Crooked House - Agatha Christie [55]
I remembered Josephine’s superior smile as she had said:
“Aren’t the police stupid?”
But Josephine had not been present on the occasion of the will. And even if she had been listening outside the door (which I was fully prepared to believe!) she could hardly have guessed what her grandfather was doing. Why, then, the superior air? What did she know that made her say the police were stupid? Or was it, again, just showing off?
Struck by the silence in the room I looked up sharply—both my father and Taverner were watching me. I don’t know what there was in their manner that compelled me to blurt out defiantly:
“Sophia knew nothing about this! Nothing at all.”
“No?” said my father.
I didn’t quite know whether it was an agreement or a question.
“She’ll be absolutely astounded!”
“Yes?”
“Astounded!”
There was a pause. Then, with what seemed sudden harshness, the telephone on my father’s desk rang.
“Yes?” He lifted the receiver—listened and then said: “Put her through.”
He looked at me.
“It’s your young woman,” he said. “She wants to speak to us. It’s urgent.”
I took the receiver from him.
“Sophia?”
“Charles? Is that you? It’s—Josephine!” Her voice broke slightly.
“What about Josephine?”
“She’s been hit on the head. Concussion. She’s—she’s pretty bad … They say she may not recover….”
I turned to the other two.
“Josephine’s been knocked out,” I said.
My father took the receiver from me. He said sharply as he did so:
“I told you to keep an eye on that child….”
Eighteen
In next to no time Taverner and I were racing in a fast police car in the direction of Swinly Dean.
I remembered Josephine emerging, from among the cisterns, and her airy remark that it was “about time for the second murder.” The poor child had had no idea that she herself was likely to be the victim of the “second murder.”
I accepted fully the blame that my father had tacitly ascribed to me. Of course I ought to have kept an eye on Josephine. Though neither Taverner nor I had any real clue to the poisoner of old Leonides, it was highly possible that Josephine had. What I had taken for childish nonsense and “showing off” might very well have been something quite different. Josephine, in her favourite sports of snooping and prying, might have become aware of some piece of information that she herself could not assess at its proper value.
I remembered the twig that had cracked in the garden.
I had had an inkling then that danger was about. I had acted upon it at the moment, and afterwards it had seemed to me that my suspicions had been melodramatic and unreal. On the contrary, I should have realized that this was murder, that whoever had committed murder had endangered their neck, and that consequently that same person would not hesitate to repeat the crime if by that way safety could be assured.
Perhaps Magda, by some obscure maternal instinct, had recognized that Josephine was in peril, and that may have been what occasioned her sudden feverish haste to get the child sent to Switzerland.
Sophia came out to meet us as we arrived. Josephine, she said, had been taken by ambulance to Market Basing General Hospital. Dr. Gray would let them know as soon as possible the result of the X-ray.
“How did it happen?” asked Taverner.
Sophia led the way round to the back of the house and through a door in a small disused yard. In one corner a door stood ajar.
“It’s a kind of washhouse,” Sophia explained. “There’s a cat hole cut in the bottom of the door, and Josephine used to stand on it and swing to and fro.”
I remembered swinging on doors in my own youth.
The washhouse was small and rather dark. There were wooden boxes in it, some old hose pipe, a few derelict garden implements, and some broken furniture. Just inside the door was a marble lion doorstop.
“It’s the doorstopper from the front door,” Sophia explained. “It must have been balanced on top of the door.”
Taverner reached up a hand to the top of the door. It was a low