‘Why, Sam,’ she said to Lippincott, ‘Mrs O’Dea has been with us more than a week. I know her face perfectly well. She’s a smaller lady. Younger. Dark hair.’
‘Hard to determine hair colour by a photograph,’ Lippincott told her. ‘I’ve seen photographs of my own mother I’d swear weren’t her. Devilish art form, if you ask me.’
‘Well, I know my own mother in photographs. And I know Mrs O’Dea and this isn’t her.’
Mr Leech bustled into the room. He greeted his cousin with a heartily fond handshake, then squinted at the picture obligingly. ‘I think this Mrs O’Dea could very well be this woman,’ he announced.
‘Good gracious, Simon. You’ve scarcely glanced at her,’ said Mrs Leech. He wasn’t even wearing his spectacles. She huffed off without a goodbye or backwards glance.
‘I say.’ Mr Leech smiled at Lippincott. ‘It’ll be marvellous publicity, won’t it, Sam? The Bellefort Hotel splashed over every newspaper in the country. Good enough for Agatha Christie.’ He’d never heard of Agatha Christie until this moment but if her name was in the papers over a few days unaccounted for, she had to be enormously famous.
Lippincott, Leech and Archie formulated a plan. They agreed Archie should not confront his wife by going to her room, or standing at the bottom of the stairs waiting for her to come down to breakfast. Instead, they situated him in the drawing room, an open newspaper obfuscating his identity, while Lippincott waited in the lobby to intercept.
‘Isabelle assures me Mrs O’Dea is in her room,’ Mr Leech told his cousin. ‘And while she’s been in and out a good bit, she usually does take a meal upon rising.’
His words had barely left his mouth when Chilton and Agatha came down the stairs. They were engrossed in each other, heads close together. She had forgotten to wear his hat, as if she believed herself no longer visible to the outside world, but could move through it undetected, in any situation. Chilton did not have his arm around her waist, luckily, but his hand fluttered as he talked, cupping the air by her elbow in a manner that appeared intimate. Lippincott’s jaw dropped. Partly at the audacity of it. Partly at the change that had come over Chilton in the mere days since last he’d seen him. He looked taller. His hair was neatly in place. And he seemed terribly light-hearted, not only for himself, but for someone who’d been investigating a missing person and a possible double murder.
But it was the woman who surprised him most. Looking younger than her photographs, and also light, happy – incandescent, even. Dressed as if she’d just walked in from ploughing a field, wholly inappropriate. He’d expected, if it were indeed her, to find a ghostly shell. The woman who stood before him – blind to surroundings apart from her companion – was quite the opposite.
‘Mrs Christie,’ said Lippincott. And just like that, the bubble burst.
Agatha and Chilton snapped their gazes to the foot of the stairs. Their hands came down to their sides. Lippincott was a kindly man on the whole but his tone in this moment – the four abrupt and indignant syllables, distinctly chastising with additional phrases implied. Mrs Christie. How dare you. Mrs Christie. What on earth do you think you’re doing? A tone used freely by all kinds of men, meant to return a person to reality, meaning proper behaviour, befitting whomever it was they’d proclaimed her to be. Her imperviousness vanished. The shame whose absence she had marvelled at descended, a bucket of water, a shroud.
‘Well, Mr Chilton,’ Lippincott said, his voice changing entirely, aghast but with a whiff of admiration. ‘I see you’ve found her.’
Archie, listening from behind his newspaper in the drawing room just off the main hall, could bear it no longer. He had to see if it was really her. He imagined two scenarios. One, feasting his eyes upon his wife, upon Agatha, seeing her alive and whole and well, knowing this entire nightmare had finally ended. And two, seeing a stranger, someone wholly irrelevant, this trip another dead end, a needless waste of time like dredging the Silent Pool or engaging spirit mediums, his life forevermore this circus of public scrutiny and unanswered questions.
Stepping into the front hall, he drew in his breath. There Agatha stood. Wearing trousers and a jumper. Hair grips holding back the wisps off her forehead like a girl. If he had registered Chilton and his proximity to her, he might have sprung at him. But Chilton was not the sort of man Archie registered unless he needed something. If he had walked into a room and seen Chilton close by, he might have wordlessly handed him his coat and hat.
Relief flooded Archie’s body, as if it had been administered by syringe. He had pictured his wife’s lifeless body in so many places: at the bottom of a lake, in a ditch, in the bonnet of some maniac’s car. All the ways Agatha herself had imagined bodies ending up dead – all the ways she would imagine them ending up dead – Archie had imagined hers. And he was not an imaginative man. Now he felt too overcome to recognize the dismay on her face. It didn’t occur to him that she hadn’t wanted to be found. He should have realized. At one glance he should have known: he’d lost her.
‘Agatha.’
‘Archie.’ Unnaturally loud, in case I was in the hotel. To warn me. There was no need for both of us to be caught.
Archie pointed to the door of the library. His hand trembled before him like it belonged to a hundred-year-old man. That’s what these eleven days had done to him, how much they’d aged him. But there were things to be said in private that might restore him yet.
Agatha stood frozen, like a misbehaved schoolgirl summoned by the headmaster. The newspaper headlines and all their readers. The manpower wasted on the search for her, and all the worry. Her child left at home without so much as a goodbye. Everything she’d been miraculously able to turn a blind eye to came rushing in with the force of a river when the dam is lifted.
She dared not look at Chilton. She stepped away from him, bowing her head, and descended the stairs. She walked into the library obediently and sat on the very edge of the worn sofa, as if worried she’d dirty it, suddenly aware of how she was presenting herself to the world, in these outrageously inappropriate clothes, no jewellery. Like she was an urchin caught playing in the streets.
But Archie – he did something wholly unexpected. Alone in a room with her, seeing her mortified face – dear, pinched, pretty, familiar face – he dropped to his knees. He laid his face in her lap, immune to any foreign smells, wrapping his arms around her.
‘A.C.,’ he said, his voice as close to weeping as she’d ever heard it. ‘You’re alive. Are you all right?’
‘I am.’ Her voice sounded frightfully weak. She knew she was supposed to say it back, A.C., but she couldn’t bring herself to do so.