Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  She now appealed to Carlo to return, other doctors having discovered that her father’s illness was not in fact severe. Carlo was horrified at Agatha’s condition. She found her unable to eat or sleep, all the day in tears. Of Archie’s state we know less, though friends with whom he had stayed during the early part of the summer, while Agatha dismantled Ashfield, thought him subdued and lonely. Agatha herself found him impatient, as much with himself, it appears, as with her, but she later took trouble to try to explain his behaviour. She was frank about Archie’s selfishness: ‘He said, “I did tell you once, long ago, that I hate it when people are ill or unhappy – it sort of spoils everything for me.” Again and again,’ she recalled, ‘he would say to me: “I can’t stand not having what I want and I can’t stand not being happy. Everybody can’t be happy – somebody has got to be unhappy.”’ These are childish words, spoken by someone thoroughly miserable. Archie found Agatha increasingly irritating, not least because he was annoyed with himself and with the intractability of their situation. He could not stand tears and depression, Carlo later recalled, in a letter to Rosalind. Agatha spoke of Archie’s ‘continued unkindness’: ‘he was unhappy’, she wrote, ‘because he was, I think, deep down fond of me, and he did really hate to hurt me, but he had to make out for himself that this was not hurting me, that it would be much better for me in the end; that I should have a happy life, that I should travel, that I had got my writing, after all, to console me. But because his conscience really troubled him he could not help behaving with a certain ruthlessness. My mother had always said he was ruthless – she had appreciated that trait in him which I did not; I had always seen so clearly his many acts of kindness, his good nature.…’ Even so, she admitted, ‘I had admired his ruthlessness. Now,’ she observed, ‘I saw the other side of it.’

  How our mothers’ warnings come back to haunt us. Clara had always emphasised to Agatha that men needed unremitting encouragement and companionship, advice that, later, Agatha herself never failed to give her younger women friends when their husbands’ work took them abroad. Now Agatha had lost both Archie and her mother. She had Rosalind but she was a child and should be spared such troubles. She had the perceptive and compassionate Carlo but it would have been disloyal as well as untypical for Agatha to share even with her all her grief and grievances. She felt herself entirely alone. All her love and comfort, she believed, came from a dog, Peter, a wire-haired terrier Rosalind had been given when they moved to Sunningdale. Years later, when Peter was ill, Agatha told her second husband that, though her sorrow might appear foolish, it would not seem so to someone who understood what it was like to have a dog as the sole source of companionship and consolation.

  When Agatha and Rosalind returned to Styles from Ashfield, it at first seemed best for Archie to return to his club in London. It was then that Carlo came back to Styles. After a couple of weeks, however, Archie returned home. He said that ‘perhaps he had been wrong,’ Agatha wrote. ‘Perhaps it was the wrong thing to do.’ Moreover, Archie and Rosalind, now aged seven, were devoted to one another and for that reason he tried to stay. Unbearably difficult though he was then, Agatha sought to hold him. She did not want a divorce, for a mixture of reasons. A divorce would be like death, the disappearance of a person with whom, however uncomfortably and disagreeably, an intensely close relationship had been contrived and sustained. Like death, too, it would be complicated materially as well as emotionally: property would have to be apportioned and possessions re-allocated. Divorce, though, is, unlike death, a choice. Rather than inflict pain and inconvenience on all concerned, it is tempting to struggle on or at least to defer the moment of irrevocable decision. Where there are children, the temptation is even greater. In 1926 – and for many years afterwards – there were other pressures, too, against lightly accepting divorce as the means of resolving an emotional dilemma. Obtaining a divorce was difficult and shaming; the only admissible ground was adultery, which had to be proved, generally by various standard, sordid procedures.

  Agatha may not have thought this far ahead. It is sufficient to explain her refusal to contemplate a divorce as deriving from her conviction that her marriage to Archie was fundamentally happy and sound. ‘There had never been any suspicion of anything of that kind in our lives – we’d been happy together and harmonious. We had never quarrelled and he’d never been the type who looked much at other women.’ ‘This happens with lots of husbands,’ her relations told her. Archie, they said, would return. Agatha, too, believed this but, when Archie remained obdurate, she recognised that his return to Sunningdale had only increased his desire to leave her. He moved back to his club.

  Archie was not living with Miss Neele, nor she with him. Conscientious and orderly, steady and reliable, he would not wish to jeopardise his standing with his colleagues in the City – in the late nineteen-twenties a small and conventional society – by behaving recklessly. Moreover, he liked his domestic arrangements to be as well-planned and regular as his business affairs; each morning his breakfast was the same, his day unfolded according to a careful routine, at half-past ten he retired for the night. When it became impossible for him to remain at Styles, he inevitably removed to his club. Any other arrangement would have been even more disruptive, as well as being complicated, expensive and compromising to all concerned. The woman with whom Archie had fallen in love was not a thoughtless girl, but an intelligent and considerate woman, some ten years younger than Archie. She came from a large family – there were twin brothers and another brother and sister besides – and her father had an administrative post with one of the railway boards. When her schooling was finished, Nancy decided to take a course in shorthand and typewriting at one of the secretarial schools for young women recently established in London, choosing Miss Jenkins’s Typewriting and Secretarial School, the Triangle, in South Molton Street, next to Bond Street. When Nancy finished her year at this establishment, famous for its respectability, she joined a City firm called the Imperial Continental Gas Association. At first she was the only woman employed there – male clerks were still the rule – but after a year she was joined by another graduate of the Triangle, and it was this friend who introduced her to Archie.

  Madge James and her husband, Sam, lived at Hurtmore in Surrey. Nancy was still living with her family, at Croxley Green, and from time to time she would come to stay with them. Nancy, gregarious and likeable, enjoyed parties and was a pleasant guest. Sam James was a colleague of Archie’s in the City and, thinking he looked tired and unhappy, asked him down for a weekend. Madge, who had inquired whether Archie was married and would like to bring his wife, understood from her husband that all was not well between the Christies and that Archie would probably prefer to be invited alone. Nancy, as Madge’s friend, was among the other guests. It emerged that Nancy was as keen on golf as Archie and, since Sam did not play, they made a pair. As people will during long weekends in other people’s houses, they began to confide in one another.

  Agatha and Nancy also knew each other. Indeed, Nancy had been invited by Agatha to stay at Styles and on at least one occasion, when a neighbour had given a dance to which the Christies had taken their guests, Agatha, as a married woman, had chaperoned Nancy, whose family would otherwise not have wished her to be going about so freely. Agatha, writing years later, remembered Archie telling her that since he had been alone in London he had seen a good deal of Nancy, to which she had replied, ‘Well, why shouldn’t you?’ In her Autobiography Agatha spoke of Archie’s referring to Nancy as ‘Belcher’s secretary’, but either Archie or Agatha was being inaccurate, since Nancy still had her job at the Imperial Continental Gas Association. Major Belcher, now married to an Australian girl who had helped type some of his correspondence on the Empire Tour, certainly knew Nancy, for in 1925 she had stayed with the Belchers on holiday in France. Her acquaintance with Agatha was, however, slight.

  By the winter of 1926 these three troubled people were in a state of considerable distress. Archie remained at h
is club, seeing Nancy at weekends in the company of friends, so that no one’s reputation should be injured by gossip. Mrs James in particular sought to arrange matters so that Archie and Nancy could be together at her house with absolute propriety; she was not only anxious not to embarrass her servants by indiscreet behaviour nor to induce her formidable mother to scold her for turning a blind eye to an indecorous courtship but she was also concerned to protect her friend’s reputation and happiness. Agatha was in the most unfortunate position. Unlike Archie or Nancy, she had no office to which to take herself each day, no one from whom to draw comfort and love. She was trying to write her next book for Collins and finding it impossible; at night she wandered about. Carlo was frightened by Agatha’s distressed state. She sent for the doctor, who suggested that she sleep in the same room. ‘I tried to keep the house running smoothly for your sake,’ she later wrote to Rosalind, but it cannot have been easy even for such a sensible young woman.

  Agatha was in despair but it would be wrong to imagine that she ever seriously contemplated suicide. Had she wished to kill herself, her pharmaceutical knowledge would have made it easy, but that would have been wholly contrary to her strong religious beliefs. She was deeply distraught and undoubtedly ill, in a profoundly unhappy state where no one, not even her own child, could provide consolation or hope. She was sleeping badly, working haphazardly, eating too little. Her appearance deteriorated, she punished herself and everyone around her. Reeling and lurching, her purpose was not fixed.

  11

  ‘A ghastly ten days …’

  December came, and the approach of Christmas. Agatha told Carlo she should have a day to herself, especially since a friend was urging her to dine and dance with him in London. Reluctantly, because she was uneasy about Agatha, Carlo agreed to go. This was on the evening of Friday, December 3rd. After dinner Carlo telephoned Styles to make sure that Agatha was all right. She was reassured when she came to the telephone, sounding just as usual, and encouraged her to go and dance and to return by the late train.

  When Carlo reached Styles, which was within easy walking distance of the station, she found the garage doors wide open and the maids in the kitchen looking scared. They told her that at about eleven o’clock Mrs Christie had come downstairs, got into her car and driven off, without saying where she was going. Carlo, frightened now, calmed the maids and sent them to bed. She herself sat up to wait. In the letter she later sent Rosalind, describing these events, Carlo recalled that, at about six o’clock the following morning, Saturday, a policeman arrived at Styles, with the news that a Morris motor car had been found abandoned some distance away, at a place called Newlands Corner, just beyond Guildford in Surrey. Even on twisting roads, late at night and in bad weather, a driver in a small car would have taken no more than an hour to reach Newlands Corner from Sunningdale. Why Agatha had set off and what her car was still doing there was a mystery.

  What follows is, inevitably, after sixty years, a vague and muddled story. Carlo’s recollection must be imprecise, since the report of the Superintendent of the Surrey Police records that he did not hear about the car until eleven o’clock that morning. A witness later reported having helped a lady re-start the vehicle at about 6.20 a.m. It must then have taken some time for the Surrey Constabulary to notify the Berkshire Constabulary, in whose district Styles fell, and for the owner of the Morris to be traced.

  There is another discrepancy. Carlo’s letter states that the policeman informed her that the car had been found upside-down. The Police Superintendent’s report states that the car ‘was found in such a position as to indicate that some unusual proceeding had taken place, the car being found half-way down a grassy slope well off the main road with its bonnet buried in some bushes.…’ It is, however, not surprising that Carlo should have misheard, or misremembered, what the officer told her when he arrived with his frightening news.

  Carlo told the policeman that Mrs Christie had not been well and that her family had been worried. Statements in the newspapers subsequently reported that Agatha had left a letter for Carlo, asking her to cancel her arrangements to spend that weekend at a hotel in Yorkshire, and that on the Saturday afternoon Miss Fisher had telegraphed to an hotel in Beverley cancelling Agatha’s booking.

  Her immediate duty was to let Archie know what had happened. He was staying for the weekend at Hurtmore, with Mr and Mrs James. Nancy was also there. Carlo’s telephone call came in the middle of the morning and, almost immediately afterwards, a policeman arrived at the house. On hearing about Agatha’s car, Archie straightway left with the policeman to join Carlo at Styles.

  By the time Archie returned, the press had got on to the story. She and Archie were taken to examine the car, now surrounded by crowds of people, with vans selling hot drinks and ice-cream. ‘A ghastly ten days ensued,’ Carlo wrote later. The house was besieged by newspapermen and Rosalind was escorted to school by policemen, who stationed themselves at the front and back doors and by the telephone. Although Styles was in the Berkshire Police district, the boundary of the Surrey district began only a few yards away, on the other side of the road, so poor Carlo had two teams of police to deal with. Every morning they interviewed her again. At Archie’s suggestion, Carlo sent for her sister Mary, who provided some company and moral support. Archie himself soon showed his annoyance with the press and police, which Carlo thought a mistake. Each day, she remembered, she gave an interview to the Daily Mail, Agatha’s favourite newspaper.

  In 1926, as much as in later years, the Mail’s editor, correspondents and managers were engaged in a vigorous battle with rival newspapers for circulation and advertising. To the press the story of Agatha’s disappearance was a gift. The Daily Mail and the Evening News, its stable-mate, made the running, with articles on the progress of the search for Agatha and the latest speculation as to what might have become of her. Reporters from the News of the World and the Daily News were also hot on the scent. Careful scrutiny of the sequence of newspaper reports that appeared during the next week or so indicates that it was not only the press who allowed their fervour to go to their heads. Superintendent Goddard, of the Berkshire Constabulary, seems to have said little to the press, but Superintendent Kenward, of Surrey, was constantly cited as having made this or that confident, if sometimes enigmatic, statement. He appears to have enjoyed every minute of his finest hour. A day or so after Agatha’s car had been found, he apparently told the Evening News, ‘I may even have aeroplanes out again,’ but in his report for the Home Office he later stated explicitly that: ‘The aeroplanes which are said to have taken part in the search are nothing to do with the police.’ This example suggests that he may have allowed the attentions of the press to go rather to his head.

  On one point, however, it is easy to agree with him. ‘There is no doubt,’ he wrote, ‘that a good deal of press matter circulated in connection with the case was without foundation.’ This was, evidently, partly his own fault but it also owed much to the enthusiasm with which the newspapers pursued the story, conjuring witnesses from one unlikely quarter after another, frenziedly reporting far-flung sightings of their quarry, mixing up Agatha’s disappearance with those of other persons who had gone missing at the same time, and hiring clairvoyants and experts to propound their own theories as to what might have happened. Reading even a few of those newspaper accounts in sequence shows how easily myths are made and sustained. The correspondents who wrote them were deferential and circumspect to an extent that seems curious today but they nonetheless asked questions. That they did so in a polite and unhectoring tone of voice did not make their suspicions any less insidious or their suggestions less persuasive, as Archie found when, to his amazement, he realised that he was popularly suspected of doing away with his wife, or as Agatha discovered when she subsequently learnt that she had been variously believed to have disappeared as a ‘publicity stunt’, to join a lover, to cast suspicion on her husband, or for other reasons too lunatic to explore here.

  In discoveri
ng what happened to Agatha and understanding why, the press is as much of a hindrance as a help. Furthermore, Superintendent Kenward’s report to the Home Office is vague and defensive, and all other police records have been destroyed with the passage of time. Taken together, such sources represent a mixture of speculation, pure fancy and intermittently verifiable fact that not only confused the interested public at the time but has misled them ever since.

  According to Superintendent Kenward, he spent the afternoon of Saturday, December 4th, and all day on the Sunday and the Monday, together with seven or eight regular members of the Surrey Force and ‘a good muster of Special Constables (unpaid) and voluntary civilian helpers’, searching the Downs around Newlands Corner. On the Monday the newspapers reported that a farm worker, Mr Ernest Cross, had said that on his way to work on the Saturday morning he had come upon ‘a woman in a frenzied condition standing by a motor car near the top of Newlands Corner Hill, a few yards from the Newlands Corner Hotel’. According to Mr Cross, the woman was moaning and holding her hands to her head. Her teeth were chattering with the cold, which was not surprising since, he reported, ‘she was wearing only a thin frock and a thin pair of shoes, and I think she was without a hat.’ The lights of the car, he went on to say, were full on and she had stumbled towards him, remarking that it was very late and begging him to try to start the engine for her. He had wound up the engine, ‘which was quite hot’, and, as the woman had climbed back into the car, he noticed that it was running smoothly. In later accounts this witness was named as Mr Edward McAllister; he was also to be quoted as saying that the radiator was in fact ‘quite cold’. He described the woman he met so accurately, however, that Superintendent Kenward apparently had little doubt it was Agatha he had seen. The Superintendent now decided that he needed more help with the search and, he told his superiors, he ‘accordingly gathered approximately three dozen regular police, drawn from all parts of the county … together with innumerable Special Constables.…’ With considerable reinforcements of civilian helpers, a thorough search was made of that portion of the Downs. All that was found, however, was a woman’s black shoe covered with mud and a woman’s brown glove lined with fur.