up to nearly five years old, and their milk sterilised the water tested and their calories weighed and the vitamins computed! Mind you, I'm not being professional in talking to you like this. Mrs. Argyle was never my patient. If she needed a doctor she went to one in Harley Street. Not that she often went. She was very robust and healthy woman.
    “But I was the local doctor who was called in to the children, though she was inclined to think I was a bit casual over them. I told her to let 'em eat a few blueberries from the hedges. I told her it wouldn't hurt them to get their feet wet and have an occasional cold in the head, and that there's nothing much wrong with a child who's got a temperature of 99. No need to fuss till over 100. Those children were pampered and spoon-fed and fussed over and loved and in many ways it didn't do them any good.”
    “You mean,” said Calgary, “it didn't do Jacko good?”
    “Well, I wasn't really only thinking of Jacko. Jacko to my mind was a liability from the start. The modern label for him is 'a crazy mixed-up kid.' It's just as good as any other label. The Argyles did their best for him, they did everything that could have been done. I've seen a good many Jackos in my lifetime. Later in life, when the boy has gone hopelessly wrong, the parents say, 'If only I'd been stricter with him when he was young,' or else they say, 'I was too harsh, if only I'd been kinder.' I don't think myself it amounts to a penn'orth of difference. There are those who go wrong because they've had an unhappy home and essentially feel unloved. And again there are those who go wrong because at the least stress they're going to go wrong anyway. I put Jacko down as one of the latter.”
    “So you weren't surprised,” said Calgary, “when he was arrested for murder?”
    “Frankly, yes, I was surprised. Not because the idea of murder would have been particularly repugnant to Jacko. He was the sort of young man who is conscienceless. But the kind of murder he'd done did surprise me. Oh, I know he had a violent temper and all that. As a child he often hurled himself on another child or hit him with some heavy toy or bit of wood. But it was usually a child smaller than himself, and it was usually not so much blind rage as the wish to hurt or get hold of something that he himself wanted. The kind of murder I'd have expected Jacko to do, if he did one, was the type where a couple of boys go out on a raid; then, when the police come after them, the Jackos say 'Biff him on the head, bud. Let him have it. Shoot him down.' They're willing for murder, ready to incite to murder, but they've not got the nerve to do murder themselves with their own hands. That's what I should have said. Now it seems,” added the doctor, “I would have been right.”
    Calgary stared down at the carpet, a worn carpet with hardly any of its pattern remaining.
    “I didn't know,” he said, “what I was up against. I didn't realise what it was going to mean to the others. I didn't see that it might - that it must -”
    The doctor was nodding gently.
    “Yes,” he said. “It looks that way, doesn't it? It looks as though you've got to put it right there amongst them.”
    “I think,” said Calgary, “that that's really what I came to talk to you about. There doesn't seem, on the face of it, any real motive for any of them to have killed