The Christie Affair(26)

‘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



MISSING PERSONS 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.