Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (14 page)

Edgar Wallace, whose play
The Ringer
was drawing audiences at Wyndham’s Theatre in London, added to the flames of speculation in the
Daily Mail
. Although his reconstruction of the disappearance was flawed by the assumption that the chalk pit into which her car almost plunged was between Newlands Corner and Guildford instead of Newlands Corner and Albury, he was correct in his speculations as to Agatha’s motive and why he thought the amnesia theory did not hold water:

‘The disappearance seems to be a typical case of ‘mental reprisal’ on somebody who has hurt her. To put it vulgarly, her first intention seems to have been to ‘spite’ an unknown person who would be distressed by her disappearance. That she did not contemplate suicide seems evident from the fact that she deliberately created an atmosphere of suicide by the picturesque abandonment of her car. Loss of memory, that is to say, mental confusion, might easily have followed, but a person so afflicted could not possibly escape notice. We must exclude the possibility of her being in some institute or in the care of somebody who has found her. The wide publicity that has been given to her disappearance disposes of such a possibility.’

It needed very little imagination to deduce that Archie was the person Agatha wished to spite. Edgar Wallace believed that she had been surprised by the excessive publicity and was finding it difficult to reappear. In summing up, he said:

‘If Agatha Christie is not dead of shock and exposure within a limited radius of the place where her car was found she must be alive and in full possession of her faculties, probably in London. It is impossible to lose your memory and find your way to a determined destination.’

Undeterred by his inability to pinpoint Agatha, in December 1927 Edgar Wallace produced one of his more sensational tales, published in the
Pall Mall
magazine, in which the discovery of bloodstains in and around a bungalow in Berkshire leads the police of that county to entertain the gravest of concerns for its missing occupant, Mrs Gray, who is linked to a mysterious motoring ordeal on a hilltop in the neighbouring county of Sussex. The short story was entitled ‘The Sunningdale Murder’.

Peg, distressed by Archie’s ill-judged interview with the
Daily Mail
, came to her son’s defence by allowing herself to be interviewed and informing the newspaper’s readers that Archie and Agatha were ‘a devoted couple’ and that, in her opinion, her daughter-in-law had not recovered from her mother’s death earlier that year. Peg suggested that after leaving the car Agatha had probably walked a considerable distance before meeting her end:

‘It is my opinion that she will not be found in water, as she was a strong swimmer, and the suddenness of any immersion would, I believe, at once restore her to her senses. I note that Colonel Christie thinks she voluntarily disappeared, but I cannot agree with my son.’

Later on Saturday the 11th the evening press publicized the Surrey Constabulary’s appeal for the public’s voluntary assistance in searching the Surrey Downs the following day. It was a calculated move, involving the cooperation and pooling of resources of police and press, to determine once and for all if this was where the solution to the mystery lay.

Chapter Eleven
Great Expectations

The Great Sunday Hunt, as it became known, began inauspiciously with rain falling until seven in the morning. Staff from the Duke of Northumberland’s Albury estate were best qualified of all to assist. Each day that Agatha had been missing the estate had sent out thirty of its men to search for her, including Fred Baker, Ben Merrit, Ern Tyso and Frank Tuilip. They knew Newlands Corner and the land for miles around like the backs of their hands and their intimate knowledge ensured that the police searches to date had been meticulously conducted. The opinion of the estate workers was that Agatha had committed suicide and it had become a matter of pride for them to locate her before anyone else did. The competition, however, was considerably stiffer than on the previous weekend owing to the public response to the police appeal broadcast in the press.

The
Sunday Express
featured an article by ex-Chief Inspector Walter Dew, the man who had arrested the wife-murderer Dr Crippen as he fled across the Atlantic on the Montrose with his lover Ethel Le Neve. (Recent DNA evidence has thrown doubt on Crippen’s conviction.) The retired police officer asserted that Agatha’s disappearance was altogether different from that of Crippen’s wife, Belle Ellmore. Dew maintained that no clever writer of Agatha’s standing would believe that to disgrace herself ‘for publicity’s sake’ would be of service to her in her work. He was happy to accept loss of memory or hysteria as the likeliest reason for Agatha’s absence:

‘If Mrs Christie’s mind became hysterical she may have gone wandering over the country, on and on, with the false strength of the half-demented, until she dropped in some spot miles away from where she is being sought now.’

On the morning of Sunday the 12th the news coverage of the disappearance shows that the author was the country’s most talked-about woman. People arriving at Newlands Corner were confronted by newspaper placards from
Reynolds’s Illustrated News
advertising a three-month serialization of
The Murder on the Links
: ‘Missing Novelist’s Finest Serial Begins Today.’ Two points of considerable interest for the public were the chalk pit into which Agatha’s car had almost plunged and the Silent Pool some quarter of a mile away.

Of all the visitors to the Silent Pool the one who was to become the most famous was Dorothy L. Sayers. She looked around for a few moments, then announced in her robust, forthright manner, ‘No, she isn’t here.’ She later incorporated aspects of her visit to the scene of the disappearance into her third detective novel,
Unnatural Death
, published the following year, in which not one but two women are found missing from an abandoned car on downland which she relocated to the south coast. Ironically, the registration number of the abandoned car corresponded in real life to her own Ner-a-car, and passages from the book are reminiscent of reports from Sunday the 12th.

‘Reporters swarmed down upon Crow’s Beach like locusts – the downs near Shelly Head were like a fair with motors, bicycles and parties on foot, rushing out to spend a happy week-end amid surroundings of mystery and bloodshed.’

The keenness of the public to find Agatha was demonstrated by the fact that a large contingent of helpers turned up at Newlands Corner before the official start of the search at 9.30 a.m. Under Deputy Chief Constable Kenward’s direction fifty-three search parties, each under a police officer and averaging between thirty and forty people, were mustered at Newlands Corner. Before the parties moved off he appealed to them to carry out a thorough search, not merely a perfunctory one, since he was convinced that Agatha would be found somewhere in the district. After the early groups had started off, many more volunteers arrived by car, omnibus, motor cycle and bicycle. Members of the Automobile Association and the Royal Automobile Club were on hand to direct traffic, and responsible individuals were selected to guide new parties over the downs. Special omnibus services from Guildford and other neighbouring towns also brought their quota of people to swell the throng that gathered on the hilltop.

Among the early arrivals was a well-known breeder and exhibitor of bloodhounds who brought along three of her dogs. It was not expected that they would pick up the scent of the missing novelist after so long, but it was thought that if Agatha had wandered off and had fallen down from exhaustion the hounds might locate her. At the suggestion of Deputy Chief Constable Kenward they were first taken along the old chalk road which runs towards Dorking and afterwards allowed to explore a track in the vicinity of the Silent Pool.

The public had its first thrill shortly before noon when rumour spread that a number of articles, including a black handbag and an attaché case, had been discovered at a lonely spot off the beaten track near Shere and were being brought by car to Newlands Corner. But it was soon established the articles were of no assistance to the inquiry. Similar discoveries were made throughout the afternoon; this was hardly surprising since Newlands Corner was a popular picnic location owing to the natural beauty of the landscape and had a notorious reputation for articles being stolen from parked cars. It was common practice for thieves to steal the contents of handbags and then dispose of them in the undergrowth.

An unfortunate aspect of the search was that by mid-afternoon many onlookers were drawn to the hilltop through idle curiosity, with no intention of taking part, and their presence hampered the genuine volunteers. There was an even greater carnival atmosphere than on the previous weekend: anticipation, excitement, high spirits and frivolity were as much in evidence as determination to find the missing woman. There was as much speculation over whether the missing novelist’s body would be found as there was over whether her husband would join in the search. Although
Reynolds’s Illustrated News
had reminded amateur sleuths that Agatha had dedicated
The Murder on the Links
‘To my husband, a fellow enthusiast for detective stories, and to whom I am indebted for much helpful advice and criticism’, Archie was conspicuously absent. He spent the day at Styles where he was observed in the garage washing his Delage with the help of his daughter Rosalind.

Alfred Luland’s refreshment kiosk, together with the Newlands Corner Hotel, did a roaring trade. How expansive the hunt for Agatha became is attested by the use of horses to carry instructions to the outlying flanks. Albert Raven, a fourteen-year-old apprentice motor mechanic who took part in the search on horseback, recalled: ‘There was an enormous number of people around, the press was everywhere, and it was the number one topic of the day.’

During the search the public set out under police direction from three other major assembly points: Coal Kitchen Lane near Shere; Clandon Water Works on the Leatherhead to Guildford main road; and One Tree Hill on Pewley Downs on the eastern outskirts of Guildford. Innumerable special constables assisted with operations. Large numbers of the public, preferring to rely on their own intuition, set out independently. One party walked all the way along the summit of the downs from Dorking, a distance of nine miles, searching the woods and bushes that bordered the little used track. Another party, who decided to beat the common and woods around St Martha’s Chapel, found that in many places the bracken was taller than a man.

Meanwhile, having obtained a glove of Agatha’s, Sherlock Holmes’s creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave it to a medium called Horace Leaf. ‘I gave him no clue at all as to what I wanted or to whom the article belonged,’ the famous writer later recalled. ‘He never saw it until I laid it on the table at the moment of consultation, and there was nothing to connect either it or me with the Christie case . . . He at once got the name Agatha. “There is trouble connected with this article. The person who owns it is half dazed and half purposeful. She is not dead as many think. She is alive. You will hear of her, I think, next Wednesday.”’

The hunt at Newlands Corner ended that evening as a mist fell, and a flare was lit to guide those searchers who had lost their bearings. Police scouts were sent out to collect stragglers, while a deflated and exhausted Deputy Chief Constable Kenward issued a statement to the press asking journalists to thank the public for its cooperation. In an earlier statement that day he had made a point of saying that anyone who claimed Agatha had staged her disappearance was doing her a great injustice.

Around eleven o’clock that night in Harrogate, an exclusive northern spa town half-way between London and Edinburgh, two local bandsmen went to the local police to report that a woman resembling the missing novelist was staying at the hotel in which their band regularly played. They had, in fact, been suspicious of the hotel guest for some days, as a consequence of having their attention drawn to her by a keen-eyed chambermaid, but had done nothing about it until their wives had taken an interest in the matter.

Although the lateness of the hour precluded the Harrogate police from being able to investigate that night, since the woman suspected of being Agatha had already retired to her room, the two bandsmen had set in motion a chain of events which, over the next two days, would finally resolve the question to which the whole country was seeking an answer.

Chapter Twelve
A Call for Divers

On Monday the 13th the news coverage revealed that the outcome of the Great Sunday Hunt had been failure. The estimates in the press over how many people had taken part ranged from 2,000 to 15,000.

Over the weekend the
Daily Mail
had followed up a suspected sighting which had taken place late on the night of the disappearance in a lane near Pyrford, seven miles north-east of Guildford. A Mr Richards had seen a car similar to Agatha’s ‘eventually driven away towards Newlands Corner’, followed by a dark-red four-seater. The following day the dark-red car had been seen in the lane with a man and a woman inside. While the
Daily Mail’s
disclosure gave rise to speculation that Agatha might have gone off with an unknown man and spent Saturday hiding in the lane, there was no reason any astute person should have considered it likely that she was having an extra-marital affair, because one of the witnesses, Mr Fauld of Warren Farm, had described the woman as having ‘fairish bobbed hair’ and wearing a ‘smart blue coat’. Moreover, since half of all the cars on the road in the 1920s were Morris Cowleys the similarity of the woman’s car to Agatha’s did not offer much in the way of a promising lead.

Just how accurate was Mr Fauld’s description of the female? Might this have been the woman who stopped Edward McAlister in Trodd’s Lane on his way to work in the dark at 6.20 on the morning of Saturday the 4th and asked him to start her car before she drove off in the direction of Guildford?