How disappointing when two first footmen did find poor Miss Annabelle Oliver, frozen in a shallow stream, caught up in a snarl of brambles. A great cry went up at the sight of her, followed by disappointment. She was too old and too small to be Agatha Christie. One body would have been valuable. This body, belonging to someone nobody had reported missing, was not.
Archie walked down the road with Peter on a leash. He could hear the aeroplanes overhead, rotors slicing the air. Hounds bayed in the distance, a sound that had become ubiquitous since his wife had disappeared.
If Agatha had done this to drive him mad, hats off to her. Peter pulled disobediently on his leash and Archie yanked him back to his side. The dog had never liked him. But Deputy Chief Constable Thompson had asked Archie to bring her dog to the site where the Morris Cowley had been found. He could have driven but hoped the air – wind, really, cold enough to chap a man’s skin – would do something to ease the unrest swirling inside his chest. What have I done, what have I done? Blown his life to bits, that’s what. Caused this swirling mass, this appalling and unceasing to-do, all about him. The search was like Agatha’s anguish come to life. And he had caused it, for the sake of a girl who was good at golf. The newspapers were blaring the news of Agatha’s disappearance all the way to the continents. The police knew about his affair, thought they hadn’t been able to track down Nan for an interview （he felt grateful to me, for lying low as promised）。 Still, how much longer before everything else came out, everything he’d done? Once Agatha saw the story of Archie and Nan made public, would she change her mind about wanting him back? When the whole world knew? Or had he ruined his marriage, his whole life, for what he’d begun to think of as nothing, a madness, a dalliance?
Police waited by his wife’s car, still at Newlands Corner where they’d pulled it back from the chalk pit. The officers regarded Archie sternly, many of them certain he’d done some foul play. As if that were possible. As if he had it in him. Couldn’t they tell how desperate he was to see his wife found?
‘Here you go, Peter,’ Archie said. The dog pulled on the leash again, in the direction of home. Agatha had spoiled him, allowing him on furniture, feeding him from her plate, walking him with no leash at all. Frustrated, Archie bent over to pick him up. Peter wriggled in his arms, whining. Two of the younger policemen exchanged glances. Amused or disgusted? The dashing colonel could no more control this little dog than he could his wife.
‘Come on now, Peter.’ Archie placed the dog by the car, but Peter didn’t sniff, he didn’t do anything but turn round and round in whimpering circles.
‘Well,’ said the more disapproving of the two officers. ‘I suppose that’s enough of that.’
‘I suppose it is,’ Archie said. He unclipped Peter’s leash and the dog immediately bolted down the road towards home.
‘Hold up there,’ a voice called, as Archie started to trudge after the dog. It was Thompson, looking even sterner than usual. There were moments when Archie felt sure the man was just on the brink of throttling him.
Archie opened his mouth to speak but found no voice came out at all. Instead, it was Thompson’s voice, obscuring whatever it was he’d meant to say, with the calamitous words: ‘There’s been a development, I’m afraid. The search has turned up a body.’
A body. Agatha? Surely not. To his horror, Archie’s knees buckled, his own body, which had always been such a faithful servant to him, committing so humiliating a betrayal. He had to reach out and grab Thompson’s collar to keep himself from crumbling to the ground.
Thompson bent at the knees himself, leveraging his weight to keep the colonel upright. He wore an undecided and consternated expression. Was this grief he witnessed, or was it guilt?
My wife, thought Archie. A body. It wouldn’t do. He couldn’t bear it. The world rearranged itself into an inhospitable and unforgiving place. He would have let go the officer, fallen to the road and wept, if only he’d been a different sort of man.