Sharyn McCrumb - Missing Susan

“Just as well,” said Rowan. “The world is too much with us late and soon.”

Frances Coles waved her tiny automatic camera. “Just stand together, everybody, would you? I want to get a group shot with Stonehenge in the background. Everybody smile!”

“Torquay, isn’t it?” asked Bernard, when the freezing tourists had been loaded back into the coach. “Any particular route you’d fancy?”

Rowan Rover knelt down beside the driver’s seat and studied the road atlas. “Here we are above Salisbury,” he murmured, tracing the A303 with his finger. “And we have to get down to the Devon coast in reasonably good time. Shops tend to close at five, don’t they? Not tourist season anymore, really.”

“We should stay on the A303 to Honiton, I should think,” said Bernard. “Lunch there? By then it ought to be about one o’clock. Then the A30, bypass Exeter, pick up the A38, and take it to the A380. That will take us straight in. We should be there by half past three, if you don’t take too long eating your lunch.”

Rowan cast a steely eye at the shopping members of the party, who were happily engaged in comparing Stonehenge postcards, tea towels, and tiny replicas of the circle itself. “I’ll be ruthless,” he promised, reaching for the microphone. “Ladies and Charles, as you know from your schedule, you will be staying tonight in Exeter, but for this afternoon’s outing, it will be necessary for us to bypass Exeter and drive on to Torquay, where we will view the Agatha Christie exhibit in Torre Abbey. After that, it will be a drive of an hour or so to get you back to Exeter to your hotel. Any questions?”

Charles Warren raised his hand. “Lunch?”

“Bernard and I think that Honiton will provide a few suitable restaurants-”

“Honiton lace,” said Martha Tabram. “Is it the same place?”

Rowan Rover frowned. “If you wish to get to Torre Abbey before it closes, you will confine yourselves to a brief lunch stop. Are we all agreed?”

There was a mutinous set to Elizabeth’s jaw, but it was early days yet on the tour. There would be time to shop later. The others agreed cheerfully.

“Well then, say goodbye to the Beaker People. We’re off to the English Riviera.”

True to their word, the group passed up a street full of inviting curio and antique shops and descended en masse into the Three Tuns Pub on the Honiton High Street, immediately outnumbering the bemused locals. They packed themselves in fours around wooden tables the size of poker chips, sharing one paper menu per table and speculating on the entrees like sharks at a swim meet. Rowan Rover explained, between sips of a pint of ale, that prawns were shrimp, cider was not synonymous with apple juice, and there were no waitresses in pubs. If they wanted to eat, they’d better join the queue at the bar.

“Can’t you get anything nonalcoholic?” asked Susan. “I hate beer. And why are these tables so tiny? And no waitresses?”

Rowan Rover sighed. “A far cry from the Minneapolis Burger King, I have no doubt.”

She frowned at the menu. “What is this stuff, anyway. What are you having, Rowan?”

“A double Scotch and three cigarettes. For my nerves.”

Bernard, who did not appear in the crowded pub, had presumably found somewhere else to eat, because precisely forty-five minutes later, when Rowan had herded the flock back to the appointed meeting place on a corner of the high street, Bernard was already there, with the door open and classical music to aid the digestive process.

For the next couple of hours, as they passed through Dorset, Rowan Rover confined his remarks to explaining points of interest on the landscape (“That rounded hill is believed to be the site of King Arthur’s great battle at Badon Hill, as are the Badbury Hill in Oxfordshire, and the one near Swindon in Wiltshire”) and answering questions about objects sighted by the tourists as they rode along (“That, madam, is a goat”). Several members of the party took advantage the indifferent motorway scenery and the inducement of a full stomach. They slept the untroubled sleep of the jet-lagged.

At one point, noticing the mention of Torquay on a highway sign, Frances Coles asked, “Are we by any chance going to pass the spot where Agatha Christie staged her disappearance in the Twenties?”

Rowan Rover, whose knowledge of English literature did not extend to the private controversies of mystery writers, met this query with a blank stare. “I know she went missing for a week or so,” he said at last. “Somebody produced a movie based on the case. I don’t know where she took off from, though. She was born in Torquay, but I don’t think she lived there as an adult.”

“She disappeared near Guilford,” said Alice MacKenzie, who maintained that Agatha Christie’s work reached a plane of literary perfection to which Thomas Hardy could only aspire. “I’ve read two biographies of her.”

“Oh, Guilford,” said Rowan Rover, in tones suggesting that it might as well be Hoboken. “That’s practically on the outskirts of London. We’re nowhere near it.”

“What do you make of her disappearance?” asked Elizabeth MacPherson, grasping at this straw of a crime.

“Amnesia under a strain isn’t all that uncommon,” Rowan suggested.

“It’s more common if there has been a head injury,” said Kate Conway. “Personally, I’ve never seen a case.”

“Amnesia!” said Alice MacKenzie. “Ha!”

“I really know very little about the incident, but she was a very shy woman, wasn’t she? Hardly the sort of person to stage a publicity stunt.”

“I don’t think it was a publicity stunt,” said Alice, leaning forward and speaking in a stage whisper, so as not to disturb the sleeping Frances. “But I do think she did it on purpose.”

“Wasn’t her husband having an affair?” asked Kate Conway.

“Yes! And he had gone off to spend the weekend with his girlfriend,” said Alice triumphantly. “So Agatha crashes her car into a pond, leaves her expensive fur coat on the seat, and vanishes. The police assume foul play, of course, and guess who they suspect?”

“The husband,” sighed Rowan Rover. “They always do.”

“Right! He gets a grilling from the authorities, and his private life and the girlfriend’s name become front page news. Hundreds of people are out combing the woods for Agatha’s body. It’s the nine days’ wonder of all of England.”

“Where was she?” asked Charles Warren, postponing his nap.

“In a fancy hotel in Harrogate, attending tea dances and reading newspaper accounts of her own disappearance,” Alice informed him. “If she hadn’t planned her disappearance, how did she happen to be carrying enough money for a two-week stay at an expensive hotel? And what name do you suppose she registered under?”

“The girlfriend’s,” said Rowan with a sinking heart. His second wife was just the sort of person who would have done that.

“Exactly! Agatha wasn’t ill. She was brilliant. She humiliated her rotten husband in front of the entire world. Serves him right!”

“And did he give up the other woman and go back to Agatha?”

“No!” cried Rowan, Charles, and Bernard in unison.

Alice regarded them with the look of an entomologist who has just identified their species. “You’re right,” she said evenly. “A year later Archie Christie divorced her and married the other woman.”

“But he probably wasn’t worth having anyway,” Kate Conway pointed out. “I know a plastic surgeon who’s just like that. He’s married two nurses so far and made them both miserable. Archie Christie sounds rather heartless to me.”

“True,” said Alice. “And at least Agatha made him suffer.”