The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (15 page)

Lord Ritchie-Calder, who got to know her very well in later life, remains convinced that “her disappearance was calculated in the classic style of her detective stories”. A television play produced after her death even speculated that the disappearance was part of a plot to murder Nancy Neele. The only thing that is certain about “the case of the
disappearing authoress” is that it turned Agatha Christie into a bestseller, and eventually into a millionairess.

Postscript to “The Disappearance of Agatha Christie”

The mystery of Agatha Christie’s disappearance was finally solved after her death on 12 January 1976. Then it was clear why it had been kept secret – the truth would have been highly embarrassing to the writer and her family.

Ritchie Calder had been right all along; the disappearance had been staged with the connivance of her sister-in-law Nan, and the motive was simply to spite her husband and to spoil the weekend he had meant to spend with his mistress. What Agatha Christie had not reckoned with was the immense public interest that her disappearance would generate. The subsequent publicity appalled her – even though it also had the effect of turning her into a celebrity and a bestselling author – and she had no wish to confess that the reason for the disappearance was that her husband had a mistress.

The root of Agatha Christie’s problems almost certainly lay in her childhood. She was a highly imaginative and very private person. When a toddler she was horrified to overhear her nanny tell a housemaid that Miss Agatha had been playing again with her imaginary friends, the Kittens. Her lifelong dislike of invasions of her privacy seems to have begun there.

Agatha Christie was born on 15 September 1890, in a white villa called Ashfield, on the outskirts of Torquay, the seaside resort on the south coast of Devon. Her father, Frederick Miller, was a wealthy American and he and his wife Clarissa had three children, of whom Agatha was the third. Her elder sister Madge was regarded as the clever one of the family. It was her father’s devotion to Madge that was to cause tragedy. He spent so much money on her coming-out in New York that the family’s finances became straitened. For the first time in his life he began to think of taking some kind of a job in the City. But he had no qualifications, and a combination of depression and a chill that turned into double pneumonia killed him when Agatha was eleven.

For a while, it looked as if Clarissa Miller would have to sell Ashfield, but by means of extreme economies she managed to hang on to it, to Agatha’s enormous relief. But the change from affluence to poverty was traumatic for the child and was – at least partly – responsible for that determination to hang on to her money that led to the eventual break-up of her marriage.

In the year following her father’s death, Madge married James Watts, the son of a wealthy Manchester manufacturer, and the bridegroom’s younger sister Nan was to become Agatha’s lifelong friend and coconspirator.

It was Agatha’s regular visits to the magnificent Victorian Gothic home of James Watt Senior, Abney Hall in Cheshire, that provided her with the kind of experience of high living that she was to use so effectively in her detective novels.

As a teenager, with her long red-blonde hair and shy manner, Agatha was highly attractive and she quickly became involved with a young man she met at amateur theatricals in Torquay. But they drifted apart when she went to a finishing school in Paris where she took singing and piano lessons. Her sister-in-law Nan was at this time at a finishing school in Florence, and Agatha frequently visited her there. She also made her first acquaintance with Egypt when she had her coming-out season in Cairo. And in 1912, when she was twenty-two, she met her future husband, Archibald Christie, at a dance given by Lord and Lady Clifford at their home in Devon. He was tall, handsome, and had learned soldiering at the Royal Woolwich Military Academy, after which he became a lieutenant, stationed at Exeter.

The hero-worshipping Agatha was swept off her feet. Archie wanted to marry her immediately, but Agatha’s mother objected – there was something about Archie, perhaps a touch of selfishness or irresponsibility, that made her suspicious. But eighteen months later, the First World War broke out, and Archie and Agatha married when he was home on leave.

Archie went to serve his country in France, and his wife returned home to live with her mother. But Agatha also decided to join in the war effort and became a voluntary nurse at the Red Cross hospital in Torquay. To take her mind off the war, she began to devour detective stories.

Her elder sister Madge had become a published writer, whose stories often appeared in
Vanity Fair
and other magazines. Agatha had also been writing for years, but her stories had invariably been rejected. But it was a bet with her sister that she could write a good detective novel that led Agatha to write
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
, whose hero was a Belgian because at that time Torquay happened to be full of Belgian refugees. As might have been expected, the murder in the novel was committed by poison – a subject upon which Agatha was to become increasingly knowledgable.

The war came to an end, Archie returned home, and husband and
wife moved to London where Archie was working for the Air Ministry. Their finances were straitened, so much so that it took Agatha many weeks to decide to call on her old friend Nan, who had acquired herself a wealthy husband. The two found they enjoyed being together just as much as they had in childhood. In 1919, Agatha gave birth to a daughter, Clanssa.

Meanwhile, Agatha had decided that it would improve their finances if she could find a publisher for
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
. In 1920, it was accepted by John Lane of the Bodley Head, who was so confident of her ability to write that he gave her a contract for five books. The book was published in England and America and sold two thousand copies. All Agatha made from it was £25.

As it became clear to Agatha that her publishers were taking advantage of her, she determined to break with them as soon as possible.

Archie had joined the staff of the Imperial and Foreign Corporation, and in 1922, when he became Financial Advisor on the British Empire Mission, they went on a world tour which included South Africa, Australia and the United States. But when they got back from the tour, Archie suddenly found that he had been made redundant. Agatha’s detective stories now became doubly important to their finances. Archie hated being redundant, and the marriage began to show signs of strain. Things did not improve when a series of Poirot stories appeared in
The Sketch
, and Agatha was described as the “writer of the most brilliant detective novel of the day”. And although Archie soon found himself a job, his feeling that his wife was the family’s main provider continued to rankle.

When the five book contract with The Bodley Head came to an end, Agatha turned down an offer to renew it on better terms, and moved to Collins, who offered her an advance of £200 on each novel – an impressive sum for those days.

When Agatha refused to share her literary earnings with her husband, Archie became even more resentful. Busy with her career, his wife failed to notice the warning signs. She was probably rather relieved when Archie became a golf enthusiast, for it kept him occupied. But it was on the golf course that Archie met a typist named Nancy Neele, and fell in love with her.

On holiday with her husband in France, Agatha noticed that he seemed moody and irritable but had no idea that this was because he had transferred his affections elsewhere. In fact, she knew Nancy Neele well, and the girl often spent weekends with them. She had no suspicion that Nancy was her husband’s mistress.

So far, the name Agatha Christie had become known only to readers of detective stories, and she seldom made more than a few hundred pounds from each book. But in 1925, the serialisation of
Who Killed Roger Ackroyd
? brought her a new level of celebrity, as critics squabbled about whether it was not cheating to make the killer the harmless Watson who tells the story. It became her most successful book to-date.

The Christies had moved by now into a large house not far from Sunningdale, in Berkshire, and had decided to call it Styles, after Agatha’s first book. That was hardly auspicious, since the fictional Styles had been the scene of a murder. In fact, the real Styles had a bad reputation as the last three owners had all encountered disasters. But Agatha felt no misgivings. She was cheerful and full of confidence, her marriage seemed happy, and she even tried to persuade Archie that it was time to have another baby.

In April 1926, Agatha was shattered when her mother died after a bout of bronchitis. She was on her way to see her when she suddenly had a strong conviction that her mother was already dead.

Her intuition was to manifest itself again a few months later when Archie came back from a trip abroad and Agatha had a strong feeling that there was something wrong. She pressed him to tell her – and then was horrified when he admitted that he was in love with Nancy Neele and that she had been his mistress for the past eighteen months. Agatha felt totally betrayed. For a while, Archie moved to London, living at his club, and Agatha sank into a depression. Finally, when Archie confessed that he was not quite sure whether they should divorce, she pressed him to keep their marriage going on a trial basis for another year. Archie would only agree to three months. Agatha got a little of her own back by writing a story in which the “other woman” commits suicide by jumping off a cliff. But Nancy was disinclined to do anything so convenient.

And so came that evening on 3 December 1926, when she walked out of Styles and disappeared – and became known to every newspaper-reader in England.

In fact, she and Archie had quarrelled violently that morning because Archie intended to go and stay the weekend with friends, and Nancy Neele would also be a guest. When Archie left for London, Agatha wrote him a long letter full of recriminations. After that, she left the house at about 10 p.m, drove to Newlands Corner and put her prearranged plan into operation. She parked on the edge of the road and then pushed the car down the slope, with its headlights full on. She left her fur coat and a case of her clothes – as well as her driving license – in
the car. It had stopped in a clump of bushes on the edge of a chalk pit. After that, Agatha walked to West Clandon Station and took a train to London. There she went along to the home of her sister-in-law Nan, at 78 Chelsea Park Gardens, and stayed there the night. She had been to see Nan a few days before to tell her about her husband’s betrayal, so the visit was not wholly unexpected.

The next morning, Agatha posted a letter she had written to Archie’s brother Campbell, telling him that she was on her way to a Yorkshire spa. She sent this to his office in Woolwich so that he would not receive it until after the weekend. But in fact, on opening the letter Campbell Christie only glanced at it and then somehow managed to mislay it. This explains why it took so long for Archie and the police to find her – eleven days after her disappearance. Meanwhile, Archie got a little of his own back by telling a newspaper reporter that his wife had discussed the possibility of “disappearing” – implying that it might be a kind of practical joke or publicity stunt.

And so Agatha sat in the Harrogate Hydro Hotel, reading the newspaper accounts of herself and doing the kind of things that overseas visitors – she claimed to be from South Africa – did when they stay at a hotel during the Christmas holiday period.

On Sunday, 12 December, hundreds of members of the public set out to comb the Surrey hills for the missing novelist when in fact two members of a band who played in the Harrogate Hydro Hotel already thought they had recognized Agatha Christie on the dance floor, and went to inform the local police. A chambermaid called Rosie Asher had confirmed the bandsmens’ suspicions. She had noticed that the woman’s handbag had a zip, which was the first time she had ever seen this newly fashionable item but she was afraid to mention it to the management in case she lost her job. During the following Monday, plain-clothed police mingled with the hotel guests and quickly arrived at the conclusion that they had found Agatha Christie. The following day, the Yorkshire police rang Archie at work and asked him if he would travel to Harrogate to identify his wife. It must have been a relief to Archie to know that he was no longer suspected of his wife’s murder.

Early that evening, Archie sat in the hotel lounge hidden behind a newspaper as Agatha walked in and paused to look at her own photograph on the front of a newspaper lying on a table. Then she saw her husband looking across at her. With typical English coolness, the couple said hello, and then, a few minutes later, went in to dinner. There, apparently, Agatha admitted that she had staged her disappearance to spite her husband and that the prank had expanded beyond her expectations.

Now Archie learned that her sister-in-law Nan had known where she was all the time and had even lent her the money to travel to Harrogate and stay in the hotel. Agatha had posted the letter to Campbell – which was supposed to have guaranteed that she would be found quickly – and then had lunch with Nan in London. She then caught a train at 1.40 from King’s Cross to Harrogate, where she arrived six hours later.

The following morning, decoys who looked like the Christies left the hotel to be pursued by a crowd of reporters, while the
Daily Mail
cameraman, who was the only one who was left behind, took a photograph of the real Mr and Mrs Christie as they hurried out of the hotel at 9.15. At Harrogate station, they entered – by prior arrangement – by the goods entrance, but nevertheless found the London platform jammed with dozens of reporters and photographers. Agatha’s sister Madge had arrived, together with her husband Jimmy, but the attempt by the party to deceive the reporters by splitting into two pairs, male and female, failed in its purpose and flashbulbs popped as the sisters scrambled on to the train, with Agatha close to tears. At Leeds, they managed to mislead the reporters by changing trains, but the press caught up with them again in London where a photographer snapped Agatha as she walked up the platform. She then had to run the gauntlet of another crowd of reporters and managed to scramble on to the Manchester train. But one of the photographs of her that appeared that evening showed her grinning broadly, and strengthened the general impression that this was some kind of publicity stunt or hoax.