By the Pricking of My Thumbs. Агата Кристи. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Агата Кристи
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Приключения: прочее
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780007422180
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      By the Pricking of My Thumbs

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      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.

       www.agathachristie.com

      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.

      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: ‘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

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Dedication

       Epigraph

       BOOK 1: Sunny Ridge

       CHAPTER 1: Aunt Ada

       CHAPTER 2: Was It Your Poor Child?

       CHAPTER 3: A Funeral

       CHAPTER 4: Picture of a House

       CHAPTER 5: Disappearance of an Old Lady

       CHAPTER 6: Tuppence on the Trail

       BOOK 2: The House on the Canal

       CHAPTER 7: The Friendly Witch

       CHAPTER 8: Sutton Chancellor

       CHAPTER 9: A Morning in Market Basing

       BOOK 3: Missing—A Wife

       CHAPTER 10: A Conference—and After

       CHAPTER 11: Bond Street and dr Murray

       CHAPTER 12: Tommy Meets an Old Friend

       CHAPTER 13: Albert on Clues

       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

       CHAPTER 16: The Morning After

       CHAPTER 17: Mrs Lancaster

       Also by Agatha Christie

       About the Publisher

BOOK 1

       CHAPTER 1

       Aunt Ada

      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