Conan Doyle’s name was also heavily featured in the press that month, though for less sinister reasons. The latest series of Sherlock Holmes stories was still running in The Strand, and each new story provoked a great deal of comment in the newspapers. “Those who were about fifteen years old when they first made the acquaintance of Sherlock Holmes, and when Dr. Watson first wrote about him, must be about fifty now,” said the Times. “To whom else has it been given to share life so long with so persistent, though fictitious, a contemporary?”
While praising the longevity of Holmes, the newspaper mistakenly eulogized Dr. Watson, who had been absent from both “The Lion’s Mane,” published that December, and “The Blanched Soldier,” which appeared the previous month. “Fame is a capricious bedlam,” the Times declared, “but why is Holmes the only prolonger of his own life, the only survivor of his own biographer and obituarist, the only personage privileged to be his creator’s never-failing resource?” No doubt there was much relief in the Times offices when Watson reappeared the following month in “The Retired Colourman.”
While Conan Doyle enjoyed the accolades of a long career, Agatha Christie had only just begun to make her presence known. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a milestone of detective fiction, had appeared earlier that year to great acclaim. Mrs. Christie and her husband, the dashing Colonel Archibald Christie of the Royal Flying Corps, began to enjoy a new prosperity. Two years earlier they had moved thirty miles out of London to Sunningdale, where they purchased a large house and christened it the “Styles,” a nod to the setting of her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
As it happened, Mrs. Christie’s first wave of commercial success coincided with a period of great personal unhappiness—just as it had with Conan Doyle. The death of her mother in the spring of 1926 threw Mrs. Christie into a deep depression. Matters grew worse in August when Colonel Christie revealed that he had fallen in love with a younger woman named Nancy Neele, a family acquaintance. Mrs. Christie resisted her husband’s appeals for a divorce, and their relationship grew increasingly strained.
On the morning of Friday, December 3, a parlor maid overheard a bitter argument between the Christies at breakfast—though Colonel Christie would later deny it. Later that morning, the colonel drove off to spend the weekend with friends in nearby Godalming. Nancy Neele, his new love, was also expected to attend. It was even rumored that Colonel Christie intended to announce his engagement to Miss Neele at the gathering, despite his wife’s refusal to grant a divorce.
With her six-year-old daughter Rosalind in tow, Mrs. Christie drove out to Dorking to have tea with her mother-in-law, Rosamund Hemsley. She appeared restless and distracted, though she put on a brave face for her daughter—even singing a few songs with the girl while waiting for the kettle to boil. Mrs. Hemsley attributed her daughter-in-law’s moodiness to anxiety over her latest book, The Blue Train Mystery, which had brought on a serious case of writer’s block. “These rotten plots,” Mrs. Christie declared. “Oh, these rotten plots!” Later, Mrs. Hemsley asked why her daughter-in-law wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. Mrs. Christie gave no answer. Instead, she sat very still for a moment, then burst into what Mrs. Hemsley called a “hysterical laugh.” Upon leaving, Mrs. Christie spent several moments crouched behind the wheel of her car as if lost in contemplation, then she slowly drove away.
That night, Mrs. Christie left the Styles shortly before ten, leaving behind a small clutch of letters. The following morning, her “bottle-nosed” Morris-Cowley two-seater was found abandoned at Newlands Corner, about five miles from Godalming, where Colonel Christie was staying. The car had been driven off the road and abandoned with its lights still burning. A brown fur coat and small suitcase were found inside. The case, which had burst open, contained dresses, shoes, and an expired driver’s license in the name of Agatha Christie. Nearby was a small body of water called the Silent Pool where, in one of Mrs. Christie’s early novels, a body had been discovered.
Fearing the worst, the police launched a massive search of the area. Tracker dogs and spotter planes were brought in. A crew of divers dragged the Silent Pool. A “petrol-driven tractor” cleared away thick patches of undergrowth. Colonel Christie took an active part, even employing his wife’s wire-haired terrier as a bloodhound. As the days dragged on with no progress, thousands of civilian volunteers joined in the search—including thirty-three-year-old Dorothy L. Sayers.
Strange, conflicting stories began to emerge. One man came forward to report that on the night in question he had encountered a stranded female motorist who was “strange in her manner.” She wore no hat or coat, and her hair was “covered with hoar-frost.” The man assisted her in restarting her Morris-Cowley, and she drove away in the general direction of Newlands Corner.
Colonel Christie’s own mother threw coals on the fire with a confusing statement to a Daily Mail reporter. “I am inclined to think that my daughter-in-law planned her end and deliberately drove the car to where it was found,” Mrs. Hemsley stated. If this appeared to suggest a premeditated suicide, however, she immediately contradicted herself: “She was devoted to her husband and child and would never willingly have left them. It is my opinion that in a fit of depression and not knowing where she was going or what she was doing, my daughter-in-law abandoned her car at Newlands Corner and wandered away over the Downs.”
The question of premeditation was to vex more than one investigator. The noted crime novelist Edgar Wallace, speculating on the case in the Daily Mail, offered his own theory: “The disappearance 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. That she did not contemplate suicide seems evident from the fact that she deliberately created an atmosphere of suicide by abandonment of her car.”
Wallace did not name the person against whom this mental reprisal might be directed, but the implication was clear. Initially, the public viewed Colonel Christie as the very model of the concerned, grieving husband. As the search dragged on, this perception began to change, fueled by lurid speculation in the press. One scenario had him receiving a phone call from his wife on the fateful night and rushing away from his dinner party to prevent her from causing a scene. As rumors of his affair with Nancy Neele began to circulate, Colonel Christie found himself transformed into a suspect in his wife’s disappearance. Much conjecture centered on the letters Mrs. Christie left behind at the Styles. Though the contents were never disclosed, it was darkly hinted that the missing woman had feared for her safety. Colonel Christie had no illusions about the shifting attitude of the police. “They think I’ve murdered my wife,” he complained to a colleague.
By the time Conan Doyle stepped in, Mrs. Christie had been missing for one week. Unlike Edgar Wallace, Conan Doyle could claim something of an official connection to the case. At the time of his knighthood in 1902, Conan Doyle had been given the honorary position of Deputy-Lieutenant of Surrey. Though he had shed the title as he transferred his energies to the spiritualist movement, the association may have provided a pretext for the chief constable of Surrey to seek his advice.
It was reasonable to hope that Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, would approach the Christie disappearance with the same rigorous logic he brought to the cases of George Edalji and Oscar Slater. Instead, he decided to solve the problem by psychic means.
In fairness, this should not have come as a surprise to anyone who had been following Conan Doyle’s “Uncharted Coast” writings in The Strand. In “A New Light on Old Crimes,” published in 1920, Conan Doyle made it clear that he regarded psychic science as a powerful tool for clearing up unsolved mysteries. “It should be possible at every great police-centre to have the call upon the best clairvoyant or other medium that can be got, and to use them freely, for what they are worth. None are infallible. They have their off-days and their failures. No man should ever be convicted upon th
eir evidence. But when it comes to suggesting clues and links, then it might be invaluable.”
The Christie case, Conan Doyle believed, presented an ideal opportunity to showcase the clues and links one might glean from psychic investigation. Toward that end, he contacted Colonel Christie and obtained one of the missing woman’s gloves. Next, he placed the glove in the hands of Horace Leaf, the man he considered to be the best psychic available. Conan Doyle thought so highly of Leaf that he occasionally sent the younger man out to lecture in his stead, and came to regard him as his “lieutenant” in the spiritualist crusade. “I knew him to be an exponent of the subject with an intellectual grasp of every aspect of it, and a pleasing platform manner and delivery,” Conan Doyle wrote. “But above all he has what I lacked, those personal psychic powers which enabled him to give actual demonstrations.”
Chief among Leaf’s powers was a talent for psychometry, the ability to receive psychic impressions from a physical object. “The method is very simple,” Leaf explained in his book The Psychology and Development of Mediumship. “An article worn or handled by an individual, held in the hand of the psychometrist or pressed against the forehead may call up in his mind thoughts, feelings, and even visions related to that individual.”
In other words, Conan Doyle intended to use Horace Leaf as a kind of psychic bloodhound, after giving him the “scent” from Mrs. Christie’s glove. “I gave him no clue at all as to what I wanted or to whom the article belonged,” Conan Doyle said in a letter to the Morning Post. “He never saw it until I laid it on the table at the moment of consultation, and there was nothing to connect either it or me with the Christie case. The date was Sunday last. He at once got the name of Agatha.”
In the absence of corroboration, we must take Conan Doyle at his word that he offered no clue as to the identity of the glove’s owner. However, as Mrs. Christie’s name had been on the front page of every newspaper for a full week, it is possible that Leaf reached his conclusion by other than psychic means.
It is also possible that Conan Doyle neglected to record intermediate steps that could have led Leaf to the name of “Agatha.” Magicians who perform mind-reading effects sometimes employ a technique called “chaining,” in which a string of canny, ambiguous questions is asked, phrased so as to invite response from the subject. A question such as “You’re not married, are you?” will likely draw an affirmation or denial. If the answer is yes, the mind reader is able to say, “Ah! I thought so!” If not, an answer of “I didn’t think so” is equally correct. In this manner, a skilled entertainer can pluck a seemingly impossible revelation from a series of benign questions. Once explained, as Dr. Watson often declared, the matter becomes absurdly simple.
It is not known whether Horace Leaf employed a similar technique, consciously or not, to produce the name of the owner of the glove. Having gotten that far, however, he could no longer have been in any doubt as to the identity of the owner. He might have stopped there and received full marks for an impressive psychometric display, but Leaf went on to offer a further series of impressions, with none of the misty ambivalence of a typical psychic reading. “There is trouble connected with this article,” Leaf announced. “The person who owns it is half dazed and half purposeful. She is not dead, as many think. She is alive. You will hear of her, I think, next Wednesday.”
At the time Mrs. Christie was widely presumed to be dead, especially by the Berkshire police, whose efforts were clearly aimed at retrieving a body, rather than at locating a missing person. Leaf’s unambiguous declaration that she would be found alive appears very persuasive. From Conan Doyle’s account, however, it is difficult to tell whether Leaf’s impressions were quite as bold and precise as he suggests. “There was a good deal about character and motives which was outside my knowledge,” Conan Doyle said in his letter to the Post. His reluctance to belabor the unhappy details of the Christies’ marriage is entirely admirable, but it also tells us that he did not report the full content of Leaf’s remarks, some of which may have been off the point.
One of those unrecorded remarks concerned an impression of water, which proved to be strangely accurate, though perhaps not in the way that Leaf or Conan Doyle imagined. An even more compelling clue might have been gleaned from the previous day’s Times. While the front pages kept readers current on the search, a personal ad further back invited communication from friends and relatives of a woman named Teresa Neele, late of South Africa.
On Saturday, December 4—the morning after Mrs. Christie’s disappearance—Teresa Neele had arrived by taxi at an elegant Edwardian spa called the Harrogate Hydropathic Hotel, in Yorkshire, with no luggage apart from a small bag. The other guests were led to believe that she had come to recover from the loss of a baby, which accounted for her melancholy appearance. Over the next few days, however, Mrs. Neele grew cheerier, acquired new clothing, and became more sociable. In the evenings, she danced the Charleston with the other guests to such hit tunes as “Don’t Bring Lulu” and “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” performed by the Happy Hydro Boys. On occasion, Mrs. Neele sang and played the piano in the lounge. She also tried her hand at billiards.
Bob Tappin, who played banjo with the Happy Hydro Boys, could not help noticing that Teresa Neele bore a strong resemblance to Agatha Christie. Other guests had noticed the similarity, and some had even pointed out the likeness to Mrs. Neele, who brushed the comments aside. Tappin waited a day or so, then took his suspicions to the police, who summoned Colonel Christie to Harrogate. “Fancy,” said Teresa Neele at the sight of Colonel Christie, “my brother has just arrived.”
The two withdrew into a private room as reporters converged on the hotel, clamoring for details. Later that evening, Colonel Christie offered a terse statement: “There is no question about the identity. It is my wife. She has suffered from the most complete loss of memory and I do not think she knows who she is.” The following morning, while a decoy couple distracted the press, the Christies slipped into a waiting car at the hotel’s side entrance.
While his wife recovered with friends, Colonel Christie expanded on the amnesia story. “My wife is extremely ill,” he told the press. “Three years have dropped out of her life. She cannot recall anything that has happened during that period. The fact that she lives in Sunningdale has no significance for her, and she does not seem to realize that her home is at the Styles. As to what has happened since she left there her mind is a complete blank. She has not the slightest recollection of going to Newlands Corner or of proceeding eventually to Harrogate.… It is somewhat remarkable that she does not know she has a daughter. In this connexion, when she was shown a picture of herself and Rosalind, her little daughter, she asked who the child was, ‘What is the child like?’ and ‘How old is she?’”
The explanation did not sit well with the press or the public. Further inquiries were brushed aside, though Mrs. Christie’s doctors issued several bulletins concerning her health. Questions were raised in Parliament about the expense of the search, which some estimated to have amounted to £10,000, though the home secretary placed it at a considerably more modest £25. Colonel Christie indicated that he would pay the costs in either case, and renewed his pleas for solitude to allow his wife to recover.
Many questions and contradictions remain. No one can be certain how Mrs. Christie covered the three miles from Newlands Corner to the Guildford Railway Station, where she caught the milk train to London, on the night in question. It remains unclear what she hoped to accomplish by placing her personal ad in the Times. If her memory loss was genuine, it seems strange that her publisher, Sir Godfrey Collins, was heard to remark “She is in Harrogate, resting” on the morning after her disappearance. Stranger still, Harrod’s of Knightsbridge forwarded a ring belonging to Mrs. Christie to Mrs. Neele in Harrogate. Mrs. Christie’s brother-in-law also appears to have known that she was at a spa in Yorkshire, having received a letter to that effect from Mrs. Christie herself. The police followed up the lead, but the inquiry came to nothi
ng since Teresa Neele, not Agatha Christie, had signed the hotel register.
Many theories were put forward. Some dismissed the entire episode as a publicity stunt. Others inclined to the view that Mrs. Christie hoped the drama would intimidate her husband into remaining in the marriage. Mrs. Christie’s choice of the name Neele—the name of Colonel Christie’s new love—cannot have been a coincidence. Another theory held that Mrs. Christie intended to frame her husband for murder, perhaps so that she herself could rescue him from the clutches of the law. This seemed outlandish, the theorists agreed, but no more so than the average plot of an Agatha Christie novel. The contents of the letters Mrs. Christie wrote on the night of her disappearance have never come to light, but it is thought that one of them went to the local police, indicating that she feared for her life. Certainly the police came to take a dim view of Colonel Christie as the search dragged on. One journalist had no doubts on this point: “If she had intended suicide and if her body had been found in the Silent Pool, I have no doubt from what I knew of the police attitude that Colonel Christie would have been held on circumstantial evidence.”
Conan Doyle, for his part, offered no opinion of Mrs. Christie’s motives. For him, the case had been a triumph of psychometry. “The Christie case has afforded an excellent example of the use of psychometry as an aid to the detective,” he wrote in his letter to the Morning Post. “It is, it must be admitted, a power which is elusive and uncertain, but occasionally it is remarkable in its efficiency. It is often used by the French and German police, but if it is ever employed by our own it must be sub rosa, for it is difficult for them to call upon the very powers which the law compels them to persecute.”
Conan Doyle was indulging in a bit of rhetorical gamesmanship here. The French and German police were unlikely to contest this bland assertion, but the British police were quick to register annoyance. “We do not keep hopeless lunatics in the police forces of this country,” declared one official.
Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle Page 48