The Snow Globe (2 page)

When Eden Hall was first built, the local newspaper received a number of letters about its electric lights. They were dangerous, too bright, and had no place in the country, people wrote.
These Londoners
should stay in the city if they wanted that sort of thing.

A quarter of a century later, and two weeks before Christmas, Eden Hall was once again in the newspaper. This time not because of its size or bright lights, or in fact because of anything to do with
it
, but because eighteen-year-old Daisy Forbes had joined the nationwide manhunt for missing writer Agatha Christie and had volunteered her family home as a meeting point for those searching the surrounding hills and valley known as the Devil's Punchbowl.

“Volunteers wishing to assist the Police in the search are invited to meet at Eden Hall this Saturday, December 11th, at 9 o'clock . . . Refreshments and facilities will be available,” the paper stated at the end of its front-page bulletin, titled
THE MYSTERY OF MRS. CHRISTIE
.

By nine o'clock on Saturday morning more than 150 people had converged on Eden Hall, and more kept coming. They stood about in the dank December gloom, clutching Mabel Forbes's Crown Derby and Wedgwood china as Daisy and Mrs. Jessop, the cook, refilled cups from the large tea urn.

For seven days, ever since Mrs. Christie's Morris Cowley motorcar had been found abandoned at a nearby lake with an expired driving license in it, the nation had been gripped, and like the airplanes scouring the countryside, conjecture buzzed in the icy air: Had Mrs. Christie been kidnapped? Had she been murdered? Was her husband in some way involved?

When the local police constable climbed onto the old mounting block with a megaphone, a hush descended and heads turned. The policeman spoke in a solemn voice; it was a grave and serious situation, he said. He pointed to the map pinned to the coach-house doors, asking everyone to note the areas marked with red ribbon and requesting that they organize themselves into groups of four or five. No one, he advised, should walk through the valley of Devil's Punchbowl alone.

Daisy listened as grisly questions were tossed through the mist at PC Trotton; murmurings and then louder debates broke out in huddles. A man had been seen behaving suspiciously down at the crossroads two days earlier. Yes, a few had seen him. No, he wasn't from these parts. An outsider. But was he a murderer, too? Was the man lurking in the fog-shrouded heathland waiting to strike again? For some minutes PC Trotton struggled to regain control of the assembled crowd; then he remembered his megaphone and
reminded everyone in a newly stern voice that, as yet, no crime had been committed.

It was almost ten o'clock when Stephen Jessop strolled across the gritted courtyard to Daisy. The last group—with knapsacks, binoculars and sticks—had already disappeared through the five-barred gate into the woods, accompanied by Trotton and two of his colleagues.

“Thanks for waiting . . . Sorry I'm late,” said Stephen, rubbing his hands together, then cupping them over his mouth.

“We're meant to be in groups of four or five, Stephen, not two.”

“Ah, but that's probably for those who don't know the terrain. And we do.”

“No, it's for reasons of safety, Trotton said.”

Stephen smiled. “Well, you're perfectly safe with me.”

Daisy shook her head and began to walk. “Why are you so late?” she asked.

“I slept in.”

“I can't believe you slept in when all
this
is happening. I've barely had any sleep and been awake since half past five.”

“Yes, well . . . you are a little obsessed.”

“Obsessed? I'm concerned—like everyone else. Apart from you, it would seem.”

“I've told you what I think. It's a publicity stunt. Has to be.”

“I don't think the government would be quite so involved if it were just a publicity stunt, Stephen. I read that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's very worried now, too. He's given a spirit medium one of Mrs. Christie's gloves so that she can use it to try to find her,” she
added, turning to him as she walked through the oak gate into the woods. Overhead, the now-familiar burring of a small airplane circling distracted her, and she paused to look up. “Yes, all very queer,” she said. She lowered her gaze, met his eyes. “What? Why are you smiling?”

“No reason,” he said, and they walked on beneath the evergreens.

Three years older than Daisy, Stephen had lived at Eden Hall since the summer of 1909, when the Jessops adopted him. The then four-year-old orphan had come down from London on a train accompanied by a cousin of Mrs. Jessop, and though Daisy had no memory of that momentous day, she had heard how very shy Stephen had been and how very happy Mrs. Jessop had been to meet her new son.

For all intents and purposes a general servant, Stephen had been officially employed at Eden Hall since he'd finished school at fourteen. More recently, after the scandal of the previous year, when Howard Forbes's chauffeur had put a young kitchen maid in
the family
way
and Howard had sent them both packing, Stephen had been called on to step in. He had never driven a motorcar, but Howard had told him that it was easy enough and that he could spend an hour or two practicing on the driveway. And so up and down and up and down Stephen and the Rolls went, clanking and grinding, juddering and stalling, as Daisy and her sisters looked on. The girls had anticipated—almost hoped for—a repeat of Aunt Dosia's performance of earlier that year, when she'd decided to have a go in Howard's old Austin Twenty and had—at some speed—driven the vehicle straight off the driveway through the Japanese
garden and into the lily pond. But no such drama occurred, and now Stephen was
Jessop
and lived above the garages in the coachman's flat.

He was, Daisy often thought, the nearest thing she had to a brother—an elder brother—because he'd always been exactly how she imagined one to be: protective, informative, knowledgeable and sometimes teasing.

Halfway down into the valley, standing on the ridge by the old wooden bridge, Daisy lifted her father's binoculars from their leather case. The mist was clearing, the low winter sun breaking through the vaporous cloud, picking up flecks of color in the otherwise drab and scrawny heathland. Far below, she could see clusters of people moving in and out of the shadows on the tree-lined pathways.

“Everyone seems to be heading in the same direction . . . toward Thursley,” she said. “Trotton specifically said we had to spread ourselves out, not follow each other,” she added, putting away the binoculars and turning to Stephen, who was rolling a cigarette. “I don't know how you can do that at a time like this.” She jumped down from the embankment. “Don't you realize? This is
international
news.”

Stephen said nothing. He tilted his head, lifted his lighter to the cigarette.

“You're so annoying,” she said, watching him. “If poor Mrs. Christie is found, it'll be no thanks to you.”

Beneath his cap his dark hair looked greasy and uncombed. He obviously hadn't had time to shave or to wash, she thought. He wore the dark green scarf she had given him last Christmas, knotted
at the front of his pale neck and tucked into his sweater, his jacket collar pulled up high around it. He shivered and then stamped his feet as he sucked on his cigarette. “Come on, then,” he said, walking on. “Who's dallying now?” he called back, jogging off beneath the pine trees.

By the time Daisy caught up with him they were at the very bottom of the valley, where the stream was wider and gushed in a torrent over rocks and boulders swept down from the hills over millennia. He sat upon a tree stump and made a point of looking at his wristwatch.

“Yes, very funny,” she said, not looking at him, walking slowly toward him. “There may have been a murder committed and you're treating it as though . . . as though it's all some sort of game.”

“I don't believe we're going to find Mrs. Christie—or any clues to her disappearance—around here, that's all. Her car was left at Newlands Corner, Daisy. That's some miles away.”

“Then why bother to come along? You were the one who first suggested we look here.”

He stood up, took off his cap. His hair
was
dirty. He looked a state.

“Were you perchance at the Coach and Horses last night?” she asked, kicking at the soft earth with her boot.

He took a moment to reply. He said, “Yes, I was. And I'm sorry for being late, and for being . . . flippant.”

She nodded.

“Will you forgive me?”

She turned to him, blinked and shrugged her shoulders. “I always do, don't I?”

“Yes, you do,” he said, newly contrite, unsmiling, staring back at her. “Always.”

“It's important for a Theosophist to give back and to forgive,” she said, walking on.

Stephen smiled. “Remind me again what it's all about.”

“It's about the reciprocal effects the universe and humanity have on each other . . . the connectness of the external world and inner experience,” she said, stopping to pick up a tiny piece of bark and looking at it closely. “To acquire wisdom one has to examine nature in its smallest detail . . . Like this,” she said, stretching out her hand.

He took the bark, stared at it for a moment or two, then looked back at her. “What wisdom is there to be gleaned from this?”

“That's for you to find out.”

He put it inside his jacket pocket and they walked on beneath the pines, then out into the beautiful wild expanse, following the old packhorse tracks of smugglers, sandy pathways through tall gorse and dark holly, juniper and thorn. Daisy spoke at length about what she had read of the case in the preceding days' newspapers, pausing every once in a while to summarize her conclusions or pose a question to herself or simply to stare out across the wilderness and say, “Hmm, I wonder . . .”

It was shortly after midday when they sat down on the wall under the stunted tree by the deserted cottage some three miles from Eden Hall. Daisy lifted two hard-boiled eggs from the canvas fishing-tackle bag she had worn strapped across her, as well as a bottle of Mrs. Jessop's homemade ginger beer.

“So very peculiar,” she said for the umpteenth time. “No sign of
a struggle . . . no ransom . . . no body . . . no witnesses,” she went on. “And yet, I can't help but feel the answer's right in front of us all.”

Stephen said nothing.

Other than a child's shoe—which, for some reason, Daisy had picked up and put into her bag—and, here and there, the remains of campfires and discarded bottles, they had found nothing. They had passed some of the other searchers, heading back in the direction of Eden Hall and shaking their heads, and walked through a small gypsy encampment where a grubby-faced boy had raised his hands to his ears and stuck his tongue out at them.

“Perhaps she's taken a turn, like Noonie,” Stephen said, using the family's nickname for Daisy's grandmother, Mabel Forbes's mother. “Perhaps she's suffering from amnesia.”

Daisy turned to him. “But Mrs. Christie's not old. She's younger than my mother.”

“Just a thought . . . and I hope for your sake it's not what I think it is. Otherwise, she's made a bit of a laughingstock of us all.”

Daisy shook her head. She passed him the brown bottle.
“This,”
she said, “is no publicity stunt, Stephen, I can assure you. It's gone beyond anything like that.”

They sat in silence for a while, peeling hard-boiled eggs, flicking small pieces of shell onto the sandy earth around them.

“You're not still thinking of emigrating, are you?” Daisy asked.

It was an idea Stephen had only recently mentioned to her. He'd told her that he'd seen advertisements offering help with one's passage to New Zealand, as well as help with finance to set up a farm.

“I'm not sure,” he said. “What do you think?”

“I told you, I think it's an awful idea,” she said quickly. “Think how sad your mother would be.”

“And you?”

“Yes, and me . . . I'd hate it if you weren't here.”

“Because?”

“Because,” she said, smiling back at him, “who would there be to annoy me?”

“I'm sure you'd find someone.”

High above, two birds fought with each other, ducking and diving, moving in circles, squawking loudly in the otherwise silent valley.

“I think it's an awful idea,” Daisy said again. “To leave your home and go off to the other side of the world.”

Stephen turned to her. “But it's not my home. It's
your
home, and my parents' home, I suppose. I don't really know where I fit in here.”

“I thought you were happy, thought you loved this place.”

He nodded. “I do, I do, but . . . well, it's hard to explain and probably impossible for you to understand.”