Confession at last in Rebecca - but is the confession accurate or complete?

OK the truth comes out - or at least so it seems, provisionally - in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Spoilers coming, although I think many readers will figure out these plot points before the hapless narrator does: After the sturm and drang of the costume ball and a really creepy scene in which the insidious servant, Mrs. Danvers, tries to taunt the narrator to kill herself by jumping from an upper-story window, there's suddenly a call for help down at the seacoast; everyone rushes to the scene, to find a merchant ship foundering on a hidden reef. Coastguard teams go out to help the mariners - no one seems to be in real danger - and a diver goes down to inspect the damage, when, lo and behold!, the diver reprts finding another boat underwater snagged in the reef. It turns out that it's the yacht that went with the eponymous Rebecca - and there's a body in the small cabin of the yacht. The narrator wrestles w/ this discovery - because R's body had been recovered two months after the drowning, she concludes that somebody else must have been w/ R on the yacht. Wrong, or partially wrong - as her husband, Maxim, finally confesses to her: He shot and killed his (first) wife, Rebecca, scuttled the yacht, later identified another body as R's and had that body interred. Well, this is a new twist: We knew husband Maxim was hardly a paradigm of kindness and gentility, but a killer? We suppose at this point that he was driven by jealousy. But that leaves open the question: Why would he be in such a rush to re-marry? What does he continue to mourn for Rebecca - which just draws even more attention to his crime, if in fact his confession is accurate or complete. Anyway, corny as it may be, and over-written as it may be by today's standards (impossible to imagine a contemporary agent or editor publishing Rebecca in this form - they would have told DdM to cut the narrative by 50 percent - we don't need to know about every lilac in bloom, for ex.) it's still a good entertainment and great raw material for film or TV (apparently there's a recent 2-episode adaptation).

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