The seaside corpse, p.23
The Seaside Corpse, page 23
We passed two days of pretending that such a letter had never come. We surveyed the grounds of Owl Park from the terrace (as Hector now had an excuse to avoid hiking) and saw how summer transformed a place we’d seen last during the snowy winter. Swans idled on the pond, turning upside down to nibble reeds from the bottom and then fluffing themselves dry. A maze of privet hedges needed a clipping. Canes were required to hold up an abundance of raspberry bushes. The icehouse in the service courtyard held ice blocks big enough to hide the skull of an ichthyosaur—and were exquisitely cold to lick, once the sawdust packing was brushed away.
We crept along the secret passage from the morning room to spy on James in the study. He was speaking on the telephone, making arrangements for Hector’s departure, a reminder that spying did not always benefit the spy.
The next day’s post, delivered at breakfast with all of us gathered, brought a letter for James from Everett. He and Nina had relocated temporarily to London, where they now had access to a laboratory from which they would oversee the cleaning and reassembly of Izzy by the Natural History Museum experts. The B-C Ichthyosaur, as it had been dubbed, was expected to be on display to the public by next summer.
“Do you suppose,” I said, “that the friendship of Everett and Nina has become rather friendlier?”
“It is a logical supposition,” said Hector. “If I believed in supposing, or in guesswork.”
“She’s probably too busy being utterly free to do what she likes,” I said, “with no time to waste on romance. Even if Everett is a top-notch character.”
James cleared his throat. “ ‘You’ll be chuffed to know…’ ” he read from Everett’s letter, “ ‘and please pass the news along to Hector, that Nina has been invited to a town called Bernissart in Belgium, as part of the team recovering thirty-seven iguanodons discovered in a mine shaft.”
Hector’s face lit up. “Dinosaurs in Belgium!”
“ ‘We can never thank you enough,’ ” James read on, “ ‘for your generous contribution’—oh, never mind that bit. Let’s see…Everett received a note of apology from Miss Spinns, but he does not forgive her for depriving him of witnessing Izzy’s rise from the shale.”
“Poor Miss Spinns will not be remembered kindly,” said Grannie Jane, “and will be wise to remain incognito.”
I looked sharply at my grandmother. Did she know more than we realized about the many faces of Mr. Fibbley? She gave no indication, but paused to count stitches along her knitting needle.
“Are you disappointed,” I said to Hector, later, “that the professor’s death was not a murder?”
“I trust,” said Hector, “that you ask this question of no one else, chère amie. To be so despised that everyone assumes your fate to be murder, it is sad, is it not?”
“But he was not murdered,” I said. “Only clumsy, as it turned out.”
I asked myself the same question I had just asked Hector. Was I disappointed? We’d been the ones to discover a gruesome corpse, after all, and to dig out most of the clues. My Morbid Preoccupation was intact…and yet, I found it went further than fascination with a dead body. There was the surrounding spatter of people not behaving at their best—and our gratifying scrutiny through an imaginary magnifying glass.
“The demise of monsieur le professeur,” said Hector, “makes me think of a quote most dismal from The Hound of the Baskervilles. ‘Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.’ ”
“I expect at least that his mother is mourning him,” I said.
“Let us hope this is true,” said Hector.
“Despite not having a murder, we had a close-up view of a few dark secrets, did we not? Isn’t that the best part?”
“Even better than gazing upon a corpse,” said Hector. “Or touching one.”
We grinned at each other, knowing he didn’t mind, really.
* * *
On the next morning, the sun shone and the birds twittered wildly. I wished we might also have a sea breeze, but sadly, Owl Park was too many miles from the coast for that. Never mind. I cajoled Marjorie into letting us have breakfast on the terrace outside the library, to echo our arrangement under the kitchen canopy at Camp Crewe.
“A letter is come for you, Miss Aggie,” said Dot, putting down the breakfast tray.
Though the handwriting on the envelope was familiar, I could not say for certain whether it belonged to Miss Sylvia Spinns or to Mr. Gus Fibbley. Inside was a newspaper clipping folded between the pages of a letter.
July 16, 1903
Dear Miss Morton,
You might be surprised to know how often I think of you. I hear from Constable Beck that you are visiting your sister in Tiverton. This news was relayed through his fiancée, Miss Charlotte Graves, who now is nursemaid to your nephew. P.C. Beck told me that Hector was bitten by an adder in Lyme Regis. Please convey my best wishes for his swift recovery. I wish also to congratulate you both on your determined effort to reveal the truth about the professor’s death. Your talent for crooked thinking is most admirable. I urge you to continue.
What will you make of the enclosed, I wonder?
Affectionately,
G.F.
The news article, written by Augustus C. Fibbley, was not from the Torquay Voice. Nor did it mention murder or excavating fossils. It reported on a demonstration outside the Digby Assembly Rooms, where more than two hundred women had gathered demanding their right to vote. The photograph showed four suffragettes holding up a banner that read DEEDS NOT WORDS!! VOTES FOR WOMEN!! The second woman from the left wore round wire-framed spectacles. She was identified as Miss Gussie Faraday.
“Gussie Faraday,” I said. “Is that her real name?”
“It seems so.” Hector leaned in to examine the face we’d known in so many guises.
“As a woman fighting for women’s rights, she can go to all the meetings…” My thoughts skipped along Miss Faraday’s path, and Hector sped beside me.
“And then report about the meetings as Mr. Fibbley,” he said.
“And to be a writer in the newspaper, she becomes Mr. Fibbley.”
“Women reporters cover mostly gardens and pies,” I said. “When I grow up and have a job as a writer, I’m going to tell stories about science and murder.”
“In ten years, or fifteen,” said Hector, “much will be different, yes?”
“If Gussie Faraday and her friends have anything to say about it.” I tucked the clipping into the envelope and the envelope into the back pages of my notebook. As often as I had been aggravated by Mr. Gus Fibbley, Miss Gussie Faraday was a person much like the one I aimed to be someday.
An Epilogue
(The Very End)
“There is a new steamer ferry across the channel,” said James, later that morning. “It sails every day from Dover to Calais, in France, which is about two hundred miles from Hector’s home near Spa.”
I held my breath.
“I will accompany Hector to Calais, where he will be met by his father,” said James. “Would you like to come along?”
“Yes!” I said. “When do we go?”
James put a hand on my shoulder. An I-am-so-sad-for-you hand. “Tomorrow,” he said.
Tomorrow!
Time whirled after that announcement, leaving us no chance to moan. It was arranged that the vicar’s wife would send Hector’s belongings in a steamer trunk from the vicarage in Torquay to the ferry port. We departed early in the morning and endured a long, long drive to Dover. We dined on fish and chips in newspaper cones, heavily sprinkled with malt vinegar, and stayed that night in a hotel. The next day we boarded the Queen, the enormous steamer turbine ship that would take us to France.
James had brought with him a novel called The Kip Brothers, an adventure story taking place on a boat in olden days. He’d rather read about a harrowing mutiny, he said, than loiter about with children. Hector and I were free to roam but not to tumble overboard, was that agreed?
I did not wish to stand at the prow trying to spy France and what lay ahead. Instead, we made our way to the stern and gazed into the foaming wake—and everything else behind us.
Hector gripped the railing with both hands. “My insides are rolling like the waves,” he said.
“Were you seasick on the voyage over?” I said.
“Then, I am sad to leave Belgium. Now, I am sad to leave England. Perhaps I mistake sorrow for the mal de mer.” After a while, he took my hand. Salt water splashed across my cheeks, and where had that come from? “Might we say goodbye now?” Hector said. “I fear my family will be so overjoyed at saying hello that our farewell will be lost.”
I swallowed the gravel in my throat. I did not, did not wish to say goodbye.
“We’ve become adept,” I said at last, “at knowing what each other is thinking, have we not?”
“Telepathic,” Hector said. “Tele from the Greek for ‘distant,’ and pathos meaning ‘perception.’ ”
“I hear you all the time!” I said. “I ask, what about this, Hector? What about that? More often, you tell me what to do whether I’ve asked or not.”
“When you speak inside my head,” said Hector, “I say, Merci, this is too much imagination, and I do the opposite of what you suggest.”
We laughed, though mine was a little choked. And then we settled on silence, hand in hand until James came to find us. He had a Brownie camera, much like Everett’s, and took four photographs of Hector and me by the railing, with the sea and a cloud-dotted sky behind us. Two we’d send to Hector and two were for my own album.
In Calais, we drew alongside the pier, lined with a crowd that cheered mightily as the Queen nudged her way to a stop. Some held banners to greet friends and relations, or held aloft rubber balloons tied in bunches. The docking of the boat was splendid, except that it was also my last hour with Hector.
“Can you see your father?” We leaned over the rail, scanning faces, though I did not know who to look for.
“There,” said Hector, pointing. “My mother also is here, and Genevie! You see there? The little girl with very black hair?” His cat-green eyes filled with tears as he began to wave.
We hustled with James into the line for disembarkation. The Perot family met us at the bottom of the gangplank and engulfed Hector so completely that I worried they would step back and find him dissolved. But no, they took turns laughing and crying and—in the case of Genevie—pulling down his stocking to see proof of the adder bite. Monsieur Perot wore a fine mustache with upturned ends. Madame had bright green eyes and a smile as warm as sunlight. Genevie chattered in French, barely taking a breath, sliding her arms around Hector’s middle as if it were she who had come home.
The parting happened quickly in the end. James assisted Monsieur Perot in loading the luggage into the motorcar, borrowed for the purpose of collecting my best friend and carrying him far away. Hector’s mother took Genevie to purchase a citronnade. Hector and I were alone for one more minute, looking at the channel from the other side. A whole new sea, really. We both had lead in our chests, I was certain of that. Lead or sawdust or bricks or fog—whatever weighty thing a writer might mention to describe the inability to breathe.
Next, we were waving, until even the face in the window disappeared.
James draped an arm over my shoulder. A warm, heavy arm that held me together as Hector was carried away. If he’d withdrawn his arm, I imagined that I would crumble to the ground in a thousand pieces, never to be reassembled in quite the same way.
But that was true, in any case, was it not? Aggie-from-before-Hector and Aggie-after-knowing-Hector were not the same person, were they? James did not withdraw the arm, not for ages. He seemed to understand about losing a friend.
There was the sky.
There was an elephant or an ichthyosaur.
There was a jungle or a sea.
And there was the most immense thing of all, the friendship of a whole other person.
When that was lost…
Oh, but I mustn’t say it was really lost. Hector wasn’t gone forever, not like Papa. I mustn’t make it worse, because it was already terrible. Hector was still here in the world, and would be forever. He hadn’t moved to Egypt; he had only gone home.
They had postboxes in Belgium, did they not? I tried to convince myself.
“They have pencils in Belgium, do they not?” I said to James.
“And sharpeners,” said James. “Paper too. Made from the very best trees. Entirely suitable for sliding into envelopes.”
“Do you suppose they have postage stamps?”
“Very clever, the Belgians,” said James. “I believe they’ve been using stamps nearly as long as the English have.”
“And what about sealing wax?” I said.
“Made of chocolate,” said James. “The Belgians are known for their chocolate. You simply bite off the seal to open the envelope.” He produced a bar of Côte d’Or chocolate for us to share as we looked out at the rolling sea.
“If I haven’t found another dead body before Hector’s birthday,” I said, after a while, “I shall write him a murder story in a letter, but I won’t put in the ending. I’ll write the clues and the suspects and possibly the weapon, but my present to him will be that he can puzzle it out all by himself.”
“A fine present indeed,” said James.
And so, I began to plot.
Author’s Note
There is no evidence that young Agatha Christie was especially curious about prehistoric bones—but she certainly spent many months of her life on archaeological digs in the company of her second husband, Sir Max Mallowan. Six of her novels feature an archaeologist character or a setting entrenched in the Middle East. Even one of her best-known books, Murder on the Orient Express, might be considered to belong in this category, because Christie’s first trip to Baghdad was aboard that famous train.
Some of these stories were written while she participated in her husband’s excavations, taking photographs and making records of the daily finds. Christie was familiar with sleeping in tents, and often set up her typewriter in makeshift conditions. She was most content when helping to restore ceramics, or cleaning items made of ivory using her own face cream. She paints a vivid picture of this alternate life in her witty memoir called Come, Tell Me How You Live, about time spent on a dig in Syria.
What if “my” Aggie’s fascination with a buried past began when she was twelve, in the company of other young scientists? What if they were exploring the same Jurassic Coast in Dorset where young Mary Anning uncovered the first ichthyosaur in 1811? What if Aggie stumbled upon not only skeletons of creatures dead for millennia but also a newly deceased human body? These were some of the questions I asked myself while devising the backdrop for the fourth and final book in the Mystery Queen series.
I’ve come to know this character well since first creating her five or six years ago. We’ve had a few sleepovers, so to speak. She came suddenly to life during a conversation with Tundra publisher Tara Walker, and Hector appeared about a minute later as the logical and loyal best friend. The corpse Aggie Morton finds in July is her fourth such discovery in less than a year. Her world is otherwise safe and somewhat sedate, populated with family and neighbors—as Christie’s was, in her homeschooled youth. Dropping the occasional corpse in the path of a shy Edwardian preteen seemed like a good fictional response to the question Why did this particular person grow up to think about murder from morning until night? The intention was to honor the real Queen of Crime, and to have fun with an homage that would include an imagined foundation for the observational acumen and morbid puzzling of the best-selling author-to-be.
This story’s outdoor setting—so uncomfortable for Hector!—is a departure from the country houses and hotels of the previous books. Camping was becoming more popular in England at this time, and the first Boy Scouts gathered four years later (in 1907) only fifty-nine miles from Lyme Regis. I like to think of Arthur Haystead as a keen troop leader in his later teen years. (Arthur is my version of Hercule Poirot’s sidekick, Captain Hastings. Athletic, loyal and always a step behind his friends.)
Although fossil-hunting had also become a trendy hobby, one of my challenges in this story was sorting out what present-day knowledge should be ignored and what might already have been accepted truth by paleontologists working in 1903. The ability to precisely calculate the age of a fossil using carbon dating did not yet exist. Darwin’s theory of evolution had been published only forty-four years previously, and was still not universally believed. For scientists, though, the biblical tale of the world being created six thousand years ago, in six days, was not taken literally. But their estimates of Earth’s origins being more than a million years ago fell far short of what we now know to be well over four billion years.
Not quite so old is Grannie Jane, my interpretation of the Miss Jane Marple who was composed by Christie with her own grandmother in mind. “She had this in common with my grandmother,” said the famous author in an audio recording. “Although a completely cheerful person, she always expected the worst.”
Being a pessimist myself (as well as a nosy parker), I strongly identify with the woman I created from Christie’s anecdotes and from the fourteen novels and twenty short stories in which she is featured. My Mrs. Jane Morton holds high the bar she expects Aggie to reach on every occasion, but allows room for humor, missteps and macabre inclinations along the way.
Agatha Christie had a happy, if lonely, childhood. When the series begins, Aggie also spends much time in solitude—until she meets Hector and they both, rather suddenly, discover a best friend. Through subsequent adventures, Aggie and Hector collect several other young companions. Florence, Lucy, Stephen, George, Arthur, Helen and Oscar. They all expand Aggie’s world a little further, and offer the first examples of the wide, wide cast of characters that fill the books she will someday write.
