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."
"Anvone 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 •1*-…
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 t Vnpw 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…"
Nineteen
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 b100^3 the whole modus operand! will be ^u1 e plain to see. Of course, if the murder^ removed the block before the chiP was found, then we might have been pu22,'
But as it is the whole thing just d068111 make sense."
He stretched out his hands..,„ ' «"i «
"And what's your present explanat^01
"The personal element. Personal id^05^" crasy. Laurence Brown's idiosyncrasy- e doesn't like violence - he can't Iorce himself to do physical violence. He [[i^ y couldn't have stood behind the doo^ an socked the kid on the head. He cou^ n^ -*- c f^f~^ up a booby trap and go away and n^1 it happen."
"Yes, I see," I said slowly. "It^. me eserine in the insulin bottle all over a^^11' "Exactly."
"Do you think he did that w^0^
Brenda's knowing?"
"It would explain why she didn't /throw away the insulin bottle. Of course, y /~\T* may have fixed it up between them ~^~., she may have thought up the poison trlcK all by herself - a nice easy death fc^ er tired old husband and all for the b^1 m the best of possible worlds! But I b^ 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 equi vocable 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 5 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?"