Crooked House - Agatha Christie [63]
Taverner took her gently under the elbow.
“Come along, Mrs. Leonides,” he said. “You don’t want a hat, do you? No? Then we’ll go off right away.”
She pulled back, staring at him with enormous cat’s eyes.
“Laurence,” she said. “What have you done to Laurence?”
“Mr. Laurence Brown is also under arrest,” said Taverner.
She wilted then. Her body seemed to collapse and shrink. The tears poured down her face. She went away quietly with Taverner across the lawn to the car. I saw Laurence Brown and Sergeant Lamb come out of the house. They all got into the car. The car drove away.
I drew a deep breath and turned to Sophia. She was very pale and there was a look of distress on her face.
“It’s horrible, Charles,” she said. “It’s quite horrible.”
“I know.”
“You must get her a really first-class solicitor—the best there is. She—she must have all the help possible.”
“One doesn’t realize,” I said, “what these things are like. I’ve never seen anyone arrested before.”
“I know. One has no idea.”
We were both silent. I was thinking of the desperate terror on Brenda’s face. It had seemed familiar to me and suddenly I realized why. It was the same expression that I had seen on Magda Leonides’ face the first day I had come to the Crooked House when she had been talking about the Edith Thompson play.
“And then,” she had said, “sheer terror, don’t you think so?”
Sheer terror—that was what had been on Brenda’s face. Brenda was not a fighter. I wondered that she had ever had the nerve to do murder. But possibly she had not. Possibly it had been Laurence Brown, with his persecution mania, his unstable personality, who had put the contents of one little bottle into another little bottle—a simple easy act—to free the woman he loved.
“So it’s over,” said Sophia.
She sighed deeply, then asked:
“But why arrest them now? I thought there wasn’t enough evidence.”
“A certain amount of evidence has come to light. Letters.”
“You mean love letters between them?”
“Yes.”
“What fools people are to keep these things!”
Yes, indeed. Fools. The kind of folly which never seemed to profit by the experience of others. You couldn’t open a daily newspaper without coming across some instance of that folly—the passion to keep the written word, the written assurance of love.
“It’s quite beastly, Sophia,” I said. “But it’s no good minding about it. After all, it’s what we’ve been hoping all along, isn’t it? It’s what you said that first night at Mario’s. You said it would be all right if the right person had killed your grandfather. Brenda was the right person, wasn’t she? Brenda or Laurence?”
“Don’t, Charles, you make me feel awful.”
“But we must be sensible. We can marry now, Sophia. You can’t hold me off any longer. The Leonides family are out of it.”
She stared at me. I had never realized before the vivid blue of her eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “I suppose we’re out of it now. We are out of it, aren’t we. You’re sure?”
“My dear girl, none of you ever really had a shadow of motive.”
Her face went suddenly white.
“Except me, Charles. I had a motive.”
“Yes, of course—” I was taken aback. “But not really. You didn’t know, you see, about the will.”
“But I did, Charles,” she whispered.
“What?” I stared at her. I felt suddenly cold.
“I knew all the time that grandfather had left his money to me.”
“But how?”
“He told me. About a fortnight before he was killed. He said to me quite suddenly: ‘I’ve left all my money to you, Sophia. You must look after the family when I’ve gone.’”
I stared.
“You never told me.”
“No. You see, when they all explained about the will and his signing it, I thought perhaps he had made a mistake—that he was just imagining that he had left it to me. Or that if he had made a will leaving it to me, then it had got lost and would never turn up. I didn’t want it to turn up—I was afraid.”
“Afraid? Why?”
“I suppose—because of murder.