Inside the Timeless Manor, though, everything was beautiful.
That night we stayed up past dawn, the records singing, the wine flowing, the four of us twirling and laughing and dancing. Agatha felt young again. Truly young – once again the girl who had slid off her horse when her hair flew off into the wind, to collect it with gales of laughter. All the house parties she’d attended as a girl, jumping from one to the next – sometimes out of necessity, because the money had run out and Ashfield was let. Without society Agatha would have had nowhere to go. But when she was a guest, everything was taken care of, everything was bright and gay and fun. But never so much fun as this. Nobody, ever, like Finbarr. Nobody like Chilton, certainly, with his hand at her waist, travelling at will. A strange, gorgeous echo of her old life but with the oddest most unlikely people, and no rules at all.
What would her mother say? Liberating to have that question melt into the air, unanswered, unimportant. How it used to hover over her every move. How she had watched herself, even in her youth. Never too much to drink, if anything at all. Don’t say this. Don’t say that. Don’t wander upstairs into a bedroom with a man not your husband to do whatever the two of you please. Now her mother was gone but life did go on in new ways. Humane ways. That was the thing. To be sensible and to be humane. Even if it appeared at the moment she wasn’t particularly sensible anymore. For what seemed the first time in her life – and only for this short window – Agatha owned her own virtue, and thereby her own fate.
When she and Chilton had disappeared upstairs, Finbarr and I stayed behind, dancing a while longer. So I forgot to return to the Bellefort Hotel, my room there empty yet again. Kitty and Carmichael would have left by now. The ruse of their misery had gone on long enough to fool everyone; nobody would ever think back and recognize it as a diversion. They didn’t return to Ireland, but headed to America, to stop in Philadelphia with Lizzie and Donny, then on to New York, both of them destined for the stage. Before they left they made sure my room was paid for a few more days. Mrs Leech would never give them up as my benefactors. And she wouldn’t send anyone hunting for me, at least not yet. She knew about Finbarr, young lovers. She’d shake her head with a secret smile, remembering a time when her romance had seemed impossible, too.
Morning light had long since arrived by the time we went to sleep. All our heads fuzzy with wine and giddy with love. Nobody got around, that day, to accusing me of murder.
On Monday morning in Sunningdale, Teddy woke, horrified to find her father sleeping beside her, on top of the covers, still wearing his suit and even his shoes, his mouth open, spittle winding its way from his mouth to the pillow. She jumped out of bed, quick as she could, collected Touchstone and held her close to her chest.
‘Colonel Christie!’ she exclaimed, deciding only the most formal address would do.
Archie started awake and swung his feet to the floor. ‘Dear me,’ he said. ‘I must have fallen asleep.’
‘Indeed.’ The little girl’s face looked dark with rebuke.
Archie lifted a hand to his brow. Unruly curls loose on his forehead. Reflected in Teddy’s glare, he had no way of knowing he’d never been handsomer, in all his undone vulnerability. He had no interest in being vulnerable. Over the past ten days he’d become everything he most detested – melancholic, sickly, ineffectual.
‘I only want to be happy,’ he told Teddy, hanging his head, hating the pathetic sound of his voice.
Because she was a kind child, Teddy patted the top of his head.
‘And so you shall be,’ she promised.
Like Miss Barnard, the woman who worked at the Karnak gift shop had been thinking about Agatha Christie. But she waited until Monday to say anything, Sunday not being a proper time to cause any kind of upheaval.
‘I’ve seen that missing lady novelist with my own eyes,’ Miss Harley announced, when she walked into the Leeds Police Headquarters. She was a middle-aged lady, unlucky in love, always rheumy with remembering the man who should have proposed before he left for the Boer War, never to be heard from again.