Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (17 page)

There was no need for Agatha to remind Archie how their endless marital rows – resulting in tears and loss of sleep and appetite – had strained her nerves almost to breaking point. Unable to cope with the loss of her husband, she had sought to punish him in the only way she knew how: through intrigue, mystery and revenge. She also made it clear that her plot had exposed her to much greater anxiety than she had anticipated because she had failed to realize the press would become obsessed with the disappearance and fan it into a sensation.

Agatha told him that after their row on the morning of the disappearance she had driven up to London to confide her problems to the one person who she knew would understand. Nan’s parents, James and Anne, had died, respectively in June and November that year, and she empathized with Agatha over her loss of Clarissa. Also, because her first husband, Hugo Pollock, had walked out on her without explanation she had an intuitive understanding of the pain that Archie had caused Agatha.

Nan had moved to 78 Chelsea Park Gardens, and Agatha had been in a dreadful state when she had arrived there on Friday morning. Her failed reconciliation with Archie had left her feeling twice betrayed, and she now told him that she had confided to Nan that she was thinking of doing something desperate if he went ahead with his plans to leave her for Nancy. Agatha revealed that she had spoken to Nan of abandoning her car at Newlands Corner because it was only a few miles from Hurtmore Cottage, and she wanted the car’s discovery to disrupt his weekend with Nancy and lead to three or four days of very unpleasant questioning by the police, who she hoped would suspect him of murdering her.

Nan considered that Archie had behaved very badly and had agreed that if Agatha went ahead with her scheme she could spend the night with her, since her second husband, George Kon, was away. The two women had decided that Agatha should claim to be suffering from amnesia when she was found, because it would later release her from awkward explanations.

After returning to Sunningdale Agatha had lunched, then driven with Rosalind and Peter to Dorking to have afternoon tea with Archie’s mother. When Agatha had returned to Styles with her daughter and dog there had been no sign of her husband, and his failure to come home from work on the evening of Friday the 3rd had confirmed what Agatha had already guessed: that her marriage was over. Charlotte, who was aware of Agatha’s fragile state but who had at no time been privy to the scheme to spite Archie, had rung early in the evening while she was in London to see if her employer was all right. Agatha had pretended that things were fine and had urged Charlotte to return to Sunningdale, as intended by the last train, because she had wanted her secretary out of the way.

At 9.45 p.m. Agatha had left the letter for Charlotte asking her to cancel the trip to Beverley, as well as a letter of recrimination to Archie over his affair with Nancy. The writer had then driven directly to Newlands Corner, where she had let the car roll off the plateau with the handbrake off and the gears in neutral. She had intentionally left the headlights on to draw attention to the car, and her fur coat, an attaché case of clothes and her driver’s licence had been left inside so that it would look as if something untoward had happened.

Having removed her handbag from the car before it careered down the steep embankment and ended up by the edge of the chalk pit, she probably walked to West Clandon Station and travelled by train to London, although Graham Gardner recalls his mother-in-law Nan telling him Agatha might have got a lift part of the way. When Agatha had arrived at 78 Chelsea Park Gardens later that night, Nan had been half expecting her and had not been at all surprised to learn that Archie had gone ahead with his plans to spend the weekend with Nancy. Nan’s ten-year-old daughter Judith was away at boarding school, so the two women had spent the night discussing the details of Agatha’s scheme. Neither had any reason to suppose that Agatha’s plot to make Archie suffer for three or four days would lead to such disastrous consequences.

Agatha told her husband she had posted the letter to her brother-in-law Campbell early on the morning of Saturday the 4th in which she stated her intention to visit a Yorkshire spa. She had deliberately sent it to his workplace, rather than his home address, knowing there would be a slight delay in his receiving it. Her decision to take a rest cure in Harrogate had arisen from her and Nan’s belief that the authorities would be bound to look there once Campbell was in receipt of the letter, because Harrogate was the most famous spa in Yorkshire. On Saturday morning, before Agatha left London, the two women had visited the Army and Navy Department Store in Victoria, where Nan gave Agatha money to acquire some items of clothing and other articles and a small case to take to Harrogate with her, since the clothes she had packed in her attaché case the previous night had been left behind in her abandoned car. They had rung two or three of the best-known hotels in Harrogate to see which had vacancies and, after discovering none were full owing to the Christmas lull, had decided that Agatha should just turn up at the Harrogate Hydro since this would later support her claim of having lost her memory.

Agatha also told Archie that she had left her diamond ring to be mended at Harrods that morning, as she had been meaning to have it repaired for some time. She had requested that the department store forward it to her in the name of ‘Mrs Neele’ at the Hydro in Harrogate.

After they had lunch together, Nan had given Agatha some more money, then Agatha had caught the 1.40 p.m. train from King’s Cross, which arrived in Harrogate at 6.40 p.m. She had taken a taxi from Harrogate Station and, a little before seven o’clock, had booked into room 105 of the Harrogate Hydro as Mrs Teresa Neele of Cape Town, South Africa. Her choice of surname was deliberate, while the Christian name she adopted had been inspired by St Teresa of Avila.

Agatha revealed she had been surprised when her letter to Campbell had failed to lead to her immediate discovery and the press had taken up the story of her disappearance. She was sure the news coverage had come as just as much of a shock to Nan. Agatha had resolved to sit tight on the assumption that she would soon be tracked down. But the search had dragged on and on. What neither woman had predicted was that Archie would crack under the strain of the police investigation and tell the
Daily Mail
that Agatha had discussed with her sister the possibility of disappearing at will. Agatha had placed the advertisement in
The Times
because it had been the only thing she could think of doing that would support her claim to have developed amnesia.

Horrified by events, she had lived very quietly as a guest at the hotel. Part of her had, of course, enjoyed knowing that her husband was suffering. She had occupied her time reading newspapers and books and had done a lot of writing to take her mind off the situation. She had also occupied herself by knitting, playing bridge and billiards in the public rooms, taking the waters in the hotel and spending her evenings in the ballroom dancing or sitting quietly at a table doing crosswords.

Agatha’s and Archie’s meal was a muted occasion, in which the full significance of the roles each had played bitterly came home to them both. Although he was forced to contain himself, Archie was furious at Nan’s involvement. It was apparent to them both that their marriage was beyond repair. Given his anger over what had happened, his restraint in dealing with his wife, who was deeply distressed by it all, might have been touching – if his main concern had not been so evidently to protect his mistress’s reputation, so that he might still marry her once the press had lost interest in the story.

Adversity had united Agatha and Archie in the past, and they were to present a united front once more over the next sixteen hours. Neither wanted their private lives splashed further across the newspapers’ front pages.

After leaving Agatha in her hotel bedroom, Archie rang Styles to tell Charlotte that his wife had been found suffering from amnesia. The secretary, who had already been informed of Agatha’s discovery by the Surrey police, accepted Archie’s lie in apparent good faith. She was immensely relieved and delighted that no physical harm had come to Agatha, and at his suggestion she arranged with the local garage in Sunningdale for his Delage to be driven up to London the following day, so that after arriving on the King’s Cross train Agatha and Archie could drive together back to Styles.

It was a trip, however, that was never to be made. Although Archie had hidden Agatha from the press in the nick of time, the reporters invaded the public rooms of the hotel. Owing to the many loose ends and discrepancies in the case, the news that Agatha had amnesia was received with the utmost incredulity.

The unrelenting journalists, well aware that Archie had attempted to deceive them about his affair with Nancy, asked themselves, not unreasonably, whether the Colonel’s explanation might not also be a lie. It quickly dawned on Archie that if he were to affect a cover-up he was going to need additional help.

Chapter Fifteen
Public Charades and Frozen Stills

The press reporters applied considerable pressure to Archie on the evening of Tuesday the 14th to make a statement about Agatha’s reappearance. The
Yorkshire Post
had been the first to reveal the discovery of the crime writer in a late edition that evening under ‘stop press’, with the tantalizing and not wholly reassuring headline ‘Agatha Christie Found’, and, on the recommendation of Superintendent McDowall of the West Riding police, Archie reluctantly arranged to speak to Archie Kenyon, the newspaper’s reporter. He did not agree to an interview but, instead, gave a carefully worded statement, which Kenyon transmitted to his press colleagues:

‘There is no question about her identity. She is my wife. She is suffering from complete loss of memory and identity. She does not know who she is. She does not know me, and she does not know why she is in Harrogate. I am hoping to take her to London tomorrow to see a doctor and a specialist, and I hope that rest and quiet will put her right. Great credit is due to the police for their untiring efforts in the matter and for the inquiries which have led to her discovery.’

It was a well-known fact among reporters that Agatha had told Campbell in the letter that she posted after her disappearance that she planned to visit a spa in Yorkshire, and, since this was what she had done, the press suspected deliberate intention. Rather unwisely, Archie confided to Archie Kenyon that while he appreciated the publicity given in the press to the facts of his wife’s disappearance he said he felt that certain newspapers had made a ‘stunt’ of it. While the journalists were naturally euphoric that their publicity had led to the author’s discovery, her husband’s tactless words fanned their suspicions, and as they delved more deeply into the circumstances of her arrival and stay at the hotel their questions multiplied.

To begin with, if the writer was suffering from amnesia, why had she not recognized pictures of herself in the newspapers? Also, how could she have ended up over two hundred miles from Newlands Corner, staying in a luxury hotel? There are at least eight variant spellings of the surname Neele – beginning either with the letter N or K – so did the Colonel really expect them to believe that when his wife had signed the hotel register she had hit on the exact spelling of his mistress’s surname by coincidence? Why had she called herself Teresa? An anagram for ‘teaser’? Where had she spent the first night of her disappearance?

Why had her car, containing her fur coat and other items of property, been deliberately allowed to roll off the edge of the plateau at Newlands Corner, and by what means had she contrived to reach Harrogate from there? Given her alleged mental confusion, if she had travelled by train, how had she managed to navigate her way across London from the southern terminus to the northern, obtaining the right tickets, catching the appropriate trains, and alighting at the correct station?

Was there any significance in the fact that in one of her books,
The Secret Adversary
, the character Jane Finn had simulated amnesia as a means of extricating herself from a dangerous situation? The journalists also thought it seemed an extraordinary coincidence for Agatha to put an advertisement in
The Times
, because this was exactly what two of the characters in her novel had decided to do.

The press also thought it was strange that the names Mrs Agatha Christie, Colonel Archibald Christie, Rosalind, Miss Charlotte Fisher, Mrs Hemsley, Captain Campbell Christie, Styles, Sunningdale and so on, which had continually been splashed across the front pages of the newspapers for a week and half, accompanied by photographs, had not triggered even a flicker of recollection in Agatha during her stay at the hotel.

Agatha’s own words came back to haunt her. During her absence the press had alluded frequently to ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’, a short story from her 1924 collection
Poirot Investigates.
According to Poirot, disappearances fall into three categories: ‘First, and most common, the voluntary disappearance. Second, the much abused “loss of memory” case – rare, but occasionally genuine. Third, murder, and a more or less successful disposal of the body.’

Moreover, in the current December issue of
Flynn’s Weekly
magazine, Agatha’s latest Mr Quin story, ‘The Voice in the Dark’, told a brooding if improbable tale of an amnesiac whose memory returns after forty years to wreak a terrifying revenge on the woman who has usurped her home and possessions. The press was keen to know what sort of games the creator of these intriguing stories was playing.

In an interview with a representative from the Press Association, Mr Taylor, the hotel manager (who was no longer publicity-shy now that the matter of his guest’s identity had been established), described the reunion between the wife and husband as ‘pathetic’. The
Daily Mail
, which had chartered a special train to take Agatha to London, offered Archie £500 if she would give them an exclusive story of her adventures. The specially chartered train was ready and waiting at Harrogate Station at 7.55 p.m. on Tuesday the 14th, but Archie flatly refused their offer and the
Daily Mail
was left with a large bill.