Chapter 18

 

In next to no time Taverner and I were racing in a fast police car in the direction of Swinly Dean.

 

I remembered Josephine emerging, from among the cisterns, and her airy remark that it was "about time for the second murder." The poor child had had no idea that she herself was likely to be the victim of the "second murder."

 

I accepted fully the blame that my father had tacitly ascribed to me. Of course I ought to have kept an eye on Josephine.

 

Though neither Taverner nor I had any real clue to the poisoner of old Leonides, it was highly possible that Josephine had.

 

What I had taken for childish nonsense and "showing off" might very well have been something quite different. Josephine, in her favourite sports of snooping and prying, might have become aware of some piece of information that she herself could not assess at its proper value.

 

I remembered the twig that had cracked in the garden.

 

I had had an inkling then that danger was about. I had acted upon it at the moment, and afterwards it had seemed to me that my suspicions had been melodramatic and unreal. On the contrary. I should have realised that this was murder, that whoever committed murder had endangered their neck, and that consequently that same person would not hesitate to repeat the crime if by the way safety could be assured.

 

Perhaps Magda, but some obscure maternal instinct, had recognised that Josephine was in peril, and that may have been what occasioned her sudden feverish haste to get the child sent to Switzerland.

 

Sophia came out to meet us as we arrived. Josephine, she said, had been taken by ambulance to Market Basing General Hospital.

 

Dr Gray would let them know as soon as possible the result of the X-ray.

 

"How did it happen?" asked Taverner.

 

Sophia led the way round to the back of the house and through a door into a small disused yard. In one corner a door stood ajar.

 

"It's a kind of wash house," Sophia explained. "There's a cat hole cut in the bottom of the door, and Josephine used to stand on it and swing to and fro."

 

I remembered swinging on doors in my own youth.

 

The wash house was small and rather dark. There were wooden boxes in it, some old hose pipe, a few derelict garden implements and some broken furniture. Just inside the door was a marble lion door stop.

 

"It's the door stop from the front door," Sophia explained. "It must have been balanced on the top of the door."

 

Taverner reached up a hand to the top of the door. It was a low door, the top of it only about a foot above his head.

 

"A booby trap," he said.

 

He swung the door experimentally to and fro. Then he stooped to the block of marble but he did not touch it.

 

"Has anyone handled this?"

 

"No," said Sophia. "I wouldn't let any one touch it."

 

"Quite right. Who found her?"

 

"I did. She didn't come in for her dinner at one o'clock. Nannie was calling her. She'd passed through the kitchen and out into the stable yard about a quarter of an hour before. Nannie said, 'She'll be bouncing her ball or swinging on that door again.' I said I'd fetch her in."

 

Sophia paused.

 

"She had a habit of playing in that way, you said? Who knew about that?"

 

Sophia shrugged her shoulders.

 

"Pretty well everybody in the house, I should think."

 

"Who else used the wash house? Gardeners?"

 

Sophia shook her head.

 

"Hardly anyone ever goes into it."

 

"And this little yard isn't overlooked from the house?" Taverner summed it up. "Anyone could have slipped out from the house or round the front and fixed up that trap ready. But it would be chancy..."

 

He broke off, looking at the door, and swinging it gently to and fro.

 

"Nothing certain about it. Hit or miss. And likelier miss than hit. But she was unlucky. With her it was hit."

 

Sophia shivered.

 

He peered at the floor. There were various dents on it.

 

"Looks as though someone experimented first... to see just how it would fall... The sound wouldn't carry to the house."

 

"No, we didn't hear anything. We'd no idea anything was wrong until I came out and found her lying face down - all sprawled out. Sophia's voice broke a little.

 

"There was blood on her hair..."

 

"That her scarf?" Taverner pointed to a checked woollen muff lying on the floor.

 

"Yes."

 

Using the scarf he picked up the block of marble carefully.

 

"There may be fingerprints, he said, but he spoke without much hope. "But I rather think whoever it was, was - careful."

 

He said to me: "What are you looking at?"

 

I was looking at a broken backed wooden kitchen chair which was among the derelicts. On the seat of it were fragments of muddy feet.

 

"Curious," said Taverner. "Someone stood on that chair with muddy feet. Now, why was that?"

 

He shook his head.

 

"What time was it when you found her, Miss Leonides?"

 

"It must have been five minutes past one."

 

"And your Nannie saw her going out about twenty minutes earlier - who was the last person before that known to have been in the wash house?"

 

"I've no idea. Probably Josephine herself. Josephine was swinging on the door this morning after breakfast, I know."

 

Taverner nodded.

 

"So between then and a quarter to one someone set the trap. You say that bit of marble is the door stop you use for the front door? Any idea when that was missing?"

 

Sophia shook her head.

 

"The door hasn't been propped open at all today. It's been too cold."

 

"Any idea where everyone was all the morning?"

 

"I went out for a walk. Eustace and Josephine did lessons until half past twelve - with a break at half past ten. Father, I think, has been in the library all the morning."

 

"Your mother?"

 

"She was just coming out of her bedroom when I came in from my walk - that was about a quarter past twelve. She doesn't get up very early."

 

We re-entered the house. I followed Sophia to the library. Philip, looking white and haggard, sat in his usual chair. Magda crouched against his knees, crying quietly. Sophia asked:

 

"Have they telephoned yet from the hospital?"

 

Philip shook his head.

 

Magda sobbed:

 

"Why wouldn't they let me go with her? My baby - my funny ugly baby. And I used to call her a changeling and make her so angry. How could I be so cruel? And now she'll die. I know she'll die."

 

"Hush, my dear," said Philip. "Hush."

 

I felt that I had no place in this family scene of anxiety and grief. I withdrew quietly and went to find Nannie. She was sitting in the kitchen crying quietly.

 

"It's a judgement on me, Mr Charles, for the hard things I've been thinking. A judgement, that's what it is."

 

I did not try and fathom her meaning. "There's wickedness in this house. That's what there is. I didn't wish to see it or believe it. But seeing's believing. Somebody killed the master and the same somebody must have tried to kill Josephine."

 

"Why should they try and kill Josephine?"

 

Nannie removed a corner of her handkerchief from her eye and gave me a shrewd glance.

 

"You know well enough what she was like, Mr Charles. She liked to know things. She was always like that, even as a tiny thing. Used to hide under the dinner table and listen to the maids talking and then she'd hold it over them. Made her feel important. You see, she was passed over, as it were, by the mistress. She wasn't a handsome child, like the other two. She was always a plain little thing. A changeling, the mistress used to call her. I blame the mistress for that, for it's my belief it turned the child sour. But in a funny sort of way she got her own back by finding out things about people and letting them know she knew them. But it isn't safe to do that when there's a poisoner about!"

 

No, it hadn't been safe. And that brought something else to my mind. I asked Nannie:

 

"Do you know where she kept a little black book - a notebook of some kind where she used to write down things?"

 

"I know what you mean, Mr Charles. Very sly about it, she was. I've seen her sucking her pencil and writing in the book and sucking her pencil again. And 'don't do that,' I'd say, 'you'll get lead poisoning' and 'oh no, I shan't,' she said, 'because it isn't really lead in a pencil. It's carbon, though I don't see how that could be so, for if you call a thing a lead pencil it stands to reason that that's because there's lead in it."

 

"You'd think so," I agreed. "But as a matter of fact she was right." (Josephine was always right!) "What about this notebook? Do you know where she kept it?"

 

"I've no idea at all, sir. It was one of the things she was sly about."

 

"She hadn't got it with her when she was found?"

 

"Oh no, Mr Charles, there was no notebook."

 

Had someone taken the notebook? Or had she hidden it in her own room? The idea came to me to look and see. I was not sure which Josephine's room was, but as I stood hesitating in the passage Taverner's voice called me:

 

"Come in here," he said. "I'm in the kid's room. Did you ever see such a sight?"

 

I stepped over the threshold and stopped dead.

 

The small room looked as though it had been visited by a tornado. The drawers of the chest of drawers were pulled out and their contents scattered on the floor. The mattress and bedding had been pulled from the small bed. The rugs were tossed into heaps. The chairs had been turned upside down, the pictures taken down from the wall, the photographs wrenched out of their frames.

 

"Good Lord," I exclaimed. "What was the big idea?"

 

"What do you think?"

 

"Someone was looking for something."

 

"Exactly."

 

I looked round and whistled.

 

"But who on earth - Surely nobody could come in here and do all this and not be heard - or seen?"

 

"Why not? Mrs Leonides spends the morning in her bedroom doing her nails and ringing up her friends on the telephone and playing with her clothes. Philip sits in the library browsing over books. The nurse woman is in the kitchen peeling potatoes and stringing beans. In a family that knows each other's habits it would be easy enough. And I'll tell you this. Anyone in the house could have done our little job - could have set the trap for the child and wrecked her room. But it was someone in a hurry, someone who hadn't the time to search quietly."

 

"Anyone in the house, you say?"

 

"Yes, I've checked up. Everyone has some time or other unaccounted for. Philip, Magda, the nurse, your girl. The same upstairs. Brenda spent most of the morning alone. Laurence and Eustace had a half hour break - from ten-thirty to eleven - you were with them part of that time - but not all of it. Miss de Haviland was in the garden alone. Roger was in his study."

 

"Only Clemency was in London at her job."

 

"No, even she isn't out of it. She stayed at home today with a headache - she was alone in her room having that headache. Any of them - any blinking one of them! And I don't know which! I've no idea. If I knew what they were looking for in here -"

 

His eyes went round the wrecked room.

 

"And if I knew whether they'd found it..."

 

Something stirred in my brain - a memory...

 

Taverner clinched it by asking me:

 

"What was the kid doing when you last saw her?"

 

"Wait," I said.

 

I dashed out of the room and up the stairs. I passed through the left hand door and went up to the top floor. I pushed open the door of the cistern room, mounted the two steps and bending my head, since the ceiling was low and sloping, I looked round me.

 

Josephine had said when I asked her what she was doing there that she was "detecting."

 

I didn't see what there could be to detect in a cobwebby attic full of water tanks. But such an attic would make a good hiding place. I considered it probable that Josephine had been hiding something there, something that she knew quite well she had no business to have. If so, it oughtn't to take long to find it.

 

It took me just three minutes. Tucked away behind the largest tank, from the interior of which a sibilant hissing added an eerie note to the atmosphere, I found a packet of letters wrapped in a torn piece of brown paper.

 

I read the first letter.

 

'Oh Laurence - my darling, my own dear love... It was wonderful last night when you quoted that verse of poetry - it was meant for me, though you didn't look at me. Aristide said, "You read verse well." He didn't guess what we were both feeling. My darling, I feel convinced that soon everything will come right. We shall be glad that he never knew, that he died happy. He's been good to me. I don't want him to suffer. But I don't really think that it can be any pleasure to live after you're eighty. I shouldn't want to! Soon we shall be together for always. How wonderful it will be when I can say to you: My dear dear husband... Dearest, we were made for each other. I love you, love you, love you - I can see no end to our love, I -

 

There was a good deal more, but I had no wish to go on.

 

Grimly I went downstairs and thrust my parcel into Taverner's hands.

 

"It's possible," I said, "that that's what our unknown friend was looking for."

 

Taverner read a few passages, whistled and shuffled through the various letters.

 

Then he looked at me with the expression of a cat who has been fed with the best cream.

 

"Well," he said softly. "This pretty well cooks Mrs Brenda Leonides's goose. And Mr Laurence Brown's. So it was them, all the time..."

 

 

Chapter 19

 

 

It seems odd to me, looking back, how suddenly and completely my pity and sympathy for Brenda Leonides vanished with the discovery of her letters, the letters she had written to Laurence Brown. Was my vanity unable to stand up to the revelation that she loved Laurence Brown with a doting and sugarly infatuation and had deliberately lied to me? I don't know. I'm not a psychologist. I prefer to believe that it was the thought of the child Josephine, struck down in ruthless self preservation that dried up the springs of my sympathy.

 

"Brown fixed that booby trap, if you ask me," said Taverner, "and it explains what puzzled me about it."

 

"What did puzzle you?"

 

"Well, it was such a sappy thing to do. Look here, say the kid's got hold of these letters - letters that are absolutely damning! The first thing to do is to try and get them back - (after all, if the kid talks about them, but has got nothing to show, it can be put down as mere romancing) but you can't get them back because you can't find them. Then the only thing to do is to put the kid out of action for good. You've done one murder and you're not squeamish about doing another. You know she's fond of swinging on a door in a disused yard. The ideal thing to do is wait behind the door and lay her out as she comes through with a poker, or an iron bar, or a nice bit of hose-pipe. They're all there ready to hand. Why fiddle about with a marble lion perched on top of a door which is as likely as not to miss her altogether and which even if it does fall on her may not do the job properly (which actually is how it turns out)? I ask you - why?"

 

"Well," I said, "what's the answer?"

 

"The only idea I got to begin with was that it was intended to tie in with someone's alibi. Somebody would have a nice fat alibi for the time when Josephine was being slugged. But that doesn't wash because, to begin with, nobody seems to have any kind of alibi, and secondly someone's bound to look for the child at lunchtime, and they'll find the booby trap and the marble block - the whole modus operandi will be quite plain to see. Of course, if the murderer removed the block before the child was found, then we might have been puzzled. But as it is the whole thing just don't make sense."

 

He stretched out his hands...

 

"And what's your present explanation?"

 

"The personal element. Personal idiosincrasy. Laurence Brown's idiosyncrasy - he doesn't like violence - he can't force himself to do physical violence. He couldn't have stood behind the door and socked the kid on the head. He could have put up a booby trap and go away and not see it happen."

 

"Yes, I see," I said slowly. "It's the eserine in the insulin bottle all over again."

 

"Exactly."

 

"Do you think he did that with Brenda's knowing?"

 

"It would explain why she didn't throw away the insulin bottle. Of course, they may have fixed it up between themselves, she may have thought up the poison trick all by herself - a nice easy death for her tired old husband and all for the best in the best of possible worlds! But I bet she didn't fix the booby trap. Women never have any faith in mechanical things working properly. And are they right. I think myself the eserine was her idea, but that she made her besotted slave do the switch. She's the kind that usually manages to avoid doing anything equivocable themselves. Then they keep a nice happy conscience."

 

He paused then went on:

 

"With these letters I think the D.P.P. will say we have a case. They'll take a bit of explaining away! Then, if the kid gets through all right everything in the garden will be lovely." He gave me a sideways glance. "How does it feel to be engaged to about a million pounds sterling?"

 

I winced. In the excitement of the last few hours, I had forgotten the developments about the will.

 

"Sophia doesn't know yet," I said. "Do you want me to tell her?"

 

"I understand Gaitskill is going to break the sad (or glad) news after the inquest tomorrow." Taverner paused and looked at me thoughtfully.

 

"I wonder," he said, "what the reactions will be from the family?"