Free The Man in the Net by Patrick Quentin

Hamilton which Linda had built up in their minds.
    He was driving through the woods now. The road dipped down a hill and then up again to the corner. He turned it, passed over the wooden bridge and, suddenly dreading his wife, swung up the drive and parked outside the kitchen door.
    Linda wasn’t in the kitchen. He passed through it, calling “Linda”. Then he moved into the living-room and stopped dead. The room was in total chaos. All his pictures were off the walls; all the records and boxes of tapes had been pulled out of the cabinet. The floor was a wild litter of them. Half the records were smashed and the pictures had been ripped savagely to and fro as if by a knife. Even the phonograph turn-table and amplifier and the tape recorder had been swept off the shelf and lay on their sides, spewing broken tubes.
    As he stood there, gazing down at the confusion, it seemed to John as if this had happened before or rather as if something which he’d always half known would happen but had kept from admitting to himself had happened at last. And the dread became horror as an image came of Linda wielding a knife, Linda trampling on the records, Linda, her face wild, contorted, gibbering—a maniac’s face. He closed his eyes as if the vision were actually there in front of him.
    And then suddenly he could feel her presence in the house or rather the presence of her madness. It seemed to permeate the air, infecting it, like a poisonous gas.
    Where is she? he thought. I’ve got to find her. I’ve got to go and face …
    That was when he saw his typewriter. It was usually kept out in his studio, but it was on a table in a corner, and propped on it was a piece of paper. He threaded his way through the ruin of records and canvases to the table. He picked up the message. It was all typed, even the signature.
     
    you never thought i’d do it, did you? well, that’s where you fooled yourself, at last i’ve found the courage to escape. so—find yourself another woman to slave for you, to stick pins in, to torture. find another one if you can. it’s a cinch you’ll never find me. bad luck to you—for ever.
    linda

7
    SHE HAD gone. He stood looking at the note, not reacting to the insane, distorted spite of the words, just registering the fact that she had left him. But dimly behind the shock, his reasoning processes were working. Why had she typed the note? He never remembered her having typed anything. He hadn’t even known she could type. Why had she taken the trouble to go out to the studio and bring the typewriter here and … ? The image of her, mad, gibbering, plunging around the room with a knife came back. And he thought: She hasn’t really gone. This note is just another devious trick. She’s still here somewhere—in the house.
    He picked his way through the havoc on the havoc, thinking, almost impersonally: She’s destroyed the pictures. Later I’ll be murderously angry. But what he felt now wasn’t anger; it was fear, a sliding miasmic fear that somewhere—upstairs maybe—madness was lurking, crouched in a corner to spring.
    He went into the dining-room. Nothing. No one. Then he went up the stairs. It’s our bedroom, he thought with blinding certainty. But, when he went into the bedroom, she wasn’t there and the door of the closet was open. He could see into it to his suits and her dresses hanging there. No one was in the closet.
    He investigated the other rooms. Then, with a sudden jitteriness, he thought of the pictures in the studio. He ran out through the kitchen door, across the lawn, serenely dappled with the evening shadows of the apple trees, and into the studio. The pictures stacked against the wall hadn’t been touched, nor had the one on the easel. That was something. But Linda wasn’t there.
    So she really had gone—without the car? Without any clothes? He went back to the bedroom and started to ruffle through the clothes in the closet. Yes,