Nineteen
It seems odd to me, looking back, how suddenly and completely my pityand sympathy for Brenda Leonides vanished with the discovery of her let-ters, the letters she had written to Laurence Brown. Was my vanity unableto stand up to the revelation that she loved Laurence Brown with a dotingand sugary infatuation and had deliberately¹ lied to me? I don’t know. I’mnot a psychologist. I prefer to believe that it was the thought of the childJosephine, struck down in ruthless self- preservation², that dried up thesprings of my sympathy.
“Brown fixed³ that booby trap, if you ask me,” said Taverner, “and it ex-plains what puzzled me about it.”
“What did puzzle you?”
“Well, it was such a sappy thing to do. Look here, say the kid’s got holdof these letters—letters that are absolutely damning! The first thing to dois to try and get them back (after all, if the kid talks about them, but hasgot nothing to show, it can be put down as mere⁴ romancing), but you can’tget them back because you can’t find them. Then the only thing to do is toput the kid out of action for good. You’ve done one murder and you’re notsqueamish about doing another. You know she’s fond of swinging on adoor in a disused yard. The ideal thing to do is wait behind the door andlay her out as she comes through with a poker⁵, or an iron bar, or a nice bitof hosepipe. They’re all there ready to hand. Why fiddle⁶ about with amarble lion perched on top of a door which is as likely as not to miss heraltogether and which even if it does fall on her may not do the job properly(which actually is how it turns out). I ask you—why?”
“Well,” I said, “what’s the answer?”
“The only idea I got to begin with was that it was intended to tie in withsomeone’s alibi⁷. Somebody would have a nice fat alibi for the time whenJosephine was being slugged. But that doesn’t wash because, to begin with,nobody seems to have any kind of alibi, and second, someone’s bound tolook for the child at lunch time, and they’ll find the booby trap and themarble block, the whole modus operandi will be quite plain to see. Ofcourse, if the murderer had removed the block before the child was found,then we might have been puzzled. But as it is the whole thing just doesn’tmake sense.”

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