The Christie Affair (25 page)

Downstairs I raked the scrubbing brush back and forth over the tarnished grout, my lower back aching, and thought of Bess. I imagined Sister Mary Clare, accidentally on purpose leaving the door to the dormitory unlocked. And Bess, swift-footed despite her advanced pregnancy, stealing away. An open gate somewhere. Her American soldier waiting outside the convent. She held details about him close, so I didn’t know his name, or what he looked like. But he’d arrive still in uniform. Once she was delivered, I’d never see her again, but would not permit myself to miss her. Because her escape would be evidence. Any of us might be rescued at any moment. And one day, I’d be back home in London, and a letter would arrive, across the envelope the address she’d memorized so faithfully. And we could write to each other to say how everything had worked out fine in the end.

Upstairs, Bess had not escaped but had fallen into a sleep she couldn’t battle her way out of. She imagined her little sister Kitty standing in the corner of the room.
You must wake, Bess
, Kitty called, and Bess tried like mad to wrest her eyelids open, tried to find the voice in her throat to call back,
You must run, Kitty, you must run away from here.
From far away she heard Sister Mary Declan’s footsteps, pounding into the dormitory, furious to hear Bess had been allowed a lie-down. For Bess it was like being at the bottom of a pool, fathoms deep. Far off above her she could see the faint suggestion of light and echoes. But
there was no swimming to the top. None at all. She imagined Sister Mary Declan’s footsteps belonged to Kitty, not running towards but away from her, fast as she could on coltish twelve-year-old legs, fast and sure and so far away. Now that Kitty was safe, it felt fine for Bess to stay deep under the water. Everything up top was vile and brutal.
Let me stay under
, she thought.
Don’t ever make me come back up.

She didn’t know, but finally her American soldier had made his way to her father’s door. ‘I’ll marry her the very hour they let her go,’ he promised, when he learned where Bess had landed.

‘Bess,’ Sister Mary Declan cried. She slapped one cheek, then another, not in anger but genuine fear. Sister Mary Clare looked on, clutching her crucifix. It was important to all the nuns, to believe anyone who called them angels. By evening they would already be offering each other forgiveness, running down the rosary. Naming their sins and flinging them aside, ready to commit more tomorrow.

There was no time for hospital, or even to bring her downstairs to the mattress by the laundry. Susanna and Sister Mary Declan helped Bess deliver as best they could, right there in the dormitory. By the following morning Bess had finally clawed her way to the surface of the water, alive and whole. A miracle.

Another miracle: that same morning her young man appeared on the doorstep of the convent, demanding to see the Mother Superior. In time to walk Bess out of the convent, but too late for their baby boy. Little Ronan was one of the few babies who left the convent in Sunday’s Corner in his mother’s arms, swaddled in a yellow blanket: perfect and round-faced and stone-cold dead.

The Disappearance

Day Six
Thursday, 9 December 1926

T
HE
B
ERKSHIRE BLOODHOUNDS
weren’t doing the job any better than Agatha’s dog had done. Deputy Chief Constable Thompson called in a woman from Belgium whose dogs were said to be the best in Europe. These expert hounds followed Agatha’s scent in circles, concentrating on the spot where Finbarr had flagged her down, where she’d stepped out of the car, lavender beads of sweat plopping to the earth. The scent ended where it began, as she’d hopped into poor Miss Oliver’s car and sped away. The dogs sniffed and bayed uselessly, finally catching a whiff of a rabbit and leading the searchers on another fruitless chase. Even expert dogs are, in the end, dogs.

‘Agatha, Agatha,’ Archie moaned, taking turns about Styles, the house and its grounds. He found Teddy’s hoop, abandoned under a bush at the edge of the property, and gave it a spin. It rolled a few feet, teetered and fell sideways on the grass. He didn’t join the searches, not only to avoid his neighbours’ suspicious glances, but also because searching seemed to be an admission that there was something to be found – another body, this time Agatha’s – and he refused to consider that possibility. She was alive. It would be one of the policemen from an unlikely
county to notify them and deliver the happy news: she’d been found, whole and well and ready to come home.

Noel Owen came round to keep him company. They drank late into the evening and took dinner in the sitting room.

‘Back when it first began with Nan,’ Archie confided, ‘it was all so new and exciting. A kind of newness and excitement I believed gone from my life. And I won’t lie, the forbidden nature of it, it was all so – so—’

‘Irresistible?’ Noel was not above prurient interest, though as far as I know he was always true to Ursula, to the extent any man can be.

Oh! The cynicism of that remark.
To the extent any man can be.
It doesn’t bear out the way I feel, and what I believe, deep down in my heart. Some men can be true to the greatest extent. Finbarr, for example. He was always true to me, and always would have been, if ever we’d been given our natural chance to be together. If the world had unfolded on its own, without wars and churches. What laughter there would have been. What joy. Dogs and books and children of our own, starting with our eldest, our own darling Genevieve, whom I’d secretly hold in my heart as my favourite, though I’d never let the other children know.

‘Irresistible,’ Archie agreed with Noel Owen, tasting the word as if it were a kind of poison. ‘The things I told myself. About Nan. About my marriage. If I’d been able to look ahead and see this moment, I believe I would have acted differently. I do believe that, Noel.’

Noel had been Archie’s friend a long while, and never had he seen him so full of doubts. ‘You can’t have known Agatha would react this way.’ He stood up to pour Archie some more whisky. ‘Men leave their wives every day, don’t they, without all
this wretchedness. Agatha always seemed to have such a good head on her shoulders.’

Archie filled his pipe and stared out the window, everything outside still and quiet, as if the chill had frozen the wind. No branches moved. If Agatha broke through that stillness, if she appeared at the top of the road, a figure coming towards him, calm and resolute, like something of his own invention, he knew he would spring from the house and run to her, but would it be to collect her in an embrace, or to strangle her for what she’d put him through? He reminded himself, uncharacteristically, that he’d put her through plenty.

Now that she was gone, and he had no way to locate her – powerless, impotent, for the first time in his life – she occupied his thoughts as the beautiful face he’d carried through the war. Peach silk. Slim as a reed. Eyes wide with adoration. The stories she scribbled just a pleasing eccentricity, nothing to eclipse anything and everything he’d ever accomplish.

The things they’d come through together, Archie and Agatha – even his relationship with Nan they had gone through together, in their way. Agatha had been a part of it, unwitting, but still a dynamic and important part. Her presence driving the secrecy, the delicious illicitness. Then the way she’d clearly known but held her tongue, waiting for it to end. And then he
had
ended it, but not in the way she’d so patiently awaited, instead in a way that crushed her, and she’d stepped out of his life, out of the world. And all he wanted was for her to come back.

‘Oh, A.C.,’ Archie said out loud, when Noel left the room. He pressed his hand against the window pane. ‘My dear wife. I’ll do anything. I’ll atone. I won’t hold a grudge, for all this worry you’ve caused, all this uproar and shame. I’ll give up the girl. If only you come back whole and well.’

Archie had no talent for magic. The road lay empty, the room sat quiet. The conjuring accomplished nothing.

Meanwhile, in Harrogate, in the course of his autopsy of Mr Marston, the coroner discovered potassium cyanide.

‘There was a mark,’ the coroner explained in Lippincott’s office, the door for once closed. Both Lippincott and Chilton had elected not to see the body again. ‘A tiny mark on the man’s hip. It was injected, is my thought, right through his trousers. This was not a natural death.’

‘What about the wife?’ asked Chilton.

‘Strychnine,’ said the coroner. ‘A lethal dose. Ingested, not injected.’

‘Both poisons easy enough to obtain,’ said Lippincott. ‘Any housewife with a wasp or rat problem knows their uses.’

‘Indeed.’ Chilton pictured the couple, perfectly ordinary in every way. Who on earth would want those two dead? ‘It had to have been someone in the dining room, then.’

The coroner nodded in agreement.

‘I’d say this points to the wife.’ Lippincott was naturally protective of his cousin’s livelihood and nothing would empty out the hotel for years to come like a double murder. ‘She offed her husband by injecting him with potassium cyanide, then killed herself with the strychnine. Did she seem particularly troubled to you,’ he asked Chilton, ‘before her husband’s death, of course?’

‘Quite the contrary. She seemed like someone who’d never known a moment’s trouble. Rather jolly. Oblivious. Annoying, really.’

‘There, there,’ said Lippincott. ‘Don’t make yourself a suspect.’

The three of them laughed, forgetting themselves and the sombre nature of their discussion.

‘But why would she want to kill her husband?’ Chilton said.

‘Clearly,’ said the coroner, whose wife greeted him nightly with a burned dinner and a new list of grievances, ‘you’ve never been married.’

‘Do the murderous feelings generally begin on a honeymoon? The woman can’t have been more vocal in her adoration.’

‘All the more suspicious,’ said Lippincott. ‘Protesting too much and all that. It’s rather clear to me, but as long as you’re already there you may as well poke around a bit to confirm my theory. Discreetly. Don’t make a fuss about it. See if Mrs Marston confided anything useful to the other ladies. It’s a good way for us to get our money’s worth out of you.’

Chilton nodded, but instead of driving directly to the hotel to start conducting interviews, he drove down a back road or two, eyes on the winter landscape. The deciduous trees provided a view into the wood. No signs of the young Irishman, or Mrs O’Dea, or Agatha. When his search yielded nothing, he gave up and went to the hotel. He would have a massage, he decided, so long as he was there, and send his mother a postcard telling her he had done so. It would please her to think of him relaxed and happy.

Mrs Leech presided over the front desk, her cheerfulness seeming an effort. Chilton gathered that more guests had pre-cipitously checked out following Mrs Marston’s death. Of course, any of those departed guests could be the killer, but now that he thought on it, Chilton tended to agree with Lippincott: the death of the couple was almost certain to have been a family affair.

‘I thought I’d book a massage,’ he told Mrs Leech.

She smiled warmly, taking up her pen, and said, ‘I’m sure you know that won’t be included in your gratis accommodation.’

Suddenly the idea of a stranger kneading his naked skin seemed less appealing. Chilton went instead to the baths. He had the place to himself, but despite the solitude and the restorative waters he did not relax a bit. His mind stayed on the roads he’d driven down, frozen and empty, no sign of the black automobile, all the houses with smoke rising from their chimneys inhabited by their rightful owners. It panicked Chilton the way a miscalculation can. He’d had her right before his eyes and had allowed her to slip away. Lippincott had tasked him with finding Agatha Christie as a lark. But what would he say if he knew that Chilton
had
found her, yet managed to daydream the quarry away? Could he do nothing right with the days he had left on earth?

After dinner Chilton took his pipe into the hotel’s small library so he could turn to the matter of confirming Lippincott’s theory regarding the Marstons. Ladies often complained about cigarettes but seldom pipes – a man with a pipe reminded them of their fathers – and it satisfied his craving while also making him look like he had something to do. The books on the shelves were mostly from the previous century. He perused the spines and landed on
Bleak House
, then settled onto the couch, where anyone who came in would have to sit beside him or across from him in one of the generous and well-worn armchairs. He’d seen Mrs O’Dea carrying a book, and a reader on holiday is soon in need of a new one. If she should venture in, he might also begin to discover her connection to Agatha Christie, killing two birds with one stone.