Once their mother was gone, though, Chilton would be free and clear. Perhaps then he’d follow the lead of this Christie woman, who from the sound of it had committed suicide. The place they’d find her was at the bottom of a lake. Chances were they’d have found her corpse closer to home by the time he arrived at the hotel. He’d spend one night there and turn around, back towards home.
Suicide. The word had a way of hounding Chilton. A hard thing for a woman to do, when she had a child. But then, from what Lippincott had said – and the fact that police all over England were being mobilized for the search – the Christies were of the breed who had enough people to look after the child so that she might not even notice her mother was gone. Chilton’s mother had been there for her sons every bedtime, every meal, every skinned knee of their childhood.
The train whistle blew for a stop. There were some pleasures left in this life, things he would miss when he left it. Chilton did like the sound of a train whistle. A time away, train travel was. A chance to gather your thoughts or have no thoughts at all. Nobody would be looking for him and nobody would find him either, here on a train. Perhaps that’s what this Agatha Christie was doing. It’s what he would do, if he wanted to get away from the world. Board a train and ride it all over England. Never get off at any stop. Everything you needed, from privies to dining cars to shelter from the rain and a place to rest your head. If he wanted to escape, to disappear, he’d simply ride on and on to nowhere. Which was, now that he thought about it, very close to what he was doing – searching for someone in a place she surely wouldn’t be found.
After a while, Chilton fell asleep with his head lolled back, mouth slightly open, cigarette still burning in his hand. The woman across the aisle, old enough to be his mother, hadn’t wanted to ride in the smoking carriage, but there were no seats left in the non-smoking one. She looked at the sleeping man kindly. He had that particular look about him, so many did nowadays. And he was a handsome fellow, if you looked beyond the edges, a little squidgy and rumpled, but a good strong chin. Nice broad hands. She reached across the aisle and took the cigarette from his fingertips, sneaking one small puff before grinding it out in the ashtray.
In Surrey and Berkshire, a hundred policemen continued to search through the brush and hedges in the damp cold. They walked through the villages handing out circulars. Archie was shown a copy of the Missing Persons notice and he registered the description like a blow to his heart. Slight. Fair. In their youth he had seen her in ballrooms. Peach silk and pale freckles. Twirling and smiling. Once at a house party, on a gallop around a field with their hosts, she hadn’t bothered with a riding outfit and had simply worn a pink dress. Her hairpieces – all women wore them in those days – flew off her head and into the wind. The long curls that had looked fetching when attached to her now seemed as ghastly as any discarded body part. Agatha slid from her side saddle to retrieve them. Archie held tight to his reins, participating in this ride out of duty rather than pleasure. His father – a judge in the Indian Civil Service – had died after a fall from a horse, the blow to his head turning into a brain infection. To watch Agatha you’d never know riding could result in injury or death. Just mirth. What a sight she’d been, holding her skirts in one hand, scooping up the errant hair in the other, roaring with laughter all the while, yet controlled enough to accomplish the task at hand, then hoist herself back onto her horse. What a good sport. What a delight.
Archie thought: I can’t imagine Nan handling such a situation – hair flying right off her head – with the same mirthful gales of laughter. Does she even know how to ride a horse? Different manner of upbringing altogether.
In truth it was hard for Archie to imagine me at all, at this time. What he thought about was his wife. The things he once loved about her. Slight and fair. Is that what she looked like? Somehow he had forgotten to notice.
He had noticed when they first met, at a ball in Chudleigh. A week later he had ridden a motorbike all the way to Torquay to see her. He knew she was engaged to some other bloke but that hardly seemed an obstacle. When Archie made up his mind to have something, he had it. Agatha would have registered this trait with a writer’s eye. Attaching it to him in quick strokes. She wasn’t interested in romances; she placed them in her books because that was the fashion. She especially disliked romances in detective novels. They were a distraction.