by Jared Cade
Curiously, there was very little damage to the car, which was found in an upright position with the glass windscreen intact. Furthermore, the folding canvas roof was still erect and the plastic side-screens in place, although the bonnet was slightly damaged, the speedometer cable was broken and one of the wings was a little bent. The car doors were closed, the brakes were off and the gears were in neutral. The spare tin of petrol, carried on the side step, appeared to have been knocked off when the car collided with the bushes and was found lying in the grass. By the time Deputy Chief Constable Kenward arrived on the scene the battery was flat, in accordance with Frederick Dore’s observations.
The police officer’s subsequent inquiries did not bode well: ‘I immediately instituted inquiries, and found that the lady had left her home at Sunningdale in the car, late the previous evening, under rather unusual circumstances. I also learned that Mrs Christie had been very depressed and that just before leaving in the car she had gone upstairs and kissed her daughter who was in bed asleep.’
A pall of bewilderment and uncertainty hung over Styles. The police slowly gathered together the known details of Agatha’s last week in the hope of finding a clue to her whereabouts.
Gradually, the pieces fell into place like a jigsaw – only Deputy Chief Constable Kenward discovered there were pieces missing. It transpired that on the Monday Agatha had played golf with her friend, Mrs da Silva. On Wednesday they had gone to London on a shopping expedition, and Agatha had stayed overnight at her club, the Forum, before meeting her literary agent on Thursday morning to discuss the impending publication of The Big Four and her difficulties over finishing her latest novel The Mystery of the Blue Train. She had also been contracted to write six stories for a US magazine and had another two to complete. Agatha had returned to Styles on Thursday afternoon and later that night had gone dancing with her secretary at Ascot. Charlotte had last seen her employer on the morning of Friday the 3rd and said that Agatha had appeared in such good spirits, happily playing with Rosalind, that she had decided to take up her employer’s offer of a day off and visit London.
But where exactly had Agatha driven to that morning before returning to Styles for lunch? If the police had thought to follow this up, the answer could have helped them find the missing writer, but they did not. The case’s many other baffling features, along with other apparently promising leads, proved too distracting.
It was established that around midday Mrs da Silva had rung Styles asking if Agatha would like to come over to her house and play bridge that afternoon. But the servant who took the call on Agatha’s behalf explained that Mrs Christie could not come, although no specific reason was given. Charlotte had last communicated with Agatha when she had rung her employer shortly after six o’clock on the night of the disappearance to see if she was all right; Agatha had answered the telephone, sounding normal despite her earlier row with Archie, and had urged Charlotte to enjoy herself and return by the late train. The police were forced to ask themselves whether the writer’s mood was of any special significance or whether she had merely been determined to keep her problems to herself.
After the ten-minute walk from Sunningdale Station Charlotte had arrived back at Styles at eleven o’clock. She told the police that she had been confronted by the parlour-maid and cook who expressed concern at the unusual manner in which Agatha had left the house at 9.45 that night. After leaving Rosalind’s bedroom she had come downstairs, kissed and patted her dog Peter, placed him on the hall mat and then driven off without telling her staff where she was going.
It transpired that Agatha had left behind a letter addressed to Charlotte, which the servants gave to her as soon as she returned home. The letter asked the secretary to cancel rooms that had been booked for Agatha in Beverley for the weekend. Agatha implied that she was in great trouble and would contact Charlotte the next day to let her know her plans. The secretary admitted she had felt so uneasy about the letter that she had wanted to contact the police that night, because it included such sentences as ‘My head is bursting. I cannot stay in this house’, but she had not dared do so for fear of offending her employer. Early on Saturday morning, before news of the abandoned car had reached Styles, Charlotte had telephoned Ascot Post Office to arrange for a telegram to be sent to the boarding-house in Beverley: ‘Regret cannot come – Christie.’
Agatha’s disappearance led to increasing apprehension among her family and friends. They were apparently at a loss as to the missing woman’s whereabouts. The police took Charlotte and Archie to Newlands Corner on Saturday afternoon. A number of interested bystanders were already there, eager to find out what the police were doing. The secretary and the Colonel were shown the car but said they were unable to explain what had happened.
What appeared to have been a casual night drive had turned into something disturbing and inexplicable. As the police became aware of the disharmony between husband and wife they realized the importance of locating the writer in case her life was in jeopardy. Wilfrid Morton, one of the Surrey probationary police officers on the case, told me his instructions were: ‘Find Mrs Agatha Christie as quickly as you can.’
Deputy Chief Constable Kenward’s inquiries established that Agatha did not carry out her intention to travel north to the boarding-house in Beverley. Her last known journey on the day of the disappearance was to her mother-in-law’s home in Dorking for afternoon tea. It was revealed that Agatha had visited her wearing the knitted green outfit in which she had gone missing later that night. Peg told the police that the only plan Agatha had mentioned was to go to Beverley that weekend. The police investigation was complicated by the fact that it was impossible to tell whether Agatha had driven directly to Newlands Corner. It was not known how much petrol had been in the tank at the outset of the journey. Nearly two galleons remained, and the spare petrol can of two galleons had not been used. There was plenty of water in the radiator, and when the car was hauled up on the main road on the afternoon of Saturday the 4th the police had no difficulty in starting it. Although there were no signs of blood in or around the car it was kept overnight at the Guildford Garage on the Epsom Road.
One of the less disturbing theories considered by the authorities during the initial stages of the investigation was the possibility that on the Friday night Agatha had wandered away from the car after abandoning it and had got herself lost in the thick undergrowth. On Saturday afternoon, accompanied by seven or eight regular police officers and a number of special constables, Deputy Constable Kenward initiated a search of the surrounding area. The special constables were a group of registered men living throughout Surrey whose voluntary services were available to the county in the event of an emergency, and they were directly accountable to the Surrey Constabulary through their leader Captain Tuckwell and his deputy Colonel Bethall.
Deputy Chief Constable Kenward’s interest in the Silent Pool, a quarter of a mile away from Newlands Corner at the bottom of the hill on the left hand side of the A25 Dorking Road, captured the imagination of many, since it was rumoured that two people had already died there in tragic circumstances. According to legend, in medieval times a naked young woman had been spied bathing there and she had retreated to the deepest part of the pool to avoid the lascivious advances of King John. Her brother had drowned trying to save her, and their bodies had never been recovered. (Nowadays a car-park has been built by the side of the A25 near the shallow basin known as the Sherbourne Pond. This is sometimes mistaken for the Silent Pool, which is at the end of a long dirt lane and higher up on the incline, shielded by a thick belt of trees and overlooked by a bird-watching hut.)
As the news of Agatha’s absence spread, civilian volunteers were quick to offer their services to the police. A statement that Agatha had been seen driving through Shere, a village two miles from Newlands Corner, at four o’clock on Saturday morning by a cow-man moving a herd of cattle was subsequently disproved, since the informant stated after being questioned a second time that the car he had se
en had a square radiator. Agatha’s Morris Cowley, like all the older models of this car, had a round radiator; the distinctive square radiators appeared for the first time in 1926.
By Saturday night Archie was growing increasingly agitated. He was filled with dread at the possible consequences of Agatha’s disappearance. A minor accident, in which she had wandered away from her car alive and well, seemed increasingly improbable to the Colonel, and he began to worry that he might have driven her to suicide by telling her that their trial reconciliation was over. The two letters Agatha had left behind at Styles had not given any clue to her proposed movements, and Archie reassured their daughter by telling Rosalind that her mother had gone to Ashfield to do some writing. Inquiries by the Torquay police, however, had revealed that Ashfield was uninhabited. What concerned the Colonel the most was the fact that the longer Agatha remained missing the more likely it was that his relationship with Nancy would come out into the open.
On Sunday the 5th Deputy Chief Constable Kenward mounted an all-day search around Newlands Corner, unaware that a third letter, written by Agatha before she left Styles on the Friday night, had since been delivered by post to the London workplace of Archie’s brother, Campbell Christie, an instructor at the Royal Woolwich Military Academy. The letter had been posted in London on the morning her car had been found abandoned. Campbell did not immediately pass on the information because he had yet to learn that his sister-in-law was missing.
One of the civilian helpers during the search on Sunday was eighteen-year-old Jack Boxall, a local gardener in Guildford. He vividly recalls the feeling of community spirit that prompted him, together with his father and a number of friends, to walk several miles from his home to Newlands Corner. He told me the police search parties were working in the direction of the Silent Pool and the village of Shere in the south-east, while his own party undertook to search that area in the north-west between Newlands Corner and Merrow known as the Roughs. It was an area very familiar to his father, a house painter, who in his spare time played golf in the open spaces on the Roughs. Despite their diligent efforts to locate Agatha, there was no sign of the missing woman as dusk fell, and the group was forced to admit defeat. Jack Boxall recalls that this did not discourage a veritable posse of police officers from continuing the search by lamplight.
On Sunday night the police visited the village of Albury on receiving a report from a hotel that a woman had been seen who answered the description of the novelist. They searched the wood at the back of Albury, but drew a blank. Later that evening a missing persons notice was circulated to the fifty police stations nearest the village:
Missing from her home, Styles, Sunningdale, Berkshire, Mrs Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, age 35 [she was actually 36]; height 5 feet 7 inches; hair, red, shingled part grey; complexion, fair, build slight; dressed in grey stockinette skirt, green jumper, grey and dark grey cardigan and small velour hat; wearing a platinum ring with one pearl; no wedding ring; black handbag with purse containing perhaps £5 or £10. Left home by car at 9.45 p.m. Friday leaving note saying that she was going for a drive.
The failure of the police to locate Agatha, and the fact that they received no word from her by the end of the weekend, led to the forfeiting of her privacy. What might have remained a private incident in the life of an intensely private woman instead rapidly fell under the harsh glare of the media spotlight.
Chapter Eight
The Search Widens
Where Agatha had gone after vanishing from Styles on Friday 3 December was the focus of the first newspaper reports to appear on Monday the 6th. News of her disappearance even reached the United States, where the New York Times ran a front-page headline: ‘Mrs Agatha Christie, Novelist, Disappears in Strange Way from Her Home in England.’ Closer to home, the weekend search had resulted in more questions than answers for the man in charge of the inquiry, Deputy Chief Constable Kenward of the Surrey Constabulary.
He wondered whether there was any significance in the fact that the car had been abandoned within six miles of Colonel Christie’s rendezvous with Nancy Neele. Also, if Agatha had accidentally run off the road, why had she failed to apply the brakes on her way down the long decline? If she had decided to commit suicide, why had she driven over fourteen miles from home to do so? The fact that Agatha had not taken her dog Peter with her as usual that night gave credence to the suicide theory.
What made suicide less likely was the fact that the writer’s handbag and purse had been removed from the car, although Agatha’s continued absence led the Surrey police to presume that the abandonment of her journey at Newlands Corner had been as unexpected to herself as to others.
The problem once again confronting the Surrey police on the Monday was to know where to take up the search. The undulating countryside around Newlands Corner included large tracts of dense woodland, streams, ponds, copses and fields in which the growth was often knee-high, so Deputy Chief Constable Kenward’s task could not have been more difficult.
The search for Agatha was thorough and precise. Wilfrid Morton, who was based at Woking at the time, remembers it well: ‘The first I knew was that I was ordered to be at the police station in the early hours of the morning for some unknown purpose. I was told to be there dressed in plain clothes and to bring a walking stick. I was a probationary constable and living in at the time. I couldn’t find out what it was about until I paraded about in the yard outside and found that there were about thirty other people there. A charabanc pulled up outside and we were all put aboard and off we went. As we were driving along somebody who knew said, “It’s Newlands Corner we’re going to.”’ He had no idea why.
By the time they disembarked day was breaking. The men were lined up at six-foot intervals and told to link hands with the officer on either side of them and slowly move forward. They were not told what they were looking for and were instructed to report anything unusual they found.
Wilfrid Morton recalls: ‘We were to go through bushes, not round them, and if we came to a tree we couldn’t get through we had to go round it, but we were to look up in its branches and see that there was nothing unusual up there. And there was no rush. Just do it slowly and keep the line intact. Eventually, after an hour or so, we came out into the open ground again. We were then reassembled and rested for a little while, then told that we were going to have another go and were taken to a fresh piece of ground to do the same thing again. Various things were found – old garments and so on – which meant an interruption to the whole line until a senior officer was brought along to examine whatever it was that was found. We pushed on, and by the time we had got out into the open ground again it was midday and we were all hungry and tired and thirsty. We had refreshments. By that time, of course, we had an idea what it was all about. Somebody had got hold of a newspaper and read the headlines about the disappearance.’
Meanwhile, Archie drove to Scotland Yard that morning with his solicitor and his wife’s secretary. He was told by senior police there that they could not intervene in the investigation unless the Surrey or Berkshire police requested their assistance. All Scotland Yard could do was place Agatha’s description in Confidential Information and the Police Gazette, alerting every police station in England to her disappearance. Archie left London resigned to an unhappy wait for news. To encourage Charlotte’s loyalty, and thus to minimize any disclosure of his personal life to the police or press, he encouraged her to invite her sister, Mary Fisher, to visit Styles and was relieved when Mary stayed for the duration of the disappearance.
His anxiety was exacerbated by the fact that because Sunningdale was situated on the borders of Berkshire and Surrey he was attempting to deceive two different county police forces into believing that talk of marital problems between him and Agatha was merely unkind servants’ gossip. However, his account of the state of his marriage was undermined on the Monday when the parlour-maid at Styles finally admitted to investigators that Colonel and Mrs Christie had had a major argument on the mornin
g of the disappearance.
Superintendent Charles Goddard, head of the Berkshire Constabulary’s investigation, had been in charge of the Wokingham Division for over twenty years. He was assisted by Inspector Sidney Frank Butler of the Ascot police, a stalwart officer with a flair for dealing with members of the public.
Unlike their Surrey counterparts, the two police officers were inclined to believe that Agatha was still alive. They had quickly formed the impression that she was a somewhat immature person with a tendency to carry her stories over into real life. They found significance in the fact that she insisted on calling her secretary ‘Carlotta’, because she thought it sounded more exotic, although it was apparent that Charlotte did not much care for this. Archie appeared to them a no-nonsense, practical man, not an especially good match for his perhaps over-imaginative wife. It was their belief that in her unhappiness after the row the novelist had wanted to bring the situation to a head and had given the impression she was going away for a day or two to think things over but had intentionally not stated where she was going. When she failed to return or make contact, it was inevitable that some people would fear she had attempted suicide in a last-ditch attempt to gain sympathy. The Berkshire police were inclined to believe that Agatha may have used similarly dramatic tactics to get her own way – or Archie’s attention – on previous occasions. Although the Colonel had been obliged to report the disappearance to Inspector Butler at Ascot Police Station he had plainly been very angry at being forced to admit the situation.
After a telephone call shortly after midday on Monday from his brother Campbell, Archie’s hopes that Agatha was alive were boosted. The postmark on the envelope of the letter Campbell had received revealed that it had been franked at 9.45 a.m. on Saturday the 4th in the SW1 area of London. Campbell was convinced that this meant the letter must have been posted in London on the day that Agatha’s car had been found abandoned and that his sister-in-law was, in all probability, still alive.