Midsummer Mysteries Read online

  MIDSUMMER MYSTERIES

  SECRETS AND SUSPENSE FROM THE QUEEN OF CRIME

  Agatha Christie

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021

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  Source ISBN: 9780008470937

  Ebook Edition © July 2021 ISBN: 9780008470944

  Version: 2021-06-08

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction: Summer in the Pyrenees

  The Blood-Stained Pavement

  The Double Clue

  Death on the Nile

  Harlequin’s Lane

  The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman

  Jane in Search of a Job

  The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim

  The Idol House of Astarte

  The Rajah’s Emerald

  The Oracle at Delphi

  The Adventure of the Sinister Stranger

  The Incredible Theft

  Bibliography

  Keep Reading …

  Also by Agatha Christie

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  Summer in the Pyrenees

  Father and Madge made a good many excursions on horseback, and in answer to my entreaties one day I was told that on the morrow I should be allowed to accompany them. I was thrilled. My mother had a few misgivings, but my father soon overruled them.

  ‘We have a Guide with us,’ he said, ‘and he’s quite used to children and will see to it that they don’t fall off.’

  The next morning the three horses arrived, and off we went. We zigzagged along up the precipitous paths, and I enjoyed myself enormously perched on top of what seemed to me an immense horse. The Guide led it up, and occasionally picking little bunches of flowers, handed them to me to stick in my hatband. So far all was well, but when we arrived at the top and prepared to have lunch, the Guide excelled himself. He came running back to us bringing with him a magnificent butterfly he had trapped. ‘Pour la petite mademoiselle,’ he cried. Taking a pin from his lapel he transfixed the butterfly and stuck it in my hat! Oh the horror of that moment! The feeling of the poor butterfly fluttering, struggling against the pin. The agony I felt as the butterfly fluttered there. And of course I couldn’t say anything. There were too many conflicting loyalties in my mind. This was a kindness on the part of the Guide. He had brought it to me. It was a special kind of present. How could I hurt his feelings by saying I didn’t like it? How I wanted him to take it off! And all the time, there was the butterfly, fluttering, dying. That horrible flapping against my hat. There is only one thing a child can do in these circumstances. I cried.

  The more anyone asked me questions the more I was unable to reply. ‘What’s the matter?’ demanded my father. ‘Have you got a pain?’

  My sister said, ‘Perhaps she’s frightened at riding on the horse.’

  I said No and No. I wasn’t frightened and I hadn’t got a pain.

  ‘Tired,’ said my father.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Well, then, what is the matter?’

  But I couldn’t say. Of course I couldn’t say. The Guide was standing there, watching me with an attentive and puzzled face. My father said rather crossly:

  ‘She’s too young a child. We shouldn’t have brought her on this expedition.’

  I redoubled my weeping. I must have ruined the day for both him and my sister, and I knew I was doing so, but I couldn’t stop. All I hoped and prayed was that presently he, or even my sister, would guess what was the matter. Surely they would look at that butterfly, they would see it, they would say, ‘Perhaps she doesn’t like the butterfly on her hat.’ If they said it, it would be all right. But I couldn’t tell them. It was a terrible day. I refused to eat any lunch. I sat there and cried, and the butterfly flapped. It stopped flapping in the end. That ought to have made me feel better. But by that time I had got into such a state of misery that nothing could have made me feel better.

  We rode down again, my father definitely out of temper, my sister annoyed, the Guide still sweet, kindly and puzzled. Fortunately, he did not think of getting me a second butterfly to cheer me up. We arrived back, a most woeful party, and went into our sitting-room where mother was.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘what’s the matter? Has Agatha hurt herself?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said my father crossly. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with the child. I suppose she’s got a pain or something. She’s been crying ever since lunch-time, and she wouldn’t eat a thing.’

  ‘What is the matter, Agatha?’ asked my mother.

  I couldn’t tell her. I only looked at her dumbly while tears still rolled down my cheeks. She looked at me thoughtfully for some minutes, then said, ‘Who put that butterfly in her hat?’

  My sister explained that it had been the Guide.

  ‘I see,’ said mother. Then she said to me, ‘You didn’t like it, did you? It was alive and you thought it was being hurt?’

  Oh, the glorious relief, the wonderful relief when somebody knows what’s in your mind and tells it to you so that you are at last released from that long bondage of silence. I flung myself at her in a kind of frenzy, thrust my arms round her neck and said, ‘Yes, yes, yes. It’s been flapping. It’s been flapping. But he was so kind and he meant to be kind. I couldn’t say.’

  She understood it all and patted me gently. Suddenly the whole thing seemed to recede in the distance.

  ‘I quite see what you felt,’ she said. ‘I know. But it’s over now, and so we won’t talk about it any more.’

  The Blood-Stained Pavement

  ‘It’s curious,’ said Joyce Lemprière, ‘but I hardly like telling you my story. It happened a long time ago—five years ago to be exact—but it’s sort of haunted me ever since. The smiling, bright, top part of it—and the hidden gruesomeness underneath. And the queer thing is that the sketch I painted at the time has become tinged with the same atmosphere. When you look at it first it is just a rough sketch of a little steep Cornish street with the sunlight on it. But if you look long enough at it something sinister creeps in. I have never sold it but I never look at it. It lives in the studio in a corner with its face to the wall.

  ‘The name of the place was Rathole. It is a queer little Cornish fishing village, very picturesque—too picturesque perhaps. There is rather too much of the atmosphere of “Ye Olde Cornish Tea House” about it. It has shops with bobbed-headed girls in smocks doing hand-illuminated mottoes on parchment. It is pretty and it is quaint, but it is very
self-consciously so.’

  ‘Don’t I know,’ said Raymond West, groaning. ‘The curse of the charabanc, I suppose. No matter how narrow the lanes leading down to them, no picturesque village is safe.’

  Joyce nodded.

  ‘They are narrow lanes that lead down to Rathole and very steep, like the side of a house. Well, to get on with my story. I had come down to Cornwall for a fortnight, to sketch. There is an old inn in Rathole, The Polharwith Arms. It was supposed to be the only house left standing by the Spaniards when they shelled the place in fifteen hundred and something.’

  ‘Not shelled,’ said Raymond West, frowning. ‘Do try to be historically accurate, Joyce.’

  ‘Well, at all events they landed guns somewhere along the coast and they fired them and the houses fell down. Anyway that is not the point. The inn was a wonderful old place with a kind of porch in front built on four pillars. I got a very good pitch and was just settling down to work when a car came creeping and twisting down the hill. Of course, it would stop before the inn—just where it was most awkward for me. The people got out—a man and a woman—I didn’t notice them particularly. She had a kind of mauve linen dress on and a mauve hat.

  ‘Presently the man came out again and to my great thankfulness drove the car down to the quay and left it there. He strolled back past me towards the inn. Just at that moment another beastly car came twisting down, and a woman got out of it dressed in the brightest chintz frock I have ever seen, scarlet poinsettias, I think they were, and she had on one of those big native straw hats—Cuban, aren’t they?—in very bright scarlet.

  ‘This woman didn’t stop in front of the inn but drove the car farther down the street towards the other one. Then she got out and the man seeing her gave an astonished shout. “Carol,” he cried, “in the name of all that is wonderful. Fancy meeting you in this out-of-the-way spot. I haven’t seen you for years. Hello, there’s Margery—my wife, you know. You must come and meet her.”

  ‘They went up the street towards the inn side by side, and I saw the other woman had just come out of the door and was moving down towards them. I had had just a glimpse of the woman called Carol as she passed by me. Just enough to see a very white powdered chin and a flaming scarlet mouth and I wondered—I just wondered—if Margery would be so very pleased to meet her. I hadn’t seen Margery near to, but in the distance she looked dowdy and extra prim and proper.

  ‘Well, of course, it was not any of my business but you get very queer little glimpses of life sometimes, and you can’t help speculating about them. From where they were standing I could just catch fragments of their conversation that floated down to me. They were talking about bathing. The husband, whose name seemed to be Denis, wanted to take a boat and row round the coast. There was a famous cave well worth seeing, so he said, about a mile along. Carol wanted to see the cave too but suggested walking along the cliffs and seeing it from the land side. She said she hated boats. In the end they fixed it that way. Carol was to go along the cliff path and meet them at the cave, and Denis and Margery would take a boat and row round.

  ‘Hearing them talk about bathing made me want to bathe too. It was a very hot morning and I wasn’t doing particularly good work. Also, I fancied that the afternoon sunlight would be far more attractive in effect. So I packed up my things and went off to a little beach that I knew of—it was quite the opposite direction from the cave, and was rather a discovery of mine. I had a ripping bathe there and I lunched off a tinned tongue and two tomatoes, and I came back in the afternoon full of confidence and enthusiasm to get on with my sketch.

  ‘The whole of Rathole seemed to be asleep. I had been right about the afternoon sunlight, the shadows were far more telling. The Polharwith Arms was the principal note of my sketch. A ray of sunlight came slanting obliquely down and hit the ground in front of it and had rather a curious effect. I gathered that the bathing party had returned safely, because two bathing dresses, a scarlet one and a dark blue one, were hanging from the balcony, drying in the sun.

  ‘Something had gone a bit wrong with one corner of my sketch and I bent over it for some moments doing something to put it right. When I looked up again there was a figure leaning against one of the pillars of The Polharwith Arms, who seemed to have appeared there by magic. He was dressed in seafaring clothes and was, I suppose, a fisherman. But he had a long dark beard, and if I had been looking for a model for a wicked Spanish captain I couldn’t have imagined anyone better. I got to work with feverish haste before he should move away, though from his attitude he looked as though he was pefectly prepared to prop up the pillars through all eternity.

  ‘He did move, however, but luckily not until I had got what I wanted. He came over to me and he began to talk. Oh, how that man talked.

  ‘“Rathole,” he said, “was a very interesting place.”

  ‘I knew that already but although I said so that didn’t save me. I had the whole history of the shelling—I mean the destroying—of the village, and how the landlord of The Polharwith Arms was the last man to be killed. Run through on his own threshold by a Spanish captain’s sword, and of how his blood spurted out on the pavement and no one could wash out the stain for a hundred years.

  ‘It all fitted in very well with the languorous drowsy feeling of the afternoon. The man’s voice was very suave and yet at the same time there was an undercurrent in it of something rather frightening. He was very obsequious in his manner, yet I felt underneath he was cruel. He made me understand the Inquisition and the terrors of all the things the Spaniards did better than I have ever done before.

  ‘All the time he was talking to me I went on painting, and suddenly I realized that in the excitement of listening to his story I had painted in something that was not there. On that white square of pavement where the sun fell before the door of The Polharwith Arms, I had painted in bloodstains. It seemed extraordinary that the mind could play such tricks with the hand, but as I looked over towards the inn again I got a second shock. My hand had only painted what my eyes saw—drops of blood on the white pavement.

  ‘I stared for a minute or two. Then I shut my eyes, said to myself, “Don’t be so stupid, there’s nothing there, really,” then I opened them again, but the bloodstains were still there.

  ‘I suddenly felt I couldn’t stand it. I interrupted the fisherman’s flood of language.

  ‘“Tell me,” I said, “my eyesight is not very good. Are those bloodstains on that pavement over there?”

  ‘He looked at me indulgently and kindly.

  ‘“No bloodstains in these days, lady. What I am telling you about is nearly five hundred years ago.”

  ‘“Yes,” I said, “but now—on the pavement”—the words died away in my throat. I knew—I knew that he wouldn’t see what I was seeing. I got up and with shaking hands began to put my things together. As I did so the young man who had come in the car that morning came out of the inn door. He looked up and down the street perplexedly. On the balcony above his wife came out and collected the bathing things. He walked down towards the car but suddenly swerved and came across the road towards the fisherman.

  ‘“Tell me, my man,” he said. “You don’t know whether the lady who came in that second car there has got back yet?”

  ‘“Lady in a dress with flowers all over it? No, sir, I haven’t seen her. She went along the cliff towards the cave this morning.”

  ‘“I know, I know. We all bathed there together, and then she left us to walk home and I have not seen her since. It can’t have taken her all this time. The cliffs round here are not dangerous, are they?”

  ‘“It depends, sir, on the way you go. The best way is to take a man what knows the place with you.”

  ‘He very clearly meant himself and was beginning to enlarge on the theme, but the young man cut him short unceremoniously and ran back towards the inn calling up to his wife on the balcony.

  ‘“I say, Margery, Carol hasn’t come back yet. Odd, isn’t it?”

  ‘I didn�
�t hear Margery’s reply, but her husband went on. “Well, we can’t wait any longer. We have got to push on to Penrithar. Are you ready? I will turn the car.”

  ‘He did as he had said, and presently the two of them drove off together. Meanwhile I had deliberately been nerving myself to prove how ridiculous my fancies were. When the car had gone I went over to the inn and examined the pavement closely. Of course there were no bloodstains there. No, all along it had been the result of my distorted imagination. Yet, somehow, it seemed to make the thing more frightening. It was while I was standing there that I heard the fisherman’s voice.

  ‘He was looking at me curiously. “You thought you saw bloodstains here, eh, lady?”

  ‘I nodded.

  ‘“That is very curious, that is very curious. We have got a superstition here, lady. If anyone sees those bloodstains—”

  ‘He paused.

  ‘“Well?” I said.

  ‘He went on in his soft voice, Cornish in intonation, but unconsciously smooth and well-bred in its pronunciation, and completely free from Cornish turns of speech.

  ‘“They do say, lady, that if anyone sees those bloodstains that there will be a death within twenty-four hours.”

  ‘Creepy! It gave me a nasty feeling all down my spine.

  ‘He went on persuasively. “There is a very interesting tablet in the church, lady, about a death—”

  ‘“No thanks,” I said decisively, and I turned sharply on my heel and walked up the street towards the cottage where I was lodging. Just as I got there I saw in the distance the woman called Carol coming along the cliff path. She was hurrying. Against the grey of the rocks she looked like some poisonous scarlet flower. Her hat was the colour of blood …

  ‘I shook myself. Really, I had blood on the brain.

  ‘Later I heard the sound of her car. I wondered whether she too was going to Penrithar; but she took the road to the left in the opposite direction. I watched the car crawl up the hill and disappear, and I breathed somehow more easily. Rathole seemed its quiet sleepy self once more.’