This is indeed a family chronicle.
Old Leonides was rather clever to choose Swinly Dean. It was only beginning to be fashionable then. The second and third golf courses hadnt been made. There was a mixture of Old Inhabitants who were passionately fond of their gardens and who liked Mrs Leonides, and rich City men who wanted to be in with Leonides, so they could take their choice of acquaintances. They were perfectly happy, I believe, until she died of pneumonia in 1905.
Leaving him with eight children?
One died in infancy. Two of the sons were killed in the last war. One daughter married and went to Australia and died there. An unmarried daughter was killed in a motor accident. Another died a year or two ago. There are two still livingthe eldest son, Roger, who is married but has no children, and Philip, who married a well-known actress and has three children. Your Sophia, Eustace, and Josephine.
And they are all living atwhat is it?Three Gables?
Yes. The Roger Leonides were bombed out early in the war. Philip and his family have lived there since 1937. And theres an elderly aunt, Miss de Haviland, sister of the first Mrs Leonides. She always loathed her brother-in-law apparently, but when her sister died she considered it her duty to accept her brother-in-laws invitation to live with him and bring up the children.
Shes very hot on duty, said Inspector Taverner. But shes not the kind that changes her mind about people. She always disapproved of Leonides and his methods
Well, I said, it seems a pretty good houseful. Who do you think killed him?
Taverner shook his head.
Early days, he said, early days to say that.
Come on, Taverner, I said. I bet you think you know who did it. Were not in court, man.
No, said Taverner gloomily. And we never may be.
You mean he may not have been murdered?
Oh, he was murdered all right. Poisoned. But you know what these poisoning cases are like. Its very tricky getting the evidence. Very tricky. All the possibilities may point one way
Thats what Im trying to get at. Youve got it all taped out in your mind, havent you?
Its a case of very strong probability. Its one of those obvious things. The perfect set-up. But I dont know, Im sure. Its tricky.
I looked appealingly at the Old Man.
He said slowly: In murder cases, as you know, Charles, the obvious is usually the right solution. Old Leonides married again, ten years ago.
When he was seventy-seven?
Yes, he married a young woman of twenty-four.
I whistled.
What sort of a young woman?
A young woman out of a tea-shop. A perfectly respectable young womangood-looking in an anemic, apathetic sort of way.
And shes the strong probability?
I ask you, sir, said Taverner. Shes only thirty-four nowand thats a dangerous age. She likes living soft. And theres a young man in the house. Tutor to the grandchildren. Not been in the wargot a bad heart or something. Theyre as thick as thieves[33].
I looked at him thoughtfully. It was, certainly, an old and familiar pattern. The mixture as before. And the second Mrs Leonides was, my father had emphasized, very respectable. In the name of respectability many murders had been committed.
What was it? I asked. Arsenic?
No. We havent got the analysts report yetbut the doctor thinks its eserine.
Thats a little unusual, isnt it? Surely easy to trace the purchaser.
Not this thing. It was his own stuff, you see. Eyedrops.
Leonides suffered from[34] diabetes, said my father. He had regular injections of insulin. Insulin is given out in small bottles with a rubber cap. A hypodermic needle[35] is pressed down through the rubber cap and the injection drawn up.
I guessed the next bit.
And it wasnt insulin in the bottle, but eserine?
Exactly.
And who gave him the injection? I asked.
His wife.
I understood now what Sophia meant by the right person.
I asked: Does the family get on well with[36] the se cond Mrs Leonides?
No. I gather they are hardly on speaking terms.
It all seemed clearer and clearer. Nevertheless, Inspector Taverner was clearly not happy about it.
What dont you like about it? I asked him.
If she did it, Mr Charles, it would have been so easy for her to substitute a bona fide[37] bottle of insulin afterwards. In fact, if she is guilty, I cant imagine why on earth[38] she didnt do just that.
Yes, it does seem indicated. Plenty of insulin about?
Oh yes, full bottles and empty ones. And if shed done that, ten to one the doctor wouldnt have spotted it. Very little is known of the post-mortem appea rances in human poisoning by eserine. But as it was he checked up on the insulin (in case it was the wrong strength or something like that) and so, of course, he soon spotted that it wasnt insulin.
So it seems, I said thoughtfully, that Mrs Leonides was either very stupidor possibly very clever.
You mean
That she may be gambling on your coming to the conclusion that nobody could have been as stupid as she appears to have been. What are the alternatives? Any othersuspects?
The Old Man said quietly:
Practically anyone in the house could have done it. There was always a good store of insulinat least a fortnights supply. One of the phials could have been tampered with[39], and replaced in the knowledge that it would be used in due course.
And anybody, more or less, had access to them?
They werent locked away. They were kept on a special shelf in the medicine cupboard in the bathroom of his part of the house. Everybody in the house came and went freely.
Any strong motive?
My father sighed.
My dear Charles, Aristide Leonides was enormously rich. He has made over a good deal of his mo ney to his family, it is true, but it may be that somebody wanted more.
Any strong motive?
My father sighed.
My dear Charles, Aristide Leonides was enormously rich. He has made over a good deal of his mo ney to his family, it is true, but it may be that somebody wanted more.
But the one that wanted it most would be the present widow. Has her young man any money?
No. Poor as a church mouse.
Something clicked in my brain. I remembered Sophias quotation. I suddenly remembered the whole verse of the nursery rhyme:
There was a crooked man and he went a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence beside a crooked stile.
He had a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.
I said to Taverner:
How does she strike youMrs Leonides? What do you think of her?
He replied slowly:
Its hard to sayvery hard to say. Shes not easy. Very quietso you dont know what shes thinking. But she likes living softthat Ill swear Im right about. Puts me in mind, you know, of a cat, a big pur ring lazy cat Not that Ive anything against cats. Cats are all right
He sighed.
What we want, he said, is evidence.
Yes, I thought, we all wanted evidence that Mrs Leonides had poisoned her husband. Sophia wanted it, and I wanted it, and Chief Inspector Taverner wanted it.
Then everything in the garden would be lovely!
But Sophia wasnt sure, and I wasnt sure, and I didnt think Chief Inspector Taverner was sure either.
Chapter 4
On the following day I went down to Three Gables with Taverner.
My position was a curious one. It was, to say the least of it, quite unorthodox. But the Old Man has never been highly orthodox.
I had a certain standing. I had worked with the Special Branch at the Yard during the early days of the war.
This, of course, was entirely differentbut my earlier performances had given me, so to speak, a certain official standing.
My father said:
If were ever going to solve this case, weve got to get some inside dope[40]. Weve got to know all about the people in that house. Weve got to know them from the inside not the outside. Youre the man who can get that for us.
I didnt like that. I threw my cigarette end into the grate as I said:
Im a police spy? Is that it? Im to get the inside dope from Sophia whom I love and who both loves and trusts me, or so I believe.
The Old Man became quite irritable. He said sharply:
For heavens sake dont take the commonplace view. To begin with, you dont believe, do you, that your young woman murdered her grand father?
Of course not. The ideas absolutely absurd.
Very wellwe dont think so either. Shes been away for some years, she has always been on perfectly amicable terms with him. She has a very generous income and he would have been, I should say, delighted to hear of her engagement to you and would probably have made a handsome marriage settlement[41] on her. We dont suspect her. Why should we? But you can make quite sure of one thing. If this thing isnt cleared up, that girl wont marry you. From what youve told me Im fairly sure of that. And mark this, its the kind of crime that may never be cleared up. We may be reasonably sure that the wife and her young man were in cahoots[42] over itbut proving it will be another matter. Theres not even a case to put up to the DPP[43] so far. And unless we get definite evidence against her, therell always be a nasty doubt. You see that, dont you?
Yes, I saw that.
The Old Man then said quietly:
Why not put it to her?
You meanask Sophia if I I stopped.
The Old Man was nodding his head vigorously.
Yes, yes. Im not asking you to worm your way in[44] without telling the girl what youre up to. See what she has to say about it.
And so it came about that the following day I drove down with Chief Inspector Taverner and Detective Sergeant Lamb to Swinly Dean.
A little way beyond the golf course, we turned in at a gateway where I imagined that before the war there had been an imposing pair of gates. Patriotism or ruthless requisitioning had swept these away. We drove up a long curving drive flanked with rhododendrons and came out on a gravelled sweep in front of the house.
It was incredible! I wondered why it had been called Three Gables. Eleven Gables would have been more apposite! The curious thing was that it had a strange air of being distortedand I thought I knew why. It was the type, really, of a cottage, it was a cottage swollen out[45] of all proportion. It was like looking at a country cottage through a gigantic magnifying-glass. The slant-wise beams, the half-timbering, the gablesit was a little that had grown like a mushroom in the night!
Yet I got the idea. It was a Greek restaurateurs idea of something English. It was meant to be an Englishmans homebuilt the size of a castle! I wondered what the first Mrs Leonides had thought of it. She had not, I fancied, been consulted or shown the plans. It was, most probably, her exotic husbands little surprise. I wondered if she had shuddered or smiled.