The Christie Affair (28 page)

She trained her sharp eyes upon Mr Chilton, assessing him frankly as she let go of his sleeve.

What a different life it had been for Agatha since she’d gone on the run with Finbarr. What a different person it had made her already. Staying in an empty house without permission or even knowing the owner’s identity. Like an outlaw. This time she wouldn’t bother leaving money, no matter how much of the household she helped herself to. She had chosen a servant’s room for the sheer austerity of it, as well as the privacy. Sitting here now, with a stranger, a man, she felt no fear whatsoever, nor worry about impropriety. She had sidestepped right out of the world as she’d always known it and had landed someplace where, seemingly, nothing mattered, not even great search parties, elsewhere, all for her benefit.

‘Mr Chilton,’ she said.

He heard her, and was struck again at the lack of ploy. A beautiful rawness exhibited either her character or what her character had been reduced – or elevated – to, thanks to whatever trauma it was that drove her.

One of the difficulties of having been to war: the impossibility of appreciating someone else’s trauma at first glance. It all seems so insignificant. Now, though, faced with her lovely furrowed brow, sympathy began to stir.

‘Is there anyone else here,’ she said, ‘in Harrogate, looking for me?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘This area is my purview. And you might imagine the bulk of the search is closer to home. Your home. Dragging ponds and so forth.’

‘They haven’t told Teddy, have they? My daughter. They haven’t passed that worry on to her?’ She stood up, the space where she sat no longer enough to contain the flood of concern.

‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ he said, and then, because placation was useful under these circumstances (even if he hadn’t precisely identified how to characterize these circumstances), he added, ‘I imagine not.’ He had never seen the child but could picture her, cossetted, protected from every bit of news or information that might cause distress, for the sake of the parents perhaps more than the child. What’s more inconvenient than another person’s distress?

He wondered if Agatha Christie had ever in her life been as willing to wear her emotions so plainly on her face.

She made an effort to collect these emotions back to invisibility. ‘Let’s not play games, Mr Chilton.’ Her voice sounded like she wanted to infuse it with accustomed authority, and yet it shook. The candle on her desk fluttered. The stove needed more coal.

‘That’s the second time you’ve said that. You needn’t say it again. I’ve no fondness for games. I only want to deliver you safely home.’ When she didn’t reply he added, ‘Mrs Christie. Isn’t that enough of all this? You’ve given your husband a fright. He’s longing to see you. Surely it’s time to put an end to it all and go home.’

‘Did you see that girl?’ Agatha said. ‘The one you said came in with Mr Mahoney?’

Now, they were getting somewhere. A mystery about to be solved.

‘She happens to be my husband’s mistress. My actual husband, Colonel Christie. She imagines she’s shortly to be his wife.’

The situation began to take a shape, albeit an unreasonable one. Chilton said, ‘She seems to have hit upon a hiccup, in that regard.’

The house was still but also electric, with an awareness of the floor beneath them and all it held. Those two young lovers, at last reunited (this much was clear). Not only what took place physically but the emotion swirling around them, oozing out from under the door, floating through the house like a new and intoxicating form of oxygen. He’d scarcely noticed that he had shifted to thinking of her as Agatha rather than Mrs Christie. In that moment the mist surrounded them, intimate in its proximity.

(The Timeless Manor, Agatha and I named it later. I’ve never been back to Harrogate, or to this manor house. But sometimes I think if I did, if I tracked the coordinates precisely, I would find an empty stretch of moor and heather and bramble, the house itself having secreted itself into the mist for another hundred years.)

‘Do you think she’s beautiful?’ Agatha asked. ‘That – girl.’

She’d been on the brink of using a different word, Chilton
could tell. He answered with a lack of propriety and a wealth of honesty, because both seemed to be what she needed.

‘Not as beautiful as you.’

For a moment, based on the fervency that held every one of Agatha’s features absolutely quiet, he thought she might lean over and kiss him.

But she didn’t. She only said, ‘Please don’t tell anybody you’ve found me. Not yet. Give me a day or two more.’

He knew he should be objecting, cajoling, insisting. Rejecting the notion – to let her remain concealed – entirely. Instead, Chilton got to his feet with an air of acquiescing. It wasn’t as though a murder had been committed, after all. Why rouse people out of their beds with the shrill invasion of ringing telephones? She was a grown woman of means and station, free to make her own decisions. And he seemed to be rather enjoying himself. He seemed to be not wanting any of this to end. If he did his duty, and reported her found, the odds of him ever seeing her again stood slim.

‘I promise I won’t tell anyone,’ he said, ‘for now. If you promise not to move again. Stay here, please, where I can find you if needs be.’

‘Done,’ she said. ‘I promise.’

She held out her hand for him to shake. Soft, cool skin.

‘Poor Finbarr,’ she said. ‘I do hope Nan’s not toying with him.’

‘You’re tender-hearted.’

Agatha laughed. In agreement, he realized. ‘I expect that makes two of us,’ she said.

Chilton had considered his heart so utterly undetectable for so long, it surprised him to believe her. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I thought earlier, for a moment, when you were looking at me so intently – I almost believed you were about to kiss me.’

‘I haven’t kissed a man other than my husband in years. Not since the day we met.’

‘You’ve been a good wife.’

Agatha nodded vigorously. It made her furious to think what a good wife she’d been. To Chilton she looked breathlessly young and full of thoughts he couldn’t read. It reminded him of his girl, Katherine, before the war. He felt his mind start to reach, by habit, for the next dark idea to follow, the bitter side of the world. And stopped himself.

‘Mrs Christie,’ he said.

‘Call me Agatha.’ She closed the distance between them and kissed him, a tentative but time-consuming kiss. Chilton didn’t dare lift an arm to her waist. He was afraid if he moved at all, she’d realize what she was doing and it would end – her soft lips on his, her hands resting ever so lightly on his chest. Both their mouths open just enough to inhale each other’s breath. She tasted like roses and spring grass.

‘Agatha,’ Mr Chilton said, when finally she stepped away.

‘You’d better go now.’ It almost wounded him, how even and unphased her voice sounded.

‘Yes.’ He boasted no such calm. His voice cracked like a twelve-year-old boy’s.

‘But you’ll keep your promise? And tell no one?’

‘Yes,’ he said again.

Chilton closed the door behind him. He walked down the stairs and through the front door, feeling like a ghost, as if, instead of stepping, he were gliding, feet still and floating an inch or more above the ground.

The Disappearance

Day Seven
Friday, 10 December 1926

S
IR
A
RTHUR
C
ONAN
Doyle loved a mystery too much to admit he’d never heard of Agatha Christie prior to her disappearance. There were whispers of a publicity stunt and so what? If this was a publicity stunt, it was a damn good one.

People do like to be the ones to solve problems. The more people trying to crack a case, the more one wants to be the man to do it.

Donald Fraser, Agatha’s new agent, cleared his schedule to take a meeting with Conan Doyle. The celebrated creator of Sherlock Holmes! Even if he didn’t see how Sir Arthur could help in discovering Agatha, perhaps the author could be persuaded to abandon his current agent and join Fraser’s list?

Not that Fraser’s feelings were mercenary where Agatha was concerned. He was worried. And he felt horrible for Mr Christie. Fraser’s own wife had run off with one of his writers last spring. Fraser fully expected Agatha to have done something similar. She always conducted herself as an unassailable lady but then so had his wife.

Fraser did not have confidence Conan Doyle could discover what every police officer in England had not. The man was an author, not a detective. What’s easier than solving a puzzle of
your own invention? Authors created problems, they didn’t solve them. Another mystery writer of the day, Dorothy Sayers, had already invited herself to Sunningdale to search for clues and
test the energy
. Agatha Christie was not the sort to meddle in such nonsense. She wouldn’t want charlatans involved, Fraser felt sure.

Conan Doyle at sixty-seven (a mere four years from joining the spiritual realm himself) cut a handsome and confident figure. It was almost endearing, that someone so stalwart could believe in messages from the beyond. Once it became clear there would be no wooing him away from his current representation, Fraser resolved to get the meeting done with. The whole business made him sad. He wanted Agatha Christie found as much as anyone and couldn’t bear wasting time about it.

‘Have you got anything of hers?’ Conan Doyle’s moustache sat wonderfully still on his face, no matter how animated he became. ‘Personal possessions she might have left behind? Clothing is best. A handwritten note might do.’

Fraser opened his desk drawer, where a lovely pair of leather gloves had lain going on nine months, waiting for their owner’s return. He hesitated before handing them over.

‘And may I enquire after your plans?’ said Fraser. ‘The hounds have already got her scent, you know. There’s a veritable army in Berkshire, searching for her.’ He mentioned Dorothy Sayers’ involvement and Conan Doyle waved it away as ridiculous.

‘She has no idea what to look for.’ He snatched at the gloves as Fraser tentatively withdrew them. ‘A spiritual fingerprint is what’s needed. I’ve been in touch with Horace Leaf.’

Fraser blinked, indicating the name meant nothing to him.

‘My good man, he’s only the most powerful clairvoyant in Europe.’ How interesting that Conan Doyle of all people
employed spiritualism – mediums and divinations – rather than deductive reasoning. ‘And to our great good fortune he happens to reside in London. Have these gloves been worn recently?’

‘Oh, very recently,’ Fraser said. ‘Mrs Christie was here just a day before she went missing. Sitting in that very chair.’

Conan Doyle nodded, stroking the armrests as though collecting molecules Agatha had left behind. He held the gloves up as if he’d found them himself, a most important clue. ‘These will do nicely,’ he said. ‘Horace Leaf will solve this. We’ll find Agatha Christie, alive or dead. By morning, we’ll know her whereabouts. You can be certain of that.’

Fraser felt no guilt whatsoever. If Mr Leaf had any powers at all, the first thing he ought to divine was that the gloves belonged to Mrs Fraser, who’d belonged to Mr Fraser, until she’d absconded to Devonshire and broken her devoted husband’s heart.

The heavy door shut. Fraser stared at it, full of melancholy. Perhaps he’d go by Harrods and buy Mrs Fraser a new pair, send them to her in Devonshire. As a present. Her hands might be cold.

It surprised Fraser that he hadn’t felt star struck meeting Sherlock Holmes’s creator, only moved by the impermanence of life here on earth. Agatha Christie had a new novel,
The Big Four
, coming out this January. Perhaps she’d be courteous enough to return to her husband by then. Or perhaps the more macabre imaginings would prove correct, and a corpse, rather than the woman, would turn up. Either way – whether or not anyone saw her again – by January she would be a household name in England, indeed if not the whole world. Which couldn’t hurt book sales.

Fraser sighed, made melancholy by his avarice. Nothing in life unfolds the way you think it will, does it?

In bed at the Timeless Manor, I propped myself up on my elbow, eyes trained on Finbarr’s sleeping form, so I would see his face in the first light. The brick we’d heated in the fire to keep us warm had gone cold at our feet. The heavy curtains were drawn and the room stood black with the late morning darkness of winter. By the time sunlight speckled into the room, his eyes were open, staring back at me. I thought of the night in Ireland I lay beside him, the only other time we’d slept all night in the same bed.

‘Last time we slept together,’ I said, ‘you never opened your eyes in the morning.’

He collected my hands and held them on top of his heart. ‘If I had, I would’ve married you that day.’

Tears filled my eyes. ‘We’d be together now.’

‘We
are
together now.’

‘Not for long,’ I said. ‘And not all of us.’

He sat up. I noticed for the first time something I’d missed the night before. His thick black hair was tamed and cropped. The back of his neck shaved. It gave him the unaccustomed and misleading look of order. It gave me proof of what seemed an impossibility: Agatha Christie was here, truly here. In this very house. With us. Living – as I’d never had the chance to do – with Finbarr Mahoney.