She stopped and pulled viciously at an entangling twining bit of green.
‘Hateful stuff—bindweed! Worst weed there is! Choking, entangling—and you can’t get at it properly, runs along underground.’
With her heel she ground the handful of greenstuff viciously underfoot.
‘This is a bad business, Charles Hayward,’ she said. She was looking towards the house. ‘What do the police think about it? Suppose I mustn’t ask you that. Seems odd to think of Aristide being poisoned. For that matter it seems odd to think of him being dead. I never liked him—never! But I can’t get used to the idea of his being dead… Makes the house seem so—empty.’
I said nothing. For all her curt way of speech, Edith de Haviland seemed in a reminiscent mood.
‘Was thinking this morning—I’ve lived here a long time. Over forty years. Came here when my sister died. He asked me to. Seven children—and the youngest only a year old… Couldn’t leave ’em to be brought up by their father, could I? An impossible marriage, of course. I always felt Marcia must have been—well—bewitched. He gave me a free hand—I will say that. Nurses, governesses, school. And proper wholesome nursery food—not those queer spiced rice dishes he used to eat.’
‘And you’ve been here ever since?’ I murmured.
‘Yes. Queer in a way… I could have left, I suppose, when the children grew up and married… I suppose, really, I’d got interested in the garden. And then there was Philip. If a man marries an actress he can’t expect to have any home life. Don’t know why actresses have children. As soon as a baby’s born they rush off and play in Repertory in Edinburgh or somewhere as remote as possible. Philip did the sensible thing—moved in here with his books.’
‘What does Philip Leonides do?’
‘Writes books. Can’t think why. Nobody wants to read them. All about obscure historical details. You’ve never even heard of them, have you?’
I admitted it.
‘Too much money, that’s what he’s had,’ said Miss de Haviland. ‘Most people have to stop being cranks and earn a living.’
‘Don’t his books pay?’
‘Of course not. He’s supposed to be a great authority on certain periods and all that. But he doesn’t have to make his books pay—Aristide settled something like a hundred thousand pounds—something quite fantastic—on him! To avoid death duties[52]! Aristide made them all financially independent. Roger runs Associated Catering—Sophia has a very handsome allowance. The children’s money is in trust for them.’
‘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 haven’t. It’s 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 don’t think they’ll be right in doing so?’
‘I simply can’t tell. She’s always seemed to me a singularly stupid and commonplace young woman—rather conventional. Not my idea of a poisoner. Still, after all, if a young woman of twenty-four marries a man close on eighty, it’s fairly obvious that she’s 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 wasn’t 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 isn’t one of the family.’
‘You’ve 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 restraint—well-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-law’s part of the house,’ said Miss de Haviland. ‘The ground floor is Philip and Magda’s.’
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 Man’s 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.
‘We’ll 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 entered—a 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 feature—the 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,