‘Searching for a dead woman, are we?’ Thompson’s tone meant to remind Archie of who was in charge of whom, and who knew what.
‘No,’ Archie insisted. ‘She’s alive. I know she is.’
‘You’re right to know we’re not awfully good at finding women. You know who else we haven’t managed to locate? A Miss Nan O’Dea. She seems to have gone missing from her place of employment as well as her flat.’ He didn’t tell Archie that he wasn’t worried about my wellbeing. An officer had stopped in to the Imperial British Rubber Company and learned that I’d phoned to say my holiday would last a few days longer than expected. It would do just as well, Thompson thought, to wait on interviewing me until after a murder was confirmed.
‘There’s no need to trouble Nan,’ Archie said. ‘No need at all. She’s the last person to know where Agatha’s disappeared to.’
‘And who would you say is the first?’
A dark, sorrowful look crossed Archie’s face and he disappointed Thompson by breaking down in tears. Even if Archie Christie turned out not to be behind his wife’s disappearance, the constable wished to waste no sympathy on him. Yesterday Archie had given a rather unfortunate interview to the Daily Mail, insisting his wife would never do harm to herself but adding that if she did, it would most certainly be with poison. Like so many men who believed themselves above reproach in deed and word, the manifest destiny of mattering in the world, Archie had no inkling of how to edit himself. Thompson, like so many men in positions of power who nonetheless found themselves tacitly subordinate to the Archies of the world, enjoyed imagining his downfall. He did not wish to feel a drop of kindness towards him, so it was most inconvenient that Archie Christie’s tears appeared to spring from genuine, uncontrollable agony.
Archie drove to his mother’s through the rain, shivering. He’d left Styles without his coat, most unlike him. He’d broken down in tears in front of another man and he didn’t feel shame, or embarrassment, or anything except the nagging, overriding, maddening question. Where is she?
He regretted the interview he’d given to the Mail. As if the police weren’t looking at him sideways already. No more press, Archie vowed, thinking not of himself but his wife. She was shy. Shy. The idea some of the officers floated, that this might be a publicity stunt, was utterly preposterous. His wife would never do such a thing. If she were alive, how could she possibly avoid seeing the newspaper articles, splashed across England – the world! – screaming her name? She would be horrified. At first glance of a headline – blaring her age! – she would ring Archie, or turn herself into the police, or simply board a train and come home. This was what worried him most. Where could she be that the publicity had not reached her? The only place he could think of was dead.
Dorothy Sayers, who fancied herself a medium as well as a novelist, had come to the Silent Pool and claimed to sense Agatha’s absence from the region. Now that was a publicity stunt, atrocious woman, hopping on the coat tails of the sort of infamy tailor made to sell detective novels by the bushel. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had phoned to deliver the sad news that he’d consulted a psychic who’d assured him Agatha no longer inhabited our mortal realm. ‘We’re working on direct word from her,’ Conan Doyle had said, and Archie rang off without a word, Order of the British Empire be damned. Oh, it was all nonsense, this idea that spirits could communicate what hundreds of living men could not find with their own hands and eyes.
Still, when Archie reached his mother’s house, he switched off the ignition and leaned his cheek against the glass of the driver’s side window. He closed his eyes and tried to sense whether or not Agatha was gone from this world. Can a man live with a woman for so many years, sleep beside her so many nights, without the molecules in his body palpably rearranging themselves in the event of her death? He forgot they had ever separated, in body or affection. He forgot divorce was a word that existed in the English language.
She’s alive, he thought. I know she is.
Agatha was shy and lovely and thoughtful and proper. Agatha was considerate. Agatha would be horrified, knowing what a fuss had risen, all in her name. She couldn’t possibly be alive and avoid seeing a newspaper. And she couldn’t possibly see a newspaper and not come rushing home.