Crooked House

The Titian hair was piled high on her head in an Edwardian coiffure, and she was dressed in a well-cut dark-grey coat and skirt with a delicately pleated pale mauve shirt fastened at the neck by a small cameo brooch. For the first time I was aware of the charm of her delightfully tip-tilted nose. I was faintly reminded of Athene Seyler—and it seemed quite impossible to believe that this was the tempestuous creature in the peach négligé.

‘Inspector Taverner?’ she said. ‘Do come in and sit down. Will you smoke? This is a most terrible business. I simply feel at the moment that I just can’t take it in.’

Her voice was low and emotionless, the voice of a person determined at all costs to display self-control. She went on:

‘Please tell me if I can help you in any way.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Leonides. Where were you at the time of the tragedy?’

‘I suppose I must have been driving down from London. I’d lunched that day at the Ivy with a friend. Then we’d gone to a dress show. We had a drink with some other friends at the Berkeley. Then I started home. When I got here everything was in commotion. It seemed my father-in-law had had a sudden seizure. He was—dead.’ Her voice trembled just a little.

‘You were fond of your father-in-law?’

‘I was devoted—’

Her voice rose. Sophia adjusted, very slightly, the angle of the Degas picture. Magda’s voice dropped to its former subdued tone.

‘I was very fond of him,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘We all were. He was—very good to us.’

‘Did you get on well with Mrs Leonides?’

‘We didn’t see very much of Brenda.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Well, we hadn’t much in common. Poor dear Brenda. Life must have been hard for her sometimes.’

Again Sophia fiddled with the Degas.

‘Indeed? In what way?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Magda shook her head, with a sad little smile.

‘Was Mrs Leonides happy with her husband?’

‘Oh, I think so.’

‘No quarrels?’

Again the slight smiling shake of the head.

‘I really don’t know, Inspector. Their part of the house is quite separate.’

‘She and Mr Laurence Brown were very friendly, were they not?’

Magda Leonides stiffened. Her eyes opened reproachfully at Taverner.

‘I don’t think,’ she said with dignity, ‘that you ought to ask me things like that. Brenda was quite friendly to everyone. She is really a very amiable sort of person.’

‘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 role 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 fiancé, 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 him up in the outer hall just going through the door to the stairway.

‘Just going up to see the elder brother,’ he explained.

I put my problem to him without more ado.