Stepping into the front hall, he drew in his breath. There Agatha stood. Wearing trousers and a jumper. Hair grips holding back the wisps off her forehead like a girl. If he had registered Chilton and his proximity to her, he might have sprung at him. But Chilton was not the sort of man Archie registered unless he needed something. If he had walked into a room and seen Chilton close by, he might have wordlessly handed him his coat and hat.
Relief flooded Archie’s body, as if it had been administered by syringe. He had pictured his wife’s lifeless body in so many places: at the bottom of a lake, in a ditch, in the bonnet of some maniac’s car. All the ways Agatha herself had imagined bodies ending up dead – all the ways she would imagine them ending up dead – Archie had imagined hers. And he was not an imaginative man. Now he felt too overcome to recognize the dismay on her face. It didn’t occur to him that she hadn’t wanted to be found. He should have realized. At one glance he should have known: he’d lost her.
‘Agatha.’
‘Archie.’ Unnaturally loud, in case I was in the hotel. To warn me. There was no need for both of us to be caught.
Archie pointed to the door of the library. His hand trembled before him like it belonged to a hundred-year-old man. That’s what these eleven days had done to him, how much they’d aged him. But there were things to be said in private that might restore him yet.
Agatha stood frozen, like a misbehaved schoolgirl summoned by the headmaster. The newspaper headlines and all their readers. The manpower wasted on the search for her, and all the worry. Her child left at home without so much as a goodbye. Everything she’d been miraculously able to turn a blind eye to came rushing in with the force of a river when the dam is lifted.
She dared not look at Chilton. She stepped away from him, bowing her head, and descended the stairs. She walked into the library obediently and sat on the very edge of the worn sofa, as if worried she’d dirty it, suddenly aware of how she was presenting herself to the world, in these outrageously inappropriate clothes, no jewellery. Like she was an urchin caught playing in the streets.
But Archie – he did something wholly unexpected. Alone in a room with her, seeing her mortified face – dear, pinched, pretty, familiar face – he dropped to his knees. He laid his face in her lap, immune to any foreign smells, wrapping his arms around her.
‘A.C.,’ he said, his voice as close to weeping as she’d ever heard it. ‘You’re alive. Are you all right?’
‘I am.’ Her voice sounded frightfully weak. She knew she was supposed to say it back, A.C., but she couldn’t bring herself to do so.
He grasped at her hand and kissed the bare spot where her wedding ring should have been, then pulled the sacred jewellery out of his pocket and slid it back on her finger. Forgiving her for running off and creating all this worry （forgiveness from her for everything he’d done apparently a foregone conclusion）。
‘Where were you?’ Archie said, as if the question had been plaguing him so it needed to be asked, despite her just being found in the place she’d presumably been. ‘Where did you go? What did you do?’
The first thing she thought to say was, Here. I came here.
But that didn’t feel true. So she said the next thing she could think, that somehow felt less like a lie, because everything had become so strange and confusing. And, after all, she was not the only party with a story at stake. She had already decided to protect me and from that she would never waver for an instant.
‘I can’t remember,’ she said. And so it would stand for the rest of her life.
The Disappearance
Day of Discovery
Tuesday, 14 December 1926
UPSTAIRS, I PACKED as quickly as I could and dragged my suitcase across the hall to Cornelia Armstrong’s room. You’d think with two unexplained deaths she might have locked her door but the same determined, trusting spirit that made her remain at the hotel and travel alone let her leave it open. When I walked in she was sitting at her vanity brushing out her hair. She turned towards me with a start. I hadn’t knocked. I held my finger to my lips.