THE KILLINGS AT KINGFISHER HILL
THE NEW HERCULE POIROT MYSTERY
Sophie Hannah
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
AGATHA CHRISTIE, POIROT and the Agatha Christie Signature are registered trademarks of Agatha Christie Limited in the UK and elsewhere.
Copyright © Agatha Christie Limited 2020
All rights reserved.
Sophie Hannah asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021
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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: 9780008264529
Ebook Edition © August 2020 ISBN: 9780008264543
Version: 2021-02-03
For Jen –
a ‘re-dedication’ in celebration of her reincarnation as an Agatha Christie fan.
As always I would like to thank the ‘gang’—James and Mathew Prichard and everyone at Agatha Christie Ltd, David Brawn, Kate Elton, Fliss Denham and the team at HarperCollins, Julia Elliott and her colleagues at William Morrow in the US, and all the dedicated and talented teams who publish my Poirot novels all over the world—thank you!
I’m hugely grateful also to my amazing agent Peter Straus and everyone at Rogers, Coleridge & White, to my family and friends, and to my lovely readers and fellow Poirot-and-Agatha fans. Thank you to Emily Winslow for her incisive editorial feedback, to Kate Jones for all her amazing help in the last year and a half, to my Dream Authors who are all amazing and ace and teach me so much, and to Faith Tilleray, my website and tech guru. Thank you also to Claire George, who suggested the name of another character: Marcus Capeling—a great name which I loved as soon as I heard it.
And last but most, thanks to the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie, whose books never stop delighting and surprising me, no matter how many times I read them.
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
1. Midnight Gathering
2. The Seat of Danger
3. Richard Devonport’s Letter
4. The Missing Manifest
5. An Abstract Confession
6. The Devonport Family
7. Confessions for Dinner
8. The Chronology
9. The Training of the Brain
10. Helen Acton
11. A Body at Little Key
12. Irritating Little Questions
13. Aunt Hester
14. Poirot Makes a Task List
15. A New Confession
16. Little Key, Heavy Door
Epilogue
The Agatha Christie Collection
Keep Reading …
About the Authors
Also by Sophie Hannah
About the Publisher
It is not midnight when this tale begins, but ten minutes before two on the afternoon of 22nd February 1931. That was when the strangeness started, as M. Hercule Poirot and Inspector Edward Catchpool (his friend, and the teller of this story) stood with thirty strangers in a dispersed huddle—no one too close to anybody else, but all of us easily identifiable as an assembly—on London’s Buckingham Palace Road.
Our group of men and women and one child (an infant carried by his mother in a bundle arrangement that presented a rather mummified appearance) were soon to be travellers on a journey that felt peculiar and puzzling to me long before I knew quite how extraordinary it would become.
We were congregated by the side of the motor-coach that was to take us from London to the famed Kingfisher Hill country estate near Haslemere in Surrey, a place of outstanding natural beauty according to many. Despite all of us passengers being present well in advance of the coach’s scheduled departure time, we had not yet been permitted to board. Instead we shivered in the damp February chill, stamped our feet and blew on our gloved hands to warm ourselves as best we could.
It was not midnight, but it was the sort of winter day that is light-starved at dawn and remains so deprived for its duration.
There were seats for thirty passengers on the coach, and thirty-two of us in all who would be travelling: the driver, the swaddled infant in his mother’s firm grip, and the rest of us occupying the passenger