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Agatha Christie

Page 27

by Laura Thompson


  But the big news on 10 December were the words of Archie Christie, who had given in and talked extensively to the newspapers. The Mail quoted him at length. Doubtless encouraged by the sympathetic demeanour of yet another Special Correspondent, he revealed something of his thoughts: not just about the disappearance, but about Agatha herself. He did not lack understanding of her nature; he knew that her mind worked in unusual ways. Nevertheless the theories he put forward were deeply coloured by the desire to cover his own tracks.

  To this end he said that Agatha

  ‘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 went on to give his reasons as to why he did not believe Agatha had committed suicide: she would have used poison, he said, had she done such a thing, and anyway, ‘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 . . . I think she walked down the hill and off – God knows where. I suggest she walked down the hill because she always hated walking uphill.’

  Some of this was amazingly near the mark, especially the passage about walking downhill. Archie’s motive for saying it, however, was affected by self-interest. He wanted to emphasise that Agatha was still alive because her only credible reason for killing herself was his relationship with Nancy Neele.

  He gave details of the last three days before Agatha had disappeared, including the visit to Edmund Cork in London. It is surprising, in the light of their estrangement, how much he knew about the progress of Agatha’s writing. Obviously they had maintained some sort of relationship, or perhaps it was simply that Agatha had pretended to carry on with him as normal.

  ‘She told me that they had been talking about her new novel, The Mystery of the Blue Train, which she could not complete . . . I think she was also rather worried about turning another series of hers, The Biß Four, into book form. It did not, however, appear to affect her, for after dinner on Thursday evening she went off with her secretary, Miss Fisher, to a dancing class or something at Ascot.’

  This was all very interesting, but the point of the interview lay elsewhere. I directed Colonel Christie’s attention to certain rumours which have gained currency in Sunningdale and elsewhere.’ Archie strenuously denied that there had been a row between him and Agatha on the morning of Friday the third.

  ‘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 or 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 which is what I want to do.

  ‘My wife has never made the slightest objection to any of my friends, all of whom she knew.’

  How badly this reads; how much wiser Archie would have been to say nothing. Yet he would not be the last person to be seduced by the press into ‘explaining’ himself. People with infinitely greater media awareness have been convinced that silence is more liable to misinterpretation than words; only clever, watchful Charlotte knew that Archie was doing the wrong thing. It was not the job of the journalists to exonerate him. Their loyalty was solely to the story, and the best story of all was Archie’s guilt. One reporter, Stanley Bishop of the Daily Express, was absolutely convinced that this was a case of uxoricide. Ritchie Calder theorised that Archie had left the Jameses’ house in the middle of the night, met Agatha at Newlands Corner and killed her. As the 1922 trial of Edith Thompson7 had shown, the English public was willing to condemn an adulterer for murder, however shaky the proof. Evidence against Archie was nonexistent, but his character had been similarly blackened; even if he had not actually murdered his wife, the press believed that he had probably driven her to suicide. So he should not have talked. But perhaps because he was innocent of the greater crime – and because he was sure, knowing her as he did, that Agatha was alive – his instinct was to defend himself.

  In truth, Archie could not believe the situation in which he had been placed. He was the type of man to think that journalists and policemen belonged to a different caste; and now here he was, at the centre of both a headline story and a possible criminal investigation. The cosy comfort of his weekend with Nancy – relaxation, respite, golf, Madge and Sam playing happily with their new baby – had been shattered by the calm voice of Charlotte. Possibly he knew then that life would never be the same again, for any of them.

  Reports differ on whether Charlotte contacted Archie on Friday night, when she returned to Styles from London, or on Saturday morning after Agatha’s car had been found. According to Ritchie Calder’s recollections – by no means error-free – it was on Friday that Charlotte, ‘whether at Mrs Christie’s suggestion or because she was in a panic’, telephoned to warn Archie that Agatha had gone missing. ‘A dinner party was in progress,’ wrote Calder, ‘what the household described as an “engagement” party for Colonel Christie and Miss Neele.’ This was gossip from the servants, relayed to the press via the police. It is unsubstantiated, but it helps to explain the attitude towards Archie. It also backed the theory that Archie had left the Jameses that night, driven to meet Agatha nearby and murdered her. But none of this is clear, as other reports have Charlotte telephoning Archie on Saturday morning, when he returned to Styles and met the police.

  Nancy, meanwhile, had retreated into the fastness of her parents’ house in Hertfordshire, where Archie prayed she would remain undisturbed; if only Agatha could be found before Nancy’s name was known! It was a mercy that Charlotte was so discreet, although the servants could not be similarly trusted. Charlotte remained selfpossessed even when the police threw the occasional dart of suspicion her way. She and her sister Mary moved in their dignified, Edinburgh way about the house, keeping things organised, keeping them normal. Charlotte dealt beautifully with Rosalind, who had been told that her mother was away writing a book. She dealt with Madge Watts, who believed that somebody must have an idea of what had happened to her sister. She dealt with the constant telephone calls and with the press who lurked outside the house; they knew that they would get little change from Miss Fisher, however hard they tried. Archie was a different matter. In his 10 December Daily Mail interview he had yet more to say about what Agatha might have done.

  ‘I only know what I have been told by the servants. I imagine, however, that she got into such a state that she could not sit down quietly to read or work. I have got into that state myself many a time and have gone out for a walk just aimlessly. That, I think, is what my wife did, but instead of walking she took the car, a four-seater, and drove off . . .

  ‘The servants did not notice anything particularly strange about her, and when Miss Fisher, who had gone to London, rang up in the evening to see if she was wanted, my wife was all right. She left a note addressed to Miss Fisher in which she asked for the arrangements for the Yorkshire visit that weekend [to Beverley] to be cancelled, adding that she was going for a run round and would let her know on the morrow where she was.

  ‘That is all I know, and I need hardly tell you that the suspense of the uncertainty is terrible.’

  The letter that Agatha had written to Charlotte was in the possession of the police by this time. There was also the letter that Agatha had left for Archie, which he had burned before anybody else could read it. Almost certainly it made reference to his relationship with Nancy Neele; although not according to the Daily Mail of 11 December, which had Archie’s own assurances as to the letter’s contents. ‘They have nothing whatev
er to do with my wife’s disappearance,’ he explained. ‘It was certainly not a goodbye letter, nor did it make the slightest complaint. It was a note which, I am sure, my wife wrote when she recalled something she wanted to tell me long before the impulse overtook her to go out in the car.’

  Not surprisingly, Kenward took a somewhat different view of Agatha’s letter to her husband. Obviously Archie himself would not have told Kenward about the letter; it is possible that Charlotte did so but far more likely it was one of the maids, who would have seen it in the hall.

  Subsequently there was a conference between the Surrey and Berkshire forces at Bagshot police station, ‘in the course of which the discovery of the new letter was discussed’, wrote the Daily Sketch. The newspapers also pondered the contents of the letter left for Charlotte, which Archie discussed with the Mail in his by now customary fashion: the one that led readers to believe precisely the opposite of what he said. ‘It had nothing whatever to do with my wife’s disappearance. It certainly made no allegations against anyone.’ Clearly thinking it would help his cause, he went on to say that he and Agatha ‘did not quarrel about our individual friends or anything else. You must remember that we have been married for some years and, like other married couples, led to a certain extent our own lives.’

  Some of the 11 December newspapers would have made uncomfortable reading for Archie. The Sketch informed its readers that ‘Colonel Christie was today invited to call upon Deputy Chief Constable Kenward’ in order to discuss the letter that he had destroyed. The Westminster Gazette wrote that ‘important developments were pending’ as a result of the Bagshot conference and described Archie as showing signs of ‘anxiety’ when he left his meeting with Kenward. The averagely astute reader might well have thought an arrest was imminent. However the Express took a different tack, stating that the police now believed Agatha to be alive (certainly this was true of the Berkshire force). Meanwhile the reporters had inevitably been badgering the Jameses’ household in Godalming. The Mail had managed to get a somewhat fractious interview with Sam James, whose loyalty to Archie read unsympathetically.

  ‘Suggestions have been made that Colonel Christie was called up by his wife while he was here, or that he went out to meet his wife, or that she came here to meet him. Nothing of that kind happened.

  ‘I believe that Mrs Christie returned home and found that the Colonel was spending the weekend with us, and that she then drove off in a fit of pique.’

  This was not the general belief. Although the Daily Mews printed three doctored photographs purporting to show Agatha in possible disguises, and although there were new rumours that she was in a south-coast hotel or possibly in Rhyl, it was Kenward’s theory that held popular sway. So it was that on 12 December the public decided to go looking for Agatha’s corpse. ‘Great Search Today by Public for Mrs Christie,’ wrote the Sunday Pictorial. ‘Motorists asked by police to join in hunt on Downs – appeal for bloodhounds.’ Rather in the way that thousands of people would descend upon Kensington after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, motivated as much as anything by the desire to be part of an event, from early Sunday morning the excited crowds came to Newlands Corner; among them was the crime novelist Dorothy L. Sayers.

  As advised by Kenward and his force, the public came dressed in hardy clothes (‘A police officer said it was no use people turning out in patent leather shoes’) and carried sticks. A half-dozen bloodhounds duly made their appearance. Large areas were covered by the search – horses were used to carry instructions to far-flung groups of people – although inevitably some of the volunteer hunters were more energetic than others, and Alfred Luland’s refreshment kiosk was popular. Rumours of discoveries were rife: the best find was a number of handbags, which the Daily Express strove to present as potentially significant.

  Estimates varied as to the size of the crowds. The Daily Mail said there were five thousand people, the Daily Sketch ten thousand, the Express and the Westminster Gazette fifteen thousand. The Times, more judiciously, had the crowd at just two thousand, although even so ‘The roads were blocked with traffic, and parked cars covered the whole of the plateau where the abandoned motor car was found.’ Around four hundred cars had turned up (or ‘three thousand’, according to the Sketch), A jolly good time, it would seem, was had by all. It was perhaps unsurprising that Archie – who had not taken part in the great Sunday hunt – should have told the Daily Express-. ‘I am sure she will not return until all is quiet.’

  The back pages of the newspapers were covered with pictures of the search at Newlands Corner. Also reported was the disappearance of twenty-year-old Una Crowe, who had walked out of her family home in Chelsea on the morning of Saturday the eleventh. ‘Daughter of a Famous Diplomat Missing’ ran the headline in the Express. ‘Another mystery of a missing woman has been added to that of Mrs Agatha Christie.’

  On 13 December the newspapers reached the height of their madness. Was Agatha dead? Was she alive? Was she in Hindhead, as suggested by the manager of the Royal Huts Hotel, which had entertained her to lunch at the weekend? Was she ‘in London disguised as a man’? This was reported, with all apparent seriousness, as the latest police theory; the Daily News revealed that Archie had ‘made a prolonged investigation’ to check if any of his clothes were missing.

  The Westminster Gazette referred back to the letter left for Charlotte Fisher – ‘Sealed Note in Christie Case To Be Opened Only if Body is Found’ – then quoted from Mrs Hemsley, Agatha’s mother-in-law, who had suggested that the half-written novel The Blue Train (sic) might contain the solution to the real-life mystery. The paper also made mention of a ‘white-clad figure’ which had been seen haunting Newlands Corner, an area that became deadlier by the day.

  The Daily Sketch informed readers that ‘séances have been held in the open air on the downs and in incense-laden rooms in Guildford and adjacent towns’. A journalist attended one held by a ‘well-known medium’, whose spirit guide, Maisie (‘an African girl, tribe unknown’), told him that Agatha had been waylaid by two men in Bayswater. The journalist was a sceptic; nevertheless he got his story, and incidentally showed the extraordinary lunacies that Agatha was leading people to commit.

  The fourteenth brought reports of a hut at East Clandon, barely a couple of miles from Newlands Corner, that bore signs of habitation. The reliably sensationalist Westminster Gazette described it as ‘a kind of eerie Hansel and Gretel house in the loneliest part of the Surrey Hills’. It contained a postcard, the end of a loaf and a fur coat; also an empty bottle ‘labelled Poison, lead and opium’. The police, it was said, had strewn powder on the floor of the hut so that they would know if anybody entered it. ‘This morning there were clear traces of a woman’s footprint over the powder.’ All, however, was not as it seemed: a rogue reporter had scattered the powder, then asked the barmaid of a Guildford hotel to put her foot in it. The ‘opium’ was a medicine for the treatment of diarrhoea. The few belongings that had been left in ‘the hut’ – a perfectly normal, if remote, cottage – were the possessions of its owners.

  Meanwhile Kenward was off again, telling the Daily Mail of his plans for another huge search around Newlands Corner: ‘All ravines, streams, and ponds in this area will be combed.’ He reiterated that a body would be found, and sought to regain the backing of the reporters (by now slightly bored with this unproductive theory) in his quest. ‘The newspapers are suggesting that Mrs Christie is alive. If this is so, why has she not written to her bankers, her agents, or her solicitors, or to any of her relatives – without divulging her address? . . . She has not written any such letter for a reason which is obvious – that she is dead.’

  Unfortunately for Kenward’s subsequent reputation, Agatha had written just such a letter – to Campbell Christie – and he had chosen to ignore it. Yet even as Kenward was speaking to the Mail, the mystery was being quietly solved.

  On Sunday the twelfth, two members of the band at the Harrogate Hydro, Bob Tappin and Bob Leeming, had gone to
the local police station to report their suspicions about the quiet, smiling Mrs Neele, who so resembled the photographs of the missing Mrs Christie. The next day, officers of the West Riding Police went to the hotel and, after observing the woman, were of the opinion that Agatha had been found. They contacted Kenward, who took no notice and continued with his plans to search the area around Newlands Corner.

  First thing on Tuesday, the Yorkshire police were again in touch with Kenward, emphasising to him that, whatever his own doubts, Agatha’s household should nonetheless be informed. Accordingly he telephoned Charlotte Fisher at Styles and asked her to travel to Harrogate in order to establish if this was indeed her employer; she then contacted Archie, who took the train north. According to the Daily Express, Kenward was still expressing scepticism barely an hour before Agatha was identified. ‘I do not think there is anything in the Harrogate end,’ he said. Later he claimed that Archie, too, had had doubts about the sighting.

  Tappin and Leeming were not the only people in the hotel – or, indeed, in the Harry Cobb Band – to have recognised Agatha. Rosie Asher, who had acted as her chambermaid throughout her stay, had done so early on. Much later she said that she had not dared to go to the police: ‘I suppose I was one of the first to know, but it was more than my job was worth to get involved.’ She had found Mrs Neele ‘a bit odd’ from the start, with her one small case and her withdrawn, ghostly air. Among her few possessions were the unusual buckled shoes reproduced in a newspaper photograph of Agatha, and the zipped handbag described by the police. ‘Then it dawned on me.’

 

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