The Christie Affair (12 page)

Four years of war. Four sisters turned to three. I wrote a poem about Colleen that won a contest, a five-shilling prize. It was printed in the newspaper but my father refused to read it. One morning after he went to work, Mum called Megs, Louisa and me into her bedroom.

‘Look here,’ she said, opening her bottom drawer and pulling out a tea tin. She twisted off the lid to show us where she’d been squirrelling away the money she earned at Buttons and Bits. I’d been working there myself, a day or two a week, and knew it would take considerable time to amass what Mum was showing us. ‘None of you will go the way of Colleen, do you hear?’ Her voice sounded as stern as I’d ever heard her. ‘If ever you’re in trouble, come to me. We’ll take this money and run away.’ She showed us she’d put her mother’s wedding ring in the tin along with the bills and coins. ‘We’ll go to America or Australia and say you’re a war widow. And then we’ll come back and say you got married there, and he ran off, or widowed you. Your father be damned. You promise me, now. I can’t lose another of you.’

We promised, all three of us. I handed over the five shillings for my poem, to add to her cache.

When news of the Hundred Days Offensive began, I worried myself sick, especially when letters from Finbarr ceased with no warming. ‘There might not be any post coming from the front,’ my mother tried to soothe. ‘Let’s not fret till there’s cause.’

There was plenty of cause. Bad news arrived for girl after girl, mother after mother, father after father. By now I was nineteen but I think in my heart I may have been much younger. The world quaked around us. One minute my mother would be her old self, brisk and loving. Then she would fade away, pale and still, staring out the window.

‘What are you watching for, Mum?’

‘Nothing,’ she’d say, and go back to some busy work. But I knew what she was watching for. Colleen, heading towards home,
a small child’s hand in hers. Love and reason have never been well acquainted.

On Armistice Day I had never seen so many people in one place as there were on the streets of London. With Megs, Louisa and our friend Emily Hastings, I went out into the celebrating throng. What noise and joy. We couldn’t stand shoulder to shoulder, everybody moved sideways.

Megs, Louisa, Emily and I tried to hold hands as we made our way through the streets but it was impossible. It should have been frightening, being trapped in the midst of so thick a crowd, but the happiness was even thicker. You can’t imagine the joy and goodwill. If you tripped, a hundred hands reached out to catch you. If you sneezed, a thousand people said ‘God Bless You’. A soldier caught Megs’s arm as she tripped over the curb, then tipped his hat and revelled on with his mates. I searched the crowd, as if there were any reason for Finbarr to be held within it, as if – being lucky enough that he loved me – I could be lucky enough to summon him before my eyes.

Somewhere out in the masses, Agatha Christie was walking too. During this stretch of time, a lonely married lady with her husband off to war, she’d occupied herself by taking a course in shorthand. When Armistice was announced right in the middle of class, everyone stumbled out into the celebrations, marvelling at the crowd just as we did. Englishwomen – Englishwomen! – dancing in the street. For all I knew, Agatha and I were shoulder to shoulder, either once or many times during that heady day.

I’m not sure when Megs and I were jostled apart, but somewhere I lost hold of her fingers, a laughing matter and not a frightening one. We’d all catch up eventually. I made it as far as
Trafalgar Square. A delivery truck rumbled up Northumberland Avenue with soldiers draped over every inch of it, so I couldn’t make out the advertisements written on its side. Just as the truck came to a halt, not able to go a single bit further because of the crowds, a soldier jumped off the bonnet and landed up ahead of me, his peaked army cap covering cropped black hair.

It was such a swift and light-hearted movement. Seconds earlier the world had been only the throng, no individuals, just one great mass of human life. I had barely existed myself except as a part of it. Now, though, even though a good fifty bodies jammed into the space between us, there were only two people in all of London. Finbarr and me. Facing each other with joyful eyes. Oh, as if I’d conjured him up.
Make a wish, Nan.
The sort of miracle that convinces us life on earth has meaning. His black hair shone blue in the London grey as it had on his own emerald island.

‘Is it you?’ he shouted. He held a bottle of champagne in one hand. ‘Am I drunk? Am I dreaming?’

‘It’s me.’ My voice rasped with the shouting of it.

‘Step aside,’ Finbarr commanded the crowd. ‘That’s my girl. I see my girl.’

Could the Red Sea refuse Moses? Could the throng refuse this handsome, blue-eyed soldier, home from victory safe and sound?

In his khaki uniform and army boots, Finbarr made his way through the cleared path and swept me up in his arms. When the crowd closed back in, he hoisted me onto his shoulder, and I saw multitudes spreading all over London, as if an ocean of people had washed into the city, flowing through its undammed streets. All of them beaming, the sky above us free of danger.

‘You didn’t tell me you were coming to London,’ I shouted down to him, and he slid me off his shoulder and into his arms.

‘I only found out day before yesterday,’ he said. ‘There was no time. Anyway, I knew I’d find you.’ As if London were Ballycotton and he only had to wander the docks, asking fishermen where Nan O’Dea lived. ‘It’s like a miracle, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘You’re like a miracle, same as ever.’ His voice had changed. Deeper, raspier, as if something had broken inside his throat, which indeed it had. In that moment I owed it to the shouting but would learn later it was a permanent alteration, brought on by mustard gas.

He kissed me, deeply, and I kissed him back. Everyone around us cheered. Celebrating not just the end of the war but our reunion. Nan and Finbarr, together as we should have been had the world never cut us apart. Victory was ours. The world had been righted. Now we could return to our happy old selves.

We moved sideways through the crowd, hand in hand, and I feared we’d be cleft apart as Megs and I had. I could scarcely see which direction we were headed in or which shops we passed. When Finbarr pulled me into the lobby of a grand hotel, it was like falling into a bubble of quiet emptiness. There were no guests anywhere, and nobody stood behind the front desk. Everyone who should have been here had abandoned their posts to celebrate in the streets. The lobby was unbearably grand – a pocket of silent extravagance I could never imagine affording. Welcoming us. Beside imposing stone columns, great potted palms reached their velvet fronds towards the ceiling. The marble floors felt cold through the soles of our shoes. If we’d whispered, it would have echoed.

So we didn’t whisper. Finbarr still had hold of my hand, and we rushed up the wide, grand staircase. At the door to each room Finbarr turned the knob, until one fell open for us, and we stepped inside with a sharp slam, a bubble inside the bubble.
Here was a talent of Finbarr’s I hadn’t yet discovered but would come to know well: finding places to hide amidst any manner of excitement or turmoil.

A little while later there would be the barest bit of time to talk, hastily, as we dressed. Finbarr suggested marrying before he returned to Ireland but I couldn’t leave before I had my mother’s blessing. He would promise to send money for my passage to Ireland. The next day I would meet him at the train station to kiss him goodbye. We agreed we’d be married inside mere months. Even if my mother forbade it, I’d give her a kiss and a thousand apologies and say my farewells. No hurry. The war was over. We had all the time in the world.

But first. Just us. How many couples faced each other in that same moment, all across the world? An entire generation with only moments to reclaim their lost youth. In our stolen hotel room there was no time to spare for words. All Finbarr said was, ‘I have to be back with my regiment before sundown.’ So we took a long moment to inhale the sight of each other, and the nearness. The aloneness and the quiet. He offered me the champagne bottle and I took a swig, warm bubbles burning my nose, I’d never had so much as a sip of champagne before that moment.

We gathered each other up and fell into a wide bed the likes of which we’d never known. But the only luxury we revelled in was the two of us, unchaperoned and unfettered and together at last after all this time.

In any moment during that afternoon did I recall my sister Colleen as a cautionary tale? I did not. There was no comparing her disappeared man to the one present and before my eyes. This was Finbarr. I knew he would never forsake or abandon me. He would never break a promise, or say an untrue word.

And he never did.

The Disappearance

Day Two
Sunday, 5 December 1926

M
ISSING
P
ERSONS NOTICE
sent to police stations throughout England:

Missing from her home, Styles, Sunningdale, Berkshire, Mrs Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie. Age 36, height 5 feet 7 inches; hair red, shingled part grey; complexion fair, build slight; dressed in grey stockinette skirt, green jumper, grey and dark grey cardigan and small velour hat; wearing a platinum ring with one pearl; no wedding ring; black handbag with purse containing perhaps 5 or 10 pounds. Left home by car at 9.45 p.m. Friday saying that she was going for a drive.

Inspector Frank Chilton rode in the third-class smoking carriage from Brixham to Harrogate. He was glad to make the trip. It had been a mistake to move back to his mother’s seaside cottage during the chill winter months, when the wrong breeze from offshore could climb into your bones, stirring up the cold from those nights in the trenches, the cold that still lived there and always would.

‘They want police officers searching in every country,’ Sam
Lippincott had told him. ‘I’m shorthanded since you left, and as Jim is off on his honeymoon.’

Within an hour of receiving Lippincott’s telegram, Chilton had bicycled over to the Cooke estate to borrow their telephone. ‘Every inch of England scoured, as if the Queen herself were missing,’ said Lippincott, his voice crackling through the wires. The words were scornful but his tone was jolly. Chilton’s old police chief was happy to have an excuse to summon his friend back to Yorkshire so soon. ‘Out of retirement with you. You can pass the lady’s photograph around and take a motor through the countryside. You’ll never have an easier job than searching for someone who’s surely someplace else.’

‘Nor a more frustrating one.’ But Chilton had already decided to join in the probably fruitless search. Busy work was better than no work at all. He’d left his position with the Leeds police three weeks earlier, to be closer to his mother. He hadn’t yet found new employment and his old outfit was short of inspectors. Now this lady author was missing – famous enough for every police force in England to be in on the hunt, spread out over the entire country – but not so famous that Chilton had ever heard of her. Yorkshire headquarters already had men searching Huddersfield and Leeds. They didn’t have a man to spare for Harrogate and Ripley. Except the one who’d only just left.

‘We’ll put you up at the Bellefort,’ Lippincott had said. ‘My cousin and his wife own the place, you know. They say they’ll be glad to give you a room free of charge.’

Chilton certainly did know about Lippincott’s cousin. Simon Leech had married a girl from Antigua. Isabelle Leech was a lovely person, possessed of the rare combination of flawless manners and her own strong mind. But the marriage had scandalized the family and also jeopardized Simon’s hotel and spa.
It was one thing to have a dark-skinned woman working the front desk, another to discover she was married to the hotel’s English owner. No doubt in addition to needing an extra man searching for Mrs Christie, Lippincott’s cousin needed more guests. Empty rooms tended to breed empty rooms. The cousins were as close as brothers and this was a chance to help both the hotel and Chilton. As for the missing lady, nobody really expected her to turn up in Yorkshire. But Chilton would search all the same. He wasn’t the sort to shirk, even when assigned a hopeless task.