‘The Sisters can get mad at anything they like,’ Susanna said, not budging from her station. ‘If you don’t know that by now, you’ll never know anything.’
Susanna was right, but still Fiona and I clasped our hands and pressed our foreheads together. I didn’t pray so much as worry. That Father Joseph would turn his attentions from Bess to me. I tried to pretend not to know what happened when he called her to him, but today, thinking of Bess’s baby moving inside her the same as mine, I couldn’t move my mind away from the horror of it. I worried Finbarr had died, which I knew was all that would ever prevent him from coming to get me.
Magical Finbarr. If anyone could get me out of here, it was him. I closed my eyes, leaning into Fiona, and pictured him, tennis ball high in his hand.
Make a wish.
The two of us – no, the three of us – leaving this place safely and together.
Granted.
Sister Mary Frances blustered in and cracked Fiona across the back with her cane.
‘None of that,’ the old nun said, as if prayer were something that didn’t belong to us anymore, except at the nuns’ discretion. ‘It’s only hard work that will wash your sins away.’
Fiona straightened, smiling instead of wincing. ‘You’re right, Sister,’ she said, her voice sounding sweet and pure. ‘I know you’re right.’
I returned to my cauldron. Fiona rolled a cart of soaking sheets up to dry on the rooftop. This time of day she might catch a glimpse of her little boy in the yard. She worried because he wasn’t walking yet. Shouldn’t he be walking?, she was sure to ask me, when she returned.
I tried to think of Bess, off with Father Joseph, as if prayers had done any good. As if I had it in me, despite all my sympathies and fondness, to pray for anyone except my baby and myself.
The Disappearance
Day Four
Tuesday, 7 December 1926
AGATHA REMOVED HER hand from Chilton’s the moment he said her name. What a fool she’d been to open the door. Finbarr had told her to keep her head low. He hadn’t said not to answer the door because likely it hadn’t occurred to him that anyone would come knocking, or that she’d be silly enough to answer if somebody did. But that’s what she’d done, instinctively, obedient as ever. Somebody knocks and in the absence of your butler, a polite lady is obliged to answer. What power these customs do have over us, Agatha thought, and steeled her spine ramrod straight, as if that could undo the mess into which good manners had propelled her.
‘I’m afraid you’re mistaken,’ she told him. ‘I don’t know anyone by that name.’
‘I have a photograph of you,’ he said. ‘It’s there in the automobile. Shall I show it to you?’
‘A photograph,’ she said, waving her hand in front of her face as if moving smoke out of the way. ‘One face in a photograph looks very much like another, doesn’t it?’
Had they really sent police all the way to Yorkshire to search for her? What a needless fuss. She felt a terrible flurry in her stomach. If they were looking for her here – where no one had any reason to imagine she’d go – where else would they search? Who else would know she’d run off, and why? Oh, she hated to think of her stalwart new benefactors – her new agent and publisher – learning of this whole humiliating mess.
‘Mrs Christie,’ the man said gently, ‘my name’s Inspector Frank Chilton. I’m representing the police department in Leeds. I’ve been charged with looking for you, though I daresay I never thought I’d find you.’
He had a pleasant face and manner. Mild and kind. Agatha saw at once he’d be easy to dismiss. ‘I beg your pardon, Inspector Chilton. But I expect you didn’t hear me. My name is not Agatha Christie.’