By the Pricking of My Thumbs - Agatha Christie [87]
‘Well, I mean, there’s one way of knowing things. The other way is that you sort of feel them.’
‘That’s rather the way you go in for, Tuppence.’
‘You can say what you like,’ said Tuppence, apparently following her own track of thought, ‘the whole thing ties up round Sutton Chancellor. Round Ladymead, or Canal House or whatever you like to call it. And all the people who lived there, now and in past times. Some things I think might go back a long way.’
‘You’re thinking of Mrs Copleigh.’
‘On the whole,’ said Tuppence, ‘I think Mrs Copleigh just put in a lot of things which have made everything more difficult. I think she’s got all her times and dates mixed up too.’
‘People do,’ said Tommy, ‘in the country.’
‘I know that,’ said Tuppence, ‘I was brought up in a country vicarage, after all. They date things by events, they don’t date them by years. They don’t say “that happened in 1930” or “that happened in 1925” or things like that. They say “that happened the year after the old mill burned down” or “that happened after the lightning struck the big oak and killed Farmer James” or “that was the year we had the polio epidemic”. So naturally, of course, the things they do remember don’t go in any particular sequence. Everything’s very difficult,’ she added. ‘There are just bits poking up here and there, if you know what I mean. Of course the point is,’ said Tuppence with the air of someone who suddenly makes an important discovery, ‘the trouble is that I’m old myself.’
‘You are eternally young,’ said Ivor gallantly.
‘Don’t be daft,’ said Tuppence, scathingly. I’m old because I remember things that same way. I’ve gone back to being primitive in my aids to memory.’
She got up and walked round the room.
‘This is an annoying kind of hotel,’ she said.
She went through the door into her bedroom and came back again shaking her head.
‘No Bible,’ she said.
‘Bible?’
‘Yes. You know, in old-fashioned hotels, they’ve always got a Gideon Bible by your bed. I suppose so that you can get saved any moment of the day or night. Well, they don’t have that here.’
‘Do you want a Bible?’
‘Well, I do rather. I was brought up properly and I used to know my Bible quite well, as any good clergyman’s daughter should. But now, you see, one rather forgets. Especially as they don’t read the lessons properly any more in churches. They give you some new version where all the wording, I suppose, is technically right and a proper translation, but sounds nothing like it used to. While you two go to the house agents, I shall drive into Sutton Chancellor,’ she added.
‘What for? I forbid you,’ said Tommy.
‘Nonsense–I’m not going to sleuth. I shall just go into the church and look at the Bible. If it’s some modern version, I shall go and ask the vicar, he’ll have a Bible, won’t he? The proper kind, I mean. Authorized Version.’
‘What do you want the Authorized Version for?’
‘I just want to refresh my memory over those words that were scratched on the child’s tombstone…They interested me.’
‘It’s all very well–but I don’t trust you, Tuppence–don’t trust you not to get into trouble once you’re out of my sight.’
‘I give you my word I’m not going to prowl about in graveyards any more. The church on a sunny morning and the vicar’s study–that’s all–what could be more harmless?’
Tommy looked at his wife doubtfully and gave in.
II
Having left her car by the lych-gate at Sutton Chancellor, Tuppence looked round her carefully before entering the church precincts. She had the natural distrust of one who has suffered grievous bodily harm in a certain geographical spot. There did not on this occasion seem to be any possible assailants lurking behind the tombstones.
She went into the church, where an elderly woman was on her knees polishing some brasses. Tuppence tiptoed up to the lectern and made a tentative examination of the volume that rested there. The woman cleaning the brasses looked up with a disapproving glance.
‘I’m not going to steal it,’ said Tuppence reassuringly, and carefully closing it again, she tiptoed out of the church.