By the Pricking of My Thumbs - Agatha Christie [80]
‘As I told Tommy, one of the important points has been this chain of houses. Genuine respectable houses with quite genuine respectable people living in them, living there for a short time–then leaving.
‘Now, thanks to you, Mrs Tommy, and your investigation of chimneys and dead birds, we’ve found quite certainly one of those houses. The house where a particular amount of the spoil was concealed. It’s been quite a clever system, you know, getting jewels or various things of that kind changed into packets of rough diamonds, hiding them, and then when the time comes they are flown abroad, or taken abroad in fishing boats, when all the hue and cry about one particular robbery has died down.’
‘What about the Perrys? Are they–I hope they’re not–mixed up in it?’
‘One can’t be sure,’ said Mr Smith. ‘No, one can’t be sure. It seems likely to me that Mrs Perry, at least, knows something, or certainly knew something once.’
‘Do you mean she really is one of the criminals?’
‘It mightn’t be that. It might be, you know, that they had a hold on her.’
‘What sort of hold?’
‘Well, you’ll keep this confidential, I know you can hold your tongue in these things, but the local police have always had the idea that the husband, Amos Perry, might just possibly have been the man who was responsible for a wave of child murders a good many years ago. He is not fully competent mentally. The medical opinion was that he might quite easily have had a compulsion to do away with children. There was never any direct evidence, but his wife was perhaps overanxious to provide him always with adequate alibis. If so, you see, that might give a gang of unscrupulous people a hold on her and they may have put her in as tenant of part of a house where they knew she’d keep her mouth shut. They may really have had some form of damaging evidence against her husband. You met them–what do you feel about them both, Mrs Tommy?’
‘I liked her,’ said Tuppence. ‘I think she was–well, as I say I summed her up as a friendly witch, given to white magic but not black.’
‘What about him?’
‘I was frightened of him,’ said Tuppence. ‘Not all the time. Just once or twice. He seemed suddenly to go big and terrifying. Just for a minute or two. I couldn’t think what I was frightened of, but I was frightened. I suppose, as you say, I felt that he wasn’t quite right in his head.’
‘A lot of people are like that,’ said Mr Smith. ‘And very often they’re not dangerous at all. But you can’t tell, and you can’t be sure.’
‘What are we going to do at the vicarage tonight?’
‘Ask some questions. See a few people. Find out things that may give us a little more of the information we need.’
‘Will Major Waters be there? The man who wrote to the vicar about his child?’
‘There doesn’t seem to be any such person! There was a coffin buried where the old gravestone had been removed–a child’s coffin, lead lined–And it was full of loot. Jewels and gold objects from a burglary near St Albans. The letter to the vicar was with the object of finding out what had happened to the grave. The local lads’ sabotage had messed things up.’
III
‘I am so deeply sorry, my dear,’ said the vicar, coming to meet Tuppence with both hands outstretched. ‘Yes, indeed, my dear, I have been so terribly upset that this should happen to you when you have been so kind. When you were doing this to help me. I really felt–yes, indeed I have, that it was all my fault. I shouldn’t have let you go poking among gravestones, though really we had no reason to believe–no reason at all–that some band of young hooligans–’
‘Now don’t disturb yourself,