Heartened a bit at this plan, he returns to his task of tromping through the trees and brush and around streams and their rivulets, making a show of poking through every branch, and listening to the volunteers talk. From their chatter, these folks seem to be enjoying this, almost as if it’s a mad, morbid caper. What would make these people break from their regular Sunday routines to search for a woman they don’t even know? He certainly wouldn’t do it. In fact, he wouldn’t have joined in the search today but for the specter of the alternative.
Even though Archie cannot see the volunteers and he’s hidden from their sight, he can hear them jabber away. They’ve been blathering about their daily lives and village gossip, but then he hears the voice of a young man say, “Hurtmore Cottage,” and his heart starts beating wildly. Archie has been assuming that his whereabouts on Friday night and Saturday morning would remain secret, but how idiotic of him. Why has he assumed that the policemen would have more discretion than the villagers? He’s been a damn fool. After all, the police officers are little more than villagers themselves.
He freezes, straining to hear what the man and his companions say next. Other than the word James, he cannot make out anything else, and he begins to relax, reframing their speculations in his mind. What of it? he thinks. Why can’t a man spend a golf weekend at a friend’s home without his wife? As far as anyone knows, that was the precise nature of his plans.
By God, though, Archie hopes that he can keep the Jameses, Hurtmore Cottage, and Nancy out of this mess. What must she be thinking today as more details have emerged? He phoned Sam and Nancy last evening when the police were busy holding a logistics meeting in the kitchen. After he explained the situation to each of them—which they’d already heard from the local gossips—they decided there should be no communication until the situation is resolved. But now he wishes that they hadn’t made that agreement. He’d welcome their familiar voices.
Instead, he plows forward with his sham of a search, suffering through the bitterly cold hours of the afternoon. Only when the daylight begins to wane does Kenward finally call it off and seek him out. Branches crack and leaves crunch under the weight of the detective chief constable as he makes his way toward Archie.
Panting at the exertion, Kenward says, “I hate to say it, Colonel, but I think the likelihood that your wife suffered some sort of minor accident and either collapsed somewhere in the thicket or wandered off in confusion is diminishing.”
Kenward stares at him, assessing his reaction. What in the name of God does he expect Archie to say? The futility of this search is apparent to even the simplest villager. Still, Archie says, “I’m very sorry to hear that, Detective Chief Constable Kenward.”
“Detective Chief Constable! Detective Chief Constable!” One of Kenward’s men calls to him, and two police officers race toward Archie and Kenward. Archie notes that the detective doesn’t even offer his men a shorter version of his title to use; he must want to have his lofty designation bandied about, reminding everyone who is in charge.
“Yes, man, spit it out,” Kenward barks at the panting man.
“There’s a report from Albury.” The policeman references the small village nearby as if that explains the urgency and his haste.
“And?”
“A woman who works at the Albury hotel saw a woman fitting the description of the colonel’s wife. We have a sighting.”
Chapter Fifteen
The Manuscript
October 14, 1916
Ashfield, Torquay, England
I wandered up the hill and veered left onto the lane leading to Ashfield. As I ambled, I passed houses that had practically brimmed with life in my childhood. Croquet at the MacGregors, dances at the Browns, idyllic summer picnics and badminton at the Lucys—nearly every home along the way contained memories of laughter and Torquay folks spilling out onto the lanes. Now those villas and houses and lanes were dark and silent; the war had shuttered them, in one way or another. I wondered if my perspective would be different if I’d married Reggie instead of Archie, an event that occurred an incredible two years ago. At once yesterday and a lifetime ago.
Once I crested the hill upon which Ashfield sat, I glanced out at the commanding views of the sea, thinking not about sailboat escapades of my youth but the naval fleet now battling the Germans. I’d seen too many of those sailors while nursing, horribly wounded after their skirmishes, and now, staring out at the whitecaps of the stormy ocean, I couldn’t help consider the poor souls who lay at the sea’s sandy bottom. While I worried constantly about Archie soaring the European skies as he fought the aerial war, the sailor’s lonely death was one fear I hadn’t contemplated until now.
When I opened the front door of Ashfield and finally entered the embrace of its fragrant parlor, it was like stepping back in time. Every object, every surface, every rug, every floorboard returned me to my youth, and I felt twelve years old again. I ran my finger along a dog figurine Papa had particularly adored, realizing how different the china dog—and my hand—looked now with my ring finger caressing it than it had when my unadorned, twelve-year-old finger touched it nightly. I was staring at the hand of a woman waiting for her real life to begin.
“Agatha, is that you?” The familiar voice rang out through Ashfield’s halls.
“It is, Mummy,” I called back and walked toward the back of the house.
“How was your day, darling?” Her voice grew louder as I neared the solarium where my mother and grandmother spent most of the day sitting side by side in cushioned chairs, two near invalids each pretending to be the other’s caretaker. The room could be drafty with all the windows, but the pair always selected this room above all others, seeking out every ray of light like a pair of tropical birds.
I peeked my head around the corner, and there they were, just as I’d pictured. “Yes, dear, do tell us,” my grandmother added in her quivering voice, turning her wrinkled face in my direction. Her cataracts rendered her nearly blind, so she leaned toward the sound of my voice.
I wanted to nestle a chair in between theirs and curl up like a kitten. Or a young girl. Instead, I sat across from them and asked, “Shall I tell you about the poisons I distributed today?”
Auntie-Grannie tittered at my dramatic inquiry, and even Mummy giggled a little. It was a safe bit of danger to hear about my handling of hazardous liquids and powders in the Torquay dispensary—although the actual peril was quite small—and it gave them a thrill without the actual fear that accompanied discussions of the war. After all, although he spent a long stint running through other people’s money on boat schemes in England and Africa and living well beyond his means, my brother, Monty, was back in the army, and his safety was never far from any of our minds.
They gazed at me expectantly, and I was struck by how much they resembled one another. Was it a trick of the light? I wondered. After all, they weren’t mother and daughter biologically, only legally, although they were bound by blood as well. Auntie-Grannie had adopted Mummy when she was a little girl, when her biological mother—Auntie-Grannie’s younger sister, who we called Granny B—had fallen on hard times. Her husband, a sea captain, had died and left her five children but not much in the way of pension. Auntie-Grannie, who’d married a wealthy, older widower with children but never had offspring of her own, offered to adopt one child, and Granny B had selected Mummy, her only daughter. My mother had never fully recovered from the sense that she’d been surrendered. Somehow, it didn’t appease her feelings of abandonment that she’d had a more affluent life than her brothers because she’d married Auntie-Grannie’s stepson, my papa.
Wide-eyed, my mother and grandmother waited for the details of my day. I’d left nursing and taken on the position at the dispensary after a bad bout of flu last year forced me out of the hospital and into my Ashfield bed as a temporary invalid. When I recovered, I learned that my old friend Eileen Morris was running the dispensary, and sh
e wanted me on staff, at a higher salary and with fewer, more favorably timed hours that would allow me to help out more at home, which was important once Auntie-Grannie moved into Ashfield over a year ago. But what began as a job chosen for convenience turned out to be a position with unique benefits. I adored the science—and the latent danger—of the dispensary.
“The morning began with a request for Donovan’s solution, which a doctor needed to treat a soldier who also suffered from diabetes. Now, this medicine contains a reasonable amount of arsenic, which, you know, is—”
Mummy interjected, “Highly poisonous. Now I do hope you were careful, Agatha.”
“Always,” I assured her and patted her hand. “But just as I finished mixing the solution, I noticed that our pharmacist, who was mixing the solution for a tray of suppositories, had gotten the decimal point wrong in the key ingredient. It would have made the suppositories quite toxic.”
Auntie-Grannie gasped, and Mummy asked, “What did you do?”
“Well, if I’d mentioned the error to our pharmacist directly, he’d have denied it and distributed a batch of very dangerous suppositories. So I pretended to stumble, and I knocked the entire tray to the ground.”
“Brilliant, darling,” Mummy said with a little clap, and I enjoyed the private fanfare. Most of the day at the dispensary passed quite slowly, as the work was monotonous; incidents like these and my own imagination were the only things that staved off the boredom of the hours where we waited for orders. But I knew better than to complain about the tedium of wartime, when most people faced unimaginable dangers.
Auntie-Grannie clapped too. “What is that little pharmacist like, anyway?” she asked.
“You’ve stumbled upon quite the right word for him—little. He’s a tiny man with a tiny man’s ego and defensiveness. But he has an unorthodox, slightly thrill-seeking side, which is a bit disturbing in a pharmacist.”
“Whatever do you mean, Agatha?” Mummy asked impatiently.
“Well, within a week of meeting him, he told me that he kept a cube of curare in his pocket, in a lethal dose. He confessed that he stored it there because it made him feel powerful.”
My mother visibly shuddered, and my grandmother tsked, saying, “I don’t think I’ll get my prescriptions filled by him any longer.”
I reveled in my newly acquired—and hard-won—knowledge of medicines and poisons, one of the intriguing benefits of the position. In order to serve in the dispensary, I’d studied for, taken, and passed the challenging assistants’ examination at Apothecaries’ Hall. For months, I’d spent weekends under the tutelage of commercial chemists, not to mention shadowing pharmacists to learn preparation techniques and memorizing medical tomes and various measurement systems. I’d never be so bold as to liken my experience to a pharmaceutical degree, but I certainly knew enough to be dangerous.
These women supported and championed me unconditionally, so why was I reluctant to discuss with them what else I worked on in the dispensary during the long hours when we had little to do as we awaited instructions from doctors and hospitals? What made me so hesitant to tell them that I’d written a novel? Not just any novel—I’d attempted a few over the years and completed one, as they both knew and had encouraged all along—but finally a detective story.
Did my reluctance stem from the origin of this book? I liked to think the inspiration came solely from the rows of poisons on the apothecary shelves and my knowledge about how one might wield them dangerously and secretly, but in truth, the genesis stemmed from Madge’s challenge. I was determined to prove my self-assured sister wrong, that I could write an unsolvable mystery. The elegant bottles of poisons on the shelves—so deceptively seductive with the sinuous shape of the glass and the vivid colors within—only fanned that spark into a blaze; I had at my disposal, literally and figuratively, the weapons to meet her challenge. Perhaps that is why I shied away from telling Mummy, because I didn’t want her to know that it was sibling rivalry that motivated me. Having never had a sister of her own, she desperately wanted Madge and I to have a supportive, loving bond.
“Shouldn’t you be packing, Agatha?” Mummy interrupted my thoughts. “Don’t you need to be ready to meet Archie tomorrow morning at the New Forest? Please don’t tell me his leave has been changed again.”
Archie’s last leave had been cancelled the night before we were supposed to meet, and even though part of me had been desperately disappointed not to see my husband, part of me had been the slightest bit relieved. His letters leading up to the planned leave had been increasingly depressive, even angry, and while I certainly understood the toll that the dangers of flying took upon his nerves and his body—not to mention watching so many of his fellow pilots die—I worried about his stability. I vacillated between wanting to race to his side so I could nurse him back to health and protecting myself from his mounting anger.
“No, Mummy, it’s still on. I suppose I should start packing.” I pushed myself off my chair, but before I left the solarium, I gave each of these elderly women a thorough assessment. Of course, I couldn’t wait to see my husband, but I still had lingering concerns about his state of mind, and Mummy and Auntie-Grannie looked especially frail. I was afraid to leave them alone. We’d had a rotating series of maids after Lucy replaced our stalwart Jane. Girl after girl left to join the Women’s Volunteer Reserve, and how could we complain? They were doing their wartime duties, just as I was doing mine. Finally, two elderly maids stepped in to help care for Mummy and Auntie-Grannie, and I now worried about the maids, too, both called Mary, funnily enough, nearly as much as my mother and grandmother. “Are you certain that you can manage without me for a few days? I do worry.”
“Don’t be silly, Agatha. We manage while you’re at work, don’t we?”
“Yes, but that’s only a few hours. And I’m just down the road if there’s an emergency.”
My mother stood and glared at me. She could be strangely formidable for such a kindly woman. “Agatha, how many times must I tell you? You must go to your husband. A gentleman cannot be left alone for too long.”
Chapter Sixteen
Day Two after the Disappearance
Sunday, December 5, 1926
Styles, Sunningdale, England
Archie paces his study. Back and forth over the crimson Turkish carpet, he cuts a path across its intricate design, almost as if he’s slicing it in two. He knows he shouldn’t be acting out, but the policeman’s announcement has riled him up.
Kenward stares at him. On the surface, the constable’s expression appears concerned and serious—all business—but Archie senses the smug delight that must lurk beneath that facade. The glee the detective must feel at exerting power over his superior in class and the irritation with Archie when he tries to reclaim some control.
“I believe I asked you a question, Detective Chief Constable Kenward,” Archie repeats, while rubbing his right temple. His head is pounding. “Why on earth are you sending my wife’s image to police stations and newspapers across the country? I fear you are turning a private matter into a public spectacle.”
“I thought I’d let you calm down before answering, Colonel.” Now Archie is certain he sees glee on the policeman’s face as he holds fast to a course of action Archie detests. All Kenward’s pretense of concern vanishes.
“This is as calm as I’m likely to be,” Archie seethes, feeling that familiar heightening of emotion that he used to experience with his wife. It would begin with slight irritation at her constant chatter over plots and characters that would boil over into fury and a throbbing headache as she continued with her flights of fancy and indecent discussions of feelings when all he wanted was the peace of a quiet dinner, the serenity of an orderly house and the evening newspaper, and the weekend spent on his club’s tidy eighteen-hole golf course with a pleasant woman nearby. But as soon as the words slip out, he knows they are a mistake. He cannot allow the pol
ice officers to see the mounting rage; a furious demeanor is not in keeping with the image he’s been instructed to maintain—that of concerned husband—or else.
“Well then, Colonel, I’ll speak plainly and explain we can no longer treat this as a private matter. We’ve combed a wide vicinity around her car and uncovered nothing. We’ve checked the rail stations and nearby towns and found no sign of her. We’ve tracked down the alleged sighting of her in Albury, which proved false. We have to extend our reach in the event, however unlikely, that she walked away from her car and traveled elsewhere.”
He forces himself not to allow his fear to assume its full voice, even though the emotions are very near the surface. If the police cast their net widely, the very facts he’s trying to hide will undoubtedly be revealed. But he’ll tip his hand regardless unless he gets a handle on his emotions.
Taking a deep breath, he says, “I’m sorry that I sounded ruffled, Detective Chief Constable Kenward; I guess that I am mostly confused. Why are you spreading her image and the news of her disappearance all around the country if you think it won’t yield anything?”
“I don’t think that’s what I said, Colonel.” Kenward’s voice is cold. He’s no longer keeping up pretenses either. “It is standard police procedure and may well yield important clues to your wife’s whereabouts. Why are you so reluctant to spread the information widely?”
It is Archie’s turn to ignore a question. “Are there additional avenues we can pursue?” he asks instead.
“Only interviews with your staff.” Kenward pauses and then says, “We are almost all the way through the list—barring one part-time person who’s been tricky to track down—and they are proving illuminating.”
His rage disappears, only to be replaced with a surge of fear. What has the staff told the police? Archie doesn’t dare answer and doesn’t dare fight back against Kenward again.
The Mystery of Mrs. Christie Page 7
