Archie filled his pipe and stared out the window, everything outside still and quiet, as if the chill had frozen the wind. No branches moved. If Agatha broke through that stillness, if she appeared at the top of the road, a figure coming towards him, calm and resolute, like something of his own invention, he knew he would spring from the house and run to her, but would it be to collect her in an embrace, or to strangle her for what she’d put him through? He reminded himself, uncharacteristically, that he’d put her through plenty.
Now that she was gone, and he had no way to locate her – powerless, impotent, for the first time in his life – she occupied his thoughts as the beautiful face he’d carried through the war. Peach silk. Slim as a reed. Eyes wide with adoration. The stories she scribbled just a pleasing eccentricity, nothing to eclipse anything and everything he’d ever accomplish.
The things they’d come through together, Archie and Agatha – even his relationship with Nan they had gone through together, in their way. Agatha had been a part of it, unwitting, but still a dynamic and important part. Her presence driving the secrecy, the delicious illicitness. Then the way she’d clearly known but held her tongue, waiting for it to end. And then he had ended it, but not in the way she’d so patiently awaited, instead in a way that crushed her, and she’d stepped out of his life, out of the world. And all he wanted was for her to come back.
‘Oh, A.C.,’ Archie said out loud, when Noel left the room. He pressed his hand against the window pane. ‘My dear wife. I’ll do anything. I’ll atone. I won’t hold a grudge, for all this worry you’ve caused, all this uproar and shame. I’ll give up the girl. If only you come back whole and well.’
Archie had no talent for magic. The road lay empty, the room sat quiet. The conjuring accomplished nothing.
Meanwhile, in Harrogate, in the course of his autopsy of Mr Marston, the coroner discovered potassium cyanide.
‘There was a mark,’ the coroner explained in Lippincott’s office, the door for once closed. Both Lippincott and Chilton had elected not to see the body again. ‘A tiny mark on the man’s hip. It was injected, is my thought, right through his trousers. This was not a natural death.’
‘What about the wife?’ asked Chilton.
‘Strychnine,’ said the coroner. ‘A lethal dose. Ingested, not injected.’
‘Both poisons easy enough to obtain,’ said Lippincott. ‘Any housewife with a wasp or rat problem knows their uses.’
‘Indeed.’ Chilton pictured the couple, perfectly ordinary in every way. Who on earth would want those two dead? ‘It had to have been someone in the dining room, then.’
The coroner nodded in agreement.
‘I’d say this points to the wife.’ Lippincott was naturally protective of his cousin’s livelihood and nothing would empty out the hotel for years to come like a double murder. ‘She offed her husband by injecting him with potassium cyanide, then killed herself with the strychnine. Did she seem particularly troubled to you,’ he asked Chilton, ‘before her husband’s death, of course?’
‘Quite the contrary. She seemed like someone who’d never known a moment’s trouble. Rather jolly. Oblivious. Annoying, really.’
‘There, there,’ said Lippincott. ‘Don’t make yourself a suspect.’
The three of them laughed, forgetting themselves and the sombre nature of their discussion.
‘But why would she want to kill her husband?’ Chilton said.
‘Clearly,’ said the coroner, whose wife greeted him nightly with a burned dinner and a new list of grievances, ‘you’ve never been married.’
‘Do the murderous feelings generally begin on a honeymoon? The woman can’t have been more vocal in her adoration.’