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 takea direct and personal interest in it.
I had not yet seen the Old Man. He had been out when I arrived, andafter a bath, a shave, and change I had gone out to meet Sophia. When Ireturned 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 Icame in.
“Charles! Well, well, it’s been a long time.”
Our meeting, after five years of war, would have disappointed a French-man. Actually all the emotion of reunion was there all right. The Old Manand I are very fond of each other, and we understand each other prettywell.
“I’ve got some whisky,” he said. “Say when. Sorry I was out when yougot 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 apprais-ing 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 inlove with her. I’m going to marry her. I met her tonight. She dined withme.”
“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 twitched1 for a moment into a smile.
“She seems,”’ he said, “to be a young lady of some resource.”
“But your police force is fully2 efficient,” I said. “A nice Army typetracked her to Mario’s. I shall figure in the reports you get. Five foot el-even, 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 fam-ily—the girl will have money—and I know you. You don’t lose your headeasily. 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 beinterested.
“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 hadgone 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 grand-children and in-laws. I haven’t got the ramifications3 clear.” I paused andthen said, “You’d better put me in the picture, Dad.”
“Yes.” He sat down. “Very well then—I’ll begin at the beginning—withAristide 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-Inspector4 Tav-erner 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 jurisdiction5. Swinly Dean is Greater London.”
I nodded as Chief-Inspector Taverner came into the room. I knew Tav-erner from many years back. He greeted me warmly and congratulatedme on my safe return.
“I’m putting Charles in the picture,” said the Old Man. “Correct me if I gowrong, Taverner. Leonides came to London in 1884. He started up a littlerestaurant in Soho. It paid. He started up another. Soon he owned sevenor eight of them. They all paid hand over fist.”
“Never made any mistakes in anything he handled,” said Chief-InspectorTaverner.
“He’d got a natural flair,” said my father. “In the end he was behindmost of the well-known restaurants in London. Then he went into the ca-tering 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. Ofcourse,” he added thoughtfully, “he was always a twister.”
“You mean he was a crook6?” I asked.
Taverner shook his head.
“No, I don’t mean that. Crooked7, yes—but not a crook. Never anythingoutside the law. But he was the sort of chap that thought up all the waysyou can get round the law. He’s cleaned up a packet that way even in thislast war, and old as he was. Nothing he did was ever illegal—but as soonas he’d got on to it, you had to have a law about it, if you know what Imean. 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. Youcould feel it. Nothing much to look at. Just a gnome—ugly little fellow—butmagnetic—women always fell for him.”
“He made a rather astonishing marriage,” said my father. “Married thedaughter of a country squire—an MFH.”
I raised my eyebrows8. “Money?”
The Old Man shook his head.
“No, it was a love match. She met him over some catering9 arrangementsfor a friend’s wedding—and she fell for him. Her parents cut up rough, butshe was determined10 to have him. I tell you, the man had charm—therewas something exotic and dynamic about him that appealed to her. Shewas bored stiff with her own kind.”
“And the marriage was happy?”
“It was very happy, oddly enough. Of course their respective friendsdidn’t mix (those were the days before money swept aside all class distinc-tions) but that didn’t seem to worry them. They did without friends. Hebuilt a rather preposterous11 house at Swinly Dean and they lived there andhad eight children.”
“This is indeed a family chronicle.”
“Old Leonides was rather clever to choose Swinly Dean. It was only be-ginning to be fashionable then. The second and third golf courses hadn’tbeen made. There was a mixture of Old Inhabitants who were passion-ately fond of their gardens and who liked Mrs. Leonides, and rich Citymen who wanted to be in with Leonides, so they could take their choice ofacquaintances. They were perfectly12 happy, I believe, until she died ofpneumonia in 1905.”
“Leaving him with eight children?”
“One died in infancy13. Two of the sons were killed in the last war. Onedaughter married and went to Australia and died there. An unmarrieddaughter was killed in a motor accident. Another died a year or two ago.
There are two still living—the eldest14 son, Roger, who is married but has nochildren, and Philip, who married a well-known actress and has three chil-dren. 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 andhis family have lived there since 1937. And there’s an elderly aunt, Miss deHaviland, sister of the first Mrs. Leonides. She always loathed15 her brother-in-law apparently16, but when her sister died she considered it her duty toaccept her brother-in-law’s invitation to live with him and bring up thechildren.”
“She’s very hot on duty,” said Inspector Taverner. “But she’s not thekind that changes her mind about people. She always disapproved17 of Le-onides and his methods—”
“Well,” I said, “it seems a pretty good houseful. Who do you think killedhim?”
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’renot 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 thesepoisoning cases are like. It’s very tricky18 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 isusually 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 wo-man—good-looking in an anaemic, apathetic19 sort of way.”
“And she’s the strong probability?”
“I ask you, sir,” said Taverner. “She’s only thirty-four now—and that’s adangerous 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 some-thing. They’re as thick as thieves.”
I looked at him thoughtfully. It was, certainly, an old and familiar pat-tern. The mixture as before. And the second Mrs. Leonides was, my fatherhad emphasized, very respectable. In the name of respectability manymurders had been committed.
“What was it?” I asked. “Arsenic?”
“No. We haven’t got the analyst’s report yet—but the doctor thinks it’seserine.”
“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 in-jections 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 in-jection drawn20 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 wasclearly 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 substi-tute a bona fide bottle of insulin afterwards. In fact, if she is guilty, I can’timagine 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 onethe doctor wouldn’t have spotted21 it. Very little is known of the post-mortem appearances in human poisoning by eserine. But as it was hechecked up on the insulin (in case it was the wrong strength or somethinglike that) and so, of course, he soon spotted that it wasn’t insulin.”
“So it seems,” I said thoughtfully, “that Mrs. Leonides was either verystupid—or possibly very clever.”
“You mean—”
“That she may be gambling22 on your coming to the conclusion thatnobody could have been as stupid as she appears to have been. What arethe alternatives? Any other—suspects?”
The Old Man said quietly:
“Practically anyone in the house could have done it. There was always agood store of insulin—at least a fortnight’s supply. One of the phials couldhave been tampered23 with, and replaced in the knowledge that it would beused 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 themedicine cupboard in the bathroom of his part of the house. Everybody inthe house came and went freely.”
“Any strong motive24?”
My father sighed.
“My dear Charles. Aristide Leonides was enormously rich. He has madeover a good deal of his money to his family, it is true, but it may be thatsomebody wanted more.”
“But the one that wanted it most would be the present widow. Has heryoung man any money?”
“No. Poor as a church mouse.”
Something clicked in my brain. I remembered Sophia’s quotation25. I sud-denly 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 youdon’t know what she’s thinking. But she likes living soft—that I’ll swearI’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 poisonedher husband. Sophia wanted it, and I wanted it, and Chief-Inspector Tav-erner 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-In-spector Taverner was sure either.
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收听单词发音
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1
twitched
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| vt.& vi.（使）抽动，（使）颤动（twitch的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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ramifications
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| n.结果，后果( ramification的名词复数 ) | |
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inspector
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| n.检查员，监察员，视察员 | |
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jurisdiction
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| n.司法权，审判权，管辖权，控制权 | |
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crook
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| v.使弯曲；n.小偷，骗子，贼；弯曲(处) | |
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crooked
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| adj.弯曲的；不诚实的，狡猾的，不正当的 | |
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eyebrows
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| 眉毛( eyebrow的名词复数 ) | |
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catering
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| n. 给养 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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preposterous
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| adj.荒谬的，可笑的 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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infancy
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| n.婴儿期；幼年期；初期 | |
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eldest
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| adj.最年长的，最年老的 | |
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loathed
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| v.憎恨，厌恶( loathe的过去式和过去分词 )；极不喜欢 | |
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16
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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disapproved
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| v.不赞成( disapprove的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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tricky
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| adj.狡猾的，奸诈的；(工作等)棘手的，微妙的 | |
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apathetic
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| adj.冷漠的，无动于衷的 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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spotted
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| adj.有斑点的，斑纹的，弄污了的 | |
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gambling
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| n.赌博；投机 | |
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tampered
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| v.窜改( tamper的过去式 )；篡改；（用不正当手段）影响；瞎摆弄 | |
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24
motive
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| n.动机，目的；adv.发动的，运动的 | |
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quotation
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| n.引文，引语，语录；报价，牌价，行情 | |
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