Chapter 25

We stayed in the garden a long time. By a kind of tacit consent, we did not discuss the horror that was weighing upon us. Instead Sophia talked affectiona tely of the dead woman, of things they had done, and games they had played as children with Nannie—and tales that the old woman used to tell them about Ro ger and their father and the other brothers and sisters.

‘They were her real children, you see. She only came back to us to help during the war when Josephine was a baby and Eustace was a funny little boy.’

There was a certain balm for Sophia in these memories and I encouraged her to talk.

I wondered what Taverner was doing. Questioning the household, I supposed. A car drove away with the police photographer and two other men, and pre sently an ambulance drove up.

Sophia shivered a little. Presently the ambulance left and we knew that Nannie’s body had been taken away in preparation for an autopsy.

And still we sat or walked in the garden and talked—our words becoming more and more of a cloak for our real thoughts.

Finally, with a shiver, Sophia said:

‘It must be very late—it’s almost dark. We’ve got to go in. Aunt Edith and Josephine haven’t come back… Surely they ought to be back by now?’

A vague uneasiness woke in me. What had happened? Was Edith deliberately keeping the child away from the Crooked House?

We went in. Sophia drew all the curtains. The fire was lit and the big drawing-room looked harmonious with an unreal air of bygone luxury. Great bowls of bronze chrysanthemums stood on the tables.

Sophia rang and a maid whom I recognized as having been formerly upstairs brought in tea. She had red eyes and sniffed continuously. Also I noticed that she had a frightened way of glancing quickly over her shoulder.

Magda joined us, but Philip’s tea was sent in to him in the library. Magda’s role was a stiff frozen ima ge of grief. She spoke little or not at all. She said once:

‘Where are Edith and Josephine? They’re out very late.’

But she said it in a preoccupied kind of way.

But I myself was becoming increasingly uneasy. I asked if Taverner were still in the house and Magda replied that she thought so. I went in search of him. I told him that I was worried about Miss de Haviland and the child.

He went immediately to the telephone and gave certain instructions.

‘I’ll let you know when I have news,’ he said.

I thanked him and went back to the drawing-room. Sophia was there with Eustace. Magda had gone.

‘He’ll let us know if he hears anything,’ I said to Sophia.

She said in a low voice:

‘Something’s happened, Charles, something must have happened.’

‘My dear Sophia, it’s not really late yet.’

‘What are you bothering about?’ said Eustace. ‘They’ve probably gone to the cinema.’

He lounged out of the room. I said to Sophia: ‘She may have taken Josephine to a hotel—or up to London. I think she really realized that the child was in danger—perhaps she realized it better than we did.’

Sophia replied with a sombre look that I could not quite fathom.

‘She kissed me goodbye…’

I did not see quite what she meant by that disconnected remark, or what it was supposed to show. I asked if Magda was worried.

‘Mother? No, she’s all right. She’s no sense of time. She’s reading a new play of Vavasour Jones called The Woman Disposes. It’s a funny play about murder—a female Bluebeard—cribbed from Arsenic and Old Lace if you ask me, but it’s got a good woman’s part, a woman who’s got a mania for being a widow.’

I said no more. We sat, pretending to read.

It was half-past six when Taverner opened the door and came in. His face prepared us for what he had to say.

Sophia got up.

‘Yes?’ she said.

‘I’m sorry. I’ve got bad news for you. I sent out a general alarm for the car. A motorist reported having seen a Ford car with a number something like that turning off the main road at Flackspur Heath—through the woods.’

‘Not—the track to the Flackspur Quarry?’

‘Yes, Miss Leonides.’ He paused and went on. ‘The car’s been found in the quarry. Both the occupants were dead. You’ll be glad to know they were killed outright.’

‘Josephine!’ It was Magda standing in the doorway. Her voice rose in a wail. ‘Josephine… My baby.’

Sophia went to her and put her arms round her. I said: ‘Wait a minute.’

I had remembered something! Edith de Haviland writing a couple of letters at the desk, going out into the hall with them in her hand.

But they had not been in her hand when she got into the car.

I dashed out into the hall and went to the long oak chest. I found the letters—pushed inconspicuously to the back behind a brass tea-urn.

The uppermost was addressed to Chief Inspector Taverner.

Taverner had followed me. I handed the letter to him and he tore it open. Standing beside him I read its brief contents.

My expectation is that this will be opened after my death. I wish to enter into no details, but I accept full responsibility for the deaths of my brother-in-law, Aristide Leonides and Janet Rowe (Nannie). I hereby solemnly declare that Brenda Leonides and Laurence Brown are innocent of the murder of Aristide Leonides. Inquiry of Dr Michael Chavasse, 783 Harley Street, will confirm that my life could only have been prolonged for a few months. I prefer to take this way out and to spare two innocent people the ordeal of being charged with a murder they did not commit. I am of sound mind and fully conscious of what I write.

Edith Elfrida de Haviland.

As I finished the letter I was aware that Sophia, too, had read it—whether with Taverner’s concurrence or not, I don’t know.

‘Aunt Edith…’ murmured Sophia.

I remembered Edith de Haviland’s ruthless foot grinding bindweed into the earth. I remembered my early, almost fanciful, suspicions of her. But why—

Sophia spoke the thought in my mind before I came to it.

‘But why Josephine? Why did she take Josephine with her?’

‘Why did she do it at all?’ I demanded. ‘What was her motive?’

But even as I said that, I knew the truth. I saw the whole thing clearly. I realized that I was still holding her second letter in my hand. I looked down and saw my own name on it.

It was thicker and harder than the other one. I think I knew what was in it before I opened it. I tore the envelope along and Josephine’s little black note-book fell out. I picked it up off the floor—it came open in my hand and I saw the entry on the first page…

Sounding from a long way away, I heard Sophia’s voice, clear and self-controlled.

‘We’ve got it all wrong,’ she said. ‘Edith didn’t do it.’

‘No,’ I said.

Sophia came closer to me—she whispered:

‘It was—Josephine—wasn’t it? That was it, Josephine.’

Together we looked down on the first entry in the little black book, written in an unformed childish hand:

‘Today I killed grandfather.’

Chapter 26

I was to wonder afterwards that I could have been so blind. The truth had stuck out so clearly all along. Josephine and only Josephine fitted in with all the necessary qualifications. Her vanity, her persistent self-importance, her delight in talking, her reiteration on how clever she was, and how stupid the police were.

I had never considered her because she was a child. But children have committed murders, and this particular murder had been well within a child’s compass. Her grandfather himself had indicated the precise method—he had practically handed her a blueprint. All she had to do was to avoid leaving fingerprints and the slightest knowledge of detection fiction would teach her that. And everything else had been a mere hotch-potch, culled at random from stock mystery stories. The note-book—the sleuthing—her pretended suspicions, her insistence that she was not going to tell till she was sure…

And finally the attack on herself. An almost incre dible performance considering that she might easily have killed herself. But then, childlike, she had never considered such a possibility. She was the heroine. The heroine isn’t killed. Yet there had been a clue there—the traces of earth on the seat of the old chair in the wash-house. Josephine was the only person who would have had to climb up on a chair to balance the block of marble on the top of the door. Obviously it had missed her more than once (the dents in the floor) and patiently she had climbed up again and replaced it, handling it with her scarf to avoid fingerprints. And then it had fallen—and she had had a near escape from death.

It had been the perfect set-up—the impression she was aiming for! She was in danger, she ‘knew something’, she had been attacked!

I saw how she had deliberately drawn my attention to her presence in the cistern room. And she had completed the artistic disorder of her room before going out to the wash-house.

But when she had returned from hospital, when she had found Brenda and Laurence arrested, she must have become dissatisfied. The case was over—and she—Josephine, was out of the limelight.

So she stole the digitalin from Edith’s room and put it in her own cup of cocoa and left the cup untouched on the hall table.

Did she know that Nannie would drink it? Possibly. From her words that morning, she had resented Nannie’s criticisms of her. Did Nannie, perhaps, wise from a lifetime of experience with children, suspect? I think that Nannie knew, had always known, that Josephine was not normal. With her precocious mental development had gone a retarded moral sense. Perhaps, too, the various factors of heredity—what Sophia had called the ‘ruthlessness of the family’—had met together.

She had had an authoritarian ruthlessness of her grandmother’s family, and the ruthless egoism of Magda, seeing only her own point of view. She had also presumably suffered, sensitive like Philip, from the stigma of being the unattractive— the changeling child—of the family. Finally, in her very marrow had run the essential crooked strain of old Leonides. She had been Leonides’ grandchild, she had resembled him in brain and cunning—but where his love had gone outwards to family and friends, hers had turned inward to herself.

I thought that old Leonides had realized what none of the rest of the family had realized, that Josephine might be a source of danger to others and to herself. He had kept her from school life because he was afraid of what she might do. He had shielded her, and guarded her in the home, and I understood now his urgency to Sophia to look after Josephine.

Magda’s sudden decision to send Josephine abroad—had that, too, been due to a fear for the child? Not, perhaps, a conscious fear, but some vague maternal instinct.

And Edith de Haviland? Had she first suspected, then feared—and finally known?

I looked down at the letter in my hand.

Dear Charles. This is in confidence for you—and for Sophia if you so decide. It is imperative that someone should know the truth. I found the enclosed in the disused dog kennel outside the back door. She kept it there. It confirms what I already suspected. The action I am about to take may be right or wrong—I do not know. But my life, in any case, is close to its end, and I do not want the child to suffer as I believe she would suffer if called to earthly account for what she has done.

There is often one of the litter who is ‘not quite right’.

If I am wrong, God forgive me—but I did it out of love. God bless you both.

Edith de Haviland.

I hesitated for only a moment, then I handed the letter to Sophia. Together we again opened Josephine’s little black book.

Today I killed grandfather.

We turned the pages. It was an amazing production. Interesting, I should imagine, to a psychologist. It set out, with such terrible clarity, the fury of thwarted egoism. The motive for the crime was set down, pitifully childish and inadequate.

Grandfather wouldn’t let me do bally dancing so I made up my mind I would kill him. Then we should go to London and live and mother wouldn’t mind me doing bally.

I give only a few entries. They are all significant.

I don’t want to go to Switzerland—I won’t go. If mother makes me I will kill her too—only I can’t get any poison. Perhaps I could make it with youherries. They are poisonous, the book says so.

Eustace has made me very cross today. He says I am only a girl and no use and that it’s silly my detecting. He wouldn’t think me silly if he knew it was me did the murder.

I like Charles—but he is rather stupid. I have not decided yet who I shall make have done the crime.

Perhaps Brenda and Laurence—Brenda is nasty to me— she says I am not all there but I like Laurence—he told me about Chariot Korday—she killed someone in his bath. She was not very clever about it.

The last entry was revealing.

I hate Nannie… I hate her… I hate her… She says I am only a little girl. She says I show off. She’s making mother send me abroad… I’m going to kill her too—I think Aunt Edith’s medicine would do it. If there is another murder, then the police will come back and it will all be exciting again.

Nannie’s dead. I am glad. I haven’t decided yet where I’ll hide the bottle with the little pill things. Perhaps in Aunt Clemency’s room—or else Eustace. When I am dead as an old woman I shall leave this behind me addressed to the Chief of Police and they will see what a really great criminal I was.

I closed the book. Sophia’s tears were flowing fast.

‘Oh, Charles—oh, Charles—it’s so dreadful. She’s such a little monster—and yet—and yet it’s so terribly pathetic.’

I had felt the same.

I had liked Josephine… I still felt a fondness for her… You do not like anyone less because they have tuberculosis or some other fatal disease. Josephine was, as Sophia had said, a little monster, but she was a pathetic little monster. She had been born with a kink—the crooked child of the little crooked house.

Sophia asked.

‘If—she had lived—what would have happened?’

‘I suppose she would have been sent to a reformatory or a special school. Later she would have been released— or possibly certified, I don’t know.’

Sophia shuddered.

‘It’s better the way it is. But Aunt Edith—I don’t like to think of her taking the blame.’

‘She chose to do so. I don’t suppose it will be made public. I imagine that when Brenda and Laurence come to trial, no case will be brought against them and they will be discharged.

‘And you, Sophia,’ I said, this time on a different note and taking both her hands in mine, ‘will marry me. I’ve just heard I’m appointed to Persia. We will go out there together and you will forget the little Crooked House. Your mother can put on plays and your father can buy more books and Eustace will soon go to a university. Don’t worry about them any more. Think of me.’

Sophia looked me straight in the eyes.

‘Aren’t you afraid, Charles, to marry me?’

‘Why should I be? In poor little Josephine all the worst of the family came together. In you, Sophia, I fully believe that all that is bravest and best in the Leonides family has been handed down to you. Your grandfather thought highly of you and he seems to have been a man who was usually right. Hold up your head, my darling. The future is ours.’ ‘I will, Charles. I love you and I’ll marry you and make you happy.’ She looked down at the note-book. ‘Poor Josephine.’

^‘Poor Josephine,’ I said.

‘What’s the truth of it, Charles?’ said my father.

I never lie to the Old Man.

‘It wasn’t Edith de Haviland, sir,’ I said. ‘It was Josephine.’ My father nodded his head gently.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve thought so for some time. Poor child…’