Endless Night
Agatha Christie’s disturbing 1960s mystery thriller, reissued with a striking cover designed to appeal to the latest generation of Agatha Christie fans and book lovers.Gipsy’s Acre was a truly beautiful upland site with views out to sea – and in Michael Rogers it stirred a child-like fantasy.There, amongst the dark fir trees, he planned to build a house, find a girl and live happily ever after.Yet, as he left the village, a shadow of menace hung over the land. For this was the place where accidents happened. Perhaps Michael should have heeded the locals’ warnings: ‘There’s no luck for them as meddles with Gipsy’s Acre.’Michael Rogers is a man who is about to learn the true meaning of the old saying ‘In my end is my beginning…’
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by Collins, The Crime Club 1967
Endless Night™ is a trade mark of Agatha Christie Limited and Agatha Christie>® and the Agatha Christie Signature are registered trade marks of Agatha Christie Limited in the UK and elsewhere.
Copyright © 1967 Agatha Christie Limited. All rights reserved.
Cover by designedbydavid.co.uk © HarperCollins/Agatha Christie Ltd 2017
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: 9780008196394
Ebook Edition © February 2017 ISBN: 9780007422326
Version: 2017-04-11
Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are born.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are born to Sweet Delight,
Some are born to Sweet Delight,
Some are born to Endless Night,
William Blake
Auguries of Innocence
Contents
In my end is my beginning … That’s a quotation I’ve often heard people say. It sounds all right—but what does it really mean?
Is there ever any particular spot where one can put one’s finger and say: ‘It all began that day, at such a time and such a place, with such an incident?’
Did my story begin, perhaps, when I noticed the Sale Bill hanging on the wall of the George and Dragon, announcing Sale by Auction of that valuable property ‘The Towers’, and giving particulars of the acreage, the miles and furlongs, and the highly idealized portrait of ‘The Towers’ as it might have been perhaps in its prime, anything from eighty to a hundred years ago?
I was doing nothing particular, just strolling along the main street of Kingston Bishop, a place of no importance whatever, killing time. I noticed the Sale Bill. Why? Fate up to its dirty work? Or dealing out its golden handshake of good fortune? You can look at it either way.
Or you could say, perhaps, that it all had its beginnings when I met Santonix, during the talks I had with him; I can close my eyes and see: his flushed cheeks, the over-brilliant eyes, and the movement of the strong yet delicate hand that sketched and drew plans and elevations of houses. One house in particular, a beautiful house, a house that would be wonderful to own!
My longing for a house, a fine and beautiful house, such a house as I could never hope to have, flowered into life then. It was a happy fantasy shared between us, the house that Santonix would build for me—if he lasted long enough …
A house that in my dreams I would live in with the girl that I loved, a house in which just like a child’s silly fairy story we should live together ‘happy ever afterwards’. All pure fantasy, all nonsense, but it started that tide of longing in me. Longing for something I was never likely to have.
Or if this is a love story—and it is a love story, I swear—then why not begin where I first caught sight of Ellie standing in the dark fir trees of Gipsy’s Acre?
Gipsy’s Acre. Yes, perhaps I’d better begin there, at the moment when I turned away from the Sale board with a little shiver because a black cloud had come over the sun, and asked a question carelessly enough of one of the locals, who was clipping a hedge in a desultory fashion nearby.
‘What’s this house, The Towers, like?’
I can still see the queer face of the old man, as he looked at me sideways and said:
‘That’s not what us calls it here. What sort of a name is that?’ He snorted disapproval. ‘It’s many a year now since folks lived in it and called it The Towers.’ He snorted again.
I asked him then what he called it, and again his eyes shifted away from me in his old wrinkled face in that queer way country folk have of not speaking to you direct, looking over your shoulder or round the corner, as it were, as though they saw something you didn’t; and he said:
