The Christie Affair (13 page)

‘It can be a working holiday for you,’ Lippincott said, clearly pleased to be able to offer such a thing. ‘Won’t get a better offer than that any time soon, will you?’ Chilton and Lippincott had been in the same regiment during the war and fought together all the way to the end. Lippincott was one of the ones who had come out all right. Not too all right – any man with a heart would be altered by battle in some way – but fine enough to do his job, love his family, hear a door slam without jumping through the roof.

On the train north, Chilton stared out the window at the passing wych elms and hedgerows, the landscape nearly empty of people, wind whipping, everyone hunkering indoors. He was as likely to find Agatha Christie wandering beside the train tracks as anywhere.

Chilton’s left arm had gone limp since taking shrapnel in the shoulder. His good hand shook as he lit his cigarette. You might think detective work wouldn’t suit a man whose one working arm still trembled from war memories. You’d be right. Which is why Lippincott calling him out of retirement after less than a month was likely a way of giving him a parting gift, rather than expecting a crime to be solved.

‘Have a soak while you’re at it,’ Lippincott had said, once all was agreed upon, proving Chilton’s suspicions. Harrogate was famous for its natural hot baths, a luxury Chilton hadn’t even considered partaking in when he lived nearby. ‘It’ll do you good.’

Smoke from Chilton’s exhale rose to mingle with the other passengers’. If a fool’s errand was all he was good for, at least it was something more than wandering the beach by his mother’s house, an old man at forty. For much of his life Chilton had two brothers. Now he had none. The youngest, Malcolm, had died at Gallipoli. The second youngest, Michael, died in the labyrinth at the Battle of Arras, where Chilton had fought beside him. From that day forward, for the sake of their mother, Chilton had committed to staying alive, even as the stench of rotting bodies followed him from the trenches and refused to ever leave.

Once their mother was gone, though, Chilton would be free and clear. Perhaps then he’d follow the lead of this Christie woman, who from the sound of it had committed suicide. The place they’d find her was at the bottom of a lake. Chances were they’d have found her corpse closer to home by the time he arrived at the hotel. He’d spend one night there and turn around, back towards home.

Suicide. The word had a way of hounding Chilton. A hard thing for a woman to do, when she had a child. But then, from what Lippincott had said – and the fact that police all over England were being mobilized for the search – the Christies were of the breed who had enough people to look after the child so that she might not even notice her mother was gone. Chilton’s mother had been there for her sons every bedtime, every meal, every skinned knee of their childhood.

The train whistle blew for a stop. There
were
some pleasures
left in this life, things he would miss when he left it. Chilton did like the sound of a train whistle. A time away, train travel was. A chance to gather your thoughts or have no thoughts at all. Nobody would be looking for him and nobody would find him either, here on a train. Perhaps that’s what this Agatha Christie was doing. It’s what he would do, if he wanted to get away from the world. Board a train and ride it all over England. Never get off at any stop. Everything you needed, from privies to dining cars to shelter from the rain and a place to rest your head. If he wanted to escape, to disappear, he’d simply ride on and on to nowhere. Which was, now that he thought about it, very close to what he was doing – searching for someone in a place she surely wouldn’t be found.

After a while, Chilton fell asleep with his head lolled back, mouth slightly open, cigarette still burning in his hand. The woman across the aisle, old enough to be his mother, hadn’t wanted to ride in the smoking carriage, but there were no seats left in the non-smoking one. She looked at the sleeping man kindly. He had that particular look about him, so many did nowadays. And he was a handsome fellow, if you looked beyond the edges, a little squidgy and rumpled, but a good strong chin. Nice broad hands. She reached across the aisle and took the cigarette from his fingertips, sneaking one small puff before grinding it out in the ashtray.

In Surrey and Berkshire, a hundred policemen continued to search through the brush and hedges in the damp cold. They walked through the villages handing out circulars. Archie was shown a copy of the Missing Persons notice and he registered the description like a blow to his heart.
Slight
.
Fair
. In their youth he
had seen her in ballrooms. Peach silk and pale freckles. Twirling and smiling. Once at a house party, on a gallop around a field with their hosts, she hadn’t bothered with a riding outfit and had simply worn a pink dress. Her hairpieces – all women wore them in those days – flew off her head and into the wind. The long curls that had looked fetching when attached to her now seemed as ghastly as any discarded body part. Agatha slid from her side saddle to retrieve them. Archie held tight to his reins, participating in this ride out of duty rather than pleasure. His father – a judge in the Indian Civil Service – had died after a fall from a horse, the blow to his head turning into a brain infection. To watch Agatha you’d never know riding could result in injury or death. Just mirth. What a sight she’d been, holding her skirts in one hand, scooping up the errant hair in the other, roaring with laughter all the while, yet controlled enough to accomplish the task at hand, then hoist herself back onto her horse. What a good sport. What a delight.

Archie thought: I can’t imagine Nan handling such a situation – hair flying right off her head – with the same mirthful gales of laughter. Does she even know how to ride a horse? Different manner of upbringing altogether.

In truth it was hard for Archie to imagine me at all, at this time. What he thought about was his wife. The things he once loved about her. Slight and fair. Is that what she looked like? Somehow he had forgotten to notice.

He had noticed when they first met, at a ball in Chudleigh. A week later he had ridden a motorbike all the way to Torquay to see her. He knew she was engaged to some other bloke but that hardly seemed an obstacle. When Archie made up his mind to have something, he had it. Agatha would have registered this trait with a writer’s eye. Attaching it to him in quick strokes.
She wasn’t interested in romances; she placed them in her books because that was the fashion. She especially disliked romances in detective novels. They were a distraction.

Oh, what a distraction she had been, to Archie, at one time. With her vanishing it all came back to him, as if the corporeal had left and all these memories – all these feelings – had erupted exactly as she herself departed the plane. Now what distracted him was the inability to see her. As if the sight of her would solve everything – certainly the way Deputy Chief Constable Thompson and his minions looked at Archie, as if they might see blood dripping from his hands. He calculated who knew about him and Nan, versus who suspected. The Owens. That pair he could trust to remain discreet. Then there was Honoria, who would have told the cook, who would have told her husband, who also happened to be the butler. Perhaps the new maid didn’t know but the rest of the staff did and even now the police were interviewing them, one by one.

‘A nervous breakdown,’ Archie had told Deputy Chief Constable Thompson, at once, before the officer got the chance to pose a single question. He saw Thompson’s eyes narrow, clearly finding the outburst suspicious, but Archie couldn’t help himself. ‘She’s been suffering terribly from nerves.’ As if the rephrasing could abate the hole he was digging himself.

‘I see,’ said Thompson. He had a full, protruding chest of the sort particularly athletic men develop when they get on in years. An impressive grey moustache and an eternally scolding countenance.
Give me no nonsense
, Thompson’s bearing seemed to say,
and I’ll spare you further ruin
. ‘Had she consulted a doctor?’

‘Goodness, no,’ Archie said. ‘Neither of us believes in that sort of thing. Fresh air and a firm bearing, that’s what restores a person’s mind.’

Thompson nodded. Approving of the philosophy, if not the man.

Honoria watched this exchange, arms wrapped round herself as if to keep all she knew inside. Agatha had written two letters – one to Archie, which nobody else ever saw, and one to Honoria, saying, ‘I’m off to Torquay for the weekend.’ Honoria had handed hers over to the police, but hadn’t yet mentioned Friday morning’s fuss, or Archie’s affair. Fond as she was of Agatha, if her employer never returned, that would leave Archie in charge of her livelihood. The man was a cad but certainly (likely?) not a murderer. Honoria hoped to stay on at Styles, tending Teddy, even if the lady of the house never returned. And weren’t the letters proof that Agatha had planned all this, that she had in fact
left
rather than
vanished
? Nobody would have batted an eyelash over her absence, or checked to see if she really was in Torquay (she was not) if it hadn’t been for that abandoned car: ominous evidence of something terribly amiss. Telegraphing that whatever Agatha’s destination, she surely had not arrived there.

When I stole away to Ireland, I left no letter for my parents. My mother found her tea tin, empty of every last penny she’d hidden. That was all the information she needed. I imagine her holding it to her bosom, lamenting the part of her plan I’d omitted – bringing her along with me.

When I went missing, just after the war, there weren’t a hundred policemen to be found in England. They’d all gone off as soldiers and took their time returning to duty. And I hadn’t been an author, or a wife. Just a disgraced girl from a family that barely
scraped by, the kind who went missing every day. There weren’t enough police in the world to set out looking for all of us.

But for Agatha Christie: thousands of men – policeman and locals; hounds; even aeroplanes; combing every inch of every forest. Spread out, even after dark, carrying torches. Searching and searching. The great mass of them in Surrey and Berkshire but inspectors dispatched all over the country. As if the sheer force of her anguish had made her, inexplicably, the most important person on earth.