Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  Mrs Taylor, manageress of the Hydro, also had her doubts, which she mentioned only to her husband. ‘I took on a certain responsibility in not informing the police,’ she told the Mail. ‘Someone outside the hotel informed the police, although some of the servants here had said that there seemed to be a great resemblance between the woman and the pictures. I told them to say nothing.’

  Certain of the guests had also wondered, but the suspicions never led to action; the people at the Hydro were not that kind. Nor were the people of Harrogate. ‘Of course, we knew it was her, but we didn’t say anything,’ a town resident said many years later. If Mrs Christie wanted to be there, on her own, wandering around and buying clothes, that was entirely her business: Harrogate would not worry, so long as she fitted in. It was aristocratic, discreet, impregnable. An incongruous place for this particular journey to have ended and yet, for Agatha, the obvious one. Harrogate was the Torquay of the north. It was where ‘people like us’ went; even when they disappeared.

  And it could not have been more removed from the world of obsessive policemen and news-hungry journalists who, for all their frenetic pursuit, had failed to find Agatha; who had ignored the one clue, given by the woman herself, that could have taken them to her.

  Small wonder the press found it so hard to forgive her, when she was finally discovered, in the place where she had said she was going.

  It was not her fault that she had made a fool of so many people. She had not asked them to search the undergrowth of the North Downs, or to drain pools, or to espy her on London buses. She had not wanted to become the headline story in almost every newspaper for the past week. She had become public property despite herself, and now there was not a single thing she could do about it. The press felt that she had led them a dance; this was true, although again she had not asked them to be led. So, too, with those members of the public who had speculated endlessly about Mrs Christie’s fate: she had aroused their pity on false pretences, had made them think that she was a hapless corpse when in fact she was a sleek and well-fed resident at a swell hotel (all right for some!), had caused them to behave in ways they would not otherwise have done. She had made them look silly. Now she would suffer for it.

  On the evening of Monday the thirteenth, the reporters were tipped off that their quarry might be found. Some travelled up to Harrogate immediately, and spent Tuesday trying to identify the hotel at which Agatha was said to be staying. The Evening Standard took the plunge and, in its 14 December afternoon edition, stated that a woman was awaiting identification by Colonel Christie.

  Archie arrived in Harrogate just after six thirty and, with Superintendent McDowell of the West Riding Police, went to the Hydro where he met the manageress, Mrs Taylor. ‘Mrs Neele’ was upstairs dressing for dinner. Her handwriting in the register was Agatha’s, slightly disguised.

  At around seven thirty Agatha came down the stairs and saw Archie, who confirmed with McDowell that this was indeed his wife. Outside, the press waited. Soon they would be let loose upon Colonel Christie; no longer a wife-murderer, now participating in a whole new cover-up.

  The newspapers of 15 December splashed the discovery. Amid the Christmas advertisements for Derry & Toms, Whiteleys, Bourne & Hollingsworth, the headlines blazed: ‘Mrs Christie Found at Harrogate’. And then Archie’s desperate lie, given to the press the night before: ‘She does not know who she is,’

  Details were given of Agatha’s stay at the Hydro. Inevitably there were discrepancies, as each newspaper found its own source for information. The Daily Mail went to the top of the tree and spoke to Mr Taylor, manager of the hotel, whose wife had suspected that the missing woman was in their midst.

  ‘Mrs Christie arrived at the Harrogate Hydropathic on the Saturday in a taxicab [he said]. From the first her life in the hydro was exactly similar to that of our other guests. She took her meals in the public dining room, only occasionally having her breakfast in bed.

  ‘In the evening we sometimes have singing and dancing in the lounge. In this Mrs Christie took an enthusiastic part. She sang several songs – what they were I do not remember, for I am not musical – and she danced often, mixing freely with the young people staying in the hydro . . .

  ‘What account of herself she gave to them I cannot tell you, but, although I understand they remarked several times to each other on the resemblance between their fellow guest and the missing woman, they did not really believe she could be Mrs Christie.’

  The Mail also said that she bought a good many clothes while staying in Harrogate. At the Hydro she spoke little at first, then made some friends; another guest, Mrs Robson, was given to understand that her child had died and she was recovering. She played billiards occasionally although ‘rarely made more than five or six at a time’. The Westminster Gazette, however, spoke to ‘an employee at the hotel’ who had seen Agatha play and

  ‘although she had told her opponent, a foreign gentleman staying at the hotel, that she could not play, some of us who were watching at the game remarked that she must have been “kidding” him . . .

  ‘She is a fine, good looking woman,’ he said, ‘and was looking cheerful, often joking with the members of staff. She did not hide herself at all from the public gaze, but on the contrary took quite an active part in the life of the hotel, being very fond of singing and playing in the lounge . . . There was certainly nothing to suggest that she was in ill-health.’

  The Daily Express spoke to the hotel’s lady entertainer, Miss Corbett, who was full of after-the-event wisdom: ‘We have all been saying it was Mrs Christie, but we hardly liked to do anything. She has done a great deal of singing to my accompaniment. She has a very high soprano voice and she sings very nicely.’ One of the hotel guests, a shipping merchant named Mr Pettelson, described to the Express how he had seen ‘Mrs Neele’ the previous evening before dinner, and she had said to him: ‘Oh, fancy, my brother has come.’ Mr Pettelson said that other guests at the Hydro had thought she was Mrs Christie, although he had ‘never dreamed’ it. She seemed, he said, to be ‘always thinking. I said to her once, “Where do you come from; do you live in London?” She replied, “No, I do not live in London. I live in South Africa.” I did not like to pursue the matter further, as she did not seem to want to encourage the conversation.’

  The next day Mr Pettelson talked some more, telling the Daily News that he and Agatha had become great friends. ‘Perhaps it was because we were both interested in music.’ He described how she had bought and signed for him a copy of the sheet music to ‘Angels Ever Guard Thee’, which they had played together. He also elaborated upon the meeting with Archie. ‘It seemed at the time strange to me for a brother to be as despondent as he was.’

  The next day, in fact, a good many things had started to seem strange. On the fifteenth the newspapers had dutifully parroted the amnesia theory, describing the ‘pathetic’ little scene of reunion between the Christies, and Archie’s attempts to get Agatha to recognise him. They had done this with a fair degree of sympathy and compassion. Now cynicism began to stream back into the reporters’ hearts.

  ‘No Evidence of Lost Memory,’ scoffed the headline in the Westminster Gazette,8 which had ‘consulted leading mental specialists’ on the subject. It was not possible to lose one’s memory and continue to act in such a normal manner, showing no signs of distress; nor was it feasible that Agatha would have failed to recognise her own name in the newspapers. Archie clung to his theory, however, and told reporters that although Agatha knew nothing of how she had arrived at Harrogate, she was beginning to regain her memory.

  ‘This morning,’ he said, ‘she has a faint idea that she is Mrs Christie.’

  The reporters had been struck by Agatha’s demeanour as she took the train from Harrogate to Leeds, thence to Manchester. ‘She chatted gaily with her sister and once laughingly patted her on the shoulder.’ This looked a little like mockery, and the newspapers began to get vicious. They knew that their readers felt similarly aggrieved, so th
ey were on safe ground, especially when they brought up the issue of money. How much had the search for Agatha cost? The Daily Sketch gave estimates of between a thousand and three thousand pounds, although the figure would go up dramatically, eventually reaching the ludicrous heights of twenty-five thousand. The Daily Mail started a correspondence on the subject of the ‘remarkable and (it seems to some of us) unjustifiable concentration of the police of two counties on the disappearance of Mrs Christie,’ wrote one reader. ‘I see no reason why the police should have expended thousands of pounds which could not be collected from anyone connected with the missing novelist.’

  Then there was the question of the name Agatha had assumed in Harrogate: ‘a name which coincides with that of the young woman who, in addition to Colonel Christie, visited Hurtmore Cottage, the Godalming home of Mr and Mrs James’, as the Westminster Gazette somewhat pointedly put it. The Daily Express was also alert, writing that Archie had ‘requested particularly that this name his wife had used at the hydro should not be divulged’. It then informed readers that Archie had no intention of contributing to the cost of the search. ‘I did not ask them to search for her,’ he said. ‘I knew all the time that she was alive, and I told them so.’

  This, of course, was unanswerable. But logic no longer had much to do with the way that this case was reported. The public story of the disappearance had been created in the minds of thousands of people; yet it was Agatha herself who had written it; and it was not the story that people wanted. The subtleties of what she had done were beyond the public grasp. It was therefore decided that her mysterious creation was nothing more or less than a ‘set-up’.

  She had eluded everybody for eleven days; now she eluded them again, locked as she was behind the gates of Abney Hall;9 and frustration poured out. ‘Millions of fine fellows were killed in the war and practically no notice was taken of them,’ said Mr Mitchell-Hedges, ‘the well-known explorer’, to the Sketch. ‘Yet paralysis set in when one woman disappeared.’ If loss of memory could be proved, wrote the Express, then sympathy for Agatha would flow; meanwhile the joke was on ‘the police who argued that she was lying dead near Newlands Corner, the willing crowds who tramped the downs in search, the good people who saw her at various irreconcilable times and places . . .

  The Surrey Advertiser, which took a proprietorial interest in the case, summed up the general mood:

  Mrs Christie has been found, but the mystery surrounding her disappearance is very far from being cleared up. Indeed, to many people the whole business gets ‘mysteriouser and mysteriouser’ with successive explanations. We all rejoice that Mrs Christie is alive and well – or was well, to all appearances, until the arrival of her husband at the Harrogate Hydro on Tuesday evening. But, frankly, the public are puzzled and bewildered.

  When did memory loss kick in? When she left her car at Newlands Corner? If so, it is passing strange that one so afflicted should have been able to find her way to London, cross the City from one terminus to another, book to Harrogate . . . Medical men may be familiar with such cases; the layman, in his ignorance, simply wonders.

  Another puzzle almost, but not quite, as great is how Mrs Christie came to remain unidentified for so long. Just think of it! For ten days she was the most talked about person in the country . . . All the while the cause of this sensation is pursuing the normal life of a normal person at a hotel where there were numbers of guests, talking to them, even singing to them, yet unidentified. . . We withdraw the qualification in the first sentence in this note: the one puzzle is as great as the other, if not greater.

  On 17 December, the last day that the case was headline news, Archie faced the reporters outside Abney Hall and handed to them a medical bulletin. It was signed by Dr Donald Core, lecturer in neurology from Manchester University, and the Wattses’ family doctor, Henry Wilson, and it read: ‘After a careful examination of Mrs Agatha Christie this afternoon we have formed the opinion that she is suffering from an unquestionably genuine loss of memory, and that for her future welfare she should be spared all anxiety and excitement.’

  Archie added his own statement, reported in The Times.

  ‘My wife is extremely ill, suffering from complete loss of memory. Three years have dropped out of her life. She cannot recall anything that has happened during that period . . . She has not the slightest recollection of going to Newlands Corner or of proceeding eventually to Harrogate.

  She now knows who I am, and has also realised that Mrs Watts is her sister. 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?”’

  In conclusion Archie made a plea for privacy. ‘All the worry has been terrible, and all we want now is peace and quietness. I have been offered £500 to tell how my wife came to Harrogate. I do not know, and she cannot tell me.’

  ‘And I hope,’ he said to the Daily Sketch, ‘that ends the matter.’ But, if nothing else, Archie’s own inability to evade questioning would ensure yet more coverage. The Sketch asked him about the suggestion that Agatha’s disappearance had been a publicity stunt, ‘all arranged to sell her books’, which he fiercely denied. ‘It has been nothing of the sort. The doctors’ report proves it.’

  The reporters also asked about the even more dangerous subject of Agatha’s use of the name ‘Neele’; that of a ‘mutual friend’, as Archie had told the Daily Mail.

  ‘She inserted the advertisement in The Times under the name of Neele, asking her relatives to communicate, because she was in the extraordinary position of being in a strange hotel for no purpose that she could think of and with no knowledge of who she was other than the conviction that Teresa Neele was her real name. The doctors told me that such an action was compatible with the action of a person suffering from loss of memory.’

  The Mail then proceeded to print a few paragraphs about our mutual friend, Miss Neele, whose father had given a brief interview from his home in Hertfordshire. ‘I cannot hazard any theory why Mrs Christie should have used my family name. It is unfortunate,’ he said, ‘that Nancy should have been a member of the house-party of Mr and Mrs James during the weekend that Mrs Christie disappeared, and that Colonel Christie should also have been a member of that party.’

  To the Westminster Gazette Mr Neele said a little more. ‘It is most unpleasant, both for my daughter and for all of us in the family, to have her name dragged through the mud, and, furthermore, it is quite unnecessary.’ Mrs Neele told the reporter that Nancy was a friend of the Christies, ‘but she has never been especially friendly with the colonel’. Her daughter, she said, was ‘very distressed over the whole affair’.

  The Gazette also alighted upon the incident of the ring that Agatha had left for repair at Harrods on Saturday the fourth, giving to the store the address of the Harrogate Hydro, to which the ring was sent. ‘It is accordingly established beyond doubt that “Mrs Neele”, en route for Harrogate, was in the West End on the Saturday morning of Mrs Agatha Christie’s disappearance, making purchases like any normal woman.’

  However much Archie insisted that Agatha was ‘extremely ill’, and that it would take weeks for her to recover, his statements were received with almost complete disbelief. As ‘Lady Pontifex’ wrote to the Daily Mail: ‘Many of us would also like to know how the statement that she has lost her memory squares with the fact that she has stayed in an hotel, paid her bills, danced and sung, and played billiards.’ The money question also continued to rankle: Archie had stated that the additional expenses incurred by the search were no more than twenty-five pounds, and that as a ratepayer he was under no obligation to meet them. ‘A Surreyite’ wrote to his local newspaper, the Advertiser, that

  the best thing Colonel Christie can do to show his gratitude for the restoration of his wife is to pay all the expenses connected with that search. It is sad enough to know that one of our Surrey beauty spots has had
to suffer by being trampled down and disfigured unnecessarily. Perhaps when Mrs Christie’s memory returns she will make what reparation she can by seeing that the ratepayers do not suffer for her disappearance.

  Agatha, and to a lesser extent Archie, had become a focus for public opprobrium. She was regarded as a devious woman whose husband was defending her in inappropriate and possibly self-serving ways. She was attacked in a manner characteristic of the British public: enviously, resentfully, pruriently and with a strong dash of ‘who does she think she is?’. A letter was sent to the Mail from ‘An Ordinary Woman’, saying that she would like to know what would happen if she disappeared. Would she get the same preferential treatment as Agatha had received? When the body of poor Una Crowe was found on the twenty-first – suicide after a nervous breakdown – it was quite obvious what people were thinking: here was somebody who had really done what Agatha had pretended to do. Here was a good person, truly deserving of sympathy, not a jumped-up attention-seeker.

  Newspaper coverage sensed the mood and did not hesitate to inflame it. Probably the reporters shared it. Female hate figures are a common feature in the press today; it is almost as though society needs them as a repository for its less-elevated emotions. ‘The world is not charitable in what it says about women,’ Agatha would later write.10 She was subjected to something scarcely less cruel than a modern tabloid witch-hunt for having committed the crime of allowing her private anguish to move into the public arena. In February 1927 questions were asked in the House of Commons about the cost of the search. Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the home secretary, answered that the total additional cost to Surrey Police was about twelve pounds ten shillings, but other MPs were not going to let this go so easily. ‘Who’, it was asked, ‘is going to compensate the thousand of people who were deliberately misled by this cruel hoax?’ Joynson-Hicks’s reply, which was that people had simply joined the search out of curiosity, was of course the truth; but nobody wanted to hear it. As always with populist stupidity, there was absolutely nothing whatever to be done about it.