The Christie Affair(46)

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



MARRIAGE 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.

Now Archie sat at his desk, with the copy of the story Agatha had written – typed out but for the title ‘The Edge’ written across the top in a madwoman’s print, as if the pen had nearly punctured the paper. He read it again. The husband came across all right. And the woman, vanquishing her rival, sending her rolling down the cliff to her death. Archie thought of his wife, with a frightened kind of respect: I don’t know her, he said to himself. I don’t know her at all.