The Mystery of Mrs. Christie

by Marie Benedict

  “How would you describe your wife, Colonel Christie?”

  “Her hair has a reddish hue but is streaked with gray—”

  Goddard interrupts, “My apologies for being vague, Colonel. How would you describe your wife’s personality?”

  “Hmm.” Archie is surprised at the query; it’s one he hasn’t been asked yet. “I suppose she’s like any wife and mother in some ways.”

  “But in others?”

  “She has an artistic temperament, I guess. Creative interests. She’s a writer, you know.”

  “I do, and I wondered whether she has that fiery temper we always hear about with artists.” Goddard says this with a smile, as if it’s a grand joke.

  “I wouldn’t say she has a temper. But she is highly strung and prone to share her emotions and thoughts, sometimes with great feeling. As you hinted at, artists aren’t known for their restraint.”

  Goddard leans toward Archie as if they are sharing an important secret. “The more witnesses I interview, I find that they share your description of Mrs. Christie’s disposition. In my years of police work, in which I’ve encountered many who share your wife’s high-strung character, I’ve seen that if those people become overwrought—for whatever reason—then they may take flight.”

  Archie holds his breath. Is this policeman actually offering a hypothesis for his wife’s whereabouts? One that doesn’t involve his malfeasance, as Kenward clearly believes?

  “This is all hypothetically speaking, of course,” Goddard adds.

  Archie knows he has a very fine line to walk. Venturing a hopeful expression, he says, “You know, Superintendent Goddard, I do believe that you are the first policeman on this case holding that view. I think—”

  The study door vibrates with a steady knock. “Colonel Christie, sir, there are two policemen here who say they must speak with Superintendent Goddard,” Lilly calls out.

  “Let them in,” Archie calls back.

  Two of Goddard’s men, distinctive by their uniforms, enter the room. “It’s a deluge, sir,” the older-looking one reports.

  “A weather report justifies the interruption of my meeting with Colonel Christie?” Goddard asks, his anger barely contained. It is a different side to the amenable superintendent than he’s presented thus far.

  “Apologies for being vague, sir, but it’s not that sort of deluge. Jim Barnes of Daily News has been covering Mrs. Christie’s disappearance, and he’s just offered one hundred pounds for information leading to the location of the colonel’s wife.”

  “I see.”

  “In the two hours since the announcement was made, we’ve had nearly a dozen reports of sightings.” The policeman checks his notepad and says, “We’ve got Ralph Brown of Battersea claiming to have seen Mrs. Christie on Albury Heath on Saturday morning walking about distracted. There’s Mrs. Kitchings of Little London—that’s near Newlands Corner—reporting that she saw a woman matching the newspaper photos of Mrs. Christie walking in a lane near her house around noon on Saturday. A railway porter named Mr. Fuett maintains that he was approached on Sunday at Milford station by a woman fitting Mrs. Christie’s description. The list goes on, sir.”

  “It looks like we’ve got some claims to investigate in order to locate your wife, Colonel Christie. I apologize for having to end our discussion,” Superintendent Goddard says as he rises. He then places his hand briefly on Archie’s shoulder, saying, “I am certain we will find her.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Manuscript

  February 15, 1922

  Mount Nelson Hotel, Cape Town, South Africa

  “Oh, you do shuffle the cards well, Mrs. Christie. Will you please sit with us and deal our hands?” Mrs. Hiam asked. What sounded like a request was actually more like a command, and she knew I had no choice but to obey. But now that Archie was sick in the hotel room again for an indeterminate period with who knows what ailment—likely his stomach—I had no choice. At least one Christie had to perform his or her designated duty lest we risk sanctioning by our mercurial leader, Major Belcher.

  I had wanted to take advantage of this brief break in our itinerary to finish up my short story. Despite the overwhelming demands of the Empire Tour schedule—which traversed from South Africa to Australia to New Zealand to Hawaii and finally to Canada before returning home—I’d managed to meet my deadlines for the Sketch magazine. But my next due date was fast approaching and much work remained. My editor at the publication had commissioned twelve stories with Hercule Poirot at the center, and I enjoyed fleshing out this peculiar little detective, who’d sprung fully formed from my imagination like the goddess Athena who’d sprung from Zeus’s skull grown and battle ready. Well, mystery ready anyway.

  My book outline called to me as well. Our journey on the RMS Kildonan Castle from England to South Africa, where we kicked off the Empire Tour, had prompted an outpouring of notes on a setting for a new novel, as had the magnificent sites we’d seen since docking in South Africa. Still, nothing provided more inspiration than the tour’s leader, Major Belcher. What he lacked in leadership and organizational abilities, he more than made up for in quirky qualities, which I could use for character material.

  I was bursting to write. While traveling, I felt like a different person, in a different life. Shed of the daily responsibilities of normal existence—paying bills, doing chores, writing letters, managing a nurse and a maid, which was the bare minimum of staff, shopping at the market, mending clothes, and, most importantly, tending to Rosalind—I felt light and brimming with energy for creative endeavors. Entire scenes appeared in my mind fully formed, pulling me toward my hotel room and my typewriter, and I longed to deny Mrs. Hiam’s request.

  But that wasn’t what I did. It wasn’t what I said. Instead, as always, I did and said what duty demanded. Even if I had duties of my own from my profession, I knew those would not be considered equal to the duties emanating from my husband and his position. Suppressing any irritation I might feel at this disparity, I turned toward the ladies with a smile.

  “Of course, Mrs. Hiam. It would be my pleasure to assist you ladies,” I said. I wasn’t certain I could withstand another steaming hot afternoon in the company of these dull, self-important ladies who spent most of their time complaining instead of admiring the views. Mrs. Hiam’s favorite topics were—in no particular order—the oppressiveness of the heat, the overabundance of dust, the constant threat of malaria and sleeping sickness, the unpleasantly Dutch appearance of the South African houses, the unpalatability of the food, and the ceaseless buzz of mosquitos. She circled back to those subjects every day, much as she probably discussed the rain and tuberculosis at home, and I wondered why she’d bothered to travel so far from home if she desperately longed for England.

  As I cut the deck and shuffled the cards, I made idle chatter with Mrs. Hiam, two other ladies staying at the hotel whose names escaped me, and Mrs. Belcher, who was my boss for all intents and purposes. Her husband, Major Belcher, was the assistant general manager of the 1924 Empire Exhibition, and this grand tour upon which we’d embarked was meant to promote the exhibition to the political leaders and key businessmen in the dominions of the English empire. When Archie came home from work last December with the news that his old Clifton instructor Major Belcher had invited him to join the Empire Tour as financial advisor, I was euphoric. Once I learned that I’d been invited and that the one-thousand-pound stipend Archie would earn for the trip would cover my expenses, that was. I dreamed that the trip might restore Archie’s spirits—which constantly hovered between dejected and depressed over his prospects at his new firm, Goldstein’s, and the propriety of some of the work undertaken by it—and that we’d finally be able to rekindle the passion of our earlier days. Perhaps, I thought, there might even be time and mental space left over for my creative endeavors to flourish. What I didn’t understand then was that our main task on the Empire T
our would be to babysit the capricious, often explosive Major Belcher and to smooth over the ruffled feathers he left in his wake. I was often left wondering at what cost we paid for the privilege of this trip.

  At the thought of the tour’s cost, I was reminded of Rosalind. She’d looked so much tinier than two years old when I waved goodbye to her from the deck of the RMS Kildonan Castle on that frigid January morning, and I’d experienced an almost overwhelming pang of regret as she reached for me from the dock. But then Archie wrapped his arms around me, an implicit reminder of his admonition to make him my priority, and I knew I’d made the right decision. I could almost hear Mummy’s voice in my head when I asked her advice—even more strident than usual—about the trip: A wife’s duty is to be with her husband, because her husband must come first, even before her children. If a wife leaves her husband alone for too long, she will lose him. But even though I knew Madge and Mummy would take good care of Rosalind, I constantly wondered whether I’d done the wrong thing by agreeing to leave my baby behind for a year.

  “Mrs. Christie?”

  I heard my name as if from a distance as I shuffled and reshuffled the cards, lost in my thoughts about the tour.

  “Mrs. Christie,” Mrs. Hiam said again, practically yelling this time. She felt comfortable taking extensive liberties in her treatment of me because she was Mrs. Belcher’s closest friend and felt that she was my boss by proxy. “I believe the deck is thoroughly shuffled. You may stop and deal.”

  “My apologies, ladies,” I said with a broad smile. “My thoughts had wandered to the intriguing exhibit we saw this afternoon at the Cape Town Museum. Wasn’t the lecture about cave paintings and the evolution of early skulls simply fascinating?” I’d been captivated by the museum’s collection of early skulls, from Pithecanthropus and beyond, with all the variations over time, particularly in the jaw and jaw angle, and I’d been dismayed to learn that early excavations had lost critical parts of the skulls in their haste to loosen the relics from the earth. It had been one of the most illuminating afternoons I’d ever experienced, making clear that mankind’s evolution was very circuitous and not the linear path we’d once assumed. Perhaps this was mankind’s fate—to learn that none of our paths were as straight as we believed they would be.

  I received a chorus of “oh yeses,” but my attempt to lead the ladies into a conversation revolving around culture petered out. It wasn’t that the ladies on the tour were completely immune to the lure of ancient artifacts or unique cultural practices, but the moment they returned to the familiarity of the hotel or the ship, they also returned to the conversations and behaviors of home. In some ways, it was as if they never left their England.

  I feigned interest for the tenth time that afternoon alone, even though I could practically faint from the heat and the exhaustion. The day’s itinerary had been grueling in and of itself; after I’d spent a late night nursing Belcher’s septic foot back to some semblance of mobility, a task assigned to me because of my work as a war nurse, we’d started the morning with a tour of a fruit farm after an early breakfast, then lunched with a local official, followed by the tour of the museum and a hike around nearby gardens. We now had this brief respite before a garden party at the archbishop’s residence. The exuberance that Archie had begun to beg me to tamp down he now relied upon to maneuver both of us through these events. But it wasn’t the schedule that exhausted me; it was the unrelenting banality of the people. It was the same reason I kept to myself and wrote stories instead of mingling with the other mothers and wives in my London neighborhood.

  My eyes felt heavy, and I was in danger of drifting off when I spotted Archie walking into the lobby. My spirits lifted as I watched my handsome husband lope in my direction. He lifted his hand in a half wave, and I wondered if we might slip off for a bit of surfing.

  We had just discovered the sport of surf bathing with planks and were hooked on it. Archie and I began surfing at Muizenberg, a picturesque bay bordered by mountains that plummeted directly into the sea, which was easily accessible from the tour hotel by a short train ride. When I first held the surfboard in my hands, the thin wood seemed flimsy, and I wondered how on earth it would support me in a lying position on the rocking waves, let alone standing. But over time and after I scraped my arms and legs several times upon the sandy shore, I got the hang of it, even more quickly than Archie in fact. By the end of our first afternoon surfing, I was riding the waves into the shore with relative ease. I remember grinning over at Archie, water dripping off my face, hair, and bathing costume, feeling alive and blissfully happy with the sport, and him returning my smile. The connection for which I’d longed seemed possible in that golden moment.

  Keeping Archie’s gaze, I mimed surfing and then gave him a quizzical expression. His face lit up, and he nodded at me. Making my excuses to the ladies, I began to rise from the card table when I spotted Belcher making a beeline for my husband. I held my breath as the changeable major—as wont to have a temper tantrum as to bestow an elaborate compliment—gesticulated wildly to Archie. My husband struggled to maintain his usually placid expression, and I thought that I might be able to rescue him from Belcher if I intervened immediately.

  As I took my leave from the ladies and turned away from the card table, I heard my name. It was Mrs. Hiam again.

  “Oh, Mrs. Christie, my ivory evening dress will certainly need a press before tonight’s dinner. Oh, how the heat wilts my silks!” she announced, then glanced around the table to ensure she received the tittering she sought. “You will help me with that, won’t you?”

  Glancing across the room at Archie, I saw that he was helpless as well; Belcher had conscripted him for some task. We gave each other a feeble smile, and I knew we’d find time to head to Muizenberg again. I knew that duty would call us again and again on the Empire Tour, but I felt confident that we’d string these brilliant times together so we’d return home stronger than before.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Day Five after the Disappearance

  Wednesday, December 8, 1926

  Styles, Sunningdale, England, and the Rio Tinto Company Building, London, England

  Tuesday night is not kind to Archie. The evening started with private police reports and public newspaper articles on the slew of purported sightings. Although the reward certainly incentivized most of the reports—the spurious and the earnest claims alike—the revelation that some reporters actually paid some citizens to file fake claims so they’d have fresh sensational articles has astonished even the crime-hardened police. The night continued with the newspapers releasing details about his wife’s letter to his brother, homing in on Agatha’s reference to feeling ill: what, the reporters had posited, or who could have caused Mrs. Christie to be so ill that she’d flee? Archie worries that this inquiry will lead them back to him.

  His apprehension becomes reality. Reporters and readers cast about for a source of Agatha’s illness, and by Wednesday morning, their eyes land on Archie. He’s certain that suggestions and innuendos Kenward has been feeding to the press—or so he believes—have fanned these flames. Overnight, he is transformed from handsome war hero in an idyllic marriage to suspicious catalyst for his wife’s flight.

  Kenward and Goddard are overwhelmed with the sighting accounts, and their collective forces are tasked with interviewing the involved citizens. As a result, the official search is halted for the day, even though civilians still prowl the fields and woods for clues. Despite experiencing relief at the shift in focus, Archie feels aimless after Charlotte and the police escort take Rosalind to school. He decides on a dose of normalcy and heads to his office in the Delage.

  As he drives toward London, he’s tempted to swerve off course to see Sam James or Nancy; to bolster their spirits, he rationalizes to himself. But then he realizes the true reason he wants to see them is to quell his own nerves as well as his fears about what they might have said to the authorities. Even thoug
h they’d all agreed to temporarily halt communication with one another, he finds himself veering toward the exit to Hurtmore Cottage first and then to the home Nancy shares with her parents. Each time, just as he’s about to make the turn, he stops himself.

  Archie congratulates himself for having made the correct decision a few minutes later when he notices a plain gray Morris following his route into the city. Has the car been there the entire time but he too enmeshed in his own thoughts to notice? Or has he become paranoid? Taking an earlier exit to London than usual, he watches to see if the automobile mimics his quick turn. It does. As he weaves in and out of traffic and traverses down side streets to reach his office building, the Morris never loses sight of him. He begins to feel irritated at Kenward, who undoubtedly ordered this surveillance, but he tells himself not to worry, that protocol must demand it regardless of how the constable perceives him.

  Instead of focusing on Kenward’s perception of him, he allows London to envelop him, with its bustle of cars and trucks and busy people. The hubbub heartens him. The entirety of London is not focused upon the disappearance of his wife. Life proceeds in the capital. He wants to slide into its bustling masses and become anonymous.

  Almost feeling like himself, he parks the car alongside Broad Street. Walking to the Rio Tinto Company building, where his office is located, he notices that the men in the car tailing him have exited their vehicle and walk in his wake. It seems that the trilby-wearing detectives plan on keeping an eye on him while he works. Well, let them, he thinks. They can stand outside in the cold while I take my time in the office. There will be nothing to see but the daily doings of work.

  He strolls into the lobby as if it is any other day. As he waits for the elevator, he imagines a productive day ahead in his office at Austral Limited, where he serves on the board of directors. He nearly bristles with excitement at the prospect of routine paperwork and office meetings. Orderly, ordinary life.