Crooked House - Agatha Christie [57]
“Why should they try and kill Josephine?”
Nannie removed a corner of her handkerchief from her eye and gave me a shrewd glance.
“You know well enough what she was like, Mr. Charles. She liked to know things. She was always like that, even as a tiny thing. Used to hide under the dinner table and listen to the maids talking and then she’d hold it over them. Made her feel important. You see, she was passed over, as it were, by the mistress. She wasn’t a handsome child, like the other two. She was always a plain little thing. A changeling, the mistress used to call her. I blame the mistress for that, for it’s my belief it turned the child sour. But in a funny sort of way she got her own back by finding out things about people and letting them know she knew them. But it isn’t safe to do that when there’s a poisoner about!”
No, it hadn’t been safe. And that brought something else to my mind. I asked Nannie: “Do you know where she kept a little black book—a notebook of some kind where she used to write down things?”
“I know what you mean, Mr. Charles. Very sly about it, she was. I’ve seen her sucking her pencil and writing in the book and sucking her pencil again. And ‘don’t do that,’ I’d say, ‘you’ll get lead poisoning’ and ‘oh no, I shan’t,’ she said, ‘because it isn’t really lead in a pencil. It’s carbon,’ though I don’t see how that could be so for if you call a thing a lead pencil it stands to reason that that’s because there’s lead in it.”
“You’d think so,” I agreed. “But as a matter of fact she was right.” (Josephine was always right!) “What about this notebook? Do you know where she kept it?”
“I’ve no idea at all, sir. It was one of the things she was sly about.”
“She hadn’t got it with her when she was found?”
“Oh no, Mr. Charles, there was no notebook.”
Had someone taken the notebook? Or had she hidden it in her own room? The idea came to me to look and see. I was not sure which Josephine’s room was, but as I stood hesitating in the passage Taverner’s voice called me:
“Come in here,” he said. “I’m in the kid’s room. Did you ever see such a sight?”
I stepped over the threshold and stopped dead.
The small room looked as though it had been visited by a tornado. The drawers of the chest of drawers were pulled out and their contents scattered on the floor. The mattress and bedding had been pulled from the small bed. The rugs were tossed into heaps. The chairs had been turned upside down, the pictures taken down from the wall, the photographs wrenched out of their frames.
“Good Lord,” I exclaimed. “What was the big idea?”
“What do you think?”
“Someone was looking for something.”
“Exactly.”
I looked round and whistled.
“But who on earth—surely nobody could come in here and do all this and not be heard—or seen?”
“Why not? Mrs. Leonides spends the morning in her bedroom doing her nails and ringing up her friends on the telephone and playing with her clothes. Philip sits in the library browsing over books. The nurse woman is in the kitchen peeling potatoes and stringing beans. In a family that knows each other’s habits it would be easy enough. And I’ll tell you this. Anyone in the house could have done our little job—could have set the trap for the child and wrecked her room. But it was someone in a hurry, someone who hadn’t the time to search quietly.”
“Anyone in the house, you say?”
“Yes, I’ve checked up. Everyone has some time or other unaccounted for. Philip, Magda, the nurse, your girl. The same upstairs. Brenda spent most of the morning alone. Laurence and Eustace had a half hour break—from ten-thirty to eleven—you were with them part of that time—but not all of it. Miss de Haviland was in the garden alone. Roger was in his study.”
“Only Clemency was in London at her job.”
“No, even she isn’t out of it. She stayed at home today with a headache—she was alone in her room having that headache. Any of them—any blinking one of them! And I don’t know which! I’ve no idea. If I knew what