It seems odd to me, looking back, how suddenly and completely my pity and sympathy for Brenda Leonides vanished with the discovery of her letters, the letters she had written to Laurence Brown. Was my vanity unable to stand up to the revelation that she loved Laurence Brown with a doting and sugarly infatuation and had deliberately lied to me? I don't know.

I'm not a psychologist. I prefer to believe that it was the thought of the child Josephine, struck down in ruthless self preservation that dried up the springs of my sympathy.

"Brown fixed that booby trap, if you ask me," said Taverner, "and it explains what puzzled me about it."

"What did puzzle you?"

"Well, it was such a sappy thing to do.

Look here, say the kid's got hold of these letters - letters that are absolutely damning! The first thing to do is to try and get them back - (after all, if the kid talks about them, but has got nothing to show, it can be put down as mere romancing) but you can't get them back because you can't find them. Then the only thing to do is to put the kid out of action for good. You've done one murder and you're not squeamish about doing another. You know she's fond of swinging on a door in a disused yard.

The ideal thing to do is wait behind the door and lay her out as she comes through with a poker, or an iron bar, or a nice bit of hose-pipe. They're all there ready to hand. Why fiddle about with a marble lion perched on top of a door which is as likely as not to miss her altogether and which even if it does fall on her may not do the job properly (which actually is how it turns out)? I ask you - why?"

"Well," I said, "what's the answer?"

"The only idea I got to begin with was that it was intended to tie in with someone's alibi. Somebody would have a nice fat alibi for the time when Josephine was being slugged. But that doesn't wash because, to begin with, nobody seems to have any kind of alibi, and secondly someone's bound to look for the child at lunchtime, and they'll find the booby trap and the marble b100^3 the whole modus operand! will be ^u1 e plain to see. Of course, if the murder^ removed the block before the chiP was found, then we might have been pu22,'

But as it is the whole thing just d068111 make sense."

He stretched out his hands..,„ ' «"i «

"And what's your present explanat^01

"The personal element. Personal id^05^" crasy. Laurence Brown's idiosyncrasy- e doesn't like violence - he can't Iorce himself to do physical violence. He [[i^ y couldn't have stood behind the doo^ an socked the kid on the head. He cou^ n^ -*- c f^f~^ up a booby trap and go away and n^1 it happen."

"Yes, I see," I said slowly. "It^. me eserine in the insulin bottle all over a^^11' "Exactly."

"Do you think he did that w^0^

Brenda's knowing?"

"It would explain why she didn't /throw away the insulin bottle. Of course, y /~\T* may have fixed it up between them ~^~., she may have thought up the poison trlcK all by herself - a nice easy death fc^ er tired old husband and all for the b^1 m the best of possible worlds! But I b^ she didn't fix the booby trap. Women never have any faith in mechanical things working properly. And are they right. I think myself the eserine was her idea, but that she made her besotted slave do the switch. She's the kind that usually manages to avoid doing anything equi vocable themselves. Then they keep a nice happy conscience."

He paused then went on:

"With these letters I think the D.P.P. will say we have a case. They'll take a bit of explaining away! Then 5 if the kid gets through all right everything in the garden will be lovely." He gave me a sideways glance. "How does it feel to be engaged to about a million pounds sterling?"

I winced. In the excitement of the last few hours, I had forgotten the developments about the will.

"Sophia doesn't know yet," I said. "Do you want me to tell her?"

"I understand Gaitskill is going to break the sad (or glad) news after the inquest tomorrow." Taverner paused and looked at me thoughtfully.

"I wonder," he said, "what the reactions will be from the family?"