Crooked House

Charles and Sophia stay in touch through letters before both returning to England several years later. They agree to meet for dinner, but as Charles reads the papers on the day of their reunion, he learns that Aristide has passed “suddenly” at the age of 85. There are two separate death notices, one from his “beloved” wife Brenda and one from his children and grandchildren.

At dinner, Sophia tells Charles that although the terms of their agreement are now fulfilled, she can’t marry him anymore. She suspects that her grandfather was murdered due to the strange circumstances of his death. As Charles is in the Diplomatic Service, and his father is the Assistant Commissioner of the Scotland Yard police force, Sophia is afraid that their marriage would shame him unless her family is cleared of all suspicions.

Charles visits his father, Sir Arthur Hayward. Arthur is heading up the Aristide investigation. Charles reveals that he intends to marry Aristide’s granddaughter, and his father concedes that would be no problem if “the right person” (11) killed the old man.

Arthur recounts the family’s saga—Aristide emigrated from Smyrna, Greece to England as a young man. After opening several successful restaurants, he went into catering and other business ventures, always finding ways to circumvent the law for maximum profit—he was “crooked, yes, but not a crook” (13). Despite being unattractive, he was charming and well-liked. He found a love connection with his first wife Marcia de Haviland. The two moved to Swinly Dean and built a house called Three Gables. Marcia died in 1905; only their eldest son Roger and younger son Philip survived into adulthood. Philip has three children—Sophia, Eustace, and Josephine. All the remaining family members live at Swinly Dean along with Aristide’s elderly sister-in-law from his first marriage, Edith de Haviland, and the children’s nanny Janet.

Charles and Arthur are joined by Chief Inspector Taverner. Taverner is pessimistic about solving the case because Aristide was poisoned with the chemical eserine, found in his medicinal eye drops. The chemical was switched out for the insulin in Aristide’s daily injections. Their most obvious suspect is Aristide’s second wife Brenda, who administered the fatal shot. A good-looking woman, Brenda married Aristide when he was 75 and she only 24. A decade later, she’s grown suspiciously close to Laurence Brown, the live-in tutor of Aristide’s grandchildren. Although she is the chief suspect, anyone living in the house would have had access to the medicine cabinet and could have made the switch.

The next day, Charles drives with Taverner down to Swinly Dean, having agreed to ask for Sophia’s help with the investigation. He’s reluctant to take advantage of her position in the family but wants suspicion off her as soon as possible so they can get married.

Three Gables is a sprawling estate with “a strange air of being distorted […] a cottage swollen out of all proportion” (21). Sophia greets them and, after a talk with Charles out on the lawn, agrees to tell him everything she knows. She suspects neither Brenda nor Laurence the tutor, the former being too careful to commit a murder and the latter too cowardly. Yet she admits that any one of her relatives might be capable of killing, due to their “different kinds of ruthlessness” (23), from her uncle’s intense temper to her father’s emotional repression. She even believes herself capable under the right circumstances.

Edith de Haviland joins the group on the lawn to say that Janet is calling for Sophia. As they walk back toward the house, Edith tells Charles that she never liked Aristide, considering him an “ugly little common foreigner” (27). She admits that he was a generous man, however, having given each of his children and grandchildren enough money to make them financially independent. Like Sophia, Edith doesn’t particularly suspect Brenda. During their conversation, Edith pauses to point out the bindweed plants growing in the garden. She calls the climbing vine “hateful” and crushes a piece of it underfoot. Charles suspects that she is hiding knowledge below her curt exterior. He wonders what, if anything, could motivate her to kill.