Crooked House - Agatha Christie [74]
“No,” I said.
Sophia came closer to me—she whispered:
“It was—Josephine—wasn’t it? That was it, Josephine.”
Together we looked down on the first entry in the little black book, written in an unformed childish hand:
“Today I killed grandfather.”
Twenty-six
I
I was to wonder afterwards that I could have been so blind. The truth had stuck out so clearly all along. Josephine and only Josephine fitted in with all the necessary qualifications. Her vanity, her persistent self-importance, her delight in talking, her reiteration on how clever she was, and how stupid the police were.
I had never considered her because she was a child. But children have committed murders, and this particular murder had been well within a child’s compass. Her grandfather himself had indicated the precise method—he had practically handed her a blueprint. All she had to do was to avoid leaving fingerprints and the slightest knowledge of detection fiction would teach her that. And everything else had been a mere hotchpotch, culled at random from stock mystery stories. The notebook—the sleuthing—her pretended suspicions, her insistence that she was not going to tell till she was sure….
And finally the attack on herself. An almost incredible performance considering that she might easily have killed herself. But then, childlike, she had never considered such a possibility. She was the heroine. The heroine isn’t killed. Yet there had been a clue there—the traces of earth on the seat of the old chair in the washhouse. Josephine was the only person who would have had to climb up on a chair to balance the block of marble on the top of the door. Obviously it had missed her more than once (the dints in the floor) and patiently she had climbed up again and replaced it, handling it with her scarf to avoid fingerprints. And then it had fallen—and she had had a near escape from death.
It had been the perfect setup—the impression she was aiming for! She was in danger, she “knew something,” she had been attacked!
I saw how she had deliberately drawn my attention to her presence in the cistern room. And she had completed the artistic disorder of her room before going out to the washhouse.
But when she had returned from hospital, when she had found Brenda and Laurence arrested, she must have become dissatisfied. The case was over—and she—Josephine, was out of the limelight.
So she stole the digitalin from Edith’s room and put it in her own cup of cocoa and left the cup untouched on the hall table.
Did she know that Nannie would drink it? Possibly. From her words that morning, she had resented Nannie’s criticisms of her. Did Nannie, perhaps, wise from a lifetime of experience with children, suspect? I think that Nannie knew, had always known, that Josephine was not normal. With her precocious mental development had gone a retarded moral sense. Perhaps, too, the various factors of heredity—what Sophia had called the “ruthlessness of the family”—had met together.
She had had an authoritarian ruthlessness of her grandmother’s family, and the ruthless egoism of Magda, seeing only her own point of view. She had also presumably suffered, sensitive like Philip, from the stigma of being the unattractive—the changeling child—of the family. Finally, in her very marrow had run the essential crooked strain of old Leonides. She had been Leonides’ grandchild, she had resembled him in brain and cunning—but where his love had gone outwards to family and friends, hers had turned inward to herself.
I thought that old Leonides had realized what none of the rest of the family had realized, that Josephine might be a source of danger to others and to herself. He had kept her from school life because he was afraid of what she might do. He had shielded her, and guarded her in the home, and I understood now his urgency to Sophia to look after Josephine.
Magda’s sudden decision to send Josephine abroad—had that, too, been due to a fear for the child? Not, perhaps, a conscious fear, but some vague maternal instinct.
And Edith