Crooked House. Agatha Christie
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wondered. I had a suspicion that there might be more going on under the battered felt hat than I knew.
Behind the perky, almost disconnected utterance, there was, I thought, a very shrewd brain at work. Just for a moment I even wondered whether Miss de Haviland had poisoned Aristide Leonides herself …
It did not seem an impossible idea. At the back of my mind was the way she had ground the bindweed into the soil with her heel with a kind of vindictive thoroughness.
I remembered the word Sophia had used. Ruthlessness.
I stole a sideways glance at Edith de Haviland.
Given good and sufficient reason … But what exactly would seem to Edith de Haviland good and sufficient reason?
To answer that, I should have to know her better.
The front door was open. We passed through it into a rather surprisingly spacious hall. It was furnished with restraint—well-polished dark oak and gleaming brass. At the back, where the staircase would normally appear, was a white panelled wall with a door in it.
‘My brother-in-law’s part of the house,’ said Miss de Haviland. ‘The ground floor is Philip and Magda’s.’
We went through a doorway on the left into a large drawing-room. It had pale-blue panelled walls, furniture covered in heavy brocade, and on every available table and on the walls were hung photographs and pictures of actors, dancers, and stage scenes and designs. A Degas of ballet dancers hung over the mantelpiece. There were masses of flowers, enormous brown chrysanthemums and great vases of carnations.
‘I suppose,’ said Miss de Haviland, ‘that you want to see Philip?’
Did I want to see Philip? I had no idea. All I had wanted to do was to see Sophia. That I had done. She had given emphatic encouragement to the Old Man’s plan—but she had now receded from the scene and was presumably somewhere telephoning about fish, having given me no indication of how to proceed. Was I to approach Philip Leonides as a young man anxious to marry his daughter, or as a casual friend who had dropped in (surely not at such a moment!) or as an associate of the police?
Miss de Haviland gave me no time to consider her question. It was, indeed, not a question at all, but more an assertion. Miss de Haviland, I judged, was more inclined to assert than to question.
‘We’ll go to the library,’ she said.
She led me out of the drawing-room, along a corridor and in through another door.
It was a big room, full of books. The books did not confine themselves to the bookcases that reached up to the ceiling. They were on chairs and tables and even on the floor. And yet there was no sense of disarray about them.
The room was cold. There was some smell absent in it that I was conscious of having expected. It smelt of the mustiness of old books and just a little beeswax. In a second or two I realized what I missed. It was the scent of tobacco. Philip Leonides was not a smoker.
He got up from behind his table as we entered—a tall man, aged somewhere around fifty, an extraordinarily handsome man. Everyone had laid so much emphasis on the ugliness of Aristide Leonides, that for some reason I expected his son to be ugly too. Certainly I was not prepared for this perfection of feature—the straight nose, the flawless line of jaw, the fair hair touched with grey that swept back from a well-shaped forehead.
‘This is Charles Hayward, Philip,’ said Edith de Haviland.
‘Ah, how do you do?’
I could not tell if he had ever heard of me. The hand he gave me was cold. His face was quite incurious. It made me rather nervous. He stood there, patient and uninterested.
‘Where are those awful policemen?’ demanded Miss de Haviland. ‘Have they been in here?’
‘I believe Chief Inspector’—(he glanced down at a card on the desk)—‘er—Taverner is coming to talk to me presently.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘I’ve no idea, Aunt Edith. Upstairs, I suppose.’
‘With Brenda?’
‘I really don’t know.’
Looking at Philip Leonides, it seemed quite impossible that a murder could have been committed anywhere in his vicinity.
‘Is Magda up yet?’
‘I don’t know. She’s not usually up before eleven.’
‘That sounds like her,’ said Edith de Haviland.
What sounded like Mrs Philip Leonides was a high voice talking very rapidly and approaching fast. The door behind me burst open and a woman came in. I don’t know how she managed to give the impression of its being three women rather than one who entered.
She was smoking a cigarette in a long holder and was wearing a peach satin négligé which she was holding up with one hand. A cascade of Titian hair rippled down her back. Her face had that almost shocking air of nudity that a woman’s has nowadays when it is not made up at all. Her eyes were blue and enormous and she was talking very rapidly in a husky, rather attractive voice with a very clear enunciation.
‘Darling, I can’t stand it—I simply can’t stand it—just think of the notices—it isn’t in the papers yet, but of course it will be—and I simply can’t make up my mind what I ought to wear at the inquest—very, very subdued—not black though, perhaps dark purple—and I simply haven’t got a coupon left—I’ve lost the address of that dreadful man who sells them to me—you know, the garage somewhere near Shaftesbury Avenue—and if I went up there in the car the police would follow me, and they might ask the most awkward questions, mightn’t they? I mean, what could one say? How calm you are, Philip! How can you be so calm? Don’t you realize we can leave this awful house now? Freedom—freedom! Oh, how unkind—the poor old Sweetie—of course we’d never have left him while he was alive. He really did dote on us, didn’t he—in spite of all the trouble that woman upstairs tried to make between us. I’m quite sure that if we had gone away and left him to her, he’d have cut us right out of everything. Horrible creature! After all, poor old Sweetie Pie was just on ninety—all the family feeling in the world couldn’t have stood up against a dreadful woman who was on the spot. You know, Philip, I really believe that this would be a wonderful opportunity to put on the Edith Thompson play. This murder would give us a lot of advance publicity. Bildenstein said he could get the Thespian—that dreary play in verse about miners is coming off any minute—it’s a wonderful part—wonderful. I know they say I must always play comedy because of my nose—but you know there’s quite a lot of comedy to be got out of Edith Thompson—I don’t think the author realized that—comedy always heightens the suspense. I know just how I’d play it—commonplace, silly, make-believe up to the last minute and then—’
She cast out an arm—the cigarette fell out of the holder on to the polished mahogany of Philip’s desk and began to burn it. Impassively he reached for it and dropped it into the wastepaper basket.
‘And then,’ whispered Magda Leonides, her eyes suddenly widening, her face stiffening, ‘just terror …’
The stark fear stayed on her face for about twenty seconds, then her face relaxed, crumpled, a bewildered child was about to burst into tears.
Suddenly all emotion was wiped away as though by a sponge and, turning to me, she asked in a businesslike tone:
‘Don’t you think that would be the way to play Edith Thompson?’
I said I thought that would be exactly the way to play Edith Thompson. At the moment I could only remember very vaguely who Edith Thompson was, but I was anxious to start off well with Sophia’s mother.
‘Rather like Brenda, really, wasn’t she?’ said Magda. ‘D’you