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was a singularly tough old man. His diabetes wasn't getting any worse. He really looked like living to be a hundred. I suppose she got tired of waiting...”
    “In that case,” I said, and stopped.
    “In that case,” said Miss de Haviland briskly, “it will be more or less all right. Annoying publicity, of course. But after all, she isn't one of the family.”
    “You've no other ideas?” I asked.
    “What other ideas should I have?”
    I wondered. I had a suspicion that there might be more going on under the battered felt hat than I knew.
    Behind the jerky, almost disconnected utterance, there was, I thought, a very shrewd brain at work. Just for a moment I even wondered whether Miss de Haviland had poisoned Aristide Leonides herself...
    It did not seem an impossible idea. At the back of my mind was the way she had ground the bindweed into the soil with her heel with a kind of vindictive thoroughness.
    I remembered the word Sophia had used. Ruthlessness.
    I stole a sideways glance at Edith de Haviland.
    Given good and sufficient reason...
    But what exactly would seem to Edith de Haviland good and sufficient reason?
    To answer that, I should have to know her better.

Crooked House

Chapter 6
    The front door was open. We passed through it into a rather surprisingly spacious hall. It was furnished with restraint - well-polished dark oak and gleaming brass. At the back, where the staircase would normally appear, was a white panelled wall with a door in it.
    “My brother-in-law's part of the house,” said Miss de Haviland. “The ground floor is Philip and Magda's.”
    We went through a doorway on the left into a large drawing room. It had pale blue panelled walls, furniture covered in heavy brocade, and on every available table and on the walls were hung photographs and pictures of actors, dancers and stage scenes and designs. A Degas of ballet dancers hung over the mantelpiece. There were masses of flowers, enormous brown chrysanthemums and great vases of carnations.
    “I suppose,” said Miss de Haviland, “that you want to see Philip?”
    Did I want to see Philip? I had no idea. All I had wanted to do was to see Sophia. That I had done. She had given emphatic encouragement to the Old Man's plan - but she had now receded from the scene and was presumably somewhere telephoning about fish, having given me no indication of how to proceed. Was I to approach Philip Leonides as a young man anxious to marry his daughter, or as a casual friend who had dropped in (surely not at such a moment!) or as an associate of the police? Miss de Haviland gave me no time to consider her question. It was, indeed, not a question at all, but more an assertion.
    Miss de Haviland, I judged, was more inclined to assert than to question.
    “We'll go to the library,” she said.
    She led me out of the drawing room, along a corridor and in through another door.
    It was a big room, full of books. The books did not confine themselves to the bookcases that reached up to the ceiling. They were on chairs and tables and even on the floor. And yet there was no sense of disarray about them.
    The room was cold. There was some smell absent in it that I was conscious of having expected. It smelt of the mustiness of old books and just a little of beeswax. In a second or two I realised what I missed. It was the scent of tobacco. Philip Leonides was not a smoker.
    He got up from behind his table as we entered - a tall man aged somewhere around fifty, an extraordinarily handsome man. Everyone had laid so much emphasis on the ugliness of Aristide Leonides, that for some reason I expected his son to be ugly too. Certainly I was not prepared for this perfection of feature - the straight nose, the flawless line of jaw, the fair hair touched with grey that swept back from a well shaped forehead.
    “This is Charles Hayward, Philip,” said Edith de Haviland.
    “Ah, how do you do?”
    I could not tell if he had ever heard of me. The hand he gave me was cold. His