"Do you like Mr Laurence Brown?"
"He's very quiet. Quite nice, but you hardly know he's there. I haven't really seen very much of him."
"Is his teaching satisfactory?"
"I suppose so. I really wouldn't know. Philip seems quite satisfied."
Taverner essayed some shock tactics.
"I'm sorry to ask you this, but in your opinion was there anything in the nature of a love affair between Mr Brown and Mrs Brenda Leonides."
Magda got up. She was very much the grande dame.
"I have never seen any evidence of anything of that kind," she said. "I don't think really. Inspector, that that is a question you ought to ask me. She was my father-in-law's wife."
I almost applauded.
The Chief Inspector also rose.
"More a question for the servants?" he suggested.
Magda did not answer.
"Thank you, Mrs Leonides," said the Inspector and went out.
"You did that beautifully, darling," said Sophia to her mother warmly.
Magda twisted up a curl reflectively behind her right ear and looked at herself in the glass.
"Ye-es," she said, "I think it was the right way to play it."
Sophia looked at me.
"Oughtn't you," she asked, "to go with the Inspector?"
"Look here, Sophia, what am I supposed -"
I stopped. I could not very well ask outright in front of Sophia's mother exactly what my rôle was supposed to be. Magda Leonides had so far evinced no interest in my presence at all, except as a useful recipient of an exit line on daughters. I might be a reporter, her daughter's fiance, or an obscure hanger-on of the police force, or even an undertaker - to Magda Leonides they would one and all come under the general heading of audience.
Looking down at her feet, Mrs Leonides said with dissatisfaction:
"These shoes are wrong. Frivolous."
Obeying Sophia's imperious wave of the head I hurried after Taverner. I caught up with him in the outer hall just going through the door to the stairway.
"Just going up to see the older brother," he explained.
I put my problem to him without more ado.
"Look here, Taverner, who am I supposed to be?"
He looked surprised.
"Who are you supposed to be?"
"Yes, what am I doing here in this house? If anyone asks me, what do I say?"
"Oh I see." He considered a moment. Then he smiled. "Has anybody asked you?"
"Well - no."
"Then why not leave it at that. Never explain. That's a very good motto. Especially in a house upset like this house is. Everyone is far too full of their own private worries and fears to be in a questioning mood. They'll take you for granted so long as you just seem sure of yourself. It's a great mistake ever to say anything when you needn't. H'm, now we go through this door and up the stairs. Nothing locked. Of course you realise, I expect, that these questions I'm asking are all a lot of hooey. Doesn't matter a hoot who was in the house and who wasn't, or where they all were on that particular day -"
"Then why -"
He went on: "Because it at least gives me a chance to look at them all, and size them up, and hear what they've got to say, and to hope that, quite by chance, somebody might give me a useful pointer." He was silent a moment and then murmured: "I bet Mrs Magda Leonides could spill a mouthful if she chose."
"Would it be reliable?" I asked.
"Oh, no," said Taverner, "it wouldn't be reliable. But it might start a possible line of enquiry. Everybody in the damned house had means and opportunity. What I want is a motive."
At the top of the stairs, a door barred off the right hand corridor. There was a brass knocker on it and Inspector Taverner duly knocked.
It was opened with startling suddenness by a man who must have been standing just inside. He was a clumsy giant of a man with powerful shoulders, dark rumpled hair, and an exceedingly ugly but at the same time rather pleasant face. His eyes looked at us and then quickly away in that furtive embarrassed manner which shy but honest people often adopt.
"Oh, I say," he said. "Come in. Yes, do. I was going - but it doesn't matter. Come into the sitting room. I'll get Clemency - oh, you're there, darling. It's Chief Inspector Taverner. He - are there any cigarettes? Just wait a minute. If you don't mind -"
He collided with a screen, said "I beg your pardon" to it in a flustered manner, and went out of the room.
It was rather like the exit of a bumble bee and left a noticeable silence behind it.
Mrs Roger Leonides was standing up by the window. I was intrigued at once by her personality and by the atmosphere of the room in which we stood.
It was quite definitely her room. I was sure of that.
The walls were painted white - really white, not an ivory or a pale cream which is what one usually means when one says "white" in house decoration. They had no pictures on them except one over the mantelpiece, a geometrical fantasia in triangles of dark grey and battleship blue.
There was hardly any furniture - only mere utilitarian necessities, three or four chairs, a glass topped table, one small bookshelf. There were no ornaments. There was light and space and air. It was as different from the big brocaded and flowered drawing room on the floor below as chalk from cheese. And Mrs Roger Leonides was as different from Mrs Philip Leonides as one woman could be from another. Whilst one felt that Magda Leonides could be, and often was, at least half a dozen different women. Clemency Leonides, I was sure, could never be anyone but herself. She was a woman of very sharp and definite personality.
She was about fifty, I suppose, her hair was grey, cut very short in what was almost an Eton crop but which grew so beautifully on her small well shaped head that it had none of the ugliness I have always associated with that particular cut. She had an intelligent, sensitive face, with light grey eyes of a peculiar and searching intensity. She had on a simple dark red woollen frock that fitted her slenderness perfectly.
She was, I felt at once, rather an alarming woman... I think because I judged that the standards by which she lived might not be those of an ordinary woman. I understood at once why Sophia had used the word ruthlessness in connection with her.
The room was cold and I shivered a little. Clemency Leonides said in a quiet well bred voice:
"Do sit down, Chief Inspector. Is there any further news?"
"Death was due to eserine, Mrs Leonides."
She said thoughtfully:
"So that makes it murder. It couldn't have been an accident of any kind, could it?"
"No, Mrs Leonides."
"Please be very gentle with my husband, Chief Inspector. This will affect him very much. He worshipped his father and he feels things very acutely. He is an emotional person."
"You were on good terms with your father-in-law, Mrs Leonides?"
"Yes, on quite good terms." She added quietly, "I did not like him very much."
"Why was that?"
"I disliked his objectives in life - and his methods of attaining them."
"And Mrs Brenda Leonides?"
"Brenda? I never saw very much of her."
"Do you think it is possible that there was anything between her and Mr Laurence Brown?"
"You mean - some kind of a love affair? I shouldn't think so. But I really wouldn't know anything about it."
Her voice sounded completely uninterested.
Roger Leonides came back with a rush, and the same bumble bee effect.
"I got held up," he said. "Telephone. Well, Inspector? Well? Have you got any news? What caused my father's death?"
"Death was due to eserine poisoning."
"It was? My God! Then it was that woman! She couldn't wait! He took her more or less out of the gutter and this is his reward. She murdered him in cold blood! God, it makes my blood boil to think of it."
"Have you any particular reason for thinking that?" Taverner asked.
Roger was pacing up and down, tugging at his hair with both hands.
"Reason? Why, who else could it be? I've never trusted her - never liked her! We've none of us liked her. Philip and I were both appalled when Dad came home one day and told us what he had done! At his age! It was madness - madness. My father was an amazing man. Inspector. In intellect he was as young and fresh as a man of forty. Everything I have in the world I owe to him. He did everything for me - never failed me. It was I who failed him - when I think of it -"
He dropped heavily onto a chair. His wife came quietly to his side.
"Now, Roger, that's enough. Don't work yourself up."
"I know, dearest - I know," he took her hand. "But how can I keep calm - how can I help feeling -"
"But we must all keep calm, Roger. Chief Inspector Taverner wants our help."
"That is right, Mrs Leonides."
Roger cried:
"Do you know what I'd like to do? I'd like to strangle that woman with my own hands. Grudging that dear old man a few extra years of life. If I had her here -" He sprang up. He was shaking with rage. He held out convulsive hands. "Yes, I'd wring her neck, wring her neck..."
"Roger!" said Clemency sharply.
He looked at her, abashed.
"Sorry, dearest." He turned to us. "I do apologise. My feelings get the better of me. I - excuse me -"
He went out of the room again. Clemency Leonides said with a very faint smile:
"Really, you know, he wouldn't hurt a fly."
Taverner accepted her remark politely.
Then he started on his so-called routine questions.
Clemency Leonides replied concisely and accurately.
Roger Leonides had been in London on the day of his father's death at Box House, the headquarters of the Associated Catering. He had returned early in the afternoon and had spent some time with his father as was his custom. She herself had been, as usual at the Lambert Institute on Gower Street where she worked. She had returned to the house just before six o'clock.
"Did you see your father-in-law?"
"No. The last time I saw him was on the day before. We had coffee with him after dinner."
"But you did not see him on the day of his death?"
"No. I actually went over to his part of the house because Roger thought he had left his pipe there - a very precious pipe, but as it happened he had left it on the hall table there, so I did not need to disturb the old man. He often dozed off about six."
"When did you hear of his illness?"
"Brenda came rushing over. That was just a minute or two after half past six."
These questions, as I knew, were unimportant, but I was aware how keen was Inspector Taverner's scrutiny of the woman who answered them. He asked her a few questions about the nature of her work in London. She said that it had to do with the radiation effects of atomic disintegration.
"You work on the atom bomb, in fact?"
"The work has nothing destructive about it. The Institute is carrying out experiments on the therapeutic effects."
When Taverner got up, he expressed a wish to look around their part of the house. She seemed a little surprised, but showed him its extent readily enough. The bedroom with its twin beds and white coverlets and its simplified toilet appliances reminded me again of a hospital or some monastic cell. The bathroom, too, was severely plain with no special luxury fitting and no array of cosmetics. The kitchen was bare, spotlessly clean, and well equipped with labour saving devices of a practical kind. Then we came to a door which Clemency opened saying: "This is my husband's special room."
"Come in," said Roger. "Come in."
I drew a faint breath of relief. Something in the spotless austerity elsewhere had been getting me down. This was an intensely personal room. There was a large roll top desk untidily covered with papers, old pipes and tobacco ash. There were big shabby easy chairs. Persian rugs covered the floor.
On the walls were groups, their photography somewhat faded. School groups, cricket groups, military groups. Water colour sketches of deserts and minarets, and of sailing boats and sea effects and sunsets. It was, somehow, a pleasant room, the room of a lovable friendly companionable man.
Roger, clumsily, was pouring out drinks from a tantalus, sweeping books and papers off one of the chairs.
"Place is in a mess. I was turning out. Clearing up old papers. Say when." The Inspector declined a drink. I accepted.
"You must forgive me just now," went on Roger. He brought my drink over to me, turning his head to speak to Taverner as he did so. "My feelings ran away with me."
He looked around almost guiltily, but Clemency Leonides had not accompanied us into the room.
"She's so wonderful," he said. "My wife, I mean. All through this, she's been splendid - splendid! I can't tell you how I admire that woman. And she's had such a hard time - a terrible time. I'd like to tell you about it. Before we were married, I mean. Her first husband was a fine chap - fine mind, I mean - but terribly delicate - tubercular as a matter of fact. He was doing some very valuable research work on crystallography, I believe. Poorly paid and very exacting, but he wouldn't give up. She slaved for him, practically kept him, knowing all the time that he was dying. And never a complaint - never a murmur of wanness. She always said she was happy. Then he died, and she was terribly cut up. At last she agreed to marry me. I was glad to be able to give her some rest, some happiness, I wished she would stop working, but of course she felt it her duty in war time, and she still seems to feel she should go on. She's been a wonderful wife - the most wonderful wife a man ever had. Gosh, I've been lucky! I'd do anything for her."
Taverner made a suitable rejoinder. Then he embarked once more on the familiar routine questions. When had he first heard of his father's illness?
"Brenda had rushed over to call me. My father was ill - she said he had had a seizure of some sort.
"I'd been sitting with the dear old boy only about half an hour earlier. He'd been perfectly all right then. I rushed over. He was blue in the face, gasping. I dashed down to Philip. He rang up the doctor. I - we couldn't do anything. Of course I never dreamed for a moment then that there had been any funny business. Funny? Did I say funny? God, what a word to use."
