By the Pricking of My Thumbs - Agatha Christie [42]
‘And his wife?’
‘She’s dead, poor lady. Died soon after she went abroad. There’s a tablet put up to her in the church. Awful for her it would be. Perhaps she wasn’t sure at first, then perhaps she began to suspect her husband, and then perhaps she got to be quite sure. She couldn’t bear it and she went away.’
‘The things you women imagine,’ said Mr Copleigh.
‘All I say is there was something that wasn’t right about Sir Philip. He was too fond of children, I think, and it wasn’t in a natural kind of way.’
‘Women’s fancies,’ said Mr Copleigh.
Mrs Copleigh got up and started to move things off the table.
‘About time,’ said her husband. ‘You’ll give this lady here bad dreams if you go on about things as were over years ago and have nothing to do with anyone here any more.’
‘It’s been very interesting hearing,’ said Tuppence. ‘But I am very sleepy. I think I’d better go to bed now.’
‘Well, we usually goes early to bed,’ said Mrs Copleigh, ‘and you’ll be tired after the long day you’ve had.’
‘I am. I’m frightfully sleepy.’ Tuppence gave a large yawn. ‘Well, good night and thank you very much.’
‘Would you like a call and a cup of tea in the morning? Eight o’clock too early for you?’
‘No, that would be fine,’ said Tuppence. ‘But don’t bother if it’s a lot of trouble.’
‘No trouble at all,’ said Mrs Copleigh.
Tuppence pulled herself wearily up to bed. She opened her suitcase, took out the few things she needed, undressed, washed and dropped into bed. It was true what she had told Mrs Copleigh. She was dead tired. The things she had heard passed through her head in a kind of kaleidoscope of moving figures and of all sorts of horrific imaginings. Dead children–too many dead children. Tuppence wanted just one dead child behind a fireplace. The fireplace had to do perhaps with Waterside. The child’s doll. A child that had been killed by a demented young girl driven off her rather weak brains by the fact that her lover had deserted her. Oh dear me, what melodramatic language I’m using, thought Tuppence. All such a muddle–the chronology all mixed up–one can’t be sure what happened when.
She went to sleep and dreamt. There was a kind of Lady of Shalott looking out of the window of the house. There was a scratching noise coming from the chimney. Blows were coming from behind a great iron plate nailed up there. The clanging sounds of the hammer. Clang, clang, clang. Tuppence woke up. It was Mrs Copleigh knocking on the door. She came in brightly, put the tea down by Tuppence’s bed, pulled the curtains, hoped Tuppence had slept well. No one had ever, Tuppence thought, looked more cheerful than Mrs Copleigh did. She had had no bad dreams!
Chapter 9
A Morning in Market Basing
‘Ah well,’ said Mrs Copleigh, as she bustled out of the room. ‘Another day. That’s what I always say when I wake up.’
‘Another day?’ thought Tuppence, sipping strong black tea. ‘I wonder if I’m making an idiot of myself…? Could be…Wish I had Tommy here to talk to. Last night muddled me.’
Before she left her room, Tuppence made entries in her notebook on the various facts and names that she had heard the night before, which she had been far too tired to do when she went up to bed. Melodramatic stories, of the past, containing perhaps grains of truth here and there but mostly hearsay, malice, gossip, romantic imagination.
‘Really,’ thought Tuppence. ‘I’m beginning to know the love lives of a quantity of people right back to the eighteenth century, I think. But what does it all amount to? And what am I looking for? I don’t even know any longer. The awful thing is that I’ve got involved and I can’t leave off.’
Having a shrewd suspicion that the first thing she might be getting involved with was Miss Bligh, whom Tuppence recognized as the overall menace of Sutton Chancellor, she circumvented all kind offers of help by driving off to Market Basing post haste, only pausing, when the car was accosted by Miss Bligh with shrill cries, to explain