Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (12 page)

On Monday night, a gravel worker, Edward McAlister of Hallshurst, Merrow, went to the police to report an alleged sighting on the morning of Saturday the 4th. He claimed that he had been cycling to work along the Merrow Downs when he had been stopped in Trodd’s Lane at 6.20 a.m. by a hatless woman dressed in a thin frock who asked him to start her car and that after he had cranked the engine she had driven off in the direction of Guildford. While this was in the opposite direction to where Agatha’s car was later found, the press made much of the account, although not always with great accuracy. In one case he was named incorrectly as Ernest Cross of Gomshall; in another the encounter was relocated to the plateau of Newlands Corner; and yet another article claimed the stranded motorist’s hair had been ‘covered in hoar-frost’, while the radiator of her car had been ‘hot to touch’. (For her hair to have been covered in hoar-frost she would have had to have been exposed to the elements for some time; the chances of catching a chill, leading to a head-cold or hypothermia, would have been strong.) More bizarrely it was variously maintained that the woman had driven off in such diverse directions as the forked road leading to Clandon and Merrow or towards Shere, the latter being a favoured suggestion since this was in the direction of the sinisterly named Silent Pool.

According to Wilfrid Morton, the Surrey police were never able to verify if Edward McAlister’s story was true. Agatha had left home on the Friday night wearing a warm knitted skirt, jumper, cardigan and velour hat, and this presented an immediate anomaly to investigators since the woman Edward McAlister claimed to have helped was hatless and wearing a thin frock. The police were aware he might have invented the entire story in order to cash in on the notoriety of the moment or, indeed, have accepted a bribe from the press to report the matter to them so that the press would have something sensational to tell their readers and thus draw the story out further. Moreover, one newspaper was planning to offer a reward for information leading to her discovery.

By Tuesday the 7th the media circus was in full swing. Fleet Street’s best reporters, including Stanley Bishop of the
Daily Express
and Jim Barnes of the
Daily News
, were on the case, staking out Styles which they regarded as their main command post. Less experienced junior colleagues, such as Trevor Allen of the
Westminster Gazette
and Ritchie Calder of the
Daily News
, were based in Guildford in order to participate in the search of the Surrey Downs.

Theories were rife. One popular but unsubstantiated suggestion was that Agatha had stopped for a rest on the plateau of Newlands Corner and, misjudging her gears when she started the car, had accidentally careered off the plateau. Newlands Corner, according to the
Westminster Gazette
, was ‘a dark, bleak, desolate place . . . the last place a normal woman would think of driving to unaccompanied’. This overwrought depiction of the landscape was given additional significance by the popular assertion, deliberately encouraged by Archie, that Agatha was suffering from a nervous breakdown owing to ‘literary overwork’. In the absence of a corpse, ‘loss of memory’ was widely touted in all the newspapers in the early days as a reason for the writer’s disappearance. The press wondered whether she might have planned to meet someone at Newlands Corner and changed cars or whether she had been waylaid and her body successfully disposed of.

After the
Daily News’s
offer on Tuesday the 7th of a £100 reward for ‘first information leading to the whereabouts, if alive, of Mrs Christie’, the newspapers reported a plethora of suspected sightings from people who claimed to have recognized her from published pictures.

One, Ralph Browne of Battersea, insisted he had seen Agatha at 11.15 a.m. on Saturday the 4th as he drove past Albury Heath. ‘She seemed to be in the kind of mood when she did not care what happened. I offered her a lift, but she said, “I am going nowhere in particular; thanks for the offer, but I would rather stay where I am.”’ His story had an added frisson of interest for the public since he had also seen a gypsy knife-grinder in the vicinity.

A Mrs Kitchings of Little London, a hamlet near Newlands Corner, came forward claiming to have seen a woman walking in a lane near her home around noon that same day. Mrs Kitchings had been struck by the vacant look in the woman’s eyes.

The Mayor of Godalming’s chauffeur, Mr J.W. Lindsey, insisted that Agatha had called at his house around nine o’clock on Saturday night. The woman had had supper with Mr Lindsey and his wife, and they had last seen her going in the direction of Milford.

A railway porter called Mr Fuett insisted he had been approached on the morning of Sunday the 5th at Milford Station by a confused woman with a hat asking the way to Portsmouth and Petersfield, and his story was confirmed, in part, by a Milford carrier called Mr Warner. The woman had last been seen going in the direction of Hambledon.

Mr B. Daniels of Vicarage Road, Plumstead, said a ‘dark-haired’ woman resembling the writer had knocked on his front door at 10.50 on the night of Monday the 6th asking if he could give her change for a pound note. He was unable to help but insisted the stranger had looked exactly like a photograph of Agatha that he had seen in the
Daily News
.

According to reporters, a Mr Clark of New Broad Street, London, stated that a woman bearing a resemblance to the missing author had travelled by the 5.08 train from Cannon Street on Monday evening. She appeared haggard, and he had formed the opinion that she was mentally disturbed because she had been making notes on a tear-off pad when she was not staring oddly out of the window.

While the reporters were unable to shed any light on the mystery, the police search on Tuesday the 7th saw men brought once again from the divisions of Woking, as well as from Chertsey and Dorking. At Albury Mill Pond huge nets were placed in position across the sluice and the gates were opened. A great torrent of water poured through and the river almost drained to the bed, but nothing was found in the net. The Postford Mill Pond was also dragged. It was thought that if Agatha had wandered along the adjacent lane she might have been attracted by the lights from the mill and slipped and fallen into the pond. Her cries for help would have been drowned out by the noise of the mill, which operated continuously night and day.

As press speculation on Agatha’s fate grew increasingly doom-laden, the police retained a sense of proportion despite their difficult task. One of the young officers to arrive in a charabanc at Newlands Corner was Constable Eric Boshier, under orders from his father Superintendent Boshier who was in charge of the Woking Division. Eric Boshier, then aged nineteen, has told me that, unlike earlier search parties, his group was told in advance that they were searching for Mrs Agatha Christie. Their search went without incident, except for a light-hearted encounter with a tramp who they jokingly suggested might be able to shed some light on Mrs Christie’s fate. The tramp good-naturedly agreed to empty out the contents of his sack, and the officers had a good laugh at the extraordinary profusion of tin cans that fell out on to the grass.

On the evening of Tuesday the 7th the mood of the press was buoyant, since the journalists had discovered the existence of the letter Agatha had written to her brother-in-law Campbell Christie. It was suggested that the most likely place Agatha might visit in Yorkshire was Harrogate, but reporters from the
Daily Chronicle
and
Daily Express
had visited all the hotels there and found no one registered under her name.

Despite the fizzling out of the Yorkshire lead the press continued to gather information at a remarkable pace. Although Archie declined to reveal to journalists where he had spent Friday night, the
Daily News
and
Daily Express
now revealed that his host had been a Mr James of Hurtmore Cottage, near Godalming. The
Daily News
disclosed the fact that Agatha’s passport had been found at Styles, which rather scotched the rumour that she had left England for Switzerland in the company of an elderly man, supposed to be a peer. It was also revealed that Agatha had recently visited her chemist, Charles Gilling, to have a sleeping draught made up for her and that during their conversation methods of committing suicide had been mentioned. The author had allegedly said: ‘I should never commit suicide by violent means when there is such a drug as hyoscine available.’

On Wednesday the 8th there was no official search. Deputy Chief Constable Kenward was, however, aware that a large number of civilian searchers were out and was kept informed of their progress by constables stationed at Newlands Corner. Furthermore, at his request the Guildford and Shere Beagles, totalling fifteen couples and a large number of spectators, kept a look-out during their hunt. Around 1.30 p.m. two boys, Stanley Lane and Frederick Jones, came across a message in a tin discovered under a bush twenty yards from where the abandoned car had been found. The message, clearly a hoax, read: ‘Ask Candle Lanche. He knows more about the Silent Pool than –’

Late on Wednesday night the body of a well-dressed woman was recovered from Basingstoke Canal. It was rumoured to be that of Agatha, but the police issued a denial since her description was altogether different.

The picture presented to the public in the early days of the search was of a beautiful and intelligent writer happily married to a dashing and handsome war hero. But it was a false image destined to crumble as the police and press competed to reunite the couple.

Chapter Nine
Persistent Scrutiny

Agatha’s continuing absence ensured that Archie’s movements were monitored by the police inside Styles and the press outside. It was abhorrent to him that his friends should have been dragged into the matter: the staff of the James household had described the evening of Friday the 3rd as an unofficial engagement party for Archie and Nancy. A more remarkable aspect of the gathering that emerged during police inquiries was that Sam and Madge James had presumed the Colonel was definitely estranged or living apart from his wife.

Nancy, whose liaison with Archie cast her in a less than respectable light, was viewed by the police as a naïve young woman who had been misled by an older man. While she was loyal to Archie throughout, her parents, who were shielding her from the public gaze at their home at Croxley Green, Rickmansworth, were an added complication. Charles Neele, an electrical engineer, and his wife Mabel had been horrified to learn of their daughter’s affair and of the illicit weekend, and they applied intense pressure on Nancy to have nothing more to do with the Colonel.

Sam James, their host on the evening of the disappearance, did his utmost to defend Archie by insisting that the only car at Hurtmore Cottage that night had been shut in a garage and the household would have been alerted to any departure by the barking of the family dog.

Deputy Chief Constable Kenward was not so sure. If Archie had murdered his wife it was possible he might have arranged an assignation with her at Newlands Corner after the James household had retired for the night. While there was no direct evidence of a scuffle by husband and wife on the plateau, the possibility of murder could not be ruled out. The police officer found Archie ‘vague and defensive’ when questioned about his private life and his movements on the night of the disappearance, and this had the effect of drawing the policeman’s suspicions to him like a magnet.

With the threat of public scandal Archie stood on the brink of losing everything: his business reputation, his social standing and the woman he loved. He was no longer under any illusion that Agatha was dead; after the discovery of the letter to his brother, Archie was convinced she was alive and playing games with him.

Campbell’s disclosure of the letter his sister-in-law had posted to him did not diminish police and press scrutiny of Archie’s private life, since it was deemed possible that someone might have posted the letter on Agatha’s behalf or that she might have doubled back to Newlands Corner after posting it herself.

In a bid to curtail the inquisition into his affairs Archie urged the Berkshire police to issue a missing persons poster, and, as an incentive, he said he was prepared to foot the bill.

Sebastian Earl, who worked in the office next to Archie’s in the city, broke a lifetime’s silence years later to recall how, while Agatha was missing, the two men had found themselves sharing a lift as they rode up to the sixth floor of the Rio Tinto Company building in London where the offices of Austral Ltd were situated.

‘He was in a terribly nervous state and told me the police had followed him up Broad Street and all the way to the office and were now waiting outside. “They think I’ve murdered my wife,” he said. He went into his office and though I saw him several times during the week when he looked progressively worse he never referred to it again – and of course I didn’t either.’

By Wednesday the 8th the press was aware that Archie was suspected by the police of having murdered Agatha, and speculation was rife, in particular, regarding the catalyst for Agatha’s departure from Styles on the night of Friday the 3rd.

Jim Barnes of the
Daily News
was convinced that the first intimation that the author had of Archie’s plans for the weekend with Nancy was when Charlotte had rung her employer at Styles shortly after six o’clock on the evening of the disappearance. What the journalists did not realize was that Agatha had learned of Archie’s plans that morning. Barnes mistakenly believed that Charlotte had rung Archie at the Jameses’ home near Godalming that evening to warn him that Agatha was on her way there to confront him. This led Barnes’s colleague Ritchie Calder to speculate whether Archie might not have muttered his excuses and left the Jameses’ house to drive to Newlands Corner to waylay and perhaps silence his wife. The fact that both Archie and the police denied this far-fetched scenario made the press all the more suspicious, not least because he was already the police’s prime suspect; they still thought he might have left the house after the others had retired for the night.