“Yes, but I thought—”
“I can’t help what you thought.”
“You are an unscrupulous devil, Emily.”
“I know, Charles darling. I know. I’m everything you like to call me. But never mind. Think how great you are going to be. You’ve got your scoop! Exclusive news for the Daily Wire. You’re a made man. What’s a woman anyway? Less than the dust. No really strong man wants a woman. She only hampers him by clinging to him like the ivy. Every great man is one who is independent of women. A career—there’s nothing so fine, so absolutely satisfying to a man, as a great career. You are a strong man, Charles, one who can stand alone—”
“Will you stop talking, Emily? It’s like a talk to Young Men on the Wireless! You’ve broken my heart. You don’t know how lovely you looked as you came into that room with Narracott. Just like something triumphant and avenging off an arch.”
A footstep crunched on the lane, and Mr. Duke appeared.
“Oh! There you are, Mr. Duke,” said Emily. “Charles, I want to tell you. This is Ex-Chief-Inspector Duke of Scotland Yard.”
“What?” cried Charles recognizing the famous name. “Not the Inspector Duke?”
“Yes,” said Emily. “When he retired, he came here to live, and being nice and modest he didn’t want his renown to get about. I see now why Inspector Narracott twinkled so when I wanted him to tell me what kind of crimes Mr. Duke had committed.”
Mr. Duke laughed.
Charles wavered. There was a short tussle between the lover and the journalist. The journalist won.
“I’m delighted to meet you, Inspector,” he said. “Now, I wonder if we could persuade you to do us a short article, say eight hundred words, on the Trevelyan case.”
Emily stepped quickly up the lane and into Mrs. Curtis’s cottage. She ran up to her bedroom and pulled out her suitcase. Mrs. Curtis had followed her up.
“You’re not going, Miss?”
“I am. I’ve got a lot to do—London, and my young man.”
Mrs. Curtis drew nearer.
“Just tell me, Miss, which of ’em is it?”
Emily was throwing clothes haphazard into the suitcase.
“The one in prison, of course. There’s never been any other.”
“Ah! You don’t think, Miss, that maybe you’re making a mistake. You’re sure the other young gentleman is worth as much as this one?”
“Oh! no,” said Emily. “He isn’t. This one will get on.” She glanced out of the window where Charles was still holding Ex-Chief-Inspector Duke in earnest parley. “He’s the kind of young man who’s simply born to get on—but I don’t know what would happen to the other one if I weren’t there to look after him. Look where he would be now if it weren’t for me!”
“And you can’t say more than that, Miss,” said Mrs. Curtis.
She retreated downstairs to where her lawful spouse was sitting and staring into vacancy.
“The living image of my Great Aunt Sarah’s Belinda she is,” said Mrs. Curtis. “Threw herself away she did on that miserable George Plunket down at the Three Cows. Mortgaged and all it was. And in two years she had the mortgage paid off and the place a going concern.”
“Ah!” said Mr. Curtis, and shifted his pipe slightly.
“He was a handsome fellow, George Plunket,” said Mrs. Curtis reminiscently.
“Ah!” said Mr. Curtis.
“But after he married Belinda he never so much as looked at another woman.”
“Ah!” said Mr. Curtis.
“She never gave him the chance,” said Mrs. Curtis.
“Ah!” said Mr. Curtis.
About the Author
Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Her books have sold more than a billion copies in English and another billion in a hundred foreign languages. She is the author of eighty crime novels and short-story collections, nineteen plays, two memoirs, and six novels written under the name Mary Westmacott.
She first tried her hand at detective fiction while working in a hospital dispensary during World War I, creating the now legendary Hercule Poirot with her debut novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles. With The Murder in the Vicarage, published in 1930, she introduced another beloved sleuth, Miss Jane Marple. Additional series characters include the husband-and-wife crime-fighting team of Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, private investigator Parker Pyne, and Scotland Yard detectives Superintendent Battle and Inspector Japp.
Many of Christie’s novels and short stories were adapted into plays, films, and television series. The Mousetrap, her most famous play of all, opened in 1952 and is the longest-running play in history. Among her best-known film adaptations are Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Death on the Nile (1978), with Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov playing Hercule Poirot, respectively. On the small screen Poirot has been most memorably portrayed by David Suchet, and Miss Marple by Joan Hickson and subsequently Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie.
Christie was first married to Archibald Christie and then to archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, whom she accompanied on expeditions to countries that would also serve as the settings for many of her novels. In 1971 she achieved one of Britain’s highest honors when she was made a Dame of the British Empire. She died in 1976 at the age of eighty-five. Her one hundred and twentieth anniversary was celebrated around the world in 2010.
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www.AgathaChristie.com
THE AGATHA CHRISTIE COLLECTION
The Man in the Brown Suit
The Secret of Chimneys
The Seven Dials Mystery
The Mysterious Mr. Quin
The Sittaford Mystery
Parker Pyne Investigates
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
Murder Is Easy
The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories
And Then There Were None
Towards Zero
Death Comes as the End
Sparkling Cyanide
The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories
Crooked House
Three Blind Mice and Other Stories
They Came to Baghdad
Destination Unknown
Ordeal by Innocence
Double Sin and Other Stories
The Pale Horse
Star over Bethlehem: Poems and Holiday Stories
Endless Night
Passenger to Frankfurt
The Golden Ball and Other Stories
The Mousetrap and Other Plays
The Harlequin Tea Set and Other Stories
The Hercule Poirot Mysteries
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The Murder on the Links
Poirot Investigates
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The Big Four
The Mystery of the Blue Train
Peril at End House
Lord Edgware Dies
Murder on the Orient Express
Three Act Tragedy
Death in the Clouds
The A.B.C. Murders
Murder in Mesopotamia
Cards on the Table
Murder in the Mews
Dumb Witness
Death on the Nile
Appointment with Death
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
Sad Cypress
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Evil Under the Sun
Five Little Pigs
The Hollow
The Labors of Hercules
Taken at the Flood
The Under Dog and Other Stories
Mrs. McGinty’s Dead
After the Funeral
Hickory Dickory Dock
Dead Man’s Folly
Cat Among the Pigeons
The Clocks
Third Girl
Hallowe’en Party
Elephants Can Remember
C
urtain: Poirot’s Last Case
The Miss Marple Mysteries
The Murder at the Vicarage
The Body in the Library
The Moving Finger
A Murder Is Announced
They Do It with Mirrors
A Pocket Full of Rye
4:50 from Paddington
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
A Caribbean Mystery
At Bertram’s Hotel
Nemesis
Sleeping Murder
Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories
The Tommy and Tuppence Mysteries
The Secret Adversary
Partners in Crime
N or M?
By the Pricking of My Thumbs
Postern of Fate
Memoirs
An Autobiography
Come, Tell Me How You Live
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This title was previously published as The Murder at Hazelmoor.
AGATHA CHRISTIE® THE SITTAFORD MYSTERY™. Copyright © 1931 Agatha Christie Limited (a Chorion company). All rights reserved.
THE SITTAFORD MYSTERY © 1931. Published by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
For more information about educational use, teachers should visit www.HarperAcademic.com.
FIRST WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2012.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-06-207414-0
Epub Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN: 978-0-06-175220-9
12 13 14 15 16 DIX/BVG 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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The Sittaford Mystery Page 22