By the Pricking of My Thumbs. Агата Кристи
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By the Pricking of My Thumbs
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by
Collins 1968
Agatha Christie® Tommy & Tuppence® By the Pricking of My Thumbs™
Copyright © 1968 Agatha Christie Limited. All rights reserved.
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers/Agatha Christie Ltd 2015
Agatha Christie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007590629
Ebook Edition © Jan 2015 ISBN: 9780007422180
Version: 2017-04-17
This book is dedicated to the many readers in this and in other countries who write to me asking: ‘What has happened to Tommy and Tuppence? What are they doing now?’ My best wishes to you all, and I hope you will enjoy meeting Tommy and Tuppence again, years older, but with spirit unquenched!
By the pricking of my thumbs
Something wicked this way comes.
—Macbeth
Contents
CHAPTER 2: Was It Your Poor Child?
CHAPTER 5: Disappearance of an Old Lady
CHAPTER 6: Tuppence on the Trail
BOOK 2: The House on the Canal
CHAPTER 9: A Morning in Market Basing
CHAPTER 10: A Conference—and After
CHAPTER 11: Bond Street and dr Murray
CHAPTER 12: Tommy Meets an Old Friend
BOOK 4: Here is a Church and here is the Steeple Open the Doors and there are the People
CHAPTER 14: Exercise in Thinking
CHAPTER 15: Evening at the Vicarage
Mr and Mrs Beresford were sitting at the breakfast table. They were an ordinary couple. Hundreds of elderly couples just like them were having breakfast all over England at that particular moment. It was an ordinary sort of day too, the kind of day that you get five days out of seven. It looked as though it might rain but wasn’t quite sure of it.
Mr Beresford had once had red hair. There were traces of the red still, but most of it had gone that sandy-cum-grey colour that red-headed people so often arrive at in middle life. Mrs Beresford had once had black hair, a vigorous curling mop of it. Now the black was adulterated with streaks of grey laid on, apparently at random. It made a rather pleasant effect. Mrs Beresford had once thought of dyeing her hair, but in the end she had decided