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 realized that this was murder, that whoever had committed murder had endangered their neck, and that consequently that same person would not hesitate to repeat the crime if by that way safety could be assured.

Perhaps Magda, by some obscure maternal instinct, had recognized 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 in 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-stopper from the front door,’ Sophia explained. ‘It must have been balanced on 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 anyone 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 muffler 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 did it 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 a few fragments of earth.

‘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 all to-day. 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 note-book 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 note-book? 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 note-book.’

Had someone taken the note-book? 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 Taver ner’s voice called me:

‘Come in here,’ he said. Tm 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 vi sited 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. Taurence 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. I knew 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’ goose. And Mr Laurence Brown’s. So it was them, all the time…’