Читать «Crooked House / Скрюченный домишко. Книга для чтения на английском языке» онлайн - страница 100
Агата Кристи
As I finished the letter I was aware that Sophia, too, had read it—whether with Taverner’s concurrence or not, I don’t know.
I remembered Edith de Haviland’s ruthless foot grinding bindweed into the earth. I remembered my early, almost fanciful, suspicions of her. But why—
Sophia spoke the thought in my mind before I came to it.
‘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 realized 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 note-book 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:
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
And finally the attack on herself. An almost incre dible performance considering that she might easily have killed herself. But then, childlike, she had 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 dents 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 she had deliberately drawn my attention to her presence in the cistern 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 limelight.
