Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days

by Jared Cade

  Agatha felt tired and worn out, and her last book, Postern of Fate, which was published in October 1973, was written in a mood of resentment and defiance. She wanted to be left in peace but felt obliged to deliver her annual manuscript to Agatha Christie Ltd on time. She complained to Mrs Thompson, her housekeeper at Greenway, that her publishers were waiting on every word she wrote. As is common with elderly people, Agatha’s thoughts turned increasingly to the past, and the home into which Tommy and Tuppence Beresford move in Postern of Fate is modelled on her beloved Ashfield.

  While the exposition is a gem of inspiration, the rest of the novel was disappointing since Agatha had started off without a preconceived conjuring trick with which to dazzle her readers. Max determined to salvage the novel by editing it himself, with the help of Agatha’s then secretary, Daphne Honeybone. His editing and that of Agatha’s publishers lacked due care and attention: the ages of the Beresfords’ grandchildren are given as fifteen, eleven and seven – despite the fact that two of them are meant to be twins. Judith and Graham recall Max cajoled Agatha into completing Postern of Fate because he was worried about their finances ‘and that Parker woman’.

  The writer’s most significant publication that year was Poems. The volume includes nearly all the poems that had appeared in 1924 in The Road of Dreams, as well as more recent ones. ‘A Choice’ shows the author’s futile attempt to put the regrets of the past behind her in order to live in the present. Significantly, not one of her love poems celebrates the unqualified joys of love. They express the darker side of yearning, trepidation, despair, abandonment and loss. In ‘What Is Love?’ Agatha bemoans the fact that love is not a tree, ‘rooted in time – for all eternity’.

  Written in anticipation of the fact that she might die before Max, Agatha seems to suggest in ‘Remembrance’ that he will forget her, although her love for him would remain undiminished after her death.

  She also recorded a number of private thoughts on scraps of paper never intending them for publication, claiming the past was with her always – she had only to ‘open the secret coffer that all of us carry within us’.

  For some time Rosalind had noticed that her stepfather Max was no longer as attentive to her mother’s needs as he had once been. It had fallen on Rosalind’s husband, Anthony, who was devoted to Agatha, to help her with all her business affairs and the running of the gardens at Greenway, since, in Rosalind’s words, ‘Max could no longer be bothered.’

  When it became apparent that there would be no new novel for 1974, Collins released Poirot’s Early Cases, which was a collection of short stories Agatha had published in The Sketch in the 1920s.

  In October that year the writer had a heart attack and was confined to bed. She passed the time by rereading her Mary Westmacott novels. ‘Unfinished Portrait I think is one of the best after Rose and the Yew Tree,’ she told Edmund Cork. When once asked by the detective novelist and critic Julian Symons why she had used a pseudonym for her romance novels, she replied: ‘I think it is better to keep the two sorts of book separate. I like keeping them to myself, too, so that I can write exactly what I like. You can write a bit of your own life into them in a way, if nobody knows it’s you . . . I would like to have written all sorts of different books, tried all kinds of different things. But of course detective stories supported me and my daughter for many years, and they had to be written.’ It was an extraordinary epitaph for a writing career the success of which was based on detective stories. Agatha also reread her autobiography and had copies sent to Max and Rosalind, two of her sternest critics, for approval.

  The medication Agatha took for her heart left her frail and thin. She regressed more and more into the past. She was more lucid some day’s than others; sometimes she would get so confused she would panic because she thought she had to pack for Baghdad, recalls Judith. Agatha was under no illusions that she was nearing the end of her life, and one day she pinned all her brooches on her dress to wear one last time. Max and Rosalind meanwhile looked after her as best they could with the help of a night nurse. Millie Bush, who was in domestic service at Winterbrook, recalls Agatha was too weak to get up some days and was washed in bed by her carers; the indignity of her condition clearly distressed her. Judith and Graham felt that Max was impatient for Agatha to die so that he could marry Barbara.

  Agatha was outwardly uncomplaining when Max’s mistress came each weekend to relieve Max of his caring duties. But one day Agatha took up a pair of scissors and cut off her locks of white hair. When someone mutilates their appearance it is often a sign of deep emotional disturbance. Agatha had every reason to feel resentful at being nursed by her husband’s mistress. Her act may have been a calculated cry for help or a deliberate attempt to shock and startle Max and Barbara into a belated sense of guilt. I would suggest Agatha most likely was reminded of the fact that she was no longer a young beautiful woman and cut off her hair in preparation for meeting God. She had, after all, had a strong religious faith for many years. At any rate Max and Barbara behaved more distantly to each other in Agatha’s presence after this and treated her even more attentively.

  A visit to Winterbrook by Lord Snowdon, the royal photographer, led to a series of photographs of Agatha and Max appearing in the Sunday Times, heralding the arrival in UK cinemas of Murder on the Orient Express. With her crumpled pink-and-white rose-leaf complexion, white hair and shrewd, kindly eyes Agatha looked more than ever like many of her fans’ popular conception of Miss Marple.

  Agatha met Lord Louis Mountbatten in November 1974 at the glittering film prèmiere of Murder on the Orient Express. He had written to her over forty years earlier with an idea for a story that she had incorporated into her most famous novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The occasion was attended by other members of the Royal Family, and she insisted on rising from her wheelchair when she was presented to the Queen and the Princess Royal. Agatha’s pleasure at conversing with royalty left her incandescent with happiness. Not even the presence in the background of television cameras could diminish her elation. Later there was a lavish supper party at Claridge’s Hotel. The stars of the film each came to pay their respects at her table, and it was well after midnight when Lord Mountbatten wheeled her from the ballroom to her waiting car to an enormous standing ovation. It was to be her last major public appearance.

  The film’s release spread her fame throughout the world, but how sensitive she remained to references to her disappearance may be measured from the fact that when the publisher Otto Penzler asked her to approve her entry for the Encyclopaedia of Mystery and Detection in mid-1975 she was upset by two allusions to her ‘attack of amnesia’. Meanwhile, since there was no new novel for that year it was decided for her by Rosalind that Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case would be released.

  Age had mellowed Rosalind’s attitude towards Agatha. The two women’s relationship had entered into a state of truce and Rosalind, more openly caring than in the past, looked after Agatha to the best of her ability. One evening, towards the end of her life, when a young boy came to see her, a calm and serene Agatha presented him with a quotation that encapsulated her own philosophy of life:

  I have three treasures,

  Guard them and keep them safe.

  The first is love,

  The second is never do too much,

  The third is never be the first in the world.

  Through love one has no fear.

  Through not doing too much one has

  amplitude of reserve power.

  Through not presuming to be the first in

  the world one can develop one’s talent

  and let it mature.

  When she finally caught a cold during the last winter she murmured, ‘I’m going to meet my Maker.’ Her last Christmas was spent at Winterbrook. Owing to staff shortage Barbara Parker came to help. She was also there on the last day of Agatha’s life. She died as Max was wheeling her in her chair from lunch at Winterbrook on 12 January 1976. Death had released her from the bizarr
e and agonizing love triangle to which she had allowed herself to be subjected for nearly thirty years. The world lost a literary legend, and, ironically, her death became a media event. The thousands of moving tributes that appeared from around the world confirmed Agatha as the greatest of all the Golden Age detective writers – and nearly all recalled how she had become famous by disappearing.

  The writer had always kept on her bedside table her mother’s copy of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, and beneath ‘Agatha Mallowan’ she had written on the flyleaf part of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans:

  Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?

  Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution or famine, or nakedness or pen, or sword?

  I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

  Graham recalls that it was only ‘at the end that she had grown tired of religion and had felt let down by the whole thing’. Having adhered to her wedding vows to Max, for better and for worse, Agatha was buried, in accordance with her request, with her wedding ring in Cholsey graveyard. Her fortune passed to her daughter. Rosalind and Anthony at last moved out of Ferry Cottage, after nine years’ tenure, and made Greenway house their main residence for the rest of their lives. Winterbrook and 22 Cresswell Place had been made over to Max long before she died.

  After Agatha’s death, Barbara Parker took over the domestic side of Max’s life. Rodney Kannreuther, a close friend from his college days, arrived at Winterbrook one day to find Barbara massaging Max’s feet. For a while she received a dose of her own medicine when Max became interested in Baroness Jeanne Camoys. The aristocrat apparently lost interest in him as a potential husband when she learned he had not inherited Agatha’s millions. Max also developed a close friendship with a young woman, who at his invitation resided at 22 Cresswell Place for about six months. The pair drove to Devon in Max’s Bentley and stayed at Greenway as guests of Rosalind and Anthony. Barbara, attempting to make light of Max’s dalliances, said fretfully: ‘It’s so silly – so silly – I know he’ll look after me.’ After Max’s death the young woman, who wished to remain unnamed, denied having a sexual relationship with him. ‘Everyone should have a Max in their life. It was like a picnic.’ She also stated that she thought ‘the last two or three years of Agatha’s life were tough on him’.

  Max’s romantic pursuits aroused a certain antipathy in Rosalind, who resented the fact he no longer coveted her company as much as he had in the past. Perhaps Rosalind also felt guilty towards her mother for having usurped his time and attention. Her dislike of Max’s mistress became evident in small ways: Barbara was a finicky eater, and this drove Rosalind mad at mealtimes; moreover, Barbara often wore a fur coat because she felt the cold, even in summer, and this really annoyed Rosalind, as she made clear with her muttered asides.

  Although many have stated Rosalind and Max demonstrated enormous affection for each other, after his death when she was asked about her relationship with him, she said dismissively: ‘He didn’t beat me, or my mother, not that I remember.’ It was a typical put-down, throw-away remark. Rosalind remembered the past as she wished to remember it, and she was quick to contradict others, even when their recollections were more accurate than hers. She became a jealous custodian of Agatha’s memory.

  Max, aware of the undercurrents of tension between his stepdaughter and mistress, wrote to Rosalind in some trepidation in March 1977 to tell her that he was going to marry Barbara. He was shrewd enough to know she would react less sharply to the news in this way rather than if told in person.

  Max’s and Barbara’s wedding took place in September 1977, a few days after the publication of Mallowan’s Memoirs, with what many of their social circle considered ‘indecent haste’ coming so soon after the death of Agatha. Max’s autobiography dismissed her eleven-day disappearance in a single sentence as resulting from ‘a loss of memory’. He went to great pains to impress on readers how happy his marriage to Agatha had been. Mallowan’s Memoirs was officially dedicated ‘To Rosalind with love’ and made no mention of his forthcoming marriage to Barbara.

  Max died from a heart attack in August 1978 and was buried with Agatha in Cholsey. Barbara continued to live in Wallingford. Her work often took her to the Oriental Institute in Oxford. As Lady Mallowan she was elected president of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. She died from complications arising from bronchitis and emphysema in November 1993. It was her private wish to be buried with Agatha and Max. Her request was denied.

  A clause in Max’s will stipulated that a sum of money be set aside each year to allow members of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq to drink a toast at their annual lecture in memory of him and Agatha.

  The posthumous publication of Agatha’s autobiography merely compounded the greatest mystery of her life. Agatha had once referred to Hercule Poirot, with whom she maintained a love–hate relationship, as ‘the Old Man from the Sea’, claiming he was a millstone round her neck throughout her life. The same was true of the disappearance.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Unforeseen Ripples

  After Agatha’s death the wall of silence she had built around herself during her lifetime remained inviolate. Biographers and journalists seeking to penetrate it were frustrated by a lack of cooperation from the Christie estate, family and friends. Officially Agatha has now sold in excess of 2.3 billion copies of her books. This is a conservative estimate because many records were lost and destroyed during the Second World War. Given that Agatha is the undisputed best-selling novelist of all time, it is hardly surprising that there has been continued speculation over the truth behind her disappearance so many years ago.

  Those close to Agatha and Nan, who know the truth of what happened on Friday 3 December 1926, have always refuted tales of an extraordinary encounter between Agatha and a journalist in the lounge of the Harrogate Hydro on the afternoon of her discovery, Tuesday 14 December, which first surfaced two weeks after her death. According to Ritchie Calder, the former Daily News reporter, there was no melodrama when he walked up to Mrs Teresa Neele and addressed her as Mrs Christie. She was not flustered, and when he asked her how she had got there she said she did not know and that she was suffering from amnesia, whereupon she retired to her room for the rest of the afternoon. The Daily News report the following day, in breaking the news of Archie’s identification of Agatha in the hotel, never mentioned such an encounter taking place, and Lord Ritchie Calder, as he later became, only wrote of the incident eight years before his death in an article, ‘Agatha and I’, that appeared in the New Statesman on 30 January 1976.

  In the article he advanced the opinion that ‘Amnesia was much too clinical a word for someone supposedly surprised into conversation, and if, as her doctor later suggested, she had an identity crisis, well, there was no Theresa [sic] Neele lurking in the self-possessed woman I met.’ Ritchie Calder said he had been in Harrogate because he had been sent there to assist the Daily News’s night reporter Sidney Campion.

  Two separate searchers, Kathleen Tynan and Gwen Robyns, seeking to establish the veracity of the encounter, have told me that Ritchie Calder repeated to them how he had immediately followed Sidney Campion by train to Harrogate to help him cover the story. However, before his death in 1978 Sidney Campion, who knew Ritchie Calder in later life, told Kathleen Tynan in a letter dated 27 September 1976: ‘I am very mystified that I never met Ritchie Calder on the Harrogate story. When two or more of the staff were on the same assignment, it was the rule for them to get together and work out any necessary plans for success. I called at the Manchester office, and there was never any mention of Ritchie Calder, and until the death of Agatha Christie I never heard of Ritchie Calder being on the Harrogate story.’

  This information has not been public knowledge until now, sin
ce the research Kathleen Tynan undertook during that period was not incorporated into the screenplay she was commissioned to write for the 1979 film Agatha, which proposed a fictional solution to the mystery of the disappearance.

  There has been further confusion about an alleged ‘fourth letter’ Agatha is said to have written before she disappeared that has intrigued and tantalized her fans. The late Deputy Chief Constable Kenward’s daughter, Gladys Kenward Dobson, gave Gwen Robyns to understand in her 1978 unauthorized biography, The Mystery of Agatha Christie, that a ‘fourth letter’ had been written by Agatha on the night of the disappearance and that in this communication she had appealed to Deputy Chief Constable Kenward for help because she was in fear of her life. Gladys Kenward Dobson’s account of what her father is supposed to have done after receiving this letter on the morning of Saturday 4 December 1926 is unequivocal: ‘He received it in the 10 a.m. mail on Saturday and brought it to our home near by to show me before going over immediately to inform the Sunningdale Police Station and begin investigations.’

  Sunningdale falls between the counties of Berkshire and Surrey and it was policed until the early 1990s by the Surrey Constabulary, who have confirmed that there was no police station there in 1926 and that the village did not get one until the early 1960s.

  Gladys Kenward Dobson claimed that the reason she knew about the letter was because she had spent ‘many years of active service in the police force as her father’s secretary’. After an extensive search, however, the Surrey police have been unable to find any records of her alleged police career, although they were able to confirm that from the early 1970s until her death in 1980 she presented a cup and runner-up prizes, in memory of her father, at the Surrey Constabulary’s annual bowls match.