The Christie Affair (44 page)

Archie’s eyes immediately landed on my last name. O’Dea. ‘This,’ he said, pointing. ‘This is my wife’s handwriting.’ As if he’d forgotten me entirely, my name as well as my hand. A sleight of mind, confusing the two of us. One of his women’s penmanship, what did it matter which? To give him credit, the mistake was likely borne of hope. He wanted his wife before his eyes, whole and alive. If he erased my existence by assigning my name and handwriting to her, he could make everything right. He could conjure her finally, safe and well.

Never knowing that I hadn’t been erased. I was just upstairs. My feet directly above his head, gliding over the floorboards, my heart dropped into my bowels, as I pressed my face against the door.

Mrs Leech was adamant: the lady in room 206, Mrs Genevieve O’Dea, was not the missing novelist.

‘Why, Sam,’ she said to Lippincott, ‘Mrs O’Dea has been with us more than a week. I know her face perfectly well. She’s a smaller lady. Younger. Dark hair.’

‘Hard to determine hair colour by a photograph,’ Lippincott told her. ‘I’ve seen photographs of my own mother I’d swear weren’t her. Devilish art form, if you ask me.’

‘Well, I know my own mother in photographs. And I know Mrs O’Dea and this isn’t her.’

Mr Leech bustled into the room. He greeted his cousin with a heartily fond handshake, then squinted at the picture obligingly. ‘I think this Mrs O’Dea could very well be this woman,’ he announced.

‘Good gracious, Simon. You’ve scarcely glanced at her,’ said Mrs Leech. He wasn’t even wearing his spectacles. She huffed off without a goodbye or backwards glance.

‘I say.’ Mr Leech smiled at Lippincott. ‘It’ll be marvellous publicity, won’t it, Sam? The Bellefort Hotel splashed over every newspaper in the country. Good enough for Agatha Christie.’ He’d never heard of Agatha Christie until this moment but if her name was in the papers over a few days unaccounted for, she had to be enormously famous.

Lippincott, Leech and Archie formulated a plan. They agreed Archie should not confront his wife by going to her room, or standing at the bottom of the stairs waiting for her to come down to breakfast. Instead, they situated him in the drawing room, an open newspaper obfuscating his identity, while Lippincott waited in the lobby to intercept.

‘Isabelle assures me Mrs O’Dea is in her room,’ Mr Leech told his cousin. ‘And while she’s been in and out a good bit, she usually does take a meal upon rising.’

His words had barely left his mouth when Chilton and
Agatha came down the stairs. They were engrossed in each other, heads close together. She had forgotten to wear his hat, as if she believed herself no longer visible to the outside world, but could move through it undetected, in any situation. Chilton did not have his arm around her waist, luckily, but his hand fluttered as he talked, cupping the air by her elbow in a manner that appeared intimate. Lippincott’s jaw dropped. Partly at the audacity of it. Partly at the change that had come over Chilton in the mere days since last he’d seen him. He looked taller. His hair was neatly in place. And he seemed terribly light-hearted, not only for himself, but for someone who’d been investigating a missing person and a possible double murder.

But it was the woman who surprised him most. Looking younger than her photographs, and also light, happy – incandescent, even. Dressed as if she’d just walked in from ploughing a field, wholly inappropriate. He’d expected, if it were indeed her, to find a ghostly shell. The woman who stood before him – blind to surroundings apart from her companion – was quite the opposite.

‘Mrs Christie,’ said Lippincott. And just like that, the bubble burst.

Agatha and Chilton snapped their gazes to the foot of the stairs. Their hands came down to their sides. Lippincott was a kindly man on the whole but his tone in this moment – the four abrupt and indignant syllables, distinctly chastising with additional phrases implied.
Mrs Christie. How dare you. Mrs Christie. What on earth do you think you’re doing?
A tone used freely by all kinds of men, meant to return a person to reality, meaning proper behaviour, befitting whomever it was they’d proclaimed her to be. Her imperviousness vanished. The shame whose absence she had marvelled at descended, a bucket of water, a shroud.

‘Well, Mr Chilton,’ Lippincott said, his voice changing entirely, aghast but with a whiff of admiration. ‘I see you’ve found her.’

Archie, listening from behind his newspaper in the drawing room just off the main hall, could bear it no longer. He had to see if it was really her. He imagined two scenarios. One, feasting his eyes upon his wife, upon Agatha, seeing her alive and whole and well, knowing this entire nightmare had finally ended. And two, seeing a stranger, someone wholly irrelevant, this trip another dead end, a needless waste of time like dredging the Silent Pool or engaging spirit mediums, his life forevermore this circus of public scrutiny and unanswered questions.

Stepping into the front hall, he drew in his breath. There Agatha stood. Wearing trousers and a jumper. Hair grips holding back the wisps off her forehead like a girl. If he had registered Chilton and his proximity to her, he might have sprung at him. But Chilton was not the sort of man Archie registered unless he needed something. If he had walked into a room and seen Chilton close by, he might have wordlessly handed him his coat and hat.

Relief flooded Archie’s body, as if it had been administered by syringe. He had pictured his wife’s lifeless body in so many places: at the bottom of a lake, in a ditch, in the bonnet of some maniac’s car. All the ways Agatha herself had imagined bodies ending up dead – all the ways she would imagine them ending up dead – Archie had imagined hers. And he was not an imaginative man. Now he felt too overcome to recognize the dismay on her face. It didn’t occur to him that she hadn’t wanted to be found. He should have realized. At one glance he should have known: he’d lost her.

‘Agatha.’

‘Archie.’ Unnaturally loud, in case I was in the hotel. To warn me. There was no need for both of us to be caught.

Archie pointed to the door of the library. His hand trembled before him like it belonged to a hundred-year-old man. That’s what these eleven days had done to him, how much they’d aged him. But there were things to be said in private that might restore him yet.

Agatha stood frozen, like a misbehaved schoolgirl summoned by the headmaster. The newspaper headlines and all their readers. The manpower wasted on the search for her, and all the worry. Her child left at home without so much as a goodbye. Everything she’d been miraculously able to turn a blind eye to came rushing in with the force of a river when the dam is lifted.

She dared not look at Chilton. She stepped away from him, bowing her head, and descended the stairs. She walked into the library obediently and sat on the very edge of the worn sofa, as if worried she’d dirty it, suddenly aware of how she was presenting herself to the world, in these outrageously inappropriate clothes, no jewellery. Like she was an urchin caught playing in the streets.

But Archie – he did something wholly unexpected. Alone in a room with her, seeing her mortified face – dear, pinched, pretty, familiar face – he dropped to his knees. He laid his face in her lap, immune to any foreign smells, wrapping his arms around her.

‘A.C.,’ he said, his voice as close to weeping as she’d ever heard it. ‘You’re alive. Are you all right?’

‘I am.’ Her voice sounded frightfully weak. She knew she was supposed to say it back,
A.C.
, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so.

He grasped at her hand and kissed the bare spot where her wedding ring should have been, then pulled the sacred jewellery out of his pocket and slid it back on her finger. Forgiving her for
running off and creating all this worry (forgiveness from her for everything he’d done apparently a foregone conclusion).

‘Where were you?’ Archie said, as if the question had been plaguing him so it needed to be asked, despite her just being found in the place she’d presumably been. ‘Where did you go? What did you do?’

The first thing she thought to say was,
Here. I came here.

But that didn’t feel true. So she said the next thing she could think, that somehow felt less like a lie, because everything had become so strange and confusing. And, after all, she was not the only party with a story at stake. She had already decided to protect me and from that she would never waver for an instant.

‘I can’t remember,’ she said. And so it would stand for the rest of her life.

The Disappearance

Day of Discovery
Tuesday, 14 December 1926

U
PSTAIRS,
I
PACKED
as quickly as I could and dragged my suitcase across the hall to Cornelia Armstrong’s room. You’d think with two unexplained deaths she might have locked her door but the same determined, trusting spirit that made her remain at the hotel and travel alone let her leave it open. When I walked in she was sitting at her vanity brushing out her hair. She turned towards me with a start. I hadn’t knocked. I held my finger to my lips.

‘Please,’ I said, ‘may I leave this suitcase with you? And will you promise not to tell anyone that it’s here, or that I was here?’

Miss Armstrong paused for a moment, then stood, took my suitcase and slid it under her bed. ‘I’ll never say a word.’

‘Dear brave girl.’ I crossed my hands over my heart. ‘If I never come back for it, everything inside is yours.’

‘Don’t be silly. Of course you’ll come back.’ At the same time she nodded. Not long afterwards I would catch news of her quite by chance, in an item in the
Daily Mirror
. Mere months after our time in Harrogate, Miss Armstrong took a trip to explore the ruins of the Memorial Theatre in Stratford upon Avon, which had recently burned to the ground. While marching directly into the rubble, she caught the eye of a fellow adventurer, a
disobedient and exceptionally handsome young earl. They married within a fortnight and she moved with him to his estate in Derbyshire, the star-crossed romance and happy ending for which she’d longed. As I never was able to return for my belongings, I like to think she was wearing my cashmere cardigan and faux pearls when they met.

For now I clasped her hand to bid her goodbye then crept to the top of the stairs in my stockinged feet, carrying my shoes. When I peered down, I saw Archie follow his wife into the library. Once inside, Agatha might tell Archie how I’d targeted him, seduced him, for the sole reason that I believed their daughter to be mine. That I had, during this time apart, been locked in a romantic and carnal embrace the likes of which he and I had never approached. That I’d known nearly all along where his wife was and hadn’t told him. That I’d committed one murder and abetted another. Which of these actions, I wondered, would he find most egregious?

And why should I ever worry for a moment about what
he
would forgive? When Archie left Sunday’s Corner, driving away with that bundled baby he’d bought and paid for, taking her home like a diamond to bestow upon his wife. Did he ever for one second give a single thought to that child’s mother?

I had to take this chance. I flew past poor, stunned Chilton, and the gaping Leeches, and the consternated Mr Lippincott, through the hotel door. Once outside I put on my shoes and slid behind the wheel of Chilton’s borrowed police car. Whatever his next destination he would have to go on foot. I drove clumsily, determined to arrive back at the manor before time returned with its brutal roar.

Luckily, Simon Leech pulled Lippincott into the drawing room before the police chief could give Chilton the lambasting that was clearly brewing. Chilton seized upon the opportunity.

‘Mrs Leech,’ he said, as the proprietress marched from the dining room to the front desk, ‘may I have a word?’

The mind is a remarkable thing, its exterior and interior layers. The way Chilton was able to conduct himself, speaking words he hardly heard, while his mind could only concentrate on the horror of it – that this husband, who oozed arrogance like a honeycomb oozed honey, would abscond with Agatha.

‘You must help me,’ he said to Mrs Leech. ‘At least by withholding contradiction. Listen. Agatha Christie has been here at the Bellefort all this while, registered under the name Mrs Genevieve O’Dea. She has been taking curing baths and massages and keeping to herself.’