So no one gains particularly by his death?
She threw me a strange glance.
Yes, they do. They all get more money. But they could probably have had it, if they asked for it, anyway.
Have you any idea who poisoned him, Miss de Haviland?
She replied characteristically:
No, indeed I havent. Its upset me very much. Not nice to think one has a Borgia sort of person loose about the house. I suppose the police will fasten on poor Brenda.
You dont think theyll be right in doing so?
I simply cant tell. Shes always seemed to me a singularly stupid and commonplace young womanrather conventional. Not my idea of a poisoner. Still, after all, if a young woman of twenty-four marries a man close on eighty, its fairly obvious that shes marrying him for his money. In the normal course of events she could have expected to become a rich widow fairly soon. But Aristide was a singularly tough old man. His diabetes wasnt getting any worse. He really looked like living to be a hundred. I suppose she got tired of waiting
In that case, I said, and stopped.
In that case, said Miss de Haviland briskly, it will be more or less all right. Annoying publicity, of course. But after all, she isnt one of the family.
Youve no other ideas? I asked.
What other ideas should I have?
I wondered. I had a suspicion that there might be more going on under the battered felt hat than I knew.
Behind the perky, almost disconnected utterance, there was, I thought, a very shrewd brain at work. Just for a moment I even wondered whether Miss de Haviland had poisoned Aristide Leonides herself
It did not seem an impossible idea. At the back of my mind was the way she had ground the bindweed into the soil with her heel with a kind of vindictive thoroughness.
I remembered the word Sophia had used. Ruthlessness.
I stole a sideways glance at Edith de Haviland.
Given good and sufficient reason But what exactly would seem to Edith de Haviland good and sufficient reason?
To answer that, I should have to know her better.
Chapter 6
The front door was open. We passed through it into a rather surprisingly spacious hall. It was furnished with restraintwell-polished dark oak and gleaming brass. At the back, where the staircase would normally appear, was a white panelled wall with a door in it.
My brother-in-laws part of the house, said Miss de Haviland. The ground floor is Philip and Magdas.
We went through a doorway on the left into a large drawing-room. It had pale-blue panelled walls, furniture covered in heavy brocade, and on every available table and on the walls were hung photographs and pictures of actors, dancers, and stage scenes and designs. A Degas of ballet dancers hung over the mantelpiece. There were masses of flowers, enormous brown chrysanthemums and great vases of carnations.
I suppose, said Miss de Haviland, that you want to see Philip?
Did I want to see Philip? I had no idea. All I had wanted to do was to see Sophia. That I had done. She had given emphatic encouragement to the Old Mans plan had now receded from the scene and was presumably somewhere telephoning about fish, having given me no indication of how to proceed. Was I to approach Philip Leonides as a young man anxious to marry his daughter, or as a casual friend who had dropped in[53] (surely not at such a moment!) or as an associate of the police?
Miss de Haviland gave me no time to consider her question. It was, indeed, not a question at all, but more an assertion. Miss de Haviland, I judged, was more inclined to assert than to question.
Well go to the library, she said.
She led me out of the drawing-room, along a corridor and in through another door.
It was a big room, full of books. The books did not confine themselves to the bookcases that reached up to the ceiling. They were on chairs and tables and even on the floor. And yet there was no sense of disarray about them.
The room was cold. There was some smell absent in it that I was conscious of having expected. It smelt of the mustiness of old books and just a little beeswax. In a second or two I realized what I missed. It was the scent of tobacco. Philip Leonides was not a smoker.
He got up from behind his table as we entereda tall man, aged somewhere around fifty, an extraordinarily handsome man. Everyone had laid so much emphasis on the ugliness of Aristide Leonides, that for some reason I expected his son to be ugly too. Certainly I was not prepared for this perfection of featurethe straight nose, the flawless line of jaw, the fair hair touched with grey that swept back from a well-shaped forehead.
This is Charles Hayward, Philip, said Edith de Haviland.
Ah, how do you do?
I could not tell if he had ever heard of me. The hand he gave me was cold. His face was quite incurious. It made me rather nervous. He stood there, patient and uninterested.
Where are those awful policemen? demanded Miss de Haviland. Have they been in here?
I believe Chief Inspector(he glanced down at a card on the desk)erTaverner is coming to talk to me presently.
Where is he now?