The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Агата Кристи
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Название: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Автор: Агата Кристи
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Зарубежные детективы
isbn: 9780007422548
isbn:
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
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, 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.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
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 СКАЧАТЬ