Agatha Christie

by Janet Morgan

  The newspapers had by now published Agatha’s description; this produced new witnesses and helpful bystanders. One was a Mrs de Silvo, a neighbour of the Christies, who told the Mail’s correspondent ‘the story of a charming and beautiful woman of whom everyone speaks in the highest terms, of a devoted husband, and of a brilliant brain taxed apparently to its limit to satisfy a never-ending demand of the public for the fancies it could weave.’ All the information Mrs de Silvo could furnish, however, was that Agatha had recently been ill, distressed by the death of her mother, but that her condition had sufficiently improved for her to discuss a plan to take a furnished house in town, ‘so that she could be more with her husband, and of letting Styles furnished’. On Wednesday, December 1st, she had driven with Agatha to London, to do some shopping, and they had discussed plans for going together to Portugal in the New Year. Agatha proposed to spend that night at her club in town and when she and Mrs de Silvo parted on Wednesday afternoon this was the last her neighbour had seen of her.

  Three days after Agatha disappeared, Archie visited Scotland Yard to ask for help. He was told that the Yard could not intervene until asked to do so by the Surrey or the Berkshire Police. The official view was that Agatha had crashed her car, stumbled away from it and lost her path in the woods. During the course of Tuesday, December 7th, according to the Evening News, some five hundred men arrived in charabancs, to search the undergrowth. Dragging parties were detailed to each pond and stream; a local beauty spot, the Silent Pool, was assailed with a pump and large grappling irons to tear through its weeds. At Albury Mill Pond nets were placed across the sluice and the gates then opened. Nothing was found.

  During the course of the week more witnesses came forward. A Mrs Kitchings reported that at midday on the Saturday she had encountered a woman wearing ‘a toque and a coat and skirt’, who had come up close and peered into her face. ‘At first I thought she was going to speak to me, as she stopped right in front of me, but then she turned back and walked away in the opposite direction.’ A Mr Frederick Dore claimed to have found the abandoned Morris as he was going to work on the Saturday morning and to have noticed ‘a quite young girl’ walking away from it, who told him that at about midnight she had heard the car coming along the track on the top of the Downs. Mr Dore was tester for a firm of motor car manufacturers and his examination of the vehicle and its path suggested to him that it had been given a push at the top of the hill and sent down deliberately. A couple who kept the hotel at Newlands Corner claimed that Agatha had spent the Friday night there, and a Mr Ralph Brown of Battersea claimed he had met her while he was driving near Newlands Corner at about eleven-fifteen on the Saturday morning. ‘She seemed to be in the kind of mood when she did not care what happened,’ he reported. ‘I offered to give her a lift, but she said, “I am going nowhere in particular; thanks for the offer, but I would rather stay where I am.”’ A cow-man from Shere declared that on Saturday at 4 a.m. he had seen the car being driven towards Newlands Corner, while a Mr Richards, an accountant who owned a nearby shoot, reported that on the Saturday afternoon he had seen a woman resembling Agatha with a ‘well-dressed man of about thirty-two, who wore a grey soft-felt hat with the brim turned down’, sitting in a car parked in his lane. According to Mr Richards, this car had been seen in the same lane late on the Friday night, together with a car resembling Mrs Christie’s Morris. This account was partly corroborated by a Mr Faulds, the son of a neighbouring farmer. He too claimed to have seen the two cars on the Friday night and on Saturday afternoon, saying that ‘twice during the day I saw the woman outside the car, but each time she saw me she went back to it and shut herself up inside so as not to be seen.’ ‘This struck me,’ he declared, ‘as being very peculiar.’

  Such reports suggested to the press that Agatha might have gone into hiding with a companion. This theory was enhanced by the discovery, in a deserted hut in the woods near Newlands Corner, of a postcard, some letters and a box of face-powder (together with a dead owl in the fireplace). A local woodman excitedly told the press how he had been asked by the police to watch the hut, over whose threshold a conscientious officer sprinkled some of the powder, in the hope of taking footprints.

  Meanwhile the Daily Sketch crime reporter, who had obtained a powder-puff of Agatha’s, showed it to a clairvoyant, who described how the missing woman’s body might be found in a log-house. Ritchie Calder, then a young reporter on the Daily News, writing in the New Statesman fifty years later, described how he and a colleague from the Westminster Gazette found such a house in the woods. Closed up for the winter, it had nevertheless recently been occupied and the reporters claimed to find a bottle of opium there. ‘Actually,’ Ritchie Calder later admitted, ‘it was ipecacuanha and opium, in discreet proportions, used in the treatment of chronic diarrhoea. Accepting our wild goose chase, we went back to Guildford and told our colleagues, as an amusing story, about our adventures. They immediately swarmed off to that clearing. One picture-paper reporter took the barmaid of a Guildford hotel with him. He scattered face-powder on the doorstep, and got her to step in it. Next day the shoe-print appeared with the caption “Is this Mrs Christie’s?”’

  On Wednesday, December 8th, five days after Agatha left Styles, the newspapers reported that Archie’s brother Campbell had received a letter from her postmarked London SW, 9.45, December 4. It had been addressed to him at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and he had found it on his desk there on Sunday morning. After reading the letter, he had put it on one side and later, when he learnt of his sister-in-law’s disappearance, could not find it. The envelope had, however, survived and he had immediately telephoned Archie and sent him the envelope. Some newspapers stated that in the letter Agatha spoke of being ill and of intending to go to a Yorkshire spa to stay with friends and recuperate. According to The Times, the Surrey Police had ‘communicated with certain centres in Yorkshire, and as a result are satisfied, it is understood, that Mrs Christie is not in that county.’

  The Mail offered an ingenious explanation as to how Agatha might have contrived to post a letter to her brother-in-law in time for it to be franked with that date, while at the same time she was either standing helplessly by her abandoned car, wandering on the Downs or in the woods, or roaming about the lanes of Surrey in such a way as to encounter Mrs Kitchings at mid-day or Mr Brown at eleven-fifteen. This explanation the newspaper christened ‘SUB-CONSCIOUS PLOT THEORY’. The police, reported the Mail, ‘are not unmindful of the fact that it is known that Mrs Christie spent Wednesday night at her club in the south-western district of London and may then have made arrangements for posting the letter at a later date.’ The Mail’s explanation of what Agatha might have been doing since her disappearance was a subtle mixture of the notion that she might have lost her memory and the idea that her skill as a detective novelist might have something to do with the puzzling nature of her disappearance. ‘It is suggested in some quarters,’ the Mail declared, ‘that Mrs Christie may be suffering from what psychologists term a temporary breakdown with loss of identity. In such a state her sub-conscious mind, controlling all her actions, might plan an ingenious disappearance similar to that which her trained and creative brain, under normal conditions, has so often devised for her works of fiction.’ The Evening News further muddied the waters by producing a tailor, Mr Daniels, who lived in Plumstead, about a mile away from Campbell’s house in Woolwich. According to Mr Daniels, shortly before 11 p.m. on the night of Monday, December 6th, his front door had been suddenly pushed open by an agitated woman who had come into his front hall. The intruder had thrust out her hand, in which she held a one-pound note, and demanded change. When told there was none, she had left the house. Captain Christie, the Evening News reported, felt it highly improbable that Agatha had gone anywhere near Woolwich.

  In the early days of this saga the newspaper correspondents’ sympathies had been as much with Archie as with Agatha. ‘Both she and her husband,’ the Mail had written, ‘are extremely popular in th
e district, and anxiety as to the fate of a brilliant woman is only equalled by the sympathy evoked by the pitiful figure of Colonel Christie, who, driven to distraction by the mystery, finds comfort in the presence of his little daughter Rosalind.’ By the middle of the week, however, the press had discovered that all was not well between the Christies. Mrs Hemsley had told the Mail of Agatha’s recent depression, saying that for some days following her mother’s death Agatha had ‘seemed at a loss to account for her actions’. Mrs Hemsley had illustrated Agatha’s ‘frenzied condition’ by describing her state when Peter, Rosalind’s dog, had been knocked down and taken for dead. She also told the Mail that, on the Friday afternoon preceding her disappearance, Agatha had visited her in Dorking for tea. ‘When she left me,’ Mrs Hemsley added, ‘she seemed a little brighter, but sat deep in thought for a few seconds in her car before starting away.’

  The press had also made enquiries at Hurtmore, where, they now revealed, Archie had been staying on the night Agatha disappeared. Mrs James’s cook and parlourmaid had left her service, whether dismissed for gossiping or because they disapproved of this notoriety the newspapers did not say. Asked about his whereabouts on that evening, Archie told the Evening News that he was not prepared to confide in their correspondent. He was becoming increasingly exasperated: ‘I have told the police. I do not want my friends to be dragged into this. It is my business alone. I have been badgered and pestered like a criminal, and all I want is to be left alone.’ Archie was clearly having a difficult time: ‘My telephone is constantly ringing. All manner of people are asking about my wife. Why, I even get clairvoyants ringing up and telling me the only hope I have of finding her is by holding a seance.’ He would not explain why she had left home, ‘save that her nerves have completely gone, and that she went away for no real purpose whatever’.

  Nonetheless, on Friday, December 10th, a week after Agatha had vanished, Archie gave an interview to the Mail. It began with a remark which was afterwards to be quoted over and over again. ‘It is quite true,’ Archie was reported as saying, ‘that my wife had discussed the possibility of disappearing at will. Some time ago she told her sister, “I could disappear if I wished and set about it carefully.” They were discussing something that appeared in the papers, I think. That shows that the possibility of engineering a disappearance had been running through her mind, probably for the purpose of her work. Personally, I feel that is what happened. At any rate, I am buoying myself up with that belief.’ Archie next gave his own explanation; ‘You see, there are three possible explanations of her disappearance: Voluntary, Loss of Memory, and Suicide. I am inclined to the first, although, of course, it may be loss of memory as a result of her highly nervous state.’ Archie now developed this train of thought, unwisely in the circumstances: ‘I do not believe this is a case of suicide. She never threatened suicide, but if she did contemplate that, I am sure her mind would turn to poison. I do not mean that she has ever discussed the question of taking poison, but that she used poison very largely in her stories. I have remonstrated with her in regard to this form of death, but her mind always turned to it. If she wanted to get poison, I am sure she could have done so. She was very clever at getting anything she wanted.’ Archie ended, however, on a common-sense note:

  But against the theory of suicide you have to remember this: if a person intends to end his life he does not take the trouble to go miles away and then remove a heavy coat and walk off into the blue before doing it. That is one reason why I do not think my wife has taken her life. She removed her fur coat and put it into the back of the car before she left it, and then I think she probably walked down the hill and off – God knows where. I suggest she walked down the hill because she always hated walking uphill.

  The text of this interview should be treated with caution. In parts it reads naturally: the passage about Agatha’s removing her coat and walking off into the blue and the reference to her distaste for walking uphill sound fluent and down-to-earth. Other sequences are, however, more stilted, with the false note that comes when direct speech is turned into indirect speech and remarks strung together to make connected prose. Certainly Archie was not at ease with the press. He was harassed and anxious, guilty at being away from home when Agatha was clearly very ill, and, in any case, unused to giving this sort of interview. The Mail correspondent was a skilful journalist, whose account reflected Archie’s tense and suspicious state: but was Archie suspecting or suspected? The Mail’s correspondent, moreover, ‘directed Colonel Christie’s attention to certain rumours which have gained currency in Sunningdale and elsewhere’. Archie replied: ‘It is absolutely untrue to suggest there was anything in the nature of a row or tiff between my wife and myself on Friday morning. She was perfectly well – that is to say, as well as she had been for months past. She knew I was going away for the weekend; she knew who were going to be the members of the little party at the house at which I was going to stay, and neither then nor at any time did she raise the slightest objection. I strongly deprecate introducing any tittle-tattle into this matter. That will not help me to find my wife; that is what I want to do. My wife has never made the slightest objection to any of my friends, all of whom she knew.’ A further puzzle was how Agatha might be living since, Archie told the Mail, neither of her bank accounts – one at Sunningdale for household expenses, and the other at Dorking for private purposes – had been drawn upon since she had disappeared. Indeed, she had left both her cheque books behind. Archie believed that when Agatha left Sunningdale she might have had £5 or £10 in her possession; her clothes and fur coat had remained in the Morris. The Mail correspondent’s report concluded: ‘Friends of Mrs Christie have told me to-day that recently she has been particularly depressed, and that on one occasion she said, “If I do not leave Sunningdale, Sunningdale will be the end of me.”’ The implications of this remark were, in the context of this report, extremely sinister. Knowing what Agatha thought of Sunningdale, however, we can well believe that she might easily, and not altogether flippantly, have said something on those lines.

  Agatha’s flight and fate were now a matter of intense popular interest. On December 12th the public (including Miss Dorothy Sayers) joined in what the Evening News described as the ‘Great Sunday Hunt for Mrs Christie’. The police advised civilians to ‘wear old clothes and be prepared for a stiff task’; the News recommended ‘Anyone who may have bloodhounds … to bring them along.’ Men, it warned, should wear thick boots; women would find Russian boots and tweed skirts an advantage. A farmer loaned tractors to explore the bracken, squads of people slashed the undergrowth, and an aeroplane circled overhead. The Silent Pool was dragged again, and, as well as the police dogs, alsatians, collies and terriers were brought. No body was found, and Superintendent Kenward made another plan. The whole area was mapped into sections; heath, quarries, pools and streams. A firm of divers offered its services and eighty members of the Aldershot Motor Cycling Club also came forward to help.

  Newspapers were now offering a reward for anyone who could find ‘the missing novelist’, an invitation which naturally produced reports that she had been spotted simultaneously in places hundreds of miles apart. The work of the police was also complicated by the fact that other cases of missing persons were now attracting the attention of the press. Even when no direct connections were drawn, the placing of the latest reports on the search for Agatha Christie next to those announcing the disappearance of other unfortunate young women doubtless produced the intended effect of linking these events in the public mind.

  By this time the press was producing its own expert theorists. One, writing in the Mail, was ex-Chief Inspector Gough, veteran of a murder case at Wokingham, who offered some observations on human nature in particular and in general: ‘One great difficulty is that the search is for a woman with certain attributes that are not common to the ordinary individual. She is talented. She is a woman who by the very nature of her work would have an exceptionally elastic brain. Consequently one would expe
ct her, consciously or subconsciously, to do something extraordinary.’ Edgar Wallace was also wheeled in and made a number of confident assertions. ‘The disappearance,’ he wrote, ‘seems to be a typical case of “mental reprisal” on somebody who has hurt her. To put it vulgarly, her first intention seems to have been to “spite” an unknown person who would be distressed by her disappearance.’ He suggested that Agatha had ‘deliberately created an atmosphere of suicide’ and that ‘In an emotional moment she decided to spend the night in the open.… She would have gone to an hotel to sleep after her night’s adventure and might not have heard the commotion her disappearance had caused until Sunday.’ His ‘reconstruction’ ended with the confident statement, printed in heavy type, that ‘If Agatha Christie is not dead of shock and exposure within a limited radius of the place where her car was found, she must be alive and in full possession of her faculties, probably in London.’ ‘It is impossible,’ he declared, ‘to lose your memory and find your way to a pre-determined destination.’ This last sentence sank gently into the minds of reporters and thence into the public consciousness.