Crooked House - Agatha Christie [40]
“I love you,” I said. “If I could take you away—”
She drew apart and shook her head.
“No, that’s impossible. We’ve got to see this through. But you know, Charles, I don’t like it. I don’t like the feeling that someone—someone in this house—someone I see and speak to every day is a cold-blooded, calculating poisoner….”
And I didn’t know how to answer that. To someone like Sophia one can give no easy meaningless reassurances.
She said: “If only one knew—”
“That must be the worst of it,” I agreed.
“You know what really frightens me?” she whispered. “It’s that we may never know….”
I could visualize easily what a nightmare that would be … And it seemed to me highly probable that it never might be known who had killed old Leonides.
But it also reminded me of a question I had meant to put to Sophia on a point that had interested me.
“Tell me, Sophia,” I said. “How many people in this house knew about the eserine eyedrops—I mean (a) that your grandfather had them, and (b) that they were poisonous and what would be a fatal dose?”
“I see what you’re getting at, Charles. But it won’t work. You see, we all knew.”
“Well, yes, vaguely, I suppose, but specifically—”
“We knew specifically. We were all up with grandfather one day for coffee after lunch. He liked all the family round him, you know. And his eyes had been giving him a lot of trouble. And Brenda got the eserine to put a drop in each eye, and Josephine, who always asks questions about everything, said: ‘Why does it say “Eyedrops—not to be taken” on the bottle?’ And grandfather smiled and said: ‘If Brenda were to make a mistake and inject eyedrops into me one day instead of insulin—I suspect I should give a big gasp, and go rather blue in the face and then die, because you see, my heart isn’t very strong.’ And Josephine said: ‘Oo,’ and grandfather went on: ‘So we must be careful that Brenda does not give me an injection of eserine instead of insulin, mustn’t we?’” Sophia paused and then said: “We were all there listening. You see? We all heard!”
I did see. I had some faint idea in my mind that just a little specialized knowledge would have been needed. But now it was borne in upon me that old Leonides had actually supplied the blueprint for his own murder. The murderer had not had to think out a scheme, or to plan or devise anything. A simple easy method of causing death had been supplied by the victim himself.
I drew a deep breath. Sophia, catching my thought, said: “Yes, it’s rather horrible, isn’t it?”
“You know, Sophia,” I said slowly. “There’s just one thing does strike me.”
“Yes?”
“That you’re right, and that it couldn’t have been Brenda. She couldn’t do it exactly that way—when you’d all listened—when you’d all remember.”
“I don’t know about that. She is rather dumb in some ways, you know.”
“Not as dumb as all that,” I said. “No, it couldn’t have been Brenda.”
Sophia moved away from me.
“You don’t want it to be Brenda, do you?” she asked.
And what could I say? I couldn’t—no, I couldn’t—say flatly: “Yes, I hope it is Brenda.”
Why couldn’t I? Just the feeling that Brenda was all alone on one side, and the concentrated animosity of the powerful Leonides family was arrayed against her on the other side. Chivalry? A feeling for the weaker? For the defenceless? I remembered her sitting on the sofa in her expensive rich mourning, the hopelessness in her voice—the fear in her eyes.
Nannie came back rather opportunely from the scullery. I don’t know whether she sensed a certain strain between myself and Sophia.
She said disapprovingly:
“Talking murders and suchlike. Forget about it, that’s what I say. Leave it to the police. It’s their nasty business, not yours.”
“Oh, Nannie—don’t you realize that someone in this house is a murderer—”
“Nonsense, Miss Sophia, I’ve no patience with you. Isn’t the front door open all the time—all the doors open, nothing locked—asking for thieves and burglars?”
“But it couldn’t have been a burglar, nothing was stolen. Besides, why should a burglar come in and poison somebody?”
“I didn