Chapter Fourteen
Last-Minute Cancellation

 

Once Agatha had been found, the real problems began. The subsequent cover-up, perpetrated by Archie, in which Agatha and certain members of her family colluded, was undermined by his statement during her absence that Agatha had previously discussed the possibility of disappearing in order to experiment with a plot for a book. Any potential sympathy their dramatic reunion might have invited had been forfeited by Archie’s ill-considered remarks.

In an atmosphere bristling with tension, the now famous author, who had answered to the name of Mrs Teresa Neele for a week and a half, walked into the hotel lounge and picked up from a table a copy of the Evening Standard, with the front page headlines ‘Mrs Christie Said to Be in Harrogate, Husband of Missing Novelist Leaves for the North to Investigate.’ From behind his own newspaper Archie gave a prearranged signal to Superintendent McDowall to confirm that the woman was his wife.

There was instant recognition in Agatha’s eyes, although she said nothing to betray herself. There was neither fuss nor melodrama. Archie was immensely relieved to find her at last. While he was unaware of the part Agatha’s friend Nan Watts had played in helping her to orchestrate the disappearance, he had suspected from the beginning that Agatha was alive and playing games with him.

After she returned his greeting with apparent nonchalance, Agatha agreed to sit down by the lounge fire and was spotted a few minutes later by a fellow guest, Alexander Pettleson, a wine merchant from London, who had just returned to the hotel. Agatha indicated Archie with a nod and quietly informed Mr Pettleson that her brother had arrived unexpectedly.

Archie, who was sitting opposite her, was too embarrassed to reply and gazed into the fire. Mr Pettleson joined them, unaware of the scene he had interrupted. Although he had read of the disappearance, he did not realize that the couple he was talking to were the famous Christies. There was an air of constraint over them, and he later admitted it had occurred to him that they might have quarrelled since they were sitting so far apart. But when Archie rather awkwardly suggested to Agatha that they both go in to dinner a few moments later, she accepted without fuss or demur.

Although she had previously arranged with another hotel guest, Mrs Robson, to attend a dance at the Prospect Hotel that night, Agatha cancelled the arrangement on the way in to dinner, explaining to Mrs Robson that her brother had arrived. As the novelist and her husband proceeded towards the dining-room, Agatha, in the full hearing of the police and onlookers, spoke to Archie about an experience that had befallen Mrs Robson’s daughter: ‘There is a lady here whose daughter had a baby just like I had, and her memory went. But you know, I shall get all right, because the lady staying in the hydro says her daughter was like this when she had a baby, but she became all right.’

When the police intervened to ask her if she knew who she was and what she was doing at the Harrogate Hydro, Agatha said she had left home in some confusion and had lost her memory, which had only just come back to her. Agatha and Archie then took a corner table in the restaurant. The authorities, sceptical of Agatha’s claim, left them alone, and over dinner they were forced by the extraordinary circumstances in which they found themselves to face a number of unpleasant home truths. The exchanges they made over dinner, following their subdued reunion, were very low key, and Archie was left in no doubt over the miscalculated circumstances that had brought Agatha to Harrogate.

As dinner proceeded, a despondent Agatha made no attempt to conceal from her husband the fact that she had deliberately staged her disappearance because she had known that her marriage was irretrievably over and she had wished to spite him. She revealed she had spent the night of the disappearance with Nan. Archie was staggered, because Nan had given everyone to understand she was as upset over Agatha’s inexplicable absence as the rest of her family.

There was no need for Agatha to remind Archie how their endless marital rows – resulting in tears and loss of sleep and appetite – had strained her nerves almost to breaking point. Unable to cope with the loss of her husband, she had sought to punish him in the only way she knew how: through intrigue, mystery and revenge. She also made it clear that her plot had exposed her to much greater anxiety than she had anticipated because she had failed to realize the press would become obsessed with the disappearance and fan it into a sensation.

Agatha told him that after their row on the morning of the disappearance she had driven up to London to confide her problems to the one person who she knew would understand. Nan’s parents, James and Anne, had died, respectively in June and November that year, and she empathized with Agatha over her loss of Clarissa. Also, because her first husband, Hugo Pollock, had walked out on her without explanation she had an intuitive understanding of the pain that Archie had caused Agatha.

Nan had moved to 78 Chelsea Park Gardens, and Agatha had been in a dreadful state when she had arrived there on Friday morning. Her failed reconciliation with Archie had left her feeling twice betrayed, and she now told him that she had confided to Nan that she was thinking of doing something desperate if he went ahead with his plans to leave her for Nancy. Agatha revealed that she had spoken to Nan of abandoning her car at Newlands Corner because it was only a few miles from Hurtmore Cottage, and she wanted the car’s discovery to disrupt his weekend with Nancy and lead to three or four days of very unpleasant questioning by the police, who she hoped would suspect him of murdering her.

Nan considered that Archie had behaved very badly and had agreed that if Agatha went ahead with her scheme she could spend the night with her, since her second husband, George Kon, was away. The two women had decided that Agatha should claim to be suffering from amnesia when she was found, because it would later release her from awkward explanations.

After returning to Sunningdale Agatha had lunched, then driven with Rosalind and Peter to Dorking to have afternoon tea with Archie’s mother. When Agatha had returned to Styles with her daughter and dog there had been no sign of her husband, and his failure to come home from work on the evening of Friday the 3rd had confirmed what Agatha had already guessed: that her marriage was over. Charlotte, who was aware of Agatha’s fragile state but who had at no time been privy to the scheme to spite Archie, had rung early in the evening while she was in London to see if her employer was all right. Agatha had pretended that things were fine and had urged Charlotte to return to Sunningdale, as intended by the last train, because she had wanted her secretary out of the way.

At 9.45 p.m. Agatha had left the letter for Charlotte asking her to cancel the trip to Beverley, as well as a letter of recrimination to Archie over his affair with Nancy. The writer had then driven directly to Newlands Corner, where she had let the car roll off the plateau with the handbrake off and the gears in neutral. She had intentionally left the headlights on to draw attention to the car, and her fur coat, an attaché case of clothes and her driver’s licence had been left inside so that it would look as if something untoward had happened.

Having removed her handbag from the car before it careered down the steep embankment and ended up by the edge of the chalk pit, she probably walked to West Clandon Station and travelled by train to London, although Graham Gardner recalls his mother-in-law Nan telling him Agatha might have got a lift part of the way. When Agatha had arrived at 78 Chelsea Park Gardens later that night, Nan had been half expecting her and had not been at all surprised to learn that Archie had gone ahead with his plans to spend the weekend with Nancy. Nan’s ten-year-old daughter Judith was away at boarding school, so the two women had spent the night discussing the details of Agatha’s scheme. Neither had any reason to suppose that Agatha’s plot to make Archie suffer for three or four days would lead to such disastrous consequences.

Agatha told her husband she had posted the letter to her brother-in-law Campbell early on the morning of Saturday the 4th in which she stated her intention to visit a Yorkshire spa. She had deliberately sent it to his workplace, rather than his home address, knowing there would be a slight delay in his receiving it. Her decision to take a rest cure in Harrogate had arisen from her and Nan’s belief that the authorities would be bound to look there once Campbell was in receipt of the letter, because Harrogate was the most famous spa in Yorkshire. On Saturday morning, before Agatha left London, the two women had visited the Army and Navy Department Store in Victoria, where Nan gave Agatha money to acquire some items of clothing and other articles and a small case to take to Harrogate with her, since the clothes she had packed in her attaché case the previous night had been left behind in her abandoned car. They had rung two or three of the best-known hotels in Harrogate to see which had vacancies and, after discovering none were full owing to the Christmas lull, had decided that Agatha should just turn up at the Harrogate Hydro since this would later support her claim of having lost her memory.

Agatha also told Archie that she had left her diamond ring to be mended at Harrods that morning, as she had been meaning to have it repaired for some time. She had requested that the department store forward it to her in the name of ‘Mrs Neele’ at the Hydro in Harrogate.

After they had lunch together, Nan had given Agatha some more money, then Agatha had caught the 1.40 p.m. train from King’s Cross, which arrived in Harrogate at 6.40 p.m. She had taken a taxi from Harrogate Station and, a little before seven o’clock, had booked into room 105 of the Harrogate Hydro as Mrs Teresa Neele of Cape Town, South Africa. Her choice of surname was deliberate, while the Christian name she adopted had been inspired by St Teresa of Avila.

Agatha revealed she had been surprised when her letter to Campbell had failed to lead to her immediate discovery and the press had taken up the story of her disappearance. She was sure the news coverage had come as just as much of a shock to Nan. Agatha had resolved to sit tight on the assumption that she would soon be tracked down. But the search had dragged on and on. What neither woman had predicted was that Archie would crack under the strain of the police investigation and tell the Daily Mail that Agatha had discussed with her sister the possibility of disappearing at will. Agatha had placed the advertisement in The Times because it had been the only thing she could think of doing that would support her claim to have developed amnesia.

Horrified by events, she had lived very quietly as a guest at the hotel. Part of her had, of course, enjoyed knowing that her husband was suffering. She had occupied her time reading newspapers and books and had done a lot of writing to take her mind off the situation. She had also occupied herself by knitting, playing bridge and billiards in the public rooms, taking the waters in the hotel and spending her evenings in the ballroom dancing or sitting quietly at a table doing crosswords.

Agatha’s and Archie’s meal was a muted occasion, in which the full significance of the roles each had played bitterly came home to them both. Although he was forced to contain himself, Archie was furious at Nan’s involvement. It was apparent to them both that their marriage was beyond repair. Given his anger over what had happened, his restraint in dealing with his wife, who was deeply distressed by it all, might have been touching – if his main concern had not been so evidently to protect his mistress’s reputation, so that he might still marry her once the press had lost interest in the story.

Adversity had united Agatha and Archie in the past, and they were to present a united front once more over the next sixteen hours. Neither wanted their private lives splashed further across the newspapers’ front pages.

After leaving Agatha in her hotel bedroom, Archie rang Styles to tell Charlotte that his wife had been found suffering from amnesia. The secretary, who had already been informed of Agatha’s discovery by the Surrey police, accepted Archie’s lie in apparent good faith. She was immensely relieved and delighted that no physical harm had come to Agatha, and at his suggestion she arranged with the local garage in Sunningdale for his Delage to be driven up to London the following day, so that after arriving on the King’s Cross train Agatha and Archie could drive together back to Styles.

It was a trip, however, that was never to be made. Although Archie had hidden Agatha from the press in the nick of time, the reporters invaded the public rooms of the hotel. Owing to the many loose ends and discrepancies in the case, the news that Agatha had amnesia was received with the utmost incredulity.

The unrelenting journalists, well aware that Archie had attempted to deceive them about his affair with Nancy, asked themselves, not unreasonably, whether the Colonel’s explanation might not also be a lie. It quickly dawned on Archie that if he were to affect a cover-up he was going to need additional help.