The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Агата Кристи
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by
Collins 1926
Copyright © 1926 Agatha Christie Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013
Cover design by Ghost Design
Cover photograph © Condé Nast Archive / Corbis
The moral right of the author is asserted
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Source ISBN: 9780007141340
Ebook Edition 2010 ISBN: 9780007422548
Version: 2018-09-03
To Punkie
who likes an orthodox detective story, murder,
inquest, and suspicion falling on everyone in turn!
Contents
Copyright
1 Dr Sheppard at the Breakfast Table
2 Who’s Who in King’s Abbot
3 The Man Who Grew Vegetable Marrows
4 Dinner at Fernly
5 Murder
6 The Tunisian Dagger
7 I Learn My Neighbour’s Profession
8 Inspector Raglan is Confident
9 The Goldfish Pond
10 The Parlourmaid
11 Poirot Pays a Call
12 Round the Table
13 The Goose Quill
14 Mrs Ackroyd
15 Geoffrey Raymond
16 An Evening at Mah Jong
17 Parker
18 Charles Kent
19 Flora Ackroyd
20 Miss Russell
21 The Paragraph in the Paper
22 Ursula’s Story
23 Poirot’s Little Reunion
24 Ralph Paton’s Story
25 The Whole Truth
26 And Nothing But The Truth
27 Apologia
Extract from Closed Casket, the new Hercule Poirot novel by Sophie Hannah
About Agatha Christie
The Agatha Christie Collection
About the Publisher
Chapter 1 Dr Sheppard at the Breakfast Table
Mrs Ferrars died on the night of the 16th–17th September—a Thursday. I was sent for at eight o’clock on the morning of Friday the 17th. There was nothing to be done. She had been dead some hours.
It was just a few minutes after nine when I reached home once more. I opened the front door with my latchkey, and purposely delayed a few moments in the hall, hanging up my hat and the light overcoat that I had deemed a wise precaution against the chill of an early autumn morning. To tell the truth, I was considerably upset and worried. I am not going to pretend that at that moment I foresaw the events of the next few weeks. I emphatically did not do so. But my instinct told me that there were stirring times ahead.
From the dining-room on my left there came the rattle of tea-cups and the short, dry cough of my sister Caroline.
“Is that you, James?” she called.
An unnecessary question, since who else could it be? To tell the truth, it was precisely my sister Caroline who was the cause of my few minutes’ delay. The motto of the mongoose family, so Mr Kipling tells us, is: “Go and find out.” If Caroline ever adopts a crest, I should certainly suggest a mongoose rampant. One might omit the first part of the motto. Caroline can do any amount of finding out by sitting placidly at home. I don’t know how she manages it, but there it is. I suspect that the servants and the tradesmen constitute her Intelligence Corps. When she goes out, it is not to gather in information, but to spread it. At that, too, she is amazingly expert.
It was really this last named trait of hers which was causing me these pangs of indecision. Whatever I told Caroline now concerning the demise of Mrs Ferrars would be common knowledge all over the village within the space of an hour and a half. As a professional man, I naturally aim at discretion. Therefore I have got into the habit of continually withholding all information possible from my sister. She usually finds out just the same, but I have the moral satisfaction of knowing that I am in no way to blame.
Mrs Ferrars’ husband died just over a year ago, and Caroline has constantly asserted, without the least foundation for the assertion, that his wife poisoned him.
She scorns my invariable rejoinder that Mr Ferrars died of acute gastritis, helped on by habitual overindulgence in alcoholic beverages. The symptoms of gastritis and arsenical poisoning are not, I agree, unlike, but Caroline bases her accusation on quite different lines.
“You’ve only got to look at her,” I have heard her say.
Mrs Ferrars, though not in her first youth, was a very attractive woman, and her clothes, though simple, always seemed to fit her very well, but all the same, lots of women buy their clothes in Paris, and have not, on that account, necessarily