Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  The theory that Agatha had known exactly what she was doing all along, that she had disappeared voluntarily and led both police and public a deliberate dance, remains attractive to many; people still emerge from time to time with tales of how they once met someone who was staying at Harrogate when she was there and, oh yes, she was definitely up to something.

  The sceptical view appeals, in part, for the same reason as it did back in 1926. It is a reaction against the ‘amnesia’ theory that was initially propounded by Archie and upheld for years by the family. So unlikely is it that Agatha lost her memory, so unconvinced is almost everybody that she did, that the official insistence upon this explanation tends to irritate. It makes people think that something is being hidden: something detrimental. And it sends theorists in precisely the opposite direction. Those who do not believe that Agatha lost her wits when she disappeared tend to think, instead, that she was in full possession of them: planning a plot, as she did with her stories. But this was not that kind of story.

  Despite what he said to reporters after the event, Archie himself believed that Agatha had known what she was doing. A letter sent to Rosalind many years later said that, according to his friend Madge James, he had ‘felt that the disappearance was a publicity stunt’. So too did Madge and her husband; and so, presumably, did Nancy Neele. The phrase ‘publicity stunt’ implies that Agatha had disappeared to advance her career as a mystery writer, but this was not what Archie meant: rather, that she had tried to create publicity against him. She had tried to generate a furore of sympathy that would lead him to be discredited, and jeopardise his relationship with Nancy.

  It was inevitable, perhaps, that Archie saw things this way. Undoubtedly he would have felt guilt about Agatha, and guilt always hardened his heart. Also he had been through hell, and blaming Agatha was the easiest way of dealing with it. Possibly, deep down, he did not entirely believe his own words to Madge James. Possibly he was using this simplistic explanation of the ‘stunt’ as a shield for deeper feelings, which it was his instinct to hide.

  The theory of deliberate intent was laid out in a famous piece of journalism in the New Statesman, written just after Agatha’s death by Ritchie Calder.11 He described the way the story had taken possession of the newspapers – ‘even the sedate Times’ – and the hints from the police that this was a murder case: ‘In those days, crime reporters and police were very much in cahoots.’ He aired various rumours from the time as if they were fact, including the idea that Archie and Nancy had been attending an unofficial engagement dinner on the night that Agatha disappeared.

  He also wrote about Agatha’s demeanour on the night she was discovered at the Harrogate Hydro. ‘She was not flustered. She answered to “Mrs Christie” and when asked how she had got there she said that she did not know and was suffering from amnesia.’ There is no evidence at all that Agatha spoke to the press on 14 December – the newspapers would certainly have reported it if she had – and this throws doubt upon Calder’s piece. He was quite right, though, in his conclusion. ‘Emotionally disturbed, yes. Suffering from amnesia, no.’

  Closer to the truth, in a way, was the 1979 film Agatha12, which caught something of her dreamlike state as she drifted, ghostlike, through Harrogate. The actual plot is absurd – Agatha concocts a means to kill herself by Nancy Neele’s hand – and, although the film is extremely sympathetic to her mother, it is understandable that Rosalind sought to stop it being made.13 Yet it grasped the essential truths: that Agatha might have been ‘planning’ without being in control of her thoughts, and that throughout the eleven days she was ‘writing’ her own story.

  Far more brutal to Agatha was Jared Cade’s 1996 book, Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days, which purported to solve once and for all the mystery of the disappearance. It was based upon a version of events told to the author by the daughter of Agatha’s friend, Nan Kon. As has been emphasised, Nan’s daughter Judith was ten years old at the time of the disappearance; therefore her account came entirely from her mother, who must have told her everything in remarkable detail. For some reason she waited a very long time to allow this story to be told, despite its apparent newsworthiness.

  According to Judith, Agatha planned to disappear to Harrogate in order to punish Archie for his affair with Nancy, and she did so with Nan’s help. On the morning of Friday the third, she drove to London to visit Nan and discuss the plan, before returning to Styles for lunch. She left Styles at nine forty-five on the evening of 3 December, drove straight to Newlands Corner, pushed the car down the slope, then walked to West Clandon station in Surrey and caught a train to London. She stayed the night with Nan at her house in Chelsea. In the morning the women rang hotels in Harrogate asking about vacancies but, being told that none was full, they decided that Agatha should turn up unannounced at the Hydro. This would give credibility to the amnesia theory. Nan gave Agatha some money, went shopping with her at the Army and Navy Stores for clothes and a case, then lunched with her and put her on the train to Harrogate.

  This theory is at first quite compelling. Some things about it are perceptive and accurate: for example, the importance it gives to the letter that Agatha wrote to Campbell Christie. But there is a flaw in the theory that renders it impossible.

  The distance between Styles, at Sunningdale, and Newlands Corner is not great: just under twenty miles. To drive it nowadays would take between thirty and forty minutes. Obviously in 1926 cars were slower and less agile, and Agatha was driving on a dark winter’s night. Nevertheless it is possible – for the sake of argument – to assume that she drove at full speed to Newlands Corner and arrived at ten thirty.14

  She then had to manoeuvre the car on to the plateau at the top of the hill and – again in pitch darkness – give it an almighty shove that would send it down the slopes. Steep though these are, they are not vertiginous, and to push the Morris would not have been an especially easy job. Nevertheless it can be assumed – again – that this went without a hitch, and took no more than five minutes.

  Agatha then had to walk along unlit, unfamiliar roads to reach the station at West Clandon, approximately two and a quarter miles away. Assuming that she went at the brisk pace of four miles an hour, assuming even that she broke into an occasional run, this journey would still take more than thirty minutes. So Agatha would have arrived at the station a little after eleven o’clock. This at the very earliest, assuming a quick and straightforward journey along dark and bending roads, an untroubled shove of the car down the hill and a sprightly walk (in high heels) through the night.

  And here lies the central flaw in the Jared Cade theory: according to the Bradshaw Railway Guide for December 1926, the last London train from Clandon left at 10.52 p.m.

  There are other problems, too. Even if one accepts the theory, why on earth would Agatha have made things so difficult for herself? If this was part of a plan, why leave so little time to accomplish all that she had to do? Why not leave at nine o’clock instead? And although there is logic to the idea that she wanted to abandon her Morris near Godalming, thus implicating Archie and drawing attention to his whereabouts, it is barely conceivable that Agatha would have chosen the arduous task of shoving the car down a hill when there were so many other tempting places in that area to suggest misadventure. Why not leave it by the Silent Pool? If she did push the car she would have had no idea where it would end up. There was no guarantee whatever that it would become stuck in so peculiarly sinister a position, overhanging a quarry. In fact the shape of the landscape makes it almost impossible that it would have done so, since it followed the track of Water Lane then took an unnatural right-hand swerve. There was also the question of how it travelled downhill for three hundred yards, constantly gathering speed before it hit the bush above the quarry, and yet suffered so little damage that it could be driven away to a garage.

  Added to the extreme unlikelihood of Agatha deciding that this was the best way to deal with her car, there is then the amazing fact that, amid all t
he many sightings, nobody should have remembered the lone female answering the police description who took the last train from Clandon to Waterloo, and that no taxi driver should have remembered picking her up at around a quarter to midnight.

  There is something more, though: and this is the fact that renders all talk of deliberate intent quite meaningless. 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: the place annihilates such a possibility. Those who have not been to Newlands Corner in the dark may accept the idea that Agatha could have got out of her car, pushed it away and skipped off to the railway station. To go there is to know, instinctively, that this is not possible; that nobody could endure that place without the mysterious insulation of mental agony.

  On a more pragmatic level, in his book Cade extracts the facts he requires from accounts of the disappearance and dismisses those that do not fit. For example, he takes Janet Morgan’s authorised biography to task (while making much use of it) for a minor mistake about train times to Harrogate, but completely ignores the fact that his theory puts Agatha on a train from Clandon that she could not possibly have caught. He also disregards the sighting of Agatha at around 6.20 a.m. on Saturday the fourth, by the local man, Edward McAllister, who said he started her car. Admittedly this is not corroborated evidence, and is complicated by the newspaper references to ‘Ernest Cross’. But McAllister came forward very early, before publicity had muddied the investigative waters, and his description of Agatha to the Surrey Advertiser is convincing. The police (not just Kenward) always took the story seriously, and it seems far more likely than not to be true: ‘unless’, as the Advertiser wrote, ‘by a coincidence so improbable as hardly to be worth entertaining, another woman closely resembling her was the person the man McAllister saw’. That was the fact of it. Not many women drove through the early mornings alone back in 1926.

  Cade also uses what was reported in newspapers, representing it as corroborated evidence when this suits his purposes. He repeats the words of Agatha’s Sunningdale friend, Mrs de Silva, without benefit of quotation marks, so that her self-important witterings to reporters become unarguable fact. Yet when Mrs de Silva told a newspaper that she had telephoned Agatha around midday on Friday, the third, asking her to tea, he ignores it as it would clash with his theory that Agatha was not at home at that time, having driven to London in order to meet Nan Kon.

  This is a small example of the book’s fundamental naughtiness. Throughout, the author describes scenes that he cannot possibly know about – such as the conversation between Agatha and Archie on the morning of the disappearance – as if he himself had been present. The omniscience of his interviewee Judith, or more precisely of her mother, is boundless. There is nothing about Agatha that they did not know. Nan, to be sure, was a good friend. Judith, too, was close to both Agatha and Rosalind, until some strange impulse led her to collaborate on a book that could only cause Rosalind great pain. But they were not the repositories for Agatha’s secrets. This role was filled most closely by Charlotte Fisher.

  It has, therefore, been suggested that Charlotte was Agatha’s accomplice in the disappearance. The advertisement placed in The Times was part of a code between the two women, and the letter Agatha left told Charlotte what she intended to do. However, as the letter was in the possession of the police throughout the inquiry, this cannot be so. The advertisement placed in The Times does look like a message (and, if so, for whom but Charlotte?); but Charlotte was simply not the kind of woman to practise such a level of deceit. If she had known anything, she would have said so. What is true is that she learned a good deal after the event, and this she told subsequently to Rosalind.

  It is understandable, laudable indeed, that Rosalind should have clung for so long, and so obstinately, to the ‘official’ theory. Her mother had driven off into the night and left her, her father was willing to leave her for good, but her loyalty to both was absolute. She wanted to protect them. So she adhered to the line that they had taken from the very first: Agatha had become ill during 1926 and, at some point during the traumatic night of 3–4 December, had lost her memory.

  It was said that Agatha did not recognise her daughter when she saw her again at Abney. This is impossible to believe, although it is very easy to imagine Agatha pretending to do such a thing. Like her character Jane Finn in The Secret Adversary, she may have feigned memory loss as a means of protecting herself. She would have felt the deepest shame about what she had done, and never more so than in the presence of her daughter. ‘Amnesia’ was a way out of the responsibility.

  But the official theory has never held water, and it could never be proclaimed indefinitely. It ignores too many facts, not least about the way in which amnesia works. Certainly it is a mysterious affliction, but it does not take possession of a person for a couple of weeks and then go away again, never to return.

  To explain Agatha’s movements between 3 and 4 December, which have a degree of design about them, it is said that she drove around for much of the night, so distraught that she did not know where she was going. Yet two gallons of petrol were left in her car, so she cannot have driven very far. Then it is said that she careered off the road at Newlands Corner and ran into the bush overhanging the quarry, perhaps concussing herself as she stopped. This, too, is unlikely, since she would surely have tried to apply the brakes during a descent, and there were no signs that she had done so. Although it was entirely possible for a car to come off the road, it was almost impossible for it to end up three hundred yards down the hill unless intent of some kind was involved.

  Despite being in a state of extreme physical distress, Agatha is then said to have made her way to Guildford station – almost four miles away – which meant climbing the steep hill to get to the main road. She took a train to Waterloo, thence to King’s Cross, thence to Harrogate. Posters for Harrogate were prominent in railway stations at that time: the suggestion is that this put the idea into Agatha’s head. Once she had arrived, the idea of going to the Hydro also occurred to her, perhaps because there were at that time cars at the station taking guests to the various hotels (although Agatha was actually reported to have arrived at the Hydro in a taxi).

  According to the official theory, she did not take part in the activities of the hotel: dancing and singing were off the agenda for a woman in Agatha’s condition. Yet the evidence that suggests she did these things is considerable. Of course some of the reporting of her behaviour at the hotel is highly dubious, and the words of some of the guests were doubtless exaggerated or misrepresented. But the fact is that the sheet music to ‘Angels Ever Guard Thee’, signed ‘Teresa Neele’, was indeed in the possession of Alexander Pettelson; his daughter offered it to Agatha’s publishers in the 1970s15 (Collins turned it down on Agatha’s behalf, saying that she was ill and no doubt thinking it would upset her).

  The advertisement that was placed in The Times – which the conspiracy theorists regard as Agatha seeking to validate her claim to have lost her memory – is inconvenient to the amnesia theory. So too is the ring Agatha left at Harrods, which was subsequently posted to ‘Mrs Neele’. And why should Agatha have abandoned her car so near to Godalming, if she had not been thinking directly of Archie? There are many questions that the official theory simply fails to answer.

  Yet it was created for reasons that are far from ignoble; not, as has often been suggested, to conceal, but to protect a fragile woman who had suffered immeasurably, in ways too complex for any theory to encompass. And it comes infinitely closer to the truth than any talk of ‘stunts’ or ‘schemes’ ever could. It understands that Agatha had been in a state of breakdown, that the cumulative effect of her mother’s death and her husband’s betrayal had sent her to the edge. But not over it.

  The aftermath was sombre: a sad
and drawn-out hangover, in which several reputations were subjected to an unforgiving scrutiny. Nancy Neele was sent on a round-the-world trip by her parents, in the hope that she would live down the press attention and get over Archie. He himself had to face his colleagues in the City, in those days a gentlemanly world that did not deal in open scandal: company directors did not come close to being accused of murder, and closer still to adultery; neither did they have hysterical wives who became front-page news. Archie left Agatha at Abney Hall on 17 December, before returning with Rosalind for Christmas. Afterwards he went back to Styles, and began the process of selling the house.

  The Jameses were left to contemplate the part they had played in allowing Archie and Nancy to meet at their house. Madge James, said to have been a ‘silly woman’,16 had assumed Archie’s marriage to be over in all but name, but she should not have put the interests of her friend Nancy above those of the inconvenient wife. It must have been a shock to realise that Agatha did not share Archie’s view of their marriage. Sam James, who was not silly at all, may have understood Agatha’s grounds for distress, but he was a loyal friend and took Archie’s side throughout. The two couples came to the tacit conclusion that the only way to deal with the whole affair was to dismiss Agatha as a hysteric and get on with life. They were all holidaying together in the South of France, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, when Sam died of sunstroke; for a time after this, Archie and Nancy lodged in the grounds of Madge’s huge house at Godalming. The friends always remained close; they had been through a lot together.