Crooked House Page 2

  I’d always taken a certain amount of interest in my father’s police work, but nothing had prepared me for the moment when I should come to take a direct and personal interest in it.

  I had not yet seen the Old Man. He had been out when I arrived, and after a bath, a shave, and change I had gone out to meet Sophia. When I returned to the house, however, Glover told me that he was in his study.

  He was at his desk, frowning over a lot of papers. He jumped up when I came in.

  “Charles! Well, well, it’s been a long time.”

  Our meeting, after five years of war, would have disappointed a Frenchman. Actually all the emotion of reunion was there all right. The Old Man and I are very fond of each other, and we understand each other pretty well.

  “I’ve got some whisky,” he said. “Say when. Sorry I was out when you got here. I’m up to the ears in work. Hell of a case just unfolding.”

  I leaned back in my chair and lit a cigarette.

  “Aristide Leonides?” I asked.

  His brows came down quickly over his eyes. He shot me a quick appraising glance. His voice was polite and steely.

  “Now what makes you say that, Charles?”

  “I’m right then?”

  “How did you know about this?”

  “Information received.”

  The Old Man waited.

  “My information,” I said, “came from the stable itself.”

  “Come on, Charles, let’s have it.”

  “You mayn’t like it,” I said. “I met Sophia Leonides out in Cairo. I fell in love with her. I’m going to marry her. I met her tonight. She dined with me.”

  “Dined with you? In London? I wonder just how she managed to do that! The family was asked—oh, quite politely, to stay put.”

  “Quite so. She shinned down a pipe from the bathroom window.”

  The Old Man’s lips twitched for a moment into a smile.

  “She seems,”’ he said, “to be a young lady of some resource.”

  “But your police force is fully efficient,” I said. “A nice Army type tracked her to Mario’s. I shall figure in the reports you get. Five foot eleven, brown hair, brown eyes, dark-blue pinstripe suit, etc.”

  The Old Man looked at me hard.

  “Is this—serious?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s serious, Dad.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Do you mind?” I asked.

  “I shouldn’t have minded—a week ago. They’re a well-established family—the girl will have money—and I know you. You don’t lose your head easily. As it is—”

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “It may be all right, if—”

  “If what?”

  “If the right person did it.”

  It was the second time that night I had heard that phrase. I began to be interested.

  “Just who is the right person?”

  He threw a sharp glance at me.

  “How much do you know about it all?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” He looked surprised. “Didn’t the girl tell you?”

  “No. She said she’d rather I saw it all—from an outside point of view.”

  “Now I wonder why that was?”

  “Isn’t it rather obvious?”

  “No, Charles. I don’t think it is.”

  He walked up and down frowning. He had lit a cigar and the cigar had gone out. That showed me just how disturbed the old boy was.

  “How much do you know about the family?” he shot at me.

  “Damn all! I know there was the old man and a lot of sons and grandchildren and in-laws. I haven’t got the ramifications clear.” I paused and then said, “You’d better put me in the picture, Dad.”

  “Yes.” He sat down. “Very well then—I’ll begin at the beginning—with Aristide Leonides. He arrived in England when he was twenty-four.”

  “A Greek from Smyrna.”

  “You do know that much?”

  “Yes, but it’s about all I do know.”

  The door opened and Glover came in to say that Chief-Inspector Taverner was here.

  “He’s in charge of the case,” said my father. “We’d better have him in. He’s been checking up on the family. Knows more about them than I do.”

  I asked if the local police had called in the Yard.

  “It’s in our jurisdiction. Swinly Dean is Greater London.”

  I nodded as Chief-Inspector Taverner came into the room. I knew Taverner from many years back. He greeted me warmly and congratulated me on my safe return.

  “I’m putting Charles in the picture,” said the Old Man. “Correct me if I go wrong, Taverner. Leonides came to London in 1884. He started up a little restaurant in Soho. It paid. He started up another. Soon he owned seven or eight of them. They all paid hand over fist.”

  “Never made any mistakes in anything he handled,” said Chief-Inspector Taverner.

  “He’d got a natural flair,” said my father. “In the end he was behind most of the well-known restaurants in London. Then he went into the catering business in a big way.”

  “He was behind a lot of other businesses as well,” said Taverner. “Second-hand clothes trade, cheap jewellery stores, lots of things. Of course,” he added thoughtfully, “he was always a twister.”

  “You mean he was a crook?” I asked.

  Taverner shook his head.

  “No, I don’t mean that. Crooked, yes—but not a crook. Never anything outside the law. But he was the sort of chap that thought up all the ways you can get round the law. He’s cleaned up a packet that way even in this last war, and old as he was. Nothing he did was ever illegal—but as soon as he’d got on to it, you had to have a law about it, if you know what I mean. But by that time he’d gone on to the next thing.”

  “He doesn’t sound a very attractive character,” I said.

  “Funnily enough, he was attractive. He’d got personality, you know. You could feel it. Nothing much to look at. Just a gnome—ugly little fellow—but magnetic—women always fell for him.”

  “He made a rather astonishing marriage,” said my father. “Married the daughter of a country squire—an MFH.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Money?”

  The Old Man shook his head.

  “No, it was a love match. She met him over some catering arrangements for a friend’s wedding—and she fell for him. Her parents cut up rough, but she was determined to have him. I tell you, the man had charm—there was something exotic and dynamic about him that appealed to her. She was bored stiff with her own kind.”

  “And the marriage was happy?”

  “It was very happy, oddly enough. Of course their respective friends didn’t mix (those were the days before money swept aside all class distinctions) but that didn’t seem to worry them. They did without friends. He built a rather preposterous house at Swinly Dean and they lived there and had eight children.”

  “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 may never 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 setup. 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 anaemic, 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.”

  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 diabetes,” said my father. “He had regular injections of insulin. Insulin is given out in small bottles with a rubber cap. A hypodermic needle 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 the second 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 bottle of insulin afterwards. In fact, if she is guilty, I can’t imagine why on earth 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 appearances 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, 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 money 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:

  There was a crooked man and he went a crooked mile.

  He found a crooked sixpence beside a crooked stile.

  He had a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,

  And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

  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 purring 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.

  Four

  On the following day I went down to Three Gables with Taverner.

  My position was a curious one. It was, to say the least of it, quite unorthodox. But the Old Man has never been highly orthodox.

  I had a certain standing. I had worked with the Special Branch at the Yard during the early days of the war.

  This, of course, was entirely different—but my earlier performances had given me, so to speak, a certain official standing.

  My father said:

  “If we’re ever going to solve this case, we’ve got to get some inside dope. We’ve got to know all about the people in that house. We’ve got to know them from the inside—not the outside. You’re the man who can get that for us.”

  I didn’t like that. I threw my cigarette end into the grate as I said:

  “I’m a police spy? Is that it? I’m to get the inside dope from Sophia whom I love and who both loves and trusts me, or so I believe.”

  The Old Man became quite irritable. He said sharply:

  “For heaven’s sake don’t take the commonplace view. To begin with, you don’t believe, do you, that your young woman murdered her grandfather?”

  “Of course not. The idea’s absolutely absurd.”

  “Very well—we don’t think so either. She’s been away for some years, she has always been on perfectly amicable terms with him. She has a very generous income and he would have been, I should say, delighted to hear of her engagement to you and would probably have made a handsome marriage settlement on her. We don’t suspect her. Why should we? But you can make quite sure of one thing. If this thing isn’t cleared up, that girl won’t marry you. From what you’ve told me I’m fairly sure of that. And mark this, it’s the kind of crime that may never be cleared up. We may be reasonably sure that the wife and her young man were in cahoots over it—but proving it will be another matter. There’s not even a case to put up to the DPP so far. And unless we get definite evidence against her, there’ll always be a nasty doubt. You see that, don’t you?”

  Yes, I saw that.

  The Old Man then said quietly:

  “Why not put it to her?”

  “You mean—ask Sophia if I—” I stopped.

  The Old Man was nodding his head vigorously.

  “Yes, yes. I’m not asking you to worm your way in without telling the girl what you’re up to. See what she has to say about it.”

  And so it came about that the following day I drove down with Chief-Inspector Taverner and Detective-Sergeant Lamb to Swinly Dean.

  A little way beyond the golf course, we turned in at a gateway where I imagined that before the war there had been an imposing pair of gates. Patriotism or ruthless requisitioning had swept these away. We drove up a long curving drive flanked with rhododendrons and came out on a gravelled sweep in front of the house.

  It was incredible! I wondered why it had been called Three Gables. Eleven Gables would have been more apposite! The curious thing was that it had a strange air of being distorted—and I thought I knew why. It was the type, really, of a cottage, it was a cottage swollen out of all proportion. It was like looking at a country cottage through a gigantic magnifying-glass. The slant-wise beams, the half-timbering, the gables—it was a little crooked house that had grown like a mushroom in the night!

  Yet I got the idea. It was a Greek restaurateur’s idea of something English. It was meant to be an Englishman’s home—built the size of a castle! I wondered what the first Mrs. Leonides had thought of it. She had not, I fancied, been consulted or shown the plans. It was, most probably, her exotic husband’s little surprise. I wondered if she had shuddered or smiled.