By the Pricking of My Thumbs
An old woman in a nursing home speaks of a child buried behind the fireplace…When Tommy and Tuppence visited an elderly aunt in her gothic nursing home, they thought nothing of her mistrust of the doctors; after all, Ada was a very difficult old lady.But when Mrs Lockett mentioned a poisoned mushroom stew and Mrs Lancaster talked about ‘something behind the fireplace’, Tommy and Tuppence found themselves caught up in an unexpected adventure involving possible black magic…
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By the Pricking of My Thumbs
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by
Collins 1968
Agatha Christie® Tommy & Tuppence® By the Pricking of My Thumbsâ¢
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 authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
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: âWhat has happened to Tommy and Tuppence? What are they doing now?â 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.
âMacbeth
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 Conferenceâand 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
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 wasnât 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 that she liked herself better as nature had made her. She had decided instead to try a new shade of lipstick so as to cheer herself up.
An elderly couple having breakfast together. A pleasant couple, but nothing remarkable about them. So an onlooker would have said. If the onlooker had been young he or she would have added, âOh yes, quite pleasant, but deadly dull, of course, like all old people.â
However, Mr and Mrs Beresford had not yet arrived at the time of life when they thought of themselves as old. And they had no idea that they and many others were automatically pronounced deadly dull solely on that account. Only by the young of course, but then, they would have thought indulgently, young people knew nothing about life. Poor dears, they were always worrying about examinations, or their sex life, or buying some extraordinary clothes, or doing extraordinary things to their hair to make them more noticeable. Mr and Mrs Beresford from their own point of view were just past the prime of life. They liked themselves and liked each other and day succeeded day in a quiet but enjoyable fashion.
There were, of course, moments, everyone has moments. Mr Beresford opened a letter, glanced through it and laid it down, adding it to the small pile by his left hand. He picked up the next letter but forbore to open it. Instead he stayed with it in his hand. He was not looking at the letter, he was looking at the toast-rack. His wife observed him for a few moments before saying,
âWhatâs the matter, Tommy?â
âMatter?â said Tommy vaguely. âMatter?â
âThatâs what I said,â said Mrs Beresford.
