By the Pricking of My Thumbs - Agatha Christie [75]
‘Then if you count the vicar out–’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Well,’ said Tommy, ‘yes, I do. As you know, I’ve been to see him and talked to him. He’s been a vicar here for years and everyone knows him. I suppose a fiend incarnate could put on a show of being a kindly vicar, but not for more than about a week or so at the outside, I’d say. Not for about ten or twelve years.’
‘Well, then,’ said Tuppence, ‘the next suspect would be Miss Bligh. Nellie Bligh. Though heaven knows why. She can’t have thought I was trying to steal a tombstone.’
‘Do you feel it might have been her?’
‘Well, I don’t really. Of course, she’s competent. If she wanted to follow me and see what I was doing, and conk me, she’d make a success of it. And like the vicar, she was there–on the spot–She was in Sutton Chancellor, popping in and out of her house to do this and that, and she could have caught sight of me in the churchyard, come up behind me on tiptoe out of curiosity, seen me examining a grave, objected to my doing so for some particular reason, and hit me with one of the church metal flower vases or anything else handy. But don’t ask me why. There seems no possible reason.’
‘Who next, Tuppence? Mrs Cockerell, if that’s her name?’
‘Mrs Copleigh,’ said Tuppence. ‘No, it wouldn’t be Mrs Copleigh.’
‘Now why are you so sure of that? She lives in Sutton Chancellor, she could have seen you go out of the house and she could have followed you.’
‘Oh yes, yes, but she talks too much,’ said Tuppence.
‘I don’t see where talking too much comes into it.’
‘If you’d listened to her a whole evening as I did,’ said Tuppence, ‘you’d realize that anyone who talks as much as she does, non-stop in a constant flow, could not possibly be a woman of action as well! She couldn’t have come up anywhere near me without talking at the top of her voice as she came.’
Tommy considered this.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘You have good judgement in that kind of thing, Tuppence. Wash out Mrs Copleigh. Who else is there?’
‘Amos Perry,’ said Tuppence. ‘That’s the man who lives at the Canal House. (I have to call it the Canal House because it’s got so many other odd names. And it was called that originally.) The husband of the friendly witch. There’s something a bit queer about him. He’s a bit simple minded and he’s a big powerful man, and he could cosh anyone on the head if he wanted to, and I even think it’s possible in certain circumstances he might want to–though I don’t exactly know why he should want to cosh me. He’s a better possibility really than Miss Bligh who seems to me just one of those tiresome, efficient women who go about running parishes and poking their noses into things. Not at all the type who would get up to the point of physical attack, except for some wildly emotional reason.’ She added, with a slight shiver, ‘You know, I felt frightened of Amos Perry the first time I saw him. He was showing me his garden. I felt suddenly that I–well, that I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of him–or meet him in a dark road at night. I felt he was a man that wouldn’t often want to be violent but who could be violent if something took him that way.’
‘All right,’ said Tommy. ‘Amos Perry. Number one.’
‘And there’s his wife,’ said Tuppence slowly. ‘The friendly witch. She was nice and I liked her–I don’t want it to be her–I don’t think it was her, but she’s mixed up in things, I think…Things that have to do with that house. That’s another point, you see, Tommy–We don’t know what the important thing is in all this–I’ve begun to wonder whether everything doesn’t circulate round that house–whether the house isn’t the central point. The picture–That picture does mean something, doesn’t it, Tommy? It must, I think.’
‘Yes,’ said Tommy, ‘I think it must.’
‘I came here trying to find Mrs Lancaster–but nobody here seems to have heard of her. I’ve been wondering whether I got things the wrong way round–that Mrs Lancaster was in danger (because I’m still sure of that) because she owned that picture.