Crooked House - Agatha Christie [11]
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.
Six
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