Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (21 page)

Although Agatha was still too shaken by her personal problems to re-evaluate her relationship with God, it would seem she was seeking to reassure herself that it is not the past that matters but the future.

Chapter Eighteen
Questions in Parliament

While Agatha was abroad Members of Parliament in the House of Commons were raising the issue of the cost of the search. When it was revealed on 10 February 1927 that expenses incurred by Scotland Yard had cost the Exchequer £12 10s., the Labour Party MP William Lunn swiftly denounced the disappearance as a ‘cruel hoax’. On the 25th, however, there was a surprise in the Commons when the Home Secretary did a complete
volte-face
and announced that the cost had been nothing.

So what had happened to the £12 10s.? After further review Scotland Yard had decided that the outstanding amount could be covered by one of its existing budgets for ‘normal police duties’. As for the other legitimate costs, if the ‘six to seven pounds’ spent by Archie on the missing persons posters issued by the Berkshire Constabulary, together with the £25 spent by the Surrey Constabulary, had been added to the £12 10s., then the combined cost of the search to the three major investigating police forces, if publicly acknowledged, would have amounted to either £44 10s. or £43 10s. By today’s standards the amounts seem negligible, but they should be compared to the average weekly wage in 1926 for a police constable of £3 10s. Since Parliament had merely sought to clarify how much the search had cost Scotland Yard, this was now officially declared to have been nothing.

Ultimately, as far as the members of the public were concerned, the issue was not about cost; it was about class. The disappearance had come hard on the heels of the General Strike, and what the working class wanted to know was whether it could expect similarly intensive searches to be conducted for one of its own – and the conclusion reached was a resounding no.

After she returned to England in late February 1927, Agatha looked around Chelsea for somewhere to live in order to be near Nan. The writer rented a flat and later bought a small mews house at 22 Cresswell Place, a few streets from 78 Chelsea Park Gardens. Judith Gardner recalls that she and her mother Nan were among the first to be shown over Agatha’s new home with its narrow stairs and tiny kitchen. Rosalind missed her father and continually blamed her mother for his absence. Agatha enjoyed playing with Judith, finding in her company a welcome distraction from her problems. Moreover Judith and Rosalind were firm friends, and this pleased Agatha as she had been worried that her daughter would be lonely after being uprooted from Sunningdale.

Agatha’s first priority after moving into Cresswell Place was to find a boarding school for Rosalind. They visited several, and Rosalind finally settled on Caledonia School in Bexhill, Sussex. It proved a good choice. She was happy there and achieved good marks. Once, however, she wrote to her mother complaining that on Sunday nights the other pupils had just one letter to write to their parents, whereas she had two. Rosalind saw Archie intermittently, but these meetings were planned and it was simply not the same as having a father who came home to her every night. Agatha was never to forget Rosalind’s upset at the break-up of her marriage to Archie.

The writer next spent some time renovating and decorating Cresswell Place. Unlike Nan, whose home was decorated quite conventionally with mahogany and chintz, Agatha went in for exotic wallpapers, a good deal of bric-à-brac and papier mâché and inlaid mother-of-pearl
objets
. Even the doorknobs were decorated with attractive floral patterns. Judith was very taken with it all and always enjoyed visiting Agatha’s house.

Judith’s mother, Nan, meanwhile, was finding life complicated. There was friction in the Kon household – and not simply because she had been forced to tell her husband George that Agatha had spent the night of the disappearance in the house in Chelsea Park Gardens. For a short time he made a habit of bringing Archie back to the house after playing golf with him at weekends. Nan was horrified when she first discovered this, insisting that Agatha would be very upset if she knew of Archie’s visits. George, however, was not prepared to let the Colonel down: Archie had been through hell over the disappearance, and George was determined to stand by his friend.

Archie was lonely and despondent as Nancy was still on her enforced voyage around the world, and Nan lived in dread of Agatha finding out about his visits. Nan felt as if she was betraying her friend, and she gave her daughter strict instructions not to say a word about the matter to Agatha. Judith obeyed, and they successfully managed to prevent Archie and Agatha from bumping into each other in their house or Agatha from finding out about his visits.

Agatha believed she had become better equipped to deal with life’s vicissitudes after surviving the breakdown of her marriage. She was, however, wary of men and especially the possibility of romantic entanglements. She could not imagine ever trusting a man again or allowing a lover to get close enough to hurt her, although she toyed momentarily with the idea of having brief affairs.

‘The Edge’ was one of Agatha’s most compelling stories, but too many people guessed it was about her and Nancy when it was published in February 1927 in
Pearson’s Magazine
. Despite repeated requests, Agatha did not allow it to be republished in her lifetime. But there were still bills to be paid, and work provided distraction from her continuing unhappiness. The May edition of
The Story-Teller
magazine saw the publication of ‘Harlequin’s Lane’, and this time the Archie–Agatha–Nancy triangle was more cleverly concealed.

‘Harlequin’s Lane’ is a mystical story full of symbolism that gives an intriguing insight into Agatha’s emotional state. John Denman, plainly based on Archie, is described as a respected businessman, clever in his work but lacking in imagination outside it. His wife Anna is full of turbulent emotion owing to the discovery of her husband’s infidelity. John Denman tells Molly Stanwell, a local village girl with whom he has fallen in love, that he cannot live without her.

After secretly witnessing the exchange between the two lovers, Anna goes to the home of Lady Roscheimer who is staging a Harlequinade concert that night. One of the female dancers has been injured, and Anna finds herself dancing opposite her former lover, Prince Sergius Oranoff. This character is obviously based on Reggie Lucy, the man Agatha was engaged to before Archie came into her life. Anna has jilted Prince Sergius Oranoff in favour of John Denman, but dancing with her former lover reawakens their ardour for each other. Ironically it also revitalizes John Denman’s interest in his wife. But Anna recognizes that it is impossible to turn the clock back. She is no longer able to put up with her intolerable situation. She announces that for ten years she has lived with the man she loved and that now she is going to the man who for ten years has loved her.

Prince Oranoff waits in anticipation for Anna in Harlequin’s Lane, but tragically the two former lovers are not reunited. At the end of the ‘lover’s lane’ is a rubbish heap overlooked by a ‘house of dreams’. The guests at the house-party find Anna’s body; she has been killed by some supernatural force. No explanation is given for her death, although her words earlier that evening perhaps offer a clue. She said there could be no third way out of her predicament; that one always looks for one thing; the perfect, eternal lover, and that it was the music of Harlequin, the protector of lovers, that one longed to hear. She maintained that no one lover could ever prove satisfactory, for all lovers were mortal. And Harlequin was only a myth, an invisible presence – unless, she added, his name was death. ‘Harlequin’s Lane’ perfectly expresses Agatha’s incurable romanticism.

Having jilted Reggie Lucy – he had since married – there was not the slightest possibility of rekindling their romance. She had taken a risk when she married Archie and, understandably, she had regrets over her broken engagement to Reggie. She realized she could have been happy with him, although she knew she would not have loved him as ardently as she had loved Archie. Archie had been her great love and passion; the marriage had failed, and what followed was a form of emotional death, symbolized by the fate of Anna.

A significant development in Agatha’s work was her creation of the shrewd and intuitive Miss Marple. Most commentators of Agatha’s literary output mistake the date the sleuth made her first appearance because they assume it to be her manifestation in the 1930 novel
The Murder at the Vicarage
. In fact her début came in a series of six stories appearing over as many months in the
Royal Magazine
from December 1927. These short stories, along with another seven she wrote between 1929 and 1931, were later incorporated into her 1932 collection
The Thirteen Problems.

Miss Marple was the complete opposite of the young and impulsive heroines that had previously dominated Agatha’s fiction. Based partly on her creator’s Ealing grandmother, Miss Marple suspected the worst of everyone and everything often with uncanny accuracy and was firmly of the opinion that charming men were not to be trusted around young, naïve girls. Given Agatha’s emotional turmoil, it is poignant that she should have created the persona of the wise and benevolent old lady she herself was so far from being.

The effect of the author’s disappearance on the sales of her books was to prove highly beneficial in the next three years:
The Big Four’s
sales reached 8,500 copies (topping its predecessor
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
by 3,000 copies); nearly 7,000 copies of
The Mystery of the Blue Train
were sold; while sales of
The Seven Dials Mystery
(plotted in a notebook left behind by Archie) were in excess of 8,000.

The year 1927 was a period of emotional recovery for Agatha and happier times lay ahead. But the professional acclaim that awaited her was to be eclipsed by press gossip in the newspapers arising from a resurgence of public interest in her disappearance, leading to her only statement on the incident and the one thing she dreaded most: divorce.

Chapter Nineteen
Sequel to the Ripley Road Hold-Up

Divorce was the last thing Agatha wanted, but Archie was determined to end the marriage in the eyes of the law. Rosalind was far from happy about it and repeatedly told her mother: ‘It’s you he doesn’t like. Not me.’ These were not easy words for Agatha to hear, and she entreated her estranged husband to reconsider for their daughter’s sake. She promised not to discuss his infidelities if he returned to her. But there was to be no turning back.

The love Archie and Nancy had for each other was undiminished; her reputation was of paramount concern to him and they lived apart on her return from her enforced trip – Nancy at her parents’ home and Archie at 9 Upper Grosvenor Street, London. The couple had snatched clandestine meetings; Nancy’s parents did not want the relationship to be resumed, as they did not believe that Archie would behave honourably and marry their daughter.

Archie regarded Agatha as an obstacle to his happiness and was determined to marry Nancy. Since she could not bear to be hated by the man she loved, Agatha finally agreed to divorce him. The arrangement with Archie was that Agatha should not cite Nancy as the third party in the divorce in return for custody of Rosalind. Despite her deep repugnance at Archie’s hypocrisy, Agatha was forced to comply with his wishes. He made it clear that if she did not he would tell the court that she had disappeared as a publicity stunt; he was prepared for a battle if Agatha made things difficult. She was terrified of further notoriety and agreed not to contest the evidence he would supply pertaining to his declaration of adultery with an unknown woman.

Meanwhile Agatha had to obtain legal advice in February 1928 owing to the fact that her disappearance had become linked in the newspapers to what was known as the Ripley Road hold-up. The incident had taken place in Surrey on the night of 14 January 1927 after a Liberal Party club dinner in London, where the guest speaker, the well-known explorer Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, had denounced contemporary youth as ‘knock-kneed Charlestoning men with no spirit of adventure’. Mitchell-Hedges falsely claimed to have been ‘attacked’ that night on the Ripley Road by indignant youths who had sought to teach him a lesson and who had stolen his Monomarks stamped brief-case. When the
Daily Express
accused Mitchell-Hedges of instigating a publicity stunt for Monomarks, he had unwisely stuck to his fabricated story and tried unsuccessfully to sue the newspaper for libel.

The libel trail, which occurred in February 1928, exposed a number of glaring discrepancies in Mitchell-Hedges’s account of events: instead of immediately reporting the ambush to the nearest police station Mitchell-Hedges and his party had driven several miles to Guildford Police Station to report the matter to Superintendent Boshier – one of the officers who had investigated Agatha’s disappearance. One of Mitchell-Hedges’s companions in the car had fainted under police interrogation and had later given a contradictory account; it was also demonstrated in court that the rope with which the bandits were alleged to have tied up Mitchell-Hedges’s chauffeur was in fact string; it was proved in court that the so-called bandits were actually friends of Mitchell-Hedges and that their chauffeur was the brother of his chauffeur. In a heated exchange, the prosecution compared the Ripley Road hold-up to Agatha’s disappearance by citing the novelist as ‘a woman who played a foolish hoax on the police’.

Although the Mitchell-Hedges trial was not the first time Agatha’s disappearance had been alluded to as a hoax, the renewed publicity could not have come at a worse time since her divorce was just two months away. Agatha knew that if proceedings became acrimonious her failure to defend herself against this slur on her reputation could be used against her by Archie. She therefore instructed her lawyer, Stuart Bevan, to make a statement during the Mitchell-Hedges case on her behalf, as well as to present to the judge the statement issued by the two doctors. Her lawyer’s appeal for the judge’s indulgence in the matter was denied, and Agatha had no alternative other than to defend herself publicly, since she was advised that it was possible for a husband to gain custody of a child if good reason was demonstrated in court.