Agatha laughed, so harshly she worried she’d erased any doubt he might still have as to her identity.
Finbarr said, ‘Good day, inspector.’ And he closed the door. Before he took his arm off her shoulders he gave her a little squeeze of comfort. Her protector.
‘Not to worry,’ he said.
Chilton walked back to the car, his head fairly swimming, trying to sort out what he’d just witnessed. If all of England was a haystack, with hundreds of police officers combing through the stalks, how extraordinary that he should be the one to find the needle. He picked up the photograph and studied it again. It was her, the same lady, he was certain of it. She was alive and would not be discovered at the bottom of any lake. What a happy thing, despite the myriad questions her discovery created, principal among them the identity of the young Irishman, whom so far today Chilton had witnessed with his hands on two unlikely but unprotesting women.
And what should Chilton have done? Marched her at gunpoint back to his car? And should he now go directly to Leeds and inform his friend Sam Lippincott that he’d found her?
No. Better to keep his promise. Give her another day to collect herself. Give himself another day to return to the Bellefort Hotel and soak in the hot pools. Eat Yorkshire pudding and sleep in the bed that was twice as wide and soft as any he’d ever owned. If Mrs Christie were in danger, that would be one thing. But it seemed she was only in a rugged love nest with a handsome Irish bloke.
No. He would not expose Agatha Christie today. He wasn’t sure exactly why he’d come to this decision. Perhaps he would change his mind tomorrow. But not today.
The Disappearance
Day Five
Wednesday, 8 December 1926
MARRIAGE HAS A hold not often acknowledged on the popular imagination. I never understood it fully until I was married myself. Whether a marriage begins in duty or convenience, or whether it begins in secret, whispered words and irresistible passion. Even when it begins in resentment, or drizzles into nothing over the years, there’s a bond formed that’s not easily broken. With his wife missing, Archie buckled under the strain of a yoke he’d believed he’d escaped. Over the last two years, since I’d come along, he’d thought of his wife mostly as Agatha. Now with her missing, possibly in danger, he began thinking of her, rather fervently, as ‘my wife’。
Deputy Chief Constable Thompson stood firmly unmoved by Colonel Christie’s professions of anguish. ‘We know about the girl,’ he had announced the day before, arriving at Styles first thing in the morning.
Surely Archie had been tempted to say What girl? But he was a smart enough man to know when he was caught. ‘I know how this looks,’ he’d admitted, mistakenly taking on a tone of authority rather than contrition. ‘But I love my wife and would never harm her.’ Archie knew he had done no physical harm to Agatha but the deputy chief constable’s furious gaze made him feel as though he had. Remembering the emotional pain to which his wife had been subjected, Archie felt simultaneously indignant with innocence and abject with guilt.
‘We’ll see about that,’ Thompson had said, regarding Archie with a scarcely contained rage. If Agatha Christie were found dead, it would be a tragedy, of which the only resulting pleasure could be marching her husband off to jail. He ordered the search to be intensified.
Now Archie sat at his desk, with the copy of the story Agatha had written – typed out but for the title ‘The Edge’ written across the top in a madwoman’s print, as if the pen had nearly punctured the paper. He read it again. The husband came across all right. And the woman, vanquishing her rival, sending her rolling down the cliff to her death. Archie thought of his wife, with a frightened kind of respect: I don’t know her, he said to himself. I don’t know her at all.
They might be searching for Agatha in every corner of England but, of course, the main hub was Berkshire and Surrey. By Wednesday the counties abounded with hounds and police officers. Even aeroplanes, the first time they’d ever been used to look for a single, missing person. The staff from the Coworth House, the largest estate in Sunningdale, took a day off to employ their knowledge of the region, which was naturally far superior to any police force. Professionally tight-lipped, they did not repeat any gossip relayed by the paltry staff at Styles （unaware that Anna had already seen to the matter, just what one could expect from a second-rate housemaid）。 They were all sure Mrs Christie was now a corpse, and took great umbrage at the idea of anyone other than themselves discovering it.