Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (16 page)

It was 6.50 on the evening of Tuesday the 14th when Archie arrived at the Harrogate Hydro with Superintendent McDowall of the West Riding police. They were shown into the office of the anxious manageress, Mrs Taylor, and Archie was informed by her that the woman thought to be his wife was playing billiards. By now the authorities and Mrs Taylor had compiled a considerable dossier of information on the mystery guest, and Archie, impatient to see the woman calling herself Mrs Neele, was forced to hear them out.

The police had discovered that the woman thought to be the novelist had arrived in a taxi shortly before 7 p.m. on Saturday the 4th and was thought to have arrived by the 6.40 train from London. Dressed in the warm knitted outfit and the velour hat in which she had vanished, she had appeared well with no signs of a head cold or hypothermia consistent with having spent the previous night in the open. She had given staff and guests to understand that she was Mrs Teresa Neele of Cape Town, South Africa, visiting England for the first time. She said she had been in the country three weeks and had passed through Torquay. Staff had told the police they presumed she had left the bulk of her luggage either with friends or had stored it. When Mrs Neele had checked into the hotel her only baggage had been a handbag and a new attaché case. The West Riding authorities were aware that Agatha’s attaché case had been left abandoned in her car. Where, then, had this new one come from? The police had ascertained from Miss Corbett, the band’s singer, that on the night of her arrival Mrs Neele had entered the ballroom wearing a green knitted outfit similar to the one later described in all the newspaper accounts of the missing writer. The singer had assumed that the unaccompanied guest would not take to the dance floor since she was not wearing evening dress, but she had danced the Charleston when the band had struck up ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’.

The police had also found out that on Monday the 6th Mrs Neele had paid a visit to the Messrs W.H. Smith library in Parliament Street and borrowed a number of books:
Ways and Means
, a family saga by Noel Forrest;
The Perennial Bachelor
, a novel of contemporary American family life by Anne Parish;
Fly Leaves
, a volume of romantic poetry by Charles Caverley;
The Double Thumb
, the title story in a collection of fourteen mysteries by Francis G. Grierson;
The Phantom Train
, a mystery by Douglas Timins; and
The Third Messenger
, an adventure thriller by Patrick Wynton. Miss Cowie, the librarian, has since recalled: ‘She appeared in every way just like an ordinary subscriber, but I gathered from her selections that she had a taste for novels of sensation and mystery. She showed no hesitation in the matter of terms, or of registering, or choosing her books.’

The band’s singer, Miss Corbett, had been privy to Mrs Neele’s desire to place an advertisement in
The Times
, and the police had confirmed that Mrs Neele’s advertisement had appeared on Saturday the 11th: ‘Friends and relatives of Teresa Neele, late of South Africa, please communicate. Write Box R 702, The Times, E. C. 4.’ The advertisement cost fifteen shillings and had initially suggested to the police that Mrs Neele might really be who she said she was.

The police also knew that on Sunday the 12th, the day of the Great Hunt, Mrs Neele had asked Miss Corbett if she could obtain a copy of the previous day’s newspaper since she was anxious to see whether her advertisement had appeared. During the week, when Mrs Neele had noticed the other hotel guests leaving – there were only fifty during the time she stayed there owing to the proximity of Christmas – she made a half-laughing remark to Miss Corbett along the lines of ‘You won’t leave me, will you?’

Archie was informed by the police that they had searched Mrs Neele’s room while she was out the previous day and had found the pile of library books described by Miss Cowie. They had also found a bottle of laudanum, used in the treatment of neuritis, which bore the label of a Torquay chemist and the word ‘poison’. The most interesting discovery was a small photograph of a girl on the bedside table, which turned out to be Agatha’s daughter Rosalind.

The chambermaid Rosie Asher had spoken at length to the police. Since she had taken Mrs Neele’s breakfast up to her nearly every morning she was able to provide her questioners with the following diary of the guest’s movements during her stay.

Saturday the 4th
– Arrived in taxicab in the evening; very little luggage. Nothing about the room except a comb, new hot-water bottle and a small photo of a little boy, across which was written ‘Teddy’.

Sunday the 5th
– Slept until 10 a.m., had breakfast in bed and then went out.

Monday the 6th
– London newspaper taken up with breakfast in bed. New hat, coat, evening shoes, books and magazines, pencil and fruit and various toilet requisites ordered from, and sent in by, local tradesmen.

Tuesday the 7th
– Had breakfast in the dining-room; appeared to be very bright.

Wednesday the 8th
– Breakfast in bed with a newspaper to read.

Thursday the 9th
– Very cheerful and bright; had a newspaper as usual in the morning and went downstairs carrying a novel.

Friday the 10th
– Seemed rather strange for a minute or so when breakfast was taken to bedroom, went downstairs early and then to Leeds for shopping and did not return until 10 p.m.

Saturday the 11th
– Breakfast in bed, but seemed agitated when reading a newspaper.

Sunday the 12th
– No newspaper taken up to bedroom with breakfast. Nothing unusual in demeanour. Had dinner in a dress very much resembling the one in her published photographs. Bottle marked poison in drawer; also paper bag from a London store.

Monday the 13th
– Detective downstairs; told all I knew. Lady in question came to her room, and I noticed her face was red and that she appeared agitated.

Although Rosie Asher mistakenly thought the child in the photograph was a boy, she stated that three days after the guest’s arrival a registered parcel had come from a London store, believed to contain a ring which Mrs Neele said she had lost in London while shopping. She had worn the diamond ring on several occasions subsequently – but never a wedding ring. Sally Potts, another chambermaid on the same floor, was not convinced the guest was the missing author, but she recalled that Mrs Neele was no bother and ‘spent a lot of her time writing’.

Before the Christies’ reunion, the hotel manageress described Mrs Neele’s unusual handbag and the clothes she had been wearing to Archie, but all he could say for sure was that his wife was thought to have taken from her car her handbag and purse containing between £5 and £10. Discreet questioning of the hotel’s guests by Mrs Taylor had elicited further information about the woman. Mrs Neele had given some of the guests, including a Mrs Robson of Harrogate, the idea that she had recently suffered a traumatic bereavement with the death of her baby girl, and she also gave them the impression she knew she was suffering from loss of memory as a consequence of the death of her child.

Otherwise Mrs Neele had seemed perfectly ordinary in every other respect. She had furnished herself with a new wardrobe of clothes from shops in Harrogate and Leeds. One evening she had appeared in a new shawl, and, on noticing a price tag still attached for seventy-five shillings, a guest jokingly had asked if that was all she was worth. She had shown a preference for reading the
Daily Mirror
, and when another guest had suggested that she looked very like the missing novelist Mrs Neele’s unequivocal and apparently uninterested reply had been: ‘This Mrs Christie is a very elusive woman, but I don’t want to bother with her.’ She had a massage at 3.30 most afternoons in the hotel, in addition to taking the beneficial sulphur waters known as the Cure. While she never seemed short of money, Mrs Neele had lived quietly during her stay at the hydro.

The police and hotel manageress were edgy, because the information they had unearthed about the mystery guest suggested that she was a fashionable and affluent woman who would not be pleased to be mistakenly identified as the missing author. But there were two clues that clinched the matter for Archie: the guest’s writing in the hotel register was just like his wife’s; and when he learned that the photograph of the child in Mrs Neele’s room had the word ‘Teddy’ written across the corner – the Christies’ nickname for their daughter – he was convinced that Agatha had been found.

By the time Archie left the manageress’s office he was impatient to see Mrs Neele, but the woman had left the billiard room and gone upstairs to her bedroom. Archie was asked to remain in the lobby, since neither Superintendent McDowall nor Mrs Taylor approved of him going up to confront the woman in her bedroom. It was their belief that she would shortly come down to dine, as was her habit every night.

Archie stationed himself in an armchair, concealed behind a newspaper, while Superintendent McDowall and his men were hidden out of sight from the main stairs down which the guest was expected to come. Outside the hotel the press were growing impatient in the cold night air, anxious to know what was happening inside.

When Agatha at last appeared it seemed evident to witnesses that she was no more suffering from amnesia or mental breakdown than was Archie. And as she came downstairs, dressed in a stylish salmon-pink georgette evening dress, there was no doubt that she was the woman the country had been seeking.

Archie had last seen Agatha on the morning of Friday the 3rd when they had had a row after his refusal to accompany her to Yorkshire after admitting he would be spending the weekend with his mistress, Nancy Neele. Given the intense acrimony that had already passed between the scorned wife and the husband who had betrayed her, the scene about to unfold in the lounge of the Harrogate Hydro promised to be even more dramatic and poignant than any they had previously shared.

Chapter Fourteen
Last-Minute Cancellation

Once Agatha had been found, the real problems began. The subsequent cover-up, perpetrated by Archie, in which Agatha and certain members of her family colluded, was undermined by his statement during her absence that Agatha had previously discussed the possibility of disappearing in order to experiment with a plot for a book. Any potential sympathy their dramatic reunion might have invited had been forfeited by Archie’s ill-considered remarks.

In an atmosphere bristling with tension, the now famous author, who had answered to the name of Mrs Teresa Neele for a week and a half, walked into the hotel lounge and picked up from a table a copy of the
Evening Standard,
with the front page headlines ‘Mrs Christie Said to Be in Harrogate, Husband of Missing Novelist Leaves for the North to Investigate.’ From behind his own newspaper Archie gave a prearranged signal to Superintendent McDowall to confirm that the woman was his wife.

There was instant recognition in Agatha’s eyes, although she said nothing to betray herself. There was neither fuss nor melodrama. Archie was immensely relieved to find her at last. While he was unaware of the part Agatha’s friend Nan Watts had played in helping her to orchestrate the disappearance, he had suspected from the beginning that Agatha was alive and playing games with him.

After she returned his greeting with apparent nonchalance, Agatha agreed to sit down by the lounge fire and was spotted a few minutes later by a fellow guest, Alexander Pettleson, a wine merchant from London, who had just returned to the hotel. Agatha indicated Archie with a nod and quietly informed Mr Pettleson that her brother had arrived unexpectedly.

Archie, who was sitting opposite her, was too embarrassed to reply and gazed into the fire. Mr Pettleson joined them, unaware of the scene he had interrupted. Although he had read of the disappearance, he did not realize that the couple he was talking to were the famous Christies. There was an air of constraint over them, and he later admitted it had occurred to him that they might have quarrelled since they were sitting so far apart. But when Archie rather awkwardly suggested to Agatha that they both go in to dinner a few moments later, she accepted without fuss or demur.

Although she had previously arranged with another hotel guest, Mrs Robson, to attend a dance at the Prospect Hotel that night, Agatha cancelled the arrangement on the way in to dinner, explaining to Mrs Robson that her brother had arrived. As the novelist and her husband proceeded towards the dining-room, Agatha, in the full hearing of the police and onlookers, spoke to Archie about an experience that had befallen Mrs Robson’s daughter: ‘There is a lady here whose daughter had a baby just like I had, and her memory went. But you know, I shall get all right, because the lady staying in the hydro says her daughter was like this when she had a baby, but she became all right.’

When the police intervened to ask her if she knew who she was and what she was doing at the Harrogate Hydro, Agatha said she had left home in some confusion and had lost her memory, which had only just come back to her. Agatha and Archie then took a corner table in the restaurant. The authorities, sceptical of Agatha’s claim, left them alone, and over dinner they were forced by the extraordinary circumstances in which they found themselves to face a number of unpleasant home truths. The exchanges they made over dinner, following their subdued reunion, were very low key, and Archie was left in no doubt over the miscalculated circumstances that had brought Agatha to Harrogate.

As dinner proceeded, a despondent Agatha made no attempt to conceal from her husband the fact that she had deliberately staged her disappearance because she had known that her marriage was irretrievably over and she had wished to spite him. She revealed she had spent the night of the disappearance with Nan. Archie was staggered, because Nan had given everyone to understand she was as upset over Agatha’s inexplicable absence as the rest of her family.