Agatha Christie's Parrot

"There was only one rule: don’t open the door.”

That was just one of the stipulations on hiring the cottage once owned by Agatha Christie, another was to look after the parrot, which was old and said to have been Agatha's favourite, but that may have just been another story.

The writer who had hired the cottage was dead on the floor outside the open door with a knife in the back. They had not obeyed that rule.

When the police were called by a neighbour who had seen the body through the window, and a black shape disappearing through the unlocked door.

The police walked in and Agatha Christies Parrot gave them a list of suspects, none of which made any sense.

"The butler did it"

"Professor Plum did it"

"Moriarty did it"

The parrot wouldn't shut up and the police were tempted to strangle the beast.

They wondered if the budding writer had been down to the cellar, they were facing away from the door so whoever murdered them seemed to have come through the door from the cellar.

In the writer's notebook, they said they had heard that there were some lost Agatha Christie manuscripts in the cellar behind the locked door. Looking at the footprints in the dust on the stairs and cellar floor they could only see the writer's footprints, but there was a biting cold in the cellar.

There were a few sheets of paper but they were unreadable. The police wondered if the place could be haunted.

There was no way out of the cellar but they could both feel something malevolent there and thought they saw a cowled figure and the glint of a blade.

They both ran upstairs and locked the door.

They didn't want to end up like the writer.