Chapter Eight
The Search Widens

 

Where Agatha had gone after vanishing from Styles on Friday 3 December was the focus of the first newspaper reports to appear on Monday the 6th. News of her disappearance even reached the United States, where the New York Times ran a front-page headline: ‘Mrs Agatha Christie, Novelist, Disappears in Strange Way from Her Home in England.’ Closer to home, the weekend search had resulted in more questions than answers for the man in charge of the inquiry, Deputy Chief Constable Kenward of the Surrey Constabulary.

He wondered whether there was any significance in the fact that the car had been abandoned within six miles of Colonel Christie’s rendezvous with Nancy Neele. Also, if Agatha had accidentally run off the road, why had she failed to apply the brakes on her way down the long decline? If she had decided to commit suicide, why had she driven over fourteen miles from home to do so? The fact that Agatha had not taken her dog Peter with her as usual that night gave credence to the suicide theory.

What made suicide less likely was the fact that the writer’s handbag and purse had been removed from the car, although Agatha’s continued absence led the Surrey police to presume that the abandonment of her journey at Newlands Corner had been as unexpected to herself as to others.

The problem once again confronting the Surrey police on the Monday was to know where to take up the search. The undulating countryside around Newlands Corner included large tracts of dense woodland, streams, ponds, copses and fields in which the growth was often knee-high, so Deputy Chief Constable Kenward’s task could not have been more difficult.

The search for Agatha was thorough and precise. Wilfrid Morton, who was based at Woking at the time, remembers it well: ‘The first I knew was that I was ordered to be at the police station in the early hours of the morning for some unknown purpose. I was told to be there dressed in plain clothes and to bring a walking stick. I was a probationary constable and living in at the time. I couldn’t find out what it was about until I paraded about in the yard outside and found that there were about thirty other people there. A charabanc pulled up outside and we were all put aboard and off we went. As we were driving along somebody who knew said, “It’s Newlands Corner we’re going to.”’ He had no idea why.

By the time they disembarked day was breaking. The men were lined up at six-foot intervals and told to link hands with the officer on either side of them and slowly move forward. They were not told what they were looking for and were instructed to report anything unusual they found.

Wilfrid Morton recalls: ‘We were to go through bushes, not round them, and if we came to a tree we couldn’t get through we had to go round it, but we were to look up in its branches and see that there was nothing unusual up there. And there was no rush. Just do it slowly and keep the line intact. Eventually, after an hour or so, we came out into the open ground again. We were then reassembled and rested for a little while, then told that we were going to have another go and were taken to a fresh piece of ground to do the same thing again. Various things were found – old garments and so on – which meant an interruption to the whole line until a senior officer was brought along to examine whatever it was that was found. We pushed on, and by the time we had got out into the open ground again it was midday and we were all hungry and tired and thirsty. We had refreshments. By that time, of course, we had an idea what it was all about. Somebody had got hold of a newspaper and read the headlines about the disappearance.’

Meanwhile, Archie drove to Scotland Yard that morning with his solicitor and his wife’s secretary. He was told by senior police there that they could not intervene in the investigation unless the Surrey or Berkshire police requested their assistance. All Scotland Yard could do was place Agatha’s description in Confidential Information and the Police Gazette, alerting every police station in England to her disappearance. Archie left London resigned to an unhappy wait for news. To encourage Charlotte’s loyalty, and thus to minimize any disclosure of his personal life to the police or press, he encouraged her to invite her sister, Mary Fisher, to visit Styles and was relieved when Mary stayed for the duration of the disappearance.

His anxiety was exacerbated by the fact that because Sunningdale was situated on the borders of Berkshire and Surrey he was attempting to deceive two different county police forces into believing that talk of marital problems between him and Agatha was merely unkind servants’ gossip. However, his account of the state of his marriage was undermined on the Monday when the parlour-maid at Styles finally admitted to investigators that Colonel and Mrs Christie had had a major argument on the morning of the disappearance.

Superintendent Charles Goddard, head of the Berkshire Constabulary’s investigation, had been in charge of the Wokingham Division for over twenty years. He was assisted by Inspector Sidney Frank Butler of the Ascot police, a stalwart officer with a flair for dealing with members of the public.

Unlike their Surrey counterparts, the two police officers were inclined to believe that Agatha was still alive. They had quickly formed the impression that she was a somewhat immature person with a tendency to carry her stories over into real life. They found significance in the fact that she insisted on calling her secretary ‘Carlotta’, because she thought it sounded more exotic, although it was apparent that Charlotte did not much care for this. Archie appeared to them a no-nonsense, practical man, not an especially good match for his perhaps over-imaginative wife. It was their belief that in her unhappiness after the row the novelist had wanted to bring the situation to a head and had given the impression she was going away for a day or two to think things over but had intentionally not stated where she was going. When she failed to return or make contact, it was inevitable that some people would fear she had attempted suicide in a last-ditch attempt to gain sympathy. The Berkshire police were inclined to believe that Agatha may have used similarly dramatic tactics to get her own way – or Archie’s attention – on previous occasions. Although the Colonel had been obliged to report the disappearance to Inspector Butler at Ascot Police Station he had plainly been very angry at being forced to admit the situation.

After a telephone call shortly after midday on Monday from his brother Campbell, Archie’s hopes that Agatha was alive were boosted. The postmark on the envelope of the letter Campbell had received revealed that it had been franked at 9.45 a.m. on Saturday the 4th in the SW1 area of London. Campbell was convinced that this meant the letter must have been posted in London on the day that Agatha’s car had been found abandoned and that his sister-in-law was, in all probability, still alive.

The suggestion that Charlotte might have posted the letter while she was in London on the night of the disappearance was disregarded. ‘It is true that I was in London on Friday evening, but I posted no letter there for Mrs Christie,’ she stated. ‘I had posted nothing for her for several days before her disappearance.’ Subsequent inquiries revealed that the letter’s postmark indicated it could only have been posted sometime between 3 a.m. and 8 a.m. on Saturday the 4th – some four hours at least after the secretary had returned to Styles the previous night.

The crux of Agatha’s letter to Campbell, which was undated and addressed from Styles, indicated she was going away for the weekend to an unnamed spa in Yorkshire. The letter had been addressed to him at the Royal Woolwich Military Academy, and on going there on the morning of Sunday the 5th Campbell had found it on his desk. There was nothing in the letter to indicate that his sister-in-law was suffering from any nervous strain or that she was contemplating any untoward action. After reading the letter he had set it aside and forgotten about it. He explained to Archie that he had heard only on the Monday morning that Agatha was missing and had immediately looked for the letter – but it, too, was missing, possibly either thrown away or torn up with other papers. Campbell had considered it highly unlikely that anyone had posted the letter on her behalf, and he was convinced that when Agatha composed the note she was in a perfectly normal state of mind and that it had been written before she left Styles on the Friday night. The envelope with its postmark had been retained, and Campbell promptly forwarded it to Archie. The most intriguing question confronting the police was why the envelope had been addressed to her brother-in-law’s workplace rather than to his home.

Meanwhile the press was having a field day. In an era of unsophisticated communication systems the story was taken up with amazing speed; it was as if someone had pressed a button and released an avalanche of publicity. Massive speculation ensued.

The press reporters did not always find time to distinguish conjecture from fact. They feverishly sought out witnesses, some reliable, others not. They followed up potential leads and shadowed the police to try to glean snippets of information. The abandoned car was a case in point. Some newspapers failed to clarify the sequence in which it had been seen by various individuals on the Saturday morning, and this led to contradictory reports regarding whether the lights had been discovered on or off. Although it was stated by the police that the car had been found with its brakes off half-way down the long decline, Alfred Luland, who ran the refreshment kiosk at Newlands Corner, excitedly insisted to eager journalists that he was ‘almost certain the brakes were on’. This only muddied matters further since the slope at the edge of the plateau was sufficiently steep for a parked car with its handbrake on to have rolled forward under the momentum of its own weight, gathering speed until it careered down the hill.

Several newspapers reproduced maps of Newlands Corner, indicating where the car had been found. Some of the maps were so inaccurate as to give rise to the suspicion that they were reproduced from descriptions given by reporters over the telephone.

The response of the press to the disappearance was both unexpected and extraordinary. On Monday the 6th the Daily Mail was hot on the trail, regaling its readers with the car’s discovery at Newlands Corner and a description of the author. The fact that Agatha was not yet a household name was evidenced by its headline: ‘Woman Novelist Disappears.’ In the absence of any knowledge of Agatha’s whereabouts, the Daily Sketch blithely descended into fanciful speculation: ‘Mrs Christie herself has made one of her heroines drown herself in the Silent Pool. In local tradition there is a feeling that the pool has an irresistible fascination on those who are brought into close touch with it, as Mrs Christie was. All the evidence available at the moment tends to suggest Mrs Christie’s mind had given way.’

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.