Day Three after the Disappearance
Monday, December 6, 1926
Styles, Sunningdale, England
Archie settles at the breakfast table after a sleepless night. The usual order of the table—the silver and crystal arranged just so, his coffee poured and steaming, and his eggs waiting under the silver dome, which the housemaid lifts as soon as he enters the dining room—calms him. Until he reaches for the morning newspaper. There, emblazoned in enormous script, is the headline he has feared, the one that kept him tossing and turning all night: Mystery of Woman Novelist Disappearing in Strange Circumstances. The article sets out Agatha’s authorial accomplishments—her three novels and the magazine serial stories that made her a modest success, if not exactly a household name—followed by a blow-by-blow of her vanishing.
Nausea wells up inside him, and he has to turn away from his breakfast—those damnable runny eggs—in order to gather himself. How on earth did the reporters grab hold of this story so quickly? When Kenward told him that he’d circulated his wife’s pictures yesterday, he’d assumed that he had a few days to gain control of the situation before news leaked out, that the information would remain in the hands of various police precincts. The speed with which the press has seized upon the story and begun its own investigation is unprecedented.
What to do, what to do, he begins to worry, to avoid the inevitable. Stop, he tells himself. This is all down to Kenward’s obvious dislike of him, nothing more. He cannot let the dramatic headline of one newspaper rattle him.
Despite his efforts, the specific, familiar pain takes hold. Reaching like the nimble arms of an octopus, it penetrates his temples, his brow, and then finally, his sinus cavity. With the gripping, paralytic pain comes the past. Suddenly, the quiet sounds of Rosalind and Charlotte and the chatter of the police officers in the kitchen disappears, and the roar of a plane engine drowns out all other noise. He sees not the heavy silk curtains and patterned wallpaper of his dining room but the vast expanse of sky and cloud through the impeded view of his aviator’s goggles. The rat-a-tat of gunfire begins to sound until a loud thud interrupts his fully immersive memory. Glancing up, he sees not the edge of his pilot’s goggles but Lilly with a fresh pot of tea. And he returns to the present moment, although the headache lingers.
Hands trembling, he reaches for a cigarette and folds the newspaper so that he cannot see his wife’s face peering up at him. Instead, he begins reading an article on the forty-third council session of the League of Nations that is set to begin today in Geneva, anything to push this ordeal from his thoughts. He’s considering the focal point of the meeting—Germany’s request that the league abandon a military commission left over from the Great War—when he hears the phone jangling in the distance. He pays it no mind, as the phone has rung almost constantly since Saturday morning, and he knows that Charlotte will summon him if it’s necessary. In less than a minute, he knows it’s necessary. It is his mother.
“Archie, have you seen the headlines?” she asks by way of greeting. He’d spoken to his mother extensively over the weekend about the disappearance and subsequent search. His mother, no great admirer of his wife, had her own theories about the matter, but Archie refused to engage with her on the subject.
“Yes, Mother, I read the Times every morning.” She has an unnerving way of making him feel ten years old again. When she uses a particular tone of voice, he’s transported back to his first day at Hillside Preparatory School in Godalming, arriving in the very strange world of England after spending his whole childhood in India. When his father died during his service as a barrister in the Indian Civil Service, Archie, his brother Campbell, and his mother had been forced to return to England and begin anew, after a stint in his mother’s native Ireland. And he never felt like he belonged. Until recently.
“I don’t just mean the Times. I mean the Gazette and the Telegraph and the Post. Honestly, Archie, I could go on and on, but I won’t. The articles are small in some papers and front and center in others, but every newspaper is reporting your wife’s disappearance.”
“How do you know?”
“When we received our regular paper this morning with that dreadful headline, I sent your stepfather out to the newsstand. He picked up an edition of the other papers, and they all had some version of that same headline about your wife.”
“My god.” He now understands that Deputy Chief Constable Kenward sent the reporters more than just a photograph of his missing wife. In order to garner this sort of coverage, Kenward must have insinuated that an unseemly act lurks at the center of this. And that Archie sits at that center. The damn man is responsible for the story of Agatha’s disappearance blanketing the newspapers.
“It’s terrible, Archie. All this public airing of your private life.” She pauses and then whispers, “Who knows what might be revealed?”
“Yes, Mother, I understand that better than anyone,” Archie says, desperately wishing that today’s newspaper coverage was the end while at the same time fully understanding that it is only the beginning. He cannot afford having these awful rags prying more deeply into his and Agatha’s private life; they could find out about his relationship with Nancy. This cannot happen.
After he replaces the phone in its cradle, he passes through the entryway, nearly knocking into Charlotte and Rosalind. They’d left while he was on the phone with his mother, hurrying Rosalind off to her day school. Why were they back? He had far too much on his mind to worry about his daughter’s attendance record. That was Charlotte’s province and, to a lesser extent, his wife’s.
He tries to scurry across the entryway without encountering Charlotte and Rosalind, without success. “Colonel Christie, Colonel Christie,” Charlotte calls out to him, although he’s only a few yards away.
“I’m right here, Charlotte.” He tries not to sound irritated. Much relies on Charlotte’s discretion, and it seems his hosting of her sister Mary at Styles will only go so far.
“Sir, it’s a circus out there. It’s not safe to take Rosalind to school.”
As Charlotte helps his daughter out of her coat, he notices for the first time that her hair is disheveled under her cloche hat. And the secretary governess is always impeccable. “Whatever do you mean?”
“Colonel, there must be fifteen or—”
“Twenty, Papa,” Rosalind interjects. “I counted twenty reporters on the front lawn. Some with notepads, many with cameras. The flashing was so bright it hurt my eyes.”
He squats down next to his daughter, who is more composed than Charlotte. Incredible, given the circumstances. Pushing aside a delicate brown curl that’s fallen into her eyes, he stifles the brewing fury that his daughter should have to deal with this onslaught. She cannot witness his upset; he must remain the essence of calm in her presence. “Are you all right, darling?”
“Yes, Papa. They were very silly men. Quite stupid, actually. They kept asking where Mama was. But don’t they know she’s at Ashfield writing?”
“I guess they don’t, darling.”
“I almost told them, but Charlotte said I shouldn’t speak to the men.”
“She’s quite right, darling. The men are strangers, and as you said yourself, they’re silly.” He stands up. “In any event, I’m about to tell them to push off, so you won’t have to trouble yourself about them anymore.”
“Papa!” Rosalind squeals at Archie’s rough language. “Push off” is a definite no-no for his daughter.
He squeezes her small hand, then passes her into Charlotte’s care. Squaring his shoulders, he opens the front door, ready to order the press from his land with an authoritative roar. He will drive them from his home, no matter the impossible position in which he has found himself, hamstrung between the implicit accusations from the police as they investigate a disappearance that increasingly points toward him and the explicit instructions left to him in the letter upon which his future depends. But when he swings the door open wide and squints into the flashing lights, Archie comprehends the magnitude of the public eye and realizes nothing will ever be the same.