Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (11 page)

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 morning 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.

The suggestion that Charlotte might have posted the letter while she was in London on the night of the disappearance was disregarded. ‘It is true that I was in London on Friday evening, but I posted no letter there for Mrs Christie,’ she stated. ‘I had posted nothing for her for several days before her disappearance.’ Subsequent inquiries revealed that the letter’s postmark indicated it could only have been posted sometime between 3 a.m. and 8 a.m. on Saturday the 4th – some four hours at least after the secretary had returned to Styles the previous night.

The crux of Agatha’s letter to Campbell, which was undated and addressed from Styles, indicated she was going away for the weekend to an unnamed spa in Yorkshire. The letter had been addressed to him at the Royal Woolwich Military Academy, and on going there on the morning of Sunday the 5th Campbell had found it on his desk. There was nothing in the letter to indicate that his sister-in-law was suffering from any nervous strain or that she was contemplating any untoward action. After reading the letter he had set it aside and forgotten about it. He explained to Archie that he had heard only on the Monday morning that Agatha was missing and had immediately looked for the letter – but it, too, was missing, possibly either thrown away or torn up with other papers. Campbell had considered it highly unlikely that anyone had posted the letter on her behalf, and he was convinced that when Agatha composed the note she was in a perfectly normal state of mind and that it had been written before she left Styles on the Friday night. The envelope with its postmark had been retained, and Campbell promptly forwarded it to Archie. The most intriguing question confronting the police was why the envelope had been addressed to her brother-in-law’s workplace rather than to his home.

Meanwhile the press was having a field day. In an era of unsophisticated communication systems the story was taken up with amazing speed; it was as if someone had pressed a button and released an avalanche of publicity. Massive speculation ensued.

The press reporters did not always find time to distinguish conjecture from fact. They feverishly sought out witnesses, some reliable, others not. They followed up potential leads and shadowed the police to try to glean snippets of information. The abandoned car was a case in point. Some newspapers failed to clarify the sequence in which it had been seen by various individuals on the Saturday morning, and this led to contradictory reports regarding whether the lights had been discovered on or off. Although it was stated by the police that the car had been found with its brakes off half-way down the long decline, Alfred Luland, who ran the refreshment kiosk at Newlands Corner, excitedly insisted to eager journalists that he was ‘almost certain the brakes were on’. This only muddied matters further since the slope at the edge of the plateau was sufficiently steep for a parked car with its handbrake on to have rolled forward under the momentum of its own weight, gathering speed until it careered down the hill.

Several newspapers reproduced maps of Newlands Corner, indicating where the car had been found. Some of the maps were so inaccurate as to give rise to the suspicion that they were reproduced from descriptions given by reporters over the telephone.

The response of the press to the disappearance was both unexpected and extraordinary. On Monday the 6th the
Daily Mail
was hot on the trail, regaling its readers with the car’s discovery at Newlands Corner and a description of the author. The fact that Agatha was not yet a household name was evidenced by its headline: ‘Woman Novelist Disappears.’ In the absence of any knowledge of Agatha’s whereabouts, the
Daily Sketch
blithely descended into fanciful speculation: ‘Mrs Christie herself has made one of her heroines drown herself in the Silent Pool. In local tradition there is a feeling that the pool has an irresistible fascination on those who are brought into close touch with it, as Mrs Christie was. All the evidence available at the moment tends to suggest Mrs Christie’s mind had given way.’