Читать «Crooked House / Скрюченный домишко. Книга для чтения на английском языке» онлайн - страница 9

I looked at him thoughtfully. It was, certainly, an old and familiar pattern. The mixture as before. And the second Mrs Leonides was, my father had emphasized, very respectable. In the name of respectability many murders had been committed.

‘What was it?’ I asked. ‘Arsenic?’

‘No. We haven’t got the analyst’s report yet—but the doctor thinks it’s eserine.’

‘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 injections 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 injection drawn 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 se cond Mrs Leonides?’

‘No. I gather they are hardly on speaking terms.’

It all seemed clearer and clearer. Nevertheless, Inspector Taverner was clearly 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 substitute a bona fide bottle of insulin afterwards. In fact, if she is guilty, I can’t imagine 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 one the doctor wouldn’t have spotted it. Very little is known of the post-mortem appea rances in human poisoning by eserine. But as it was he checked up on the insulin (in case it was the wrong strength or something like that) and so, of course, he soon spotted that it wasn’t insulin.’

‘So it seems,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘that Mrs Leonides was either very stupid—or possibly very clever.’

‘You mean—’

‘That she may be gambling on your coming to the conclusion that nobody could have been as stupid as she appears to have been. What are the alternatives? Any other—suspects?’

The Old Man said quietly:

‘Practically anyone in the house could have done it. There was always a good store of insulin—at least a fortnight’s supply. One of the phials could have been tampered with, and replaced in the knowledge that it would be used 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 the medicine cupboard in the bathroom of his part of the house. Everybody in the house came and went freely.’

‘Any strong motive?’

My father sighed.

‘My dear Charles, Aristide Leonides was enormously rich. He has made over a good deal of his mo ney to his family, it is true, but it may be that somebody wanted more.’

‘But the one that wanted it most would be the present widow. Has her young man any money?’

‘No. Poor as a church mouse.’

Something clicked in my brain. I remembered Sophia’s quotation. I suddenly remembered the whole verse of the nursery rhyme: