The Christie Affair(28)
Archie thought: I can’t imagine Nan handling such a situation – hair flying right off her head – with the same mirthful gales of laughter. Does she even know how to ride a horse? Different manner of upbringing altogether.
In truth it was hard for Archie to imagine me at all, at this time. What he thought about was his wife. The things he once loved about her. Slight and fair. Is that what she looked like? Somehow he had forgotten to notice.
He had noticed when they first met, at a ball in Chudleigh. A week later he had ridden a motorbike all the way to Torquay to see her. He knew she was engaged to some other bloke but that hardly seemed an obstacle. When Archie made up his mind to have something, he had it. Agatha would have registered this trait with a writer’s eye. Attaching it to him in quick strokes. She wasn’t interested in romances; she placed them in her books because that was the fashion. She especially disliked romances in detective novels. They were a distraction.
Oh, what a distraction she had been, to Archie, at one time. With her vanishing it all came back to him, as if the corporeal had left and all these memories – all these feelings – had erupted exactly as she herself departed the plane. Now what distracted him was the inability to see her. As if the sight of her would solve everything – certainly the way Deputy Chief Constable Thompson and his minions looked at Archie, as if they might see blood dripping from his hands. He calculated who knew about him and Nan, versus who suspected. The Owens. That pair he could trust to remain discreet. Then there was Honoria, who would have told the cook, who would have told her husband, who also happened to be the butler. Perhaps the new maid didn’t know but the rest of the staff did and even now the police were interviewing them, one by one.
‘A nervous breakdown,’ Archie had told Deputy Chief Constable Thompson, at once, before the officer got the chance to pose a single question. He saw Thompson’s eyes narrow, clearly finding the outburst suspicious, but Archie couldn’t help himself. ‘She’s been suffering terribly from nerves.’ As if the rephrasing could abate the hole he was digging himself.
‘I see,’ said Thompson. He had a full, protruding chest of the sort particularly athletic men develop when they get on in years. An impressive grey moustache and an eternally scolding countenance. Give me no nonsense, Thompson’s bearing seemed to say, and I’ll spare you further ruin. ‘Had she consulted a doctor?’
‘Goodness, no,’ Archie said. ‘Neither of us believes in that sort of thing. Fresh air and a firm bearing, that’s what restores a person’s mind.’
Thompson nodded. Approving of the philosophy, if not the man.
Honoria watched this exchange, arms wrapped round herself as if to keep all she knew inside. Agatha had written two letters – one to Archie, which nobody else ever saw, and one to Honoria, saying, ‘I’m off to Torquay for the weekend.’ Honoria had handed hers over to the police, but hadn’t yet mentioned Friday morning’s fuss, or Archie’s affair. Fond as she was of Agatha, if her employer never returned, that would leave Archie in charge of her livelihood. The man was a cad but certainly (likely?) not a murderer. Honoria hoped to stay on at Styles, tending Teddy, even if the lady of the house never returned. And weren’t the letters proof that Agatha had planned all this, that she had in fact left rather than vanished? Nobody would have batted an eyelash over her absence, or checked to see if she really was in Torquay (she was not) if it hadn’t been for that abandoned car: ominous evidence of something terribly amiss. Telegraphing that whatever Agatha’s destination, she surely had not arrived there.
When I stole away to Ireland, I left no letter for my parents. My mother found her tea tin, empty of every last penny she’d hidden. That was all the information she needed. I imagine her holding it to her bosom, lamenting the part of her plan I’d omitted – bringing her along with me.
When I went missing, just after the war, there weren’t a hundred policemen to be found in England. They’d all gone off as soldiers and took their time returning to duty. And I hadn’t been an author, or a wife. Just a disgraced girl from a family that barely scraped by, the kind who went missing every day. There weren’t enough police in the world to set out looking for all of us.
But for Agatha Christie: thousands of men – policeman and locals; hounds; even aeroplanes; combing every inch of every forest. Spread out, even after dark, carrying torches. Searching and searching. The great mass of them in Surrey and Berkshire but inspectors dispatched all over the country. As if the sheer force of her anguish had made her, inexplicably, the most important person on earth.
The Disappearance
Day Three
Monday, 6 December 1926
SPECIAL CABLE TO the New York Times:
Mrs Agatha Christie, Novelist, Disappears
in Strange Way from Her Home in England
LONDON, 5 Dec. – Mrs Agatha Clarissa Christie, the novelist, daughter of the late Frederick Miller of New York and wife of Colonel Archibald Christie, has vanished from her home at Sunningdale, in Berkshire, under mysterious circumstances, and a hundred policemen have searched for her in vain during the weekend.
Late on Friday night Agatha packed an attaché case with clothing and went out alone in a two-seater automobile, leaving a note for her secretary saying she would not return that night.