Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (40 page)

Shortly after Laura Thompson was hired for the job Rosalind died in October 2004 and her husband Anthony passed away in April of the following year. It was always her wish that the amnesia explanation should stand as the official verdict on her mother’s disappearance and that Agatha’s second marriage should be seen to have been perfect, even though she knew this had not been the case.

On 13 November 2004, in a lengthy obituary that appeared two weeks after Rosalind’s death, the
Daily Telegraph
said she had been furious at the publication of
Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days
and that, at the annual meeting of the Agatha Christie Society in 1998, her son Mathew Prichard had launched a ‘virulent attack’ on the book, advising members of the society not to buy it.

Laura Thompson subsequently stated in her 2007 biography,
Agatha Christie: An English Mystery
, that Rosalind had viewed Judith Gardner’s official endorsement of
Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days
as some kind of ‘personal vendetta’, but this claim is not supported by the facts.

Until their deaths Rosalind and her husband Anthony remained friends with Judith and Graham. The Gardners continued to lunch regularly at Greenway with Rosalind and Anthony. The couple also visited the Gardners at their home. The last Christmas card Judith and Graham received from Rosalind a year before her death, dated 1 December 2003, is a friendly and chatty missive in which she said how pleased she was to get their letter for her birthday with all their news. Rosalind recalled a voyage she made at the age of eighteen when she accompanied her friend Susan North’s family to South Africa. She added that, despite a good summer, the last week had been nothing but rain and the National Trust still hadn’t done much in the grounds of Greenway. The greenhouses were all covered over and little had been done to the pools, but perhaps it was just as well because when the National Trust did something they were ‘fairly ruthless’. Rosalind went on to say that she and Anthony were happy living at Greenway. They were well looked after and it was a beautiful place. She admitted they were both pretty feeble and she got about the garden in a golf buggy. Anthony walked a bit, but they no longer went out to see people. ‘We are proper recluses,’ Rosalind said, although people did come to visit them from time to time. Her Christmas card was signed ‘love from Rosalind and Anthony’.

When Laura Thompson’s biography was published her version of the disappearance flatly contradicted that of Janet Morgan’s, although they had both been given access to the Christie family papers. Contrary to Janet Morgan’s claim that Agatha took a train from Guildford Railway Station to London, Laura Thompson states that on the morning of Saturday 4 December Agatha abandoned her car and instead walked to Chilworth Railway Station where she took the ‘seven-thirty’ train up to London, which, according to Laura Thompson, ‘reached Waterloo at nine o’clock’. Railway records show that no trains destined for Waterloo left Chilworth Station at that time.

Contrary to Janet Morgan, Laura Thompson insists Agatha did
not
have amnesia. ‘It is understandable, laudable indeed, that Rosalind should have clung for so long, and so obstinately, to the “official” theory . . . But the official theory has never held water.’ Laura Thompson suggests Agatha ‘absconded in the belief that giving Archie a weekend of agony, making him fear that she was dead, awakening his buried feelings, might restore him to her’.

Laura Thompson’s description of the landscape contradicts her own version of events. ‘Newlands Corner on a December night is a fearful place. To stand there alone, in the silence, under the black winter skies, and look out over the vast empty slopes, is a terrifying thing to do. No woman, especially a woman of imagination, could do such a thing out of malice, or revenge, or any such petty motive.’

What Laura Thompson’s explanation does not take into account is that numerous individuals searched for Agatha throughout the period she was missing until it became too dark to continue without the use of lanterns. The landscape failed to have a terrifying effect on them, and they all returned safely to civilization. Moreover, malice and revenge are powerful motives that have destroyed lives, and it is absurd to allude to them as petty.

In the chapter entitled ‘The Quarry’, Laura Thompson’s 30-page fictionalized account of the disappearance begins with the words
‘
Time now for a new story.’ According to Laura Thompson, Agatha ‘wrote a letter to Carlo, then a letter to Archie. As she did so the black windows seemed to watch her. Perhaps Archie was outside one of them. It was the long narrow one beside the front door that she had always feared. It had a sly, malevolent look, like a goat’s eyes.’ No one, including the police, was ever able to verify in what order Agatha wrote her three letters, which were addressed to her brother-in-law Campbell Christie, her husband Archie and her secretary Charlotte. Laura Thompson’s description of Agatha’s departure from Styles is even more lurid.

Laura Thompson describes the centre of the house as ‘silent’ while beyond are the ‘discreet sounds of the servants and the soft breaths of Peter’. The stairs are ‘striped with shadow’ as Agatha climbs them to her bedroom, which is ‘chilly and flooded with moonlight’. She collects her dressing-case from the bed, dons a fur coat and a hat, then slips into Rosalind’s room and watches her daughter sleeping. The child’s face reminds her of Archie. Rosalind’s favourite teddy is falling out of bed. Agatha tucks it in again before going back downstairs. Peter wags his tail. She loves him, but she cannot stay. The house is ‘sending her out into the blackness’. She tells the maid, ‘whose white face has appeared in the hall’, that she is going to London. She kisses Peter, who ‘looks baffled’ because she is leaving without him. His body is warm as she hugs him, so tightly that he gives ‘a brief whine’. Then she goes outside to her car, ‘feet crunching’ as she pushes her way through the night, ‘moving fast now to escape the terror’.

No one – apart from Laura Thompson who has taken facts and twisted them into romanticized fiction like the film
Agatha
– can say where Agatha donned her coat and hat. We only have the biographer’s word that the stairs were striped in shadows and moonlight flooded Agatha’s bedroom. If there was a full moon, how was the house sending Agatha out into the ‘blackness’?

For the sky to have been totally black and starless it would have to have been covered in heavy rain clouds. It strains credibility that Laura Thompson should know that the expression on Peter’s face was puzzled or that he whined. Nor does Laura Thompson identify the precise nature of the ‘terror’ that allegedly prompted Agatha to move faster through the night.

After Agatha has driven away from Styles and is passing through Surrey, Laura Thompson states ‘the black sky dipped upon her’. What had become of the moonlight? A short while later readers are told that she got out of the car and, above her, the sky was ‘a pure vast starless black . . . She found a rutted path. It led to a quarry, a round bowl of chalk, white and faceless beneath the moon . . . By lifting her left wrist to the sky she could see that it was ten past two’.

In this fictionalized version of events the moon disappears and reappears more often than Agatha. So what were the weather conditions really like at Sunningdale and Newlands Corner on the night of Friday 3 December 1926? Records held at the British National Meteorology Library and Archive disclose ‘a quarter of the sky had been covered in cloud at 6 p.m.’ and by midnight ‘the sky had completely cleared of cloud cover’. According to the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, ‘the moon would only have been visible as a very slim arc’ during the day of Friday 3rd and would have set before the sun, so in effect there was no moon in the sky over the south of England that night because it was on the other side of the world.

Over the course of the next twenty-four pages Laura Thompson becomes so caught up in her fantasy that further discrepancies creep into her account. She gives her readers to understand that Agatha dreamed up the plots and words from her 1928 short story ‘Harlequin’s Lane’ and her 1954 book
Destination Unknown
by the side of the chalk pit before she abandoned her car; that she conceived the plots of her novels,
Death on the Nile
(1937),
Sad Cypress
(1940) and
Five Little Pigs
(1943) and the short story ‘The Edge’ (1927) while she was in Harrogate. She even claims that Agatha wrote chunks of these stories in her mind and later recalled every line she had composed in her head when it came time to commit them to paper prior to their UK publication. In fact, what Laura Thompson has done is take quotes from these stories and incorporate them into her account of what Agatha did in Harrogate.

When ‘The Edge’ was published in
Pearson’s Magazine
in February 1927 an editorial note stated it was ‘a story that was written just before this author’s recent illness and mysterious disappearance’, which negates Laura Thompson’s suggestion that the story was conceived and written by Agatha while she was in Harrogate.

The biographer states that Agatha took room five on the first floor of the Harrogate Hydro, but this is factually incorrect. Agatha’s handwritten entry as Mrs Neele in the hotel register shows her room was 105. According to the chambermaid Rosie Asher, during Agatha’s visit room 105 was not situated on the first floor but on the third floor because the numbering of the rooms conformed at that time to continental standards: ‘They had a funny system in those days. The best rooms were at the front of the hotel with a nice view. They were all numbered one and the rooms in the back, near the kitchen, were numbered two and three.’

Many readers will have assumed that Laura Thompson had accurate knowledge of Agatha’s time in Harrogate since the blurb for the biography states that it was ‘written with unique access to her diaries, letters and family’. But this is not so. After reviewing the Christie family papers, Janet Morgan stated: ‘Gaps remain in the story. No one knows why Agatha fled from Styles late on the night of December 3rd . . . We simply do not know what Agatha planned to do, if indeed she had any plans at all.’ By writing a romantic fictionalized account of the disappearance Laura Thompson avoids the main issues and trivializes what remains a serious subject for many of the crime-writer’s staunch fans.

Laura Thompson also claims it was wrong of me to allege that Agatha called her secretary Carlotta. But Agatha dedicated
The Mystery of the Blue Train
‘To the two distinguished members of the O.F.D. Carlotta and Peter.’ While some paperback versions have since dropped the dedication to her secretary and dog it can be found in both the first hardback English editions and 2007 facsimile editions of the novel released by Harper-Collins.

Moreover, Edith Butler has stated unequivocally that Agatha had called her secretary Carlotta. The reason she is so sure of this is because her father, Inspector Sidney Butler, discussed the case with her and her mother over the breakfast table at the time of the disappearance. Edith Butler also recalls seeing Archie, dressed in plus-fours, arriving at Ascot Police Station to report his wife’s disappearance to her father and clearly being very unhappy at having to do so.

Laura Thompson employs faulty logic to refute the Gardners’ version of events pertaining to the night of the disappearance. The police established that Agatha left Styles at 9.45 p.m. Laura Thompson envisages it would have taken her between ‘thirty and forty minutes’ to drive from Styles to Newlands Corner and concludes she would have reached there at ‘ten-thirty’. But if Agatha had taken thirty minutes’ driving time she would have reached Newlands Corner by 10.15; or if she had taken forty minutes driving time her arrival would have been at 10.25, not 10.30. The biographer argues it would have taken Agatha ‘no more than five minutes’ to push the car off the plateau of Newlands Corner before walking to West Clandon Railway Station. On the basis of these timings, she argues that Agatha would not have arrived there in time to catch the 10.52 train up to London.

The distance between Styles, Sunningdale, and Newlands Corner is 14.7 miles and not ‘just under twenty miles’ as maintained by Laura Thompson. During the 1920s the makers of the model of Agatha’s Morris Cowley car advertised it could average 45 m.p.h., but according to Philip Garnons-Williams, the author of
Morris Cars, 1913–1930
, it was capable of comfortably attaining higher speeds of 55 m.p.h. A Morris Cowley driven at a steady 50 m.p.h. would have taken twenty minutes to reach Newlands Corner and would have arrived there at 10.05 p.m.

Contrary to Laura Thompson’s hypothesis, Agatha’s car rolled off the edge of the plateau within seconds because she had left the gears in neutral and released the handbrake – no sensible person would have spent five minutes pushing the car off the plateau with the handbrake on. The distance from Newlands Corner to West Clandon Railway Station is 2.3 miles. This would have given Agatha plenty of time, forty-seven minutes to be precise, in which to walk down the sloping road, which flattened out at the bottom of the hill, to West Clandon Station and catch the 10.52 train.

The average speed of a normal, healthy person walking at a reasonable steady pace is about four miles an hour or fifteen minutes per mile; it would take about thirty-five minutes to complete the walk, bringing the time to 10.40 pm, with twelve minutes to spare before the train arrived. Laura Thompson’s theory does not take into account that if, for any reason, Agatha’s car journey had taken longer than she had predicted she could have turned round at Newlands Corner and driven back part of the way she had come, then abandoned the vehicle and walked the remaining mile or so to West Clandon Station, thus ensuring she caught her train on time. All this is, of course, purely speculative since it is clear from Nan’s conversation with Graham Gardner that she believed Agatha might have got a lift part of the way to the station.

After I restaged Agatha’s journey one night in 1996 by getting Philip Garnons-Williams to drive me in his vintage Morris Cowley from Styles to Newlands Corner, then walking to West Clandon Station, it became apparent that the main reason she left her fur coat on the back seat of her car is because it would have been too hot for walking in – just as Superintendent Goddard had guessed after she was found alive.