Crooked House - Agatha Christie [69]
“What’s the matter?”
“I know now what was wrong. We assumed, Taverner and I, that the wrecking of Josephine’s room, the frantic search, was for those letters. I thought that she’d got hold of them and that she’d hidden them up in the cistern room. But when she was talking to me the other day she made it quite clear that it was Laurence who had hidden them there. She saw him coming out of the cistern room and went snooping around and found the letters. Then, of course, she read them. She would! But she left them where they were.”
“Well?”
“Don’t you see? It couldn’t have been the letters someone was looking for in Josephine’s room. It must have been something else.”
“And that something—”
“Was the little black book she writes down her ‘detection’ in. That’s what someone was looking for! I think, too, that whoever it was didn’t find it. I think Josephine still has it. But if so—”
I half rose.
“If so,” said my father, “she still isn’t safe. Is that what you were going to say?”
“Yes. She won’t be out of danger until she’s actually started for Switzerland. They’re planning to send her there, you know.”
“Does she want to go?”
I considered.
“I don’t think she does.”
“Then she probably hasn’t gone,” said my father, drily. “But I think you’re right about the danger. You’d better go down there.”
“Eustace?” I cried desperately. “Clemency?”
My father said gently:
“To my mind the facts point clearly in one direction … I wonder you don’t see it yourself. I….”
Glover opened the door.
“Beg pardon, Mr. Charles, the telephone. Miss Leonides speaking from Swinly Dean. It’s urgent.”
It seemed like a horrible repetition. Had Josephine again fallen a victim. And had the murderer this time made no mistake …?
I hurried to the telephone.
“Sophia? It’s Charles here.”
Sophia’s voice came with a kind of hard desperation in it. “Charles, it isn’t all over. The murderer is still here.”
“What on earth do you mean? What is wrong? Is it—Josephine?”
“It’s not Josephine. It’s Nannie.”
“Nannie?”
“Yes, there was some cocoa—Josephine’s cocoa, she didn’t drink it. She left it on the table. Nannie thought it was a pity to waste it. So she drank it.”
“Poor Nannie. Is she very bad?”
Sophia’s voice broke.
“Oh, Charles, she’s dead.”
Twenty-four
We were back again in the nightmare.
That is what I thought as Taverner and I drove out of London. It was a repetition of our former journey.
At intervals, Taverner swore.
As for me, I repeated from time to time, stupidly, unprofitably: “So it wasn’t Brenda and Laurence. It wasn’t Brenda and Laurence.”
Had I really thought it was? I had been so glad to think it. So glad to escape from other, more sinister, possibilities….
They had fallen in love with each other. They had written silly sentimental romantic letters to each other. They had indulged in hopes that Brenda’s old husband might soon die peacefully and happily—but I wondered really if they had even acutely desired his death. I had a feeling that the despairs and longings of an unhappy love affair suited them as well or better than commonplace married life together. I didn’t think Brenda was really passionate. She was too anaemic, too apathetic. It was romance she craved for. And I thought Laurence, too, was the type to enjoy frustration and vague future dreams of bliss rather than the concrete satisfaction of the flesh.
They had been caught in a trap and, terrified, they had not had the wit to find their way out. Laurence, with incredible stupidity, had not even destroyed Brenda’s letters. Presumably Brenda had destroyed his, since they had not been found. And it was not Laurence who had balanced the marble doorstop on the washhouse door. It was someone else whose face was still hidden behind a mask.
We drove up to the door. Taverner got out and I followed him. There was a plain clothes man in the hall whom I didn’t know. He saluted Taverner and Taverner drew him aside.
My attention was taken by a pile of luggage in the hall. It was labelled and ready for departure. As I looked at it Clemency came