"But why Josephine?
Why did she take Josephine with her?"
"Why did she do it at all?" I demanded.
"What was her motive?"
But even as I said that, I knew the truth.
I saw the whole thing clearly.
I realised that I was still holding her second letter in my hand.
I looked down and saw my own name on it.
It was thicker and harder than the other one.
I think I knew what was in it before I opened it.
I tore the envelope along and Josephine's little black notebook fell out.
I picked it up off the floor - it came open in my hand and I saw the entry on the first page...
Sounding from a long way away, I heard Sophia's voice, clear and self controlled.
"We've got it all wrong," she said. "Edith didn't do it."
"No," I said.
Sophia came closer to me - she whispered:
"It was - Josephine - wasn't it? That was it, Josephine."
Together we looked down on the first entry in the little black book, written in an unformed childish hand.
"Today I killed grandfather..."
Chapter 26
I was to wonder afterwards that I could have been so blind.
The truth had stuck out so clearly all along. Josephine and only Josephine fitted in with all the necessary qualifications.
Her vanity, her persistent self-importance, her delight in talking, her reiteration on how clever she was, and how stupid the police were.
I had never considered her because she was a child.
But children have committed murders, and this particular murder had been well within a child's compass.
Her grandfather himself had indicated the precise method - he had practically handed her a blue print.
All she had to do was to avoid leaving fingerprints and the slightest knowledge of detective fiction would teach her that.
And everything else had been a mere hotch potch, culled at random from stock mystery stories.
The notebook - the sleuthing - her pretended suspicions, her insistence that she was not going to tell till she was sure...
And finally the attack on herself.
An almost incredible performance considering that she might easily have killed herself.
But then, childlike, she never considered such a possibility.
She was the heroine. The heroine isn't killed.
Yet there had been a clue there - the traces of earth on the seat of the old chair in the wash house.
Josephine was the only person who would have had to climb up on a chair to balance the block of marble on the top of the door.
Obviously it had missed her more than once, (the dints in the floor) and patiently she had climbed up again and replaced it, handling it with her scarf to avoid fingerprints.
And then it had fallen - and she had had a near escape from death.
It had been the perfect set up - the impression she was aiming for! She was in danger, she "knew something," she had been attacked!
I saw how that had deliberately drawn my attention to her presence in the cylinder room.
And she had completed the artistic disorder of her room before going out to the wash house.
But when she had returned from hospital, when she had found Brenda and Laurence arrested, she must have become dissatisfied.
The case was over - and she - Josephine, was out of the lime light.
So she stole the digitalin from Edith's room and put it in her own cup of cocoa and left the cup untouched on the hall table.
Did she know that Nannie would drink it?
Possibly.
From her words that morning, she had resented Nannie's criticisms of her.
Did Nannie, perhaps, wise from a lifetime of experience with children, suspect? I think that Nannie knew, had always known, that Josephine was not normal.
With her precocious mental development had gone a retarded moral sense.
Perhaps, too, the various factors of heredity - what Sophia had called the "ruthlessness" of the family had met together.
She had had an authoritarian ruthlessness of her grandmother's family, and the ruthless egoism of Magda, seeing only her own point of view.