"Mrs Leonides is an angel," he said, "an angel.
Her sweetness, her kindness to her elderly husband were wonderful.
To think of her in connection with poison is laughable - laughable!
And that thick-headed Inspector can't see it!"
"He's prejudiced," I said, "by the number of cases on his files where elderly husbands have been poisoned by sweet young wives."
"The insufferable dolt," said Laurence Brown angrily.
He went over to a bookcase in the corner and began rummaging the books in it.
I didn't think I should get anything more out of him. I went slowly out of the room.
As I was going along the passage, a door on my left opened and Josephine almost fell on top of me.
Her appearance had the suddenness of a demon in an old-fashioned pantomime.
Her face and hands were filthy and a large cobweb floated from one ear.
"Where have you been, Josephine?"
I peered through the half open door.
A couple of steps led up into the attic-like rectangular space in the gloom of which several big tanks could be seen. "In the cistern room."
"Why in the cistern room?"
Josephine replied in a brief businesslike way: "Detecting."
"What on earth is there to detect among the cisterns?"
To this, Josephine merely replied:
"I must wash."
"I should say most decidedly."
Josephine disappeared through the nearest bathroom door. She looked back to say:
"I should say it's about time for the next murder, wouldn't you?"
"What do you mean - the next murder?"
"Well, in books there's always a second murder about now.
Someone who knows something is bumped off before they can tell what they know."
"You read too many detective stories, Josephine.
Real life isn't like that.
And if anybody in this house knows something the last thing they seem to want to do is to talk about it."
Josephine's reply came to me rather obscured by the gushing of water from a tap. "Sometimes it's something that they don't know that they do know."
I blinked as I tried to think this out.
Then, leaving Josephine to her ablutions, I went down to the floor below.
Just as I was going out through the front door to the staircase, Brenda came with a soft rush through the drawing room door.
She came close to me and laid her hand on my arm, looking up in my face.
"Well?" she asked.
It was the same demand for information that Laurence had made, only it was phrased differently. And her one word far more effective.
I shook my head. "Nothing," I said.
She have a long sigh.
"I'm so frightened," she said. "Charles, I'm so frightened..."
Her fear was very real.
It communicated itself to me there in that narrow space.
I wanted to reassure her, to help her. I had once more that poignant sense of her as terribly alone in hostile surroundings.
She might well have cried out:
"Who is on my side?"
And what would the answer have been?
Laurence Brown?
And what, after all, was Laurence Brown?
No tower of strength in a time of trouble.
One of the weaker vessels.
I remembered the two of them drifting in from the garden the night before.
I wanted to help her.