The Christie Affair(88)

I walked to her bed and sat down, pressing the cup into her hands. ‘Drink this,’ I said in my most soothing voice. ‘There’s a bit of brandy in it.’ I wore a dressing gown, my hair loose. Hers was gathered up under a nightcap. I could see the gleam of cream upon her face, still tending to the usual ministrations, imagining a tomorrow despite her bereavement.

‘Oh, you’re a darling,’ she said to me. ‘That doctor gave me a sleeping draught but my nerves are overcoming it.’ She took the cup and sipped. The English love of tea as solution to life’s ills does make us easy to poison.

‘I can’t say where I’ll go tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We had a plan, Mr Marston and I, for where we’d go next. Manchester, where I lived as a girl, before I was sent off to Ireland.’ She was speaking to herself, not realizing I’d heard this story before. ‘But my family’s not there anymore. How can I do it without Mr Marston? I’ve never lived alone, you see. I used to be a nun, if you can believe that.’

‘Oh, I believe it, Mrs Marston. I do.’

She cried and sipped, cried and sipped. I sat beside her and patted her knee. It had only been seven years, and not years that particularly age a person. At twenty-seven I looked passably as I had at twenty. She’d seen me every day for months. She’d been with me when Genevieve first laughed. She was the last person I ever saw holding my baby. I stared and stared, willing her to stare back. The ghosts that ought to have haunted her fluttered away, unthinking.

‘You’re a dear,’ she said, handing me the empty cup.

I put it on the bedside table. Later, I would be sure to wipe it clean of fingerprints and residue. Sister Mary Clare lay back. She reached out and clasped my hand. ‘You’ll stay with me, won’t you? Until I fall asleep.’

‘Of course I will.’

Her eyes fluttered closed. If I waited, the poison would kill her. But unlike Bess, I wanted hands on my quarry. The coroner would find the strychnine. But I’d have her dead before it did its work. I hummed a few bars of the same haunting tune she was always so fond of, but even that didn’t make her realize. She smiled a bit and said – very quiet, eyes still closed – ‘Oh, I do love that song.’

A few more moments passed. The clock downstairs chimed but I didn’t count the hour. I picked up a pillow, no doubt it had lain beneath Father Joseph’s head the night before. Then I tapped her to make sure she hadn’t fallen asleep. Her eyes fluttered open. I smiled, dearly wanting her to see love and kindness in my face. She managed a wan, thankful smile in return. Then down came the pillow.

I took one risk, in the middle, taking the pillow away for the barest second. Sister Mary Clare rewarded me with the second honest expression of her life: fear and shock and anguish. I could have told her who I was, in that moment. But I liked adding confusion to the terrible emotions overcoming her. So I pressed the pillow back down. I held the woman down. Until she stopped struggling. Until she stopped causing harm. Until her body came to rest, and her breath ceased to flow. When I pulled the pillow away her face held no false cheer, no false kindness. Her lips spoke no empty promises. All she had were eyes newly made of glass, open but not seeing. Her mouth open, frozen in its useless attempt to find oxygen.

For years I’d been swept in directions I never meant to go. I’d made mistakes, acting by accident or imperative. Finally, in this moment, I was the author of my story. The universe must not have held it against me, because I was rewarded almost at once with my days in the Timeless Manor.

When Sister Mary Clare lay dead before me, how the air metamorphosed. Particles that had been charged became inert. The rage inside me quieted. A violent storm had ended.

The urge to murder. It never left me until the job was done.





The Disappearance



Day Eight

Saturday, 11 December 1926



FINBARR WAS DOWNSTAIRS stoking the kitchen fire when Chilton and Agatha returned to the Timeless Manor. On the table were bottles of wine – he had helped himself to the collection in the cellar – along with a tray that held three loaves of fresh bread, various kinds of sausage, a wheel of Swaledale cheese and tins of peaches.

‘You said you were tired of tongue,’ he told Agatha. ‘So I went on a little scouting mission.’

‘Aren’t you a darling,’ she said.

Chilton frowned the slightest bit, looking from one to the other. Agatha sat, weary, the force of these days away, this time away, still not seeing the future take any shape she could recognize. Chilton pulled out a chair and sat beside her. In a calm voice he told Finbarr what they’d pieced together. The Marstons’ true identity and my hand in their murder.

Finbarr listened, his face unmoving and inscrutable. When Chilton had finished he said, ‘Good.’

‘Good?’ said Chilton. ‘Come now, man. You can’t mean that.’

‘But I do mean it.’

Agatha poured wine into a teacup. This seemed the right night to make an exception to her abstinence. It occurred to her she ought to be glad of the thought, me headed to jail, which would not only get me out of the way but also punish me for the pain I’d caused her. But even before our escape, accidentally mutual, such a thing wouldn’t have made her glad. She wasn’t that sort of person and never would be. She might be capable of imagining other people’s plots of revenge and the bitterness that drove them. She could even sympathize with mine. But she never could carry them out herself. She was better than me in that way. Or else just luckier.