Mrs Leech was adamant: the lady in room 206, Mrs Genevieve O’Dea, was not the missing novelist.
‘Why, Sam,’ she said to Lippincott, ‘Mrs O’Dea has been with us more than a week. I know her face perfectly well. She’s a smaller lady. Younger. Dark hair.’
‘Hard to determine hair colour by a photograph,’ Lippincott told her. ‘I’ve seen photographs of my own mother I’d swear weren’t her. Devilish art form, if you ask me.’
‘Well, I know my own mother in photographs. And I know Mrs O’Dea and this isn’t her.’
Mr Leech bustled into the room. He greeted his cousin with a heartily fond handshake, then squinted at the picture obligingly. ‘I think this Mrs O’Dea could very well be this woman,’ he announced.
‘Good gracious, Simon. You’ve scarcely glanced at her,’ said Mrs Leech. He wasn’t even wearing his spectacles. She huffed off without a goodbye or backwards glance.
‘I say.’ Mr Leech smiled at Lippincott. ‘It’ll be marvellous publicity, won’t it, Sam? The Bellefort Hotel splashed over every newspaper in the country. Good enough for Agatha Christie.’ He’d never heard of Agatha Christie until this moment but if her name was in the papers over a few days unaccounted for, she had to be enormously famous.
Lippincott, Leech and Archie formulated a plan. They agreed Archie should not confront his wife by going to her room, or standing at the bottom of the stairs waiting for her to come down to breakfast. Instead, they situated him in the drawing room, an open newspaper obfuscating his identity, while Lippincott waited in the lobby to intercept.
‘Isabelle assures me Mrs O’Dea is in her room,’ Mr Leech told his cousin. ‘And while she’s been in and out a good bit, she usually does take a meal upon rising.’
His words had barely left his mouth when Chilton and Agatha came down the stairs. They were engrossed in each other, heads close together. She had forgotten to wear his hat, as if she believed herself no longer visible to the outside world, but could move through it undetected, in any situation. Chilton did not have his arm around her waist, luckily, but his hand fluttered as he talked, cupping the air by her elbow in a manner that appeared intimate. Lippincott’s jaw dropped. Partly at the audacity of it. Partly at the change that had come over Chilton in the mere days since last he’d seen him. He looked taller. His hair was neatly in place. And he seemed terribly light-hearted, not only for himself, but for someone who’d been investigating a missing person and a possible double murder.
But it was the woman who surprised him most. Looking younger than her photographs, and also light, happy – incandescent, even. Dressed as if she’d just walked in from ploughing a field, wholly inappropriate. He’d expected, if it were indeed her, to find a ghostly shell. The woman who stood before him – blind to surroundings apart from her companion – was quite the opposite.
‘Mrs Christie,’ said Lippincott. And just like that, the bubble burst.
Agatha and Chilton snapped their gazes to the foot of the stairs. Their hands came down to their sides. Lippincott was a kindly man on the whole but his tone in this moment – the four abrupt and indignant syllables, distinctly chastising with additional phrases implied. Mrs Christie. How dare you. Mrs Christie. What on earth do you think you’re doing? A tone used freely by all kinds of men, meant to return a person to reality, meaning proper behaviour, befitting whomever it was they’d proclaimed her to be. Her imperviousness vanished. The shame whose absence she had marvelled at descended, a bucket of water, a shroud.
‘Well, Mr Chilton,’ Lippincott said, his voice changing entirely, aghast but with a whiff of admiration. ‘I see you’ve found her.’
Archie, listening from behind his newspaper in the drawing room just off the main hall, could bear it no longer. He had to see if it was really her. He imagined two scenarios. One, feasting his eyes upon his wife, upon Agatha, seeing her alive and whole and well, knowing this entire nightmare had finally ended. And two, seeing a stranger, someone wholly irrelevant, this trip another dead end, a needless waste of time like dredging the Silent Pool or engaging spirit mediums, his life forevermore this circus of public scrutiny and unanswered questions.