He had packed his bags and gone to spend the weekend with his mistress, Nancy Neele.
That evening, leaving their daughter Rosalind asleep in bed, Agatha drove off from her Sunningdale mansion in her grey Morris Cowley. She left a letter for her secretary, saying her engagements should be cancelled and that she was off to Yorkshire.
But she also posted a letter to the Deputy Chief Constable of Surrey, claiming she feared for her life and asking for his help.
Her car was found abandoned next morning. Like Georgia Lester’s Jaguar, Agatha’s Morris was found near a local beauty spot, Silent Pool. Inside the car was Agatha’s fur coat and a small suitcase containing three dresses, two pairs of shoes and her expired driving licence.
The newspapers of the time fell upon the story, speculating on whether the missing mystery writer had been murdered or committed suicide.
This newspaper even offered a 100 reward for information leading to her discovery. Suspicion naturally fell on her unfaithful husband while the manhunt continued. Silent Pool was dredged, light aircraft flew low over the area looking for traces and a pack of Airedales and bloodhounds were tracked over the ground, all to no avail.
The police of four counties coordinated a mass search of the Downs, in which 15,000 volunteers took part.
Criminologist Edgar Lustgarten wrote a piece for the Daily Mail, commenting that Agatha was indulging in “a typical case of ‘mental reprisal’.”
Sales of her books boomed, naturally. Meanwhile, at the Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate (now the Old Swan) a woman registered as Mrs. Neele was enjoying all the facilities the hotel had to offer for seven guineas a week. She was chatting to guests, claiming to be from South Africa, taking meals in the restaurant and enjoying the ballroom dancing.
But a sharp-eyed banjo player in the hotel band recognized her from the press photographs.
Police were called in and watched her for two days before her husband arrived and confirmed that the mysterious Mrs. Neele was in fact his wife. The press accused her of publicity-seeking, although two doctors testified that she was suffering from a genuine case of amnesia brought on by stress.
Agatha Christie carried the truth behind her vanishing act to her grave. We will never know if she really lost her memory or if she was taking public vengeance against her husband. And today, similar questions must arise from Georgia Lester’s disappearance. With her new book due out, is she simply seeking publicity? Is she taking her revenge against her publisher for not taking her fears of a stalker seriously? Or has something more sinister happened to Britain’s contemporary Queen of Crime? Her legions of fans anxiously await the answer.
They weren’t the only ones, Kit thought. He wouldn’t mind some answers himself. What’s more, if Georgia had indeed staged her disappearance, he felt he deserved them. They were supposed to be mates, him and Georgia. She had been one of the first crime writers he’d ever met once he was himself a published author.
He vividly remembered the first event they’d done together, at a literary festival in the Midlands. His first novel had just come out in paperback, and it was only the third public appearance he’d ever made as an author. He was overawed to find himself on the same platform as Georgia, already a bestseller, and another writer whose books had leapt to prominence on the back of a particularly classy TV adaptation. In the green room before the event, the TV-tie-in author had gleefully spotted Kit’s nerves and was indulging himself in a pernicious mixture of patronizing put-downs and the sort of event-disaster anecdote calculated to trigger a fit of panic in any but the most sanguine.
Georgia had swept in on the tail end of one of these, all white silk and Chanel No. 5. She’d taken one look at Kit’s anxious face, then shot a shrewd glance at the other author. “You really are a bastard, Godfrey, upsetting this poor sweet boy,” she’d said, then settled like a stylish swan on the arm of Kit’s chair. She put a manicured hand on his arm. “I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you, Kit. I thought The Dissection Man was absolutely the best thriller I read last year. I just know you are going to be a mega-star.”
He’d mumbled something awkward and complimentary in response.
“And you absolutely mustn’t be nervous, darling. Just remember, those people are out there because they love what we all do. They want so very much to like you as much as they like your books. You’d have to be an utter monster for them not to take you to their bosoms. And you’re clearly not that, my dear.”
It had been what he needed to hear. Thanks to Georgia, he relaxed into the event and, to his astonishment, actually began to enjoy himself. He watched and listened as she and Godfrey worked the room and by the end of the evening, he’d come to realize that he too could perform. All he’d lacked was the technique that provided the confidence to allow him to sail through.
Afterwards, he’d gone for supper with Georgia and her publicist. It had been the start of what had developed into a surprisingly close relationship. Surprising because, although one strand of Georgia’s work incorporated some of the grisliness of his own serial killer thrillers, they could not have been more different in temperament, outlook and lifestyle. But their mutual respect and affection had always carried them over their differences in everything from politics to social background. The amused tolerance he sometimes felt for her more scandalous pronouncements had never even dented their friendship. His only regret was that Fiona never seemed to see beyond Georgia’s public face to the warmth behind it. Somehow, Georgia always seemed to get under Fiona’s skin, though he could never quite grasp the source of the friction. What seemed like an innocuous remark to him could provoke a sudden flash of irritation in Fiona’s eyes, leaving him baffled. In the end, he put it down to bad chemistry and tried to keep them apart wherever possible.
Kit wished he could work out what was going on with Georgia. While she was perfectly capable of something as outrageous as staging a disappearance to embarrass her publishers, he really didn’t believe she would let Anthony suffer too. In spite of Georgia’s frequent indiscretions and infidelities, she relied on Anthony’s dogged devotion for the stability she needed. Over the years, he had cultivated an air of studied nonchalance about her predilection for young Latin lovers, but there was no doubt in Kit’s mind that however bizarre a marriage it might seem to outside eyes, theirs was a union that was built for survival.
He re-examined the notion he’d earlier dismissed out of hand. It was, of course, possible that Anthony was in on it. Hard though it was to imagine Anthony, that profoundly respectable man, leading press and police up the garden path, if anyone could cajole him into it, it would be Georgia. And if the police weren’t taking her disappearance seriously, the chances of that being the case were probably stronger. It was a hope Kit clung to, not wanting to contemplate the more disturbing possibility that lurked constantly at the edge of his consciousness. If something terrible had happened, he wanted to postpone that certainty for as long as possible. He couldn’t allow himself to begin to imagine that Georgia might never come back.
Kit forced himself away from such thoughts, superstitiously believing he could influence her return by visualizing it. He allowed himself a wry smile. He could just imagine the press conference when Georgia resurfaced. Would she play the amnesia card? Somehow, he doubted it. No, she’d infinitely prefer the melodramatic. She’d gone into hiding in fear of her life after what had happened to poor, dear Drew. But she had decided to re-emerge into the world because she couldn’t bear the thought that uncertainty about her fate was causing pain to her friends, her fans and most of all to her dearly beloved husband Anthony.
Yes, he thought. That would be the way she’d run it. There would be howls of outrage from some quarters at such blatant manipulation of the media and wasting of police time in that order of priority, Kit decided with a cynic’s certainty. But her fans would go for it, their imaginations hyper charged with the fuel he and Georgia and the rest of them provided. And that was the crucial thing.
 
; But his determined whistling in the dark wasn’t entirely successful; the other, less entertaining possibilities still pressed close. He could immediately discount suicide. Nobody who loved herself as much as Georgia did could ever plunge so far into despair so fast. Someone would have noticed and rallied the troops round her.
As for the other, more terrifying, option, that was a route he wasn’t prepared to travel without a guide. And since the best possible guide would be coming home to him that evening, he decided that he wouldn’t even allow himself to consider that scenario till then. As he reached that decision, the need for it was taken out of his hands. A short, thick-set man with tattooed hands dropped into the chair opposite him.
“You’ll be Kit Martin, then?” he said in a strong Geordie accent.
Kit extended a hand across the table. Salvation took many strange forms, but he was always willing to recognize it when it arrived.
THIRTY
Fiona glared angrily across the table, the hazel of her eyes darkening. “That,” she said with plosive precision, “is taking the piss.”
Steve shook his head. “You know me better than that,”
“I thought I did.” She turned away and stared unseeingly at the wall. When she spoke, her voice was calm and measured, a distillation of her fury channelled through her control. “I thought you understood the depth of my commitment to what I do. It wasn’t my pride that was wounded when you threw me out and brought in Andrew Horsforth, you know. It was my belief that people like you had begun to take seriously the value of what me and a handful of my colleagues are doing.”
“You know I do.” There was no apology in his voice.
Fiona faced him. “Your bosses still see psychologists as nothing more than a tool they can use in whatever way suits them. And that’s not good enough.”
“You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t want to change that?” he demanded, his own eyes dark with frustration. “Fi, help me out here. Help me change their minds. All I’m asking is that you run these cases through your crime linkage program and see what the geographic profile comes up with. I thought you wanted Susan Blanchard’s killer caught? If you won’t do it for the sake of our friendship, then do it for her and her kids.”
“Oh, that’s well below the belt, Steve. Look, I’ve already suspended my better judgement and given in to moral blackmail over this. I reviewed Horsforth’s material, even though, God knows, some of it made me feel sick to my stomach. I made some suggestions about how you might continue the investigation. I offered that much out of friendship. But now I feel like you’re taking advantage of that friendship. You’re fresh out of favours.” Her chin came up in a challenge.
Steve held her gaze. He knew there was justice in her words but his determination to get a result in this case was stronger than his shame. “I need this doing, Fi,” he said, laying it out for her as straightforwardly as he could. “I’ve got no resources to fall back on with this case. My bosses don’t want to know unless I can come up with some sort of blinding revelation. They just want the whole thing to go away. So do I, but I want it to go away because we’ve nailed the right person. And right now, I’m dead-ended. I’ve got officers who desperately want to work this case to a standstill, but I need some sort of lead to put them on. My best chance of that is what you can give me.” He clamped his mouth shut and locked stares with her, his lean face taut as sculpture.
They glowered at each other, the friendship of half a lifetime on the line. “I won’t do it,” Fiona said.
Steve’s lips compressed in a thin line. He felt the high hopes he’d arrived with sliding out of reach, but he wouldn’t let go. Not yet. He refused to release her eyes, willing himself to be the last one standing.
“I really won’t do it, Steve,” Fiona repeated.
He recognized it for a tiny crack of weakness and leaned forward. “I need this.”
She nodded wearily. “I know you do. So here’s the deal. I have a PhD student who’s working on crime linkage and geographical profiling. What’s going to happen is that the Met is going to pay my student to analyse the material. On a consultancy basis.”
“I don’t know if I can find leeway in the budget for that.”
“You better had, Steve. At least this way somebody gets some benefit from this.”
“But you’ll supervise?”
Fiona shook her head. “Terry Fowler is perfectly capable of a straightforward analysis like this. I don’t insult my students by looking over their shoulders. I’m out of it, Steve. I keep telling you this and you’re not hearing me.”
He ran a hand through his hair in a gesture of frustration. “I suppose I’ll have to make do with second best, then.”
“I’m not fobbing you off. Terry will do a good job for you. Steve, you’ve got to stop punishing yourself over this case. I know you care about what you do, but you can’t let it put our friendship at risk.” Fiona reached across the table and took his hand. “I suppose it’s too late to tell you to get a life?”
Steve managed half a smile. “Well past too late.”
“It’s what saved me,” she said simply.
Steve’s eyes clouded over. “He did, didn’t he?” He wanted to say that he’d wished they could have been each other’s saviours, but he never would now. Either she already knew and had made her own accommodation with his feelings; or else the fresh knowledge would swirl through their lives as a disruptive current, threatening the balance that had evolved between them. Whatever, it would be pointless.
As if on cue, the front door opened. “Hi, Fiona, I’m home,” echoed down the hall. They heard the thump of Kit’s satchel hitting the floor as he tossed it into his office in passing. Then he was in the doorway, grinning at the sight of them, oblivious to the tension in the room. “Hey, Stevie, I wasn’t expecting to see you tonight.”
“I came to see just how overdrawn I was at the bank,” Steve said wryly.
Kit crossed to Fiona and gave her a hug. “Steve wants more work done on the Susan Blanchard case,” she said.
Kit looked over the top of her head at Steve, his eyebrows raised in mild interrogation. “She blew you out, then.”
“In a manner of speaking,” Steve said.
“The Met are going to pay Terry Fowler to do the job,” Fiona said firmly.
“I hope,” said Steve. He got to his feet. “I’ll call you in the morning about the arrangements.”
“Don’t go, Steve,” Fiona urged. “Stay for dinner. We could have a Scrabble challenge match afterwards.”
It was an olive branch, he knew. The part of him that had hated to beg wanted to carry on walking, but he was uncertain what that would mean for the future of their relationship. His pride was a small sacrifice for the healing of the breach that had opened between them. Steve looked at Kit. “Depends what’s for dinner,” he said.
Kit frowned. “Lemme see.” He opened the fridge and stared into it. “I’ve got chicken breasts, shallots, fresh tarragon, fennel…What about chicken and tarragon pilaff?” He looked round.
Steve pretended to consider for a moment. “Pudding?”
“You don’t ask much, do you?” Kit complained. “There’s some homemade chocolate ice-cream in the freezer, a few strawberries and half a jar of mango could is in the fridge. That do you?”
“OK, you talked me into it.”
Kit shrugged off his jacket and tossed it over a chair then set to work. “How was your day?” Fiona asked as she watched him chopping and dicing.
“Very productive,” Kit said. “I went to see a contact. But I better not go into details in front of the law,” he added, grinning over his shoulder at Steve. “Tell you what, though. Georgia’s kicking up a storm in the papers. You seen the tabloids today? The Mail did a big piece comparing her disappearance with Agatha Christie’s vanishing act back in the twenties.”
“She’s still not shown up, then?” Fiona asked. She turned to Steve. “Georgia Lester, the crime writer? Have you been following th
e story?”
“I’ve seen it in the papers, yes. Didn’t you say she’d had a letter like yours, Kit? What do you think? Has she gone underground out of pique or out of fear?”
“The letter didn’t really scare her until she found out I’d had one too. She was edgy about it, definitely. I know she was pitching her publisher to send her out on the tour with a pair of minders, but I reckoned that was just Georgia trying it on. She can be a bit of a grandstander,” he added affectionately, reaching for a heavy cast-iron skillet hanging beside the cooker.
“One thing’s for sure,” Fiona said dryly. “The suicide option is a nonstarter with Georgia.”
“Why do you say that?” Steve asked.
“Suicides have low self-esteem. Georgia, on the other hand, is a woman entirely devoid of the slightest shred of self-doubt. On a scale of one to ten, the health of her ego would be somewhere around eleven.”
“She’s right,” Kit confirmed. “Most of us, we get a bad review, we kick the cat, we swear at the computer screen, we hurt. Even if we pretend we’re far too manly for that. But Georgia, she gets a bad review, she sends the reviewer flowers and a note saying she hopes they’ll be better soon.”
Steve snorted with laughter. “You’re making that up.”
“Swear to God, it’s a true story. Georgia could no more top herself than wear a shell suit.”
“So there’s only one alternative, is that what you’re saying? If she hasn’t staged this disappearance as a publicity stunt, then she’s been abducted?” Steve put into words what Kit and Fiona had been avoiding.
There was a long moment of silence. Then Kit tipped the diced chicken into the pan with the shallots. Steam rose in the air, carrying the cooking smells across the room. “I suppose that’s what we’re carefully not saying,” Fiona said.