The young fellow at the front desk called Lippincott over.
‘Are you quite sure?’ Lippincott demanded, assessing Miss Harley to no particular advantage. ‘I’ve got a man reporting daily on that case.’ In fact, he realized, he had not heard from Chilton in several days. ‘He says he’s not seen head or tail of her.’
‘Well, I’ve seen the head and the tail.’ The wattle on Miss Harley’s neck became tremulous with indignation. ‘She was in the hotel gift shop, staring right at me, looking just like her picture. She bought a bathing dress and picture postcard. I thought I might be imagining things but I saw another photograph of her in the papers today and it was her. I just know it was.’
That’s what you get when you don’t take matters in your own hands, thought Lippincott. He headed over to the library to question Miss Barnard.
‘Oh, I’m quite sure it was her,’ Miss Barnard said, thankful to be heard finally. ‘She went awfully pale when I pointed out the resemblance. Can you say someone has a resemblance to herself?’ Miss Barnard laughed, then stopped abruptly when she saw Lippincott was unamused. ‘Took some books out, too. Detective novels, mostly.’
‘What name did she give?’
‘Mrs O’Dea. Said she was staying at the Bellefort Hotel and Spa.’
‘The Bellefort!’
The thought of Agatha Christie right under Chilton’s nose this whole time – not to mention Lippincott’s own family – was more than any man could bear. Fond of Chilton though he was, Lippincott marched out of the library with his fingers twitching, ready himself to do everything that needed to be done.
That evening, the phone rang at Styles. The maid Anna found Archie at the dining table, his food before him uneaten, a tumbler of Scotch in one hand. His eyes, persistently, on the window. Dark now, only returning his own sad reflection.
‘Colonel Christie,’ Anna said, ‘there’s a police officer on the telephone. Says he’s calling from Leeds.’
The Disappearance
Our Last Night
Monday, 13 December 1926
OVER THE YEARS, since our time in Yorkshire, Agatha and I have managed to steal a private moment or two, when our paths crossed – accidentally, in London, or at a family function. The funeral of Archie’s mother, for example. Teddy’s wedding. Times the blending of families past and present could not be avoided.
She and I agreed that although we’d spent not even a week in the Timeless Manor, in the dead of winter – bare branches and foggy windows – we remembered the house in every season. We could see the glorious canopy, dripping with moss and green, arching over the drive. The lawn where we played tennis soft with recent rain, so our feet left divots in the earth as we played. Birds making a racket when we woke, sun arriving too early and pouring through the curtains. The fields that rolled behind the house carpeted with dahlias, lily of the valley and primula. We remember Teddy running through the flowers, picking the brightest ones, hem of her skirt stained with mud and grass, though truly she was never there at all.
‘To call it amnesia never quite feels like a lie,’ she once told me. ‘Because it all still seems a marvellous dream. The kind you create to take the place of something terrible.’
We should steal away together, I suggested at least once. We should go back.
Agatha admitted she’d thought of finding the owner and buying the house. But she never did, and neither of us returned there, not together or apart. The house lived on only as a place we visited in conversation and memory, no more visible to the outside world than we had been, inhabiting it, undetected.
Sometimes at night I have a marvellous dream of my own: a party. The manor’s not dusty or spare of furnishings, but bright and fully appointed. Genevieve, and my little Rosie, and my sister Louisa’s children, and even Colleen’s: they sit in the upstairs hallway peering down through the banisters long after they were sent to bed. Finbarr is there, and Chilton, and my parents. Fiona and her son, the raspberry birthmark faded. Bess and Donny and Ronan – plus the three girls they’d go on to have. All three of my sisters. The Mahoneys and Uncle Jack and Aunt Rosie. Seamus, grown to a man, laughing as though he never knew a moment’s sickness. Alby, black and white fur gleaming, a perfect gentleman, exactly at Finbarr’s side. Sparkling lights, and trays of brimming champagne flutes, and the most cheerful music – not scratchy from an old Victrola, but a live orchestra. It’s the happiest moment in the world. It’s everything I’ve ever wished for, finally bestowed.