‘Mrs Mahoney,’ Chilton said, with no faint measure of sarcasm. She had to strain backwards in her chair to face him.
‘Is this how the Yorkshire police conduct themselves?’ There was a practised tone of upper-crust umbrage in her voice but he could tell her heart wasn’t in it. ‘Marching into a lady’s bedroom in the middle of the night?’
‘I did knock,’ he said. ‘You were expecting your husband?’
A sad look crossed her face. Chilton did not mean to make her cry. At least, as a man, he did not. As an inspector, he recognized emotional frailty might lead to an outpouring of information.
‘I’m afraid,’ he pressed on, ‘your husband is downstairs in one of the bedrooms with another lady. I do hate to be the bearer of such unfortunate news.’
Finally, she released her pen, placing it on the bedside table with the exhalation of someone whose concentration has been truly and unwelcomely wrecked.
‘Let’s not play games,’ she said. ‘You know very well he’s not my husband.’
‘But wasn’t it he you meant when you said darling? He’s not—’
‘Don’t you dare say it. I’m not nearly old enough to be Finbarr’s mother.’
‘I was going to say, your brother.’
‘He has become very like a brother to me, and is indeed very darling. Though I don’t see what business it is of yours.’
‘What business it is of mine, Mrs Christie,’ Chilton switched to her true name, though she had not yet confirmed her identity, ‘is that I am employed by the Yorkshire police. There are a good many officers searching for you.’
‘A good many? Searching for me? In Yorkshire?’
‘Yorkshire and everywhere else in England.’
Agatha frowned. She couldn’t even curse her bad luck at landing in Yorkshire. If she’d run off to Derbyshire or Cumberland or Norfolk, there would be police to come knocking on the door of her hideout.
‘Gracious,’ Agatha said, exhausted by the news. ‘What a fuss.’
‘So you admit, you’re Mrs Agatha Christie?’
‘I admit no such thing.’ But she looked doubtful.
If Miss O’Dea （he had begun thinking of me as Miss almost without considering it） or any other woman had done what Agatha did next, Chilton would have been on guard, considering it an attempt at manipulation. But when she reached out her hand, touching his arm, closing her fingers around the thick woollen cloth, he recognized the gesture as not woman to man, but human to human. A genuine and urgent entreaty.
‘Mr Chilton,’ she said, ‘have you ever been in trouble? Real trouble, the kind that comes not only from without but also from some place within? Some place you never even recognized?’
Her face looked open and painfully tender. Thirty-six is an age one looks back on as young. But at the time, living in thirty-six-year-old skin, it doesn’t feel young. Women start believing themselves old so soon, don’t they? Agatha didn’t realize it was her youth that allowed her to sit for hours in that comfortless rock of a chair, staring at her pages without need of spectacles, nary a twinge from the small of her back. One day far into the future she would look back on this time in her life and understand she had not been old, or even middle aged, but young, with the bulk of her life ahead of her, not to mention the best of it.
She trained her sharp eyes upon Mr Chilton, assessing him frankly as she let go of his sleeve.
What a different life it had been for Agatha since she’d gone on the run with Finbarr. What a different person it had made her already. Staying in an empty house without permission or even knowing the owner’s identity. Like an outlaw. This time she wouldn’t bother leaving money, no matter how much of the household she helped herself to. She had chosen a servant’s room for the sheer austerity of it, as well as the privacy. Sitting here now, with a stranger, a man, she felt no fear whatsoever, nor worry about impropriety. She had sidestepped right out of the world as she’d always known it and had landed someplace where, seemingly, nothing mattered, not even great search parties, elsewhere, all for her benefit.