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.”