By the Pricking of My Thumbs - Agatha Christie [30]
‘What’s this thing?’ said Tuppence.
She poked with her toe at something lying half hidden in the rubble. Then she bent and picked it up.
‘Don’t you touch a dead bird,’ said Mrs Perry.
‘It’s not a bird,’ said Tuppence. ‘Something else must have come down the chimney. Well I never,’ she added, staring at it. ‘It’s a doll. It’s a child’s doll.’
They looked down at it. Ragged, torn, its clothes in rags, its head lolling from the shoulders, it had originally been a child’s doll. One glass eye dropped out. Tuppence stood holding it.
‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘I wonder how a child’s doll ever got up a chimney. Extraordinary.’
Chapter 8
Sutton Chancellor
After leaving the canal house, Tuppence drove slowly on along the narrow winding road which she had been assured would lead her to the village of Sutton Chancellor. It was an isolated road. There were no houses to be seen from it–only field gates from which muddy tracks led inwards. There was little traffic–one tractor came along, and one lorry proudly announcing that it carried Mother’s Delight and the picture of an enormous and unnatural-looking loaf. The church steeple she had noticed in the distance seemed to have disappeared entirely–but it finally reappeared quite near at hand after the lane had bent suddenly and sharply round a belt of trees. Tuppence glanced at the speedometer and saw she had come two miles since the canal house.
It was an attractive old church standing in a sizeable churchyard with a lone yew tree standing by the church door.
Tuppence left the car outside the lych-gate, passed through it, and stood for a few moments surveying the church and the churchyard round it. Then she went to the church door with its rounded Norman arch and lifted the heavy handle. It was unlocked and she went inside.
The inside was unattractive. The church was an old one, undoubtedly, but it had had a zealous wash and brush up in Victorian times. Its pitch pine pews and its flaring red and blue glass windows had ruined any antique charm it had once possessed. A middle-aged woman in a tweed coat and skirt was arranging flowers in brass vases round the pulpit–she had already finished the altar. She looked round at Tuppence with a sharply inquiring glance. Tuppence wandered up an aisle looking at memorial tablets on the walls. A family called Warrender seemed to be most fully represented in early years. All of The Priory, Sutton Chancellor. Captain Warrender, Major Warrender, Sarah Elisabeth Warrender, dearly beloved wife of George Warrender. A newer tablet recorded the death of Julia Starke (another beloved wife) of Philip Starke, also of The Priory, Sutton Chancellor–so it would seem the Warrenders had died out. None of them were particularly suggestive or interesting. Tuppence passed out of the church again and walked round it on the outside. The outside, Tuppence thought, was much more attractive than the inside. ‘Early Perp. and Dec.,’ said Tuppence to herself, having been brought up on familiar terms with ecclesiastical architecture. She was not particularly fond of early Perp. herself.
It was a fair-sized church and she thought that the village of Sutton Chancellor must once have been a rather more important centre of rural life than it was now. She left the car where it was and walked on to the village. It had a village shop and a post office and about a dozen small houses or cottages. One or two of them were thatched but the others were rather plain and unattractive. There were six council houses at the end of the village street looking slightly self-conscious. A brass plate on a door announced ‘Arthur Thomas, Chimney Sweep’.
Tuppence wondered if any responsible house agents were likely to engage his services for the house by the canal which certainly needed them. How silly she had been, she thought, not to have asked the name of the house.
She walked back slowly towards the church, and her car, pausing to examine the churchyard more closely. She liked the churchyard. There