Crooked House - Agatha Christie [58]
His eyes went round the wrecked room….
“And if I knew whether they’d found it….”
Something stirred in my brain—a memory….
Taverner clinched it by asking me:
“What was the kid doing when you last saw her?”
“Wait,” I said.
I dashed out of the room and up the stairs. I passed through the left-hand door and went up to the top floor. I pushed open the door of the cistern room, mounted the two steps and bending my head, since the ceiling was low and sloping, I looked round me.
Josephine had said when I asked her what she was doing there that she was “detecting.”
I didn’t see what there could be to detect in a cobwebby attic full of water tanks. But such an attic would make a good hiding-place. I considered it probable that Josephine had been hiding something there, something that she knew quite well she had no business to have. If so, it oughtn’t to take long to find it.
It took me just three minutes. Tucked away behind the largest tank, from the interior of which a sibilant hissing added an eerie note to the atmosphere, I found a packet of letters wrapped in a torn piece of brown paper.
I read the first letter.
Oh Laurence—my darling, my own dear love … It was wonderful last night when you quoted that verse of poetry. I knew it was meant for me, though you didn’t look at me. Aristide said, “You read verse well.” He didn’t guess what we were both feeling. My darling, I feel convinced that soon everything will come right. We shall be glad that he never knew, that he died happy. He’s been good to me. I don’t want him to suffer. But I don’t really think that it can be any pleasure to live after you’re eighty. I shouldn’t want to! Soon we shall be together for always. How wonderful it will be when I can say to you: “My dear dear husband …” Dearest, we were made for each other. I love you, love you, love you—I can see no end to our love, I—
There was a good deal more, but I had no wish to go on.
Grimly I went downstairs and thrust my parcel into Taverner’s hands.
“It’s possible,” I said, “that that’s what our unknown friend was looking for.”
Taverner read a few passages, whistled and shuffled through the various letters.
Then he looked at me with the expression of a cat who has been fed with the best cream.
“Well,” he said softly. “This pretty well cooks Mrs. Brenda Leonides’ goose. And Mr. Laurence Brown’s. So it was them, all the time….”
Nineteen
It seems odd to me, looking back, how suddenly and completely my pity and sympathy for Brenda Leonides vanished with the discovery of her letters, the letters she had written to Laurence Brown. Was my vanity unable to stand up to the revelation that she loved Laurence Brown with a doting and sugary infatuation and had deliberately lied to me? I don’t know. I’m not a psychologist. I prefer to believe that it was the thought of the child Josephine, struck down in ruthless self-preservation, that dried up the springs of my sympathy.
“Brown fixed that booby trap, if you ask me,” said Taverner, “and it explains what puzzled me about it.”
“What did puzzle you?”
“Well, it was such a sappy thing to do. Look here, say the kid’s got hold of these letters—letters that are absolutely damning! The first thing to do is to try and get them back (after all, if the kid talks about them, but has got nothing to show, it can be put down as mere romancing), but you can’t get them back because you can’t find them. Then the only thing to do is to put the kid out of action for good. You’ve done one murder and you’re not squeamish about doing another. You know she’s fond of swinging on a door in a disused yard. The ideal thing to do is wait behind the door and lay her out as she comes through with a poker, or an iron bar, or a nice bit of hosepipe. They’re all there ready to hand. Why fiddle about with a marble lion perched on top of a door which is as likely as not to miss her altogether and which even if it does fall on her may not do the job properly (which actually is how it turns out). I ask you—why?”
“Well,” I said, “what’s the answer?”
“The