By the Pricking of My Thumbs - Agatha Christie [20]
He jumped out of bed and hastened to the bathroom. Tuppence lay back on her pillows and closed her eyes, trying to force a recollection that just remained elusively out of reach.
Tommy was pouring out a second cup of coffee in the dining-room when Tuppence appeared flushed with triumph.
‘I’ve got it–I know where I saw that house. It was out of the window of a railway train.’
‘Where? When?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll have to think. I remember saying to myself: “Someday I’ll go and look at that house”–and I tried to see what the name of the next station was. But you know what railways are nowadays. They’ve pulled down half the stations–and the next one we went through was all torn down, and grass growing over the platforms, and no name board or anything.’
‘Where the hell’s my brief-case? Albert!’
A frenzied search took place.
Tommy came back to say a breathless goodbye. Tuppence was sitting looking meditatively at a fried egg.
‘Goodbye,’ said Tommy. ‘And for God’s sake, Tuppence, don’t go poking into something that’s none of your business.’
‘I think,’ said Tuppence, meditatively, ‘that what I shall really do, is to take a few railway journeys.’
Tommy looked slightly relieved.
‘Yes,’ he said encouragingly, ‘you try that. Buy yourself a season ticket. There’s some scheme where you can travel a thousand miles all over the British Isles for a very reasonable fixed sum. That ought to suit you down to the ground, Tuppence. You travel by all the trains you can think of in all the likely parts. That ought to keep you happy until I come home again.’
‘Give my love to Josh.’
‘I will.’ He added, looking at his wife in a worried manner, ‘I wish you were coming with me. Don’t–don’t do anything stupid, will you?’
‘Of course not,’ said Tuppence.
Chapter 6
Tuppence on the Trail
‘Oh dear,’ sighed Tuppence, ‘oh dear.’ She looked round her with gloomy eyes. Never, she said to herself, had she felt more miserable. Naturally she had known she would miss Tommy, but she had no idea how much she was going to miss him.
During the long course of their married life they had hardly ever been separated for any length of time. Starting before their marriage, they had called themselves a pair of ‘young adventurers’. They had been through various difficulties and dangers together, they had married, they had had two children and just as the world was seeming rather dull and middle-aged to them, the second war had come about and in what seemed an almost miraculous way they had been tangled up yet again on the outskirts of the British Intelligence. A somewhat unorthodox pair, they had been recruited by a quiet nondescript man who called himself ‘Mr Carter’, but to whose word everybody seemed to bow. They had had adventures, and once again they had had them together. This, by the way, had not been planned by Mr Carter. Tommy alone had been recruited. But Tuppence displaying all her natural ingenuity, had managed to eavesdrop in such a fashion that when Tommy had arrived at a guest house on the sea coast in the role of a certain Mr Meadows, the first person he had seen there had been a middle-aged lady plying knitting needles, who had looked up at him with innocent eyes and whom he had been forced to greet as Mrs Blenkinsop. Thereafter they had worked as a pair.
‘However,’ thought Tuppence to herself, ‘I can’t do it this time.’ No amount of eavesdropping, of ingenuity, or anything else would take her to the recesses of Hush Hush Manor or to participation in the intricacies of I.U.A.S. Just an Old Boys Club, she thought resentfully. Without Tommy the flat was empty, the world was lonely, and ‘What on earth,’ thought Tuppence, ‘am I to do with myself?’
The question was really purely rhetorical for Tuppence had already started on the first steps of what she planned to do with herself. There was no question this time of intelligence work, of counter-espionage or anything of that kind. Nothing of an official nature. ‘Prudence Beresford, Private Investigator, that’s what I