The Christie Affair (21 page)

I couldn’t glean from this whether Fiona knew why Father Joseph had summoned Bess. Fiona had grown up in an orphanage, then been released at the age of thirteen to work for distant relatives. A few months later their parish priest brought her here. I never heard Fiona say a word about the boy responsible, The convent burgeoned with girls who’d welcomed young men back from the war. Now the same men were dead from the flu, or fighting the Irish War of Independence, or simply had got on with their lives without a backwards glance.

And, of course, some of us – like Susanna and Fiona, I expected – had not been disappointed by boys we loved, but subjected to something far worse. Fiona’s child was a year old now. He had just been moved from the nursery to the other side
of the convent. She took comfort in the large raspberry birthmark on his forehead, which she thought would prevent him being adopted. She never seemed able to think past their time here, and what would come afterwards.

Fiona never questioned the nuns or the priest.
They know best
, she continually muttered to herself.
They know best.

‘Bess will be just fine,’ she sang now, stirring her cauldron like a very young, harmless and hopeful witch. ‘Her beau will come to get her and they’ll be married. I know it, Nan.’ Even though I didn’t argue, or ask how she knew, she added pointedly, ‘I just do.’

The joy of my baby’s movement faded. Fiona had red hair and freckles, her fair skin was flush and sweaty from the steam.

‘Bess’s beau is American,’ Fiona told Susanna. ‘She met him when she was nursing wounded soldiers at a field hospital.’

‘Her mother should never have let her near the soldiers,’ Susanna said through clenched teeth. ‘And I do wish you two would stop talking.’

‘I think her man will come for her,’ Fiona said, ignoring the plea for silence. ‘I’m praying for it. From what she says he sounds like a good lad.’ She let go of her stick. ‘Let’s take just a moment,’ she said, ‘and pray for Bess. The Sisters can’t get mad if they see that, can they? A little prayer break? For Bess and her child and their happy ever after?’

‘The Sisters can get mad at anything they like,’ Susanna said, not budging from her station. ‘If you don’t know that by now, you’ll never know anything.’

Susanna was right, but still Fiona and I clasped our hands and pressed our foreheads together. I didn’t pray so much as worry. That Father Joseph would turn his attentions from Bess to me. I tried to pretend not to know what happened when he called her
to him, but today, thinking of Bess’s baby moving inside her the same as mine, I couldn’t move my mind away from the horror of it. I worried Finbarr had died, which I knew was all that would ever prevent him from coming to get me.

Magical Finbarr. If anyone could get me out of here, it was him. I closed my eyes, leaning into Fiona, and pictured him, tennis ball high in his hand.

Make a wish.

The two of us – no, the three of us – leaving this place safely and together.

Granted.

Sister Mary Frances blustered in and cracked Fiona across the back with her cane.

‘None of that,’ the old nun said, as if prayer were something that didn’t belong to us anymore, except at the nuns’ discretion. ‘It’s only hard work that will wash your sins away.’

Fiona straightened, smiling instead of wincing. ‘You’re right, Sister,’ she said, her voice sounding sweet and pure. ‘I know you’re right.’

I returned to my cauldron. Fiona rolled a cart of soaking sheets up to dry on the rooftop. This time of day she might catch a glimpse of her little boy in the yard. She worried because he wasn’t walking yet.
Shouldn’t he be walking?
, she was sure to ask me, when she returned.

I tried to think of Bess, off with Father Joseph, as if prayers had done any good. As if I had it in me, despite all my sympathies and fondness, to pray for anyone except my baby and myself.

The Disappearance

Day Four
Tuesday, 7 December 1926

A
GATHA REMOVED HER
hand from Chilton’s the moment he said her name. What a fool she’d been to open the door. Finbarr had told her to keep her head low. He hadn’t said not to answer the door because likely it hadn’t occurred to him that anyone would come knocking, or that she’d be silly enough to answer if somebody did. But that’s what she’d done, instinctively, obedient as ever. Somebody knocks and in the absence of your butler, a polite lady is obliged to answer. What power these customs do have over us, Agatha thought, and steeled her spine ramrod straight, as if that could undo the mess into which good manners had propelled her.

‘I’m afraid you’re mistaken,’ she told him. ‘I don’t know anyone by that name.’

‘I have a photograph of you,’ he said. ‘It’s there in the automobile. Shall I show it to you?’

‘A photograph,’ she said, waving her hand in front of her face as if moving smoke out of the way. ‘One face in a photograph looks very much like another, doesn’t it?’

Had they really sent police all the way to Yorkshire to search for her? What a needless fuss. She felt a terrible flurry in her stomach. If they were looking for her here – where no one had
any reason to imagine she’d go – where else would they search? Who else would know she’d run off, and why? Oh, she hated to think of her stalwart new benefactors – her new agent and publisher – learning of this whole humiliating mess.

‘Mrs Christie,’ the man said gently, ‘my name’s Inspector Frank Chilton. I’m representing the police department in Leeds. I’ve been charged with looking for you, though I daresay I never thought I’d find you.’

He had a pleasant face and manner. Mild and kind. Agatha saw at once he’d be easy to dismiss. ‘I beg your pardon, Inspector Chilton. But I expect you didn’t hear me. My name is not Agatha Christie.’

She saw Chilton look past her, to where she’d stationed herself at the long farm table, notebooks piled on it, and her typewriter. She closed the door against herself, blocking his view.

‘And your name, then?’ He kept his tone kindly, but firm enough to remind her he was a police inspector.

‘I don’t suppose that’s any of your business. My husband will be along shortly. Ah. There he is now.’

She felt herself smile as Finbarr came up the walk, hands in his pockets and colour in his cheeks. An entirely involuntary reaction. They’d been apart very little these last four days. She found herself wanting Chilton to believe she could be married to someone so young and handsome.

‘What’s this?’ Finbarr said, reaching the front stoop. The burlap bag over his shoulder bulged with what she felt sure were apples. Only this morning she’d said how she loved apples, and now here they were. Orange Pippin, she supposed, from the time of year. How she looked forward to biting into the crisp fruit.

‘Darling,’ she said. It wasn’t the first time she’d called him that. He had nightmares. When she was wakened by his cries, she would go to him and calm him.
There, there, darling,
she would say,
you’re perfectly safe.

Finbarr started a little, to hear her use the endearment in daylight, and in front of a stranger. Agatha said, ‘This is Inspector Chilton. He seems to have mistaken me for a lady who’s gone missing. What did you say her name was? This poor lost lady?’

‘Mrs Agatha Christie.’

‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Poor thing. I do hope she’ll be all right. And I do wish you luck in finding her.’ Good manners may have forced her to open the door, but they also made it frightfully easy to manage prying strangers. Follow the script, that was all she had to do.

‘So that’ll be all, then,’ Finbarr said, with a brusque nod at the inspector. He slipped by the man, nodding to Agatha in a polite, deferential manner that no man on earth would use with his wife. He started to close the door but Chilton raised his hand and stopped it.

Finbarr draped an arm around Agatha’s shoulder. She smiled again. In the course of a few days they’d discovered a surprising amount in common. Their love of dogs, for instance.
I much prefer them to people, don’t you?
And he had agreed before adding,
Most people, anyway.
Last night when she’d woken him from one of his terrible dreams, to comfort him, she’d thought about kissing him. That would serve Nan right, wouldn’t it?

Now, looking at Chilton, she was shocked to find herself thinking about kissing him as well. Despite what threat he posed to her continued hideout, he had such a nice, kind way about him. He reminded her of Tommy, the fiancé she’d thrown over for Archie’s sake. She refused to blush. Perhaps that was what
women did, when they found themselves abandoned by their husbands. Perhaps they thought about kissing new men. She wondered how this impulse jibed with her assurances to Finbarr that they had the same mission, convincing Nan to release Archie from her clutches. Part of her felt nothing would assuage the pain of Archie being with another woman as effectively as being with another man.

‘I beg your pardon,’ Chilton said. ‘But considering the resemblance, I’m afraid I have to insist you tell me your name.’

‘Her name’s Nan Mahoney,’ Finbarr said. How annoying and predictable, for him to supply that name. Agatha’s smile disappeared.

‘So if I go to the town registry,’ Chilton said, ‘I’ll see this house belongs to the Mahoneys.’

‘Of course you will,’ Agatha said. At the same time Finbarr said, ‘We’re renting it.’

They looked at each other. Caught. But what did it matter? She hadn’t committed any crime, other than squatting in someone else’s house, which didn’t seem so very grave.

‘Listen,’ Chilton said. ‘Mrs Christie, I know it’s you. But I can give you another day to think things over and prepare yourself. I’ll come back in the morning and we can decide together what you’d like to tell your husband. He’s very worried, you know.’

Agatha laughed, so harshly she worried she’d erased any doubt he might still have as to her identity.

Finbarr said, ‘Good day, inspector.’ And he closed the door. Before he took his arm off her shoulders he gave her a little squeeze of comfort. Her protector.

‘Not to worry,’ he said.

Chilton walked back to the car, his head fairly swimming, trying to sort out what he’d just witnessed. If all of England was a haystack, with hundreds of police officers combing through the stalks, how extraordinary that he should be the one to find the needle. He picked up the photograph and studied it again. It was her, the same lady, he was certain of it. She was alive and would not be discovered at the bottom of any lake. What a happy thing, despite the myriad questions her discovery created, principal among them the identity of the young Irishman, whom so far today Chilton had witnessed with his hands on two unlikely but unprotesting women.

And what should Chilton have done? Marched her at gunpoint back to his car? And should he now go directly to Leeds and inform his friend Sam Lippincott that he’d found her?

No. Better to keep his promise. Give her another day to collect herself. Give himself another day to return to the Bellefort Hotel and soak in the hot pools. Eat Yorkshire pudding and sleep in the bed that was twice as wide and soft as any he’d ever owned. If Mrs Christie were in danger, that would be one thing. But it seemed she was only in a rugged love nest with a handsome Irish bloke.

No. He would not expose Agatha Christie today. He wasn’t sure exactly why he’d come to this decision. Perhaps he would change his mind tomorrow. But not today.

The Disappearance

Day Five
Wednesday, 8 December 1926

M
ARRIAGE HAS A
hold not often acknowledged on the popular imagination. I never understood it fully until I was married myself. Whether a marriage begins in duty or convenience, or whether it begins in secret, whispered words and irresistible passion. Even when it begins in resentment, or drizzles into nothing over the years, there’s a bond formed that’s not easily broken. With his wife missing, Archie buckled under the strain of a yoke he’d believed he’d escaped. Over the last two years, since I’d come along, he’d thought of his wife mostly as Agatha. Now with her missing, possibly in danger, he began thinking of her, rather fervently, as ‘my wife’.

Deputy Chief Constable Thompson stood firmly unmoved by Colonel Christie’s professions of anguish. ‘We know about the girl,’ he had announced the day before, arriving at Styles first thing in the morning.

Surely Archie had been tempted to say
What girl?
But he was a smart enough man to know when he was caught. ‘I know how this looks,’ he’d admitted, mistakenly taking on a tone of authority rather than contrition. ‘But I love my wife and would never harm her.’ Archie knew he had done no physical harm to Agatha but the deputy chief constable’s furious gaze made him
feel as though he had. Remembering the emotional pain to which his wife had been subjected, Archie felt simultaneously indignant with innocence and abject with guilt.

‘We’ll see about that,’ Thompson had said, regarding Archie with a scarcely contained rage. If Agatha Christie were found dead, it would be a tragedy, of which the only resulting pleasure could be marching her husband off to jail. He ordered the search to be intensified.