‘This is indeed a family chronicle.’
‘Old Leonides was rather clever to choose Swinly Dean. It was only beginning to be fashionable then. The second and third golf courses hadn’t been made. There was a mixture of Old Inhabitants who were passionately fond of their gardens and who liked Mrs Leonides, and rich City men who wanted to be in with Leonides, so they could take their choice of acquaintances. They were perfectly happy, I believe, until she died of pneumonia in 1905.’
‘Leaving him with eight children?’
‘One died in infancy. Two of the sons were killed in the last war. One daughter married and went to Australia and died there. An unmarried daughter was killed in a motor accident. Another died a year or two ago. There are two still living—the eldest son, Roger, who is married but has no children, and Philip, who married a well-known actress and has three children. Your Sophia, Eustace, and Josephine.’
‘And they are all living at—what is it?—Three Gables?’
‘Yes. The Roger Leonides were bombed out early in the war. Philip and his family have lived there since 1937. And there’s an elderly aunt, Miss de Haviland, sister of the first Mrs Leonides. She always loathed her brother-in-law apparently, but when her sister died she considered it her duty to accept her brother-in-law’s invitation to live with him and bring up the children.’
‘She’s very hot on duty,’ said Inspector Taverner. ‘But she’s not the kind that changes her mind about people. She always disapproved of Leonides and his methods—’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it seems a pretty good houseful. Who do you think killed him?’
Taverner shook his head.
‘Early days,’ he said, ‘early days to say that.’
‘Come on, Taverner,’ I said. ‘I bet you think you know who did it. We’re not in court, man.’
‘No,’ said Taverner gloomily. ‘And we never may be.’
‘You mean he may not have been murdered?’
‘Oh, he was murdered all right. Poisoned. But you know what these poisoning cases are like. It’s very tricky getting the evidence. Very tricky. All the possibilities may point one way—’
‘That’s what I’m trying to get at. You’ve got it all taped out in your mind, haven’t you?’
‘It’s a case of very strong probability. It’s one of those obvious things. The perfect set-up. But I don’t know, I’m sure. It’s tricky.’
I looked appealingly at the Old Man.
He said slowly: ‘In murder cases, as you know, Charles, the obvious is usually the right solution. Old Leonides married again, ten years ago.’
‘When he was seventy-seven?’
‘Yes, he married a young woman of twenty-four.’
I whistled.
‘What sort of a young woman?’
‘A young woman out of a tea-shop. A perfectly respectable young woman—good-looking in an anemic, apathetic sort of way.’
‘And she’s the strong probability?’
‘I ask you, sir,’ said Taverner. ‘She’s only thirty-four now—and that’s a dangerous age. She likes living soft. And there’s a young man in the house. Tutor to the grandchildren. Not been in the war—got a bad heart or something. They’re as thick as thieves[33].’
I looked at him thoughtfully. It was, certainly, an old and familiar pattern. The mixture as before. And the second Mrs Leonides was, my father had emphasized, very respectable. In the name of respectability many murders had been committed.
‘What was it?’ I asked. ‘Arsenic?’
‘No. We haven’t got the analyst’s report yet—but the doctor thinks it’s eserine.’
‘That’s a little unusual, isn’t it? Surely easy to trace the purchaser.’
‘Not this thing. It was his own stuff, you see. Eyedrops.’
‘Leonides suffered from[34] diabetes,’ said my father. ‘He had regular injections of insulin. Insulin is given out in small bottles with a rubber cap. A hypodermic needle[35] is pressed down through the rubber cap and the injection drawn up.’
I guessed the next bit.
‘And it wasn’t insulin in the bottle, but eserine?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And who gave him the injection?’ I asked.
‘His wife.’
I understood now what Sophia meant by the ‘right person’.
I asked: ‘Does the family get on well with[36] the se cond Mrs Leonides?’
‘No. I gather they are hardly on speaking terms.’
It all seemed clearer and clearer. Nevertheless, Inspector Taverner was clearly not happy about it.
‘What don’t you like about it?’ I asked him.
‘If she did it, Mr Charles, it would have been so easy for her to substitute a bona fide[37] bottle of insulin afterwards. In fact, if she is guilty, I can’t imagine why on earth[38] she didn’t do just that.’
‘Yes, it does seem indicated. Plenty of insulin about?’
‘Oh yes, full bottles and empty ones. And if she’d done that, ten to one the doctor wouldn’t have spotted it. Very little is known of the post-mortem appea rances in human poisoning by eserine. But as it was he checked up on the insulin (in case it was the wrong strength or something like that) and so, of course, he soon spotted that it wasn’t insulin.’
‘So it seems,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘that Mrs Leonides was either very stupid—or possibly very clever.’
‘You mean—’
‘That she may be gambling on your coming to the conclusion that nobody could have been as stupid as she appears to have been. What are the alternatives? Any other—suspects?’
The Old Man said quietly:
‘Practically anyone in the house could have done it. There was always a good store of insulin—at least a fortnight’s supply. One of the phials could have been tampered with[39], and replaced in the knowledge that it would be used in due course.’
‘And anybody, more or less, had access to them?’
‘They weren’t locked away. They were kept on a special shelf in the medicine cupboard in the bathroom of his part of the house. Everybody in the house came and went freely.’
‘Any strong motive?’
My father sighed.
‘My dear Charles, Aristide Leonides was enormously rich. He has made over a good deal of his mo ney to his family, it is true, but it may be that somebody wanted more.’
‘But the one that wanted it most would be the present widow. Has her young man any money?’
‘No. Poor as a church mouse.’
Something clicked in my brain. I remembered Sophia’s quotation. I suddenly remembered the whole verse of the nursery rhyme:
I said to Taverner:
‘How does she strike you—Mrs Leonides? What do you think of her?’
He replied slowly:
‘It’s hard to say—very hard to say. She’s not easy. Very quiet—so you don’t know what she’s thinking. But she likes living soft—that I’ll swear I’m right about. Puts me in mind, you know, of a cat, a big pur ring lazy cat… Not that I’ve anything against cats. Cats are all right…’
He sighed.
‘What we want,’ he said, ‘is evidence.’
Yes, I thought, we all wanted evidence that Mrs Leonides had poisoned her husband. Sophia wanted it, and I wanted it, and Chief Inspector Taverner wanted it.
Then everything in the garden would be lovely!
But Sophia wasn’t sure, and I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t think Chief Inspector Taverner was sure either.