The transference of guilt is here given its ultimate expression: Bruno offers to kill Guy's wife, who won't give him a divorce, if Guy will kill Bruno's hated father. Neither man will be suspected of the crimes because each is utterly without a motive. Guy dismisses the plan as ridiculous, but Bruno goes ahead and fulfills his part of the bargain. This was an offer Guy couldn't refuse. As Hitchcock observes: "Though Bruno has killed Guy's wife, for Guy, it's just as if he had committed the murder himself." Bruno, enmeshed in a relationship with a crazy mother, and clearly a forerunner of Psycho's sympathetic psychopath Norman Bates, exemplifies Hitchcock's love/hate relationship with his villains. As Robin Wood writes in Hitchcock Revisited: "Bruno forms a link in a chain of fascinating, insidiously attractive Hitchcock villains who constantly threaten to 'take over'...as the center of sympathy....All these characters strike me as very personal to Hitchcock, as partial identification figures who must also be repudiated." -Marilyn Fabe