By the following weekend, hundreds of policemen and thousands of members of the general public had joined in the search for Agatha Christie. The Silent Pool was dredged with special machinery, light aircraft scoured the countryside from above, and packs of airedales and bloodhounds went over the ground more closely. Police from four counties, Surrey, Essex, Berkshire and Kent, were brought in. As in an Agatha Christie murder mystery, a number of clues were found, only to be discarded as red herrings: a local chemist said that Mrs Christie had often discussed with him methods of committing suicide; a woman claimed that she had seen someone, whom she identified from photographs as Mrs Christie, wandering about, dazed; and two other people remembered that a woman answering to her description, her clothes covered in frost, had asked them the way to Petersfield, a town in Hampshire. The police guarded Colonel Christie’s house, monitored his phone calls, and followed him to his office. Christie told a city colleague, ‘They think I’ve murdered my wife.’ The weekend after her disappearance, in answer to an appeal from the police fifteen thousand volunteers searched the Downs. On the Saturday afternoon, three thousand of their cars were parked on Merrow Downs, and they set off in groups of thirty with a police officer in charge of each group. The Daily Mail played its part by publishing an article by the famous thriller writer, Edgar Wallace, in which he expounded his theory of Mrs Christie’s disappearance. He did not suspect foul play, but considered it
a typical case of ‘mental reprisal’ on somebody who has hurt her. To put it vulgarly her first intention seems to have been to ‘spite’ an unknown person who would be distressed by her disappearance.
That she did not contemplate suicide seems evident from the fact that she deliberately created an atmosphere of suicide by abandonment of her car.
Loss of memory, that is to say mental confusion, might easily have followed but a person so afflicted could not possibly escape notice … If Agatha Christie is not dead of shock and exposure within a limited radius of the place where her car was found, she must be alive and in full possession of her faculties, probably in London. It is impossible to lose your memory and find your way to a determined destination.
Edgar Wallace’s theory was perfectly tenable, and indeed in its essentials was correct. It was certainly quite proper for him to have suggested it, but perhaps unwise of the chief suspect, Colonel Christie, to put forward the same idea to the Daily News: ‘My wife said to me, some time ago, that she could disappear at will and would defy anyone to find her. This shows that the possibility of engineering her disappearance was running through her mind.’
During the week in which Agatha Christie remained missing, the banjo player in the band at the Hydropathic Hotel at Harrogate, in those days an elegant spa resort in Yorkshire, informed the Harrogate police of his suspicion that the Mrs Neele who had been staying at the hotel since the previous Saturday was, in fact, Mrs Christie. The police stationed a detective in the hotel for two days to keep an eye on Mrs Neele, and the manager of the hotel (which is now called the Old Swan Hotel) made a statement to the police about Mrs Neele:
She arrived by taxi on Saturday morning with only a small suitcase and asked for a bedroom on en pension terms and was given a good room on the first floor with hot and cold water.
I did not see her myself but I believe that the price quoted to her was seven guineas a week. She accepted this without hesitation. Indeed, from the first day she has been here she seems to have as much money as she wants. From the first her life in the Hydro has been exactly similar to that of our other guests. She takes her meals in the dining-room and only once or twice has had breakfast in bed. She is a very agreeable guest.
When the story that a Mrs Neele at the Hydro Hotel in Harrogate might well be Agatha Christie was leaked to the press, several newspapers sent reporters to Harrogate, and the Daily Mail sent a special train with a team of reporters and photographers. It was, however, a Daily News reporter, the twenty-year-old Ritchie Calder (the late Baron Ritchie-Calder) who walked up to Mrs Neele in the lounge of the hotel and addressed her as Mrs Christie. ‘Mrs Neele’ admitted to him that she was Mrs Christie, but, when asked how she had got to Harrogate, said she did not know as she was suffering from amnesia. She then left Calder abruptly, went up to her room and stayed there for the remainder of the afternoon.
On Tuesday, 14 December, the London Evening Standard published the news that Agatha Christie had been found. The Daily News sent Mrs Christie a telegram, which they also published: ‘In view widespread criticism your disappearance strongly urge desirability authentic explanation from yourself to thousands of public who joined in costly search and cannot understand your loss of memory theory.’
No ‘authentic explanation’ was ever vouchsafed by Agatha Christie. She had registered at the Hydro Hotel as Mrs Teresa Neele, and had let it be known to fellow guests13 that she was a visitor from Cape Town. On the evening of the day she arrived, Saturday, 4 December, there was a dance at the hotel, and when the band played ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’, Mrs Neele got up and danced the Charleston. She spent her week at Harrogate shopping (‘she was constantly buying new clothes,’ Miss Corbett, the hotel pianist, told the police), taking tea in a local tea shop, and going on long walks. In the evening she played billiards at the Hydro, and on more than one occasion was prevailed upon to sing in her small but sweet soprano, accompanying herself at the piano. Once in the middle of a sentimental song, she faltered and seemed close to tears, but this was attributed to the fact that ‘Mrs Neele’ was recovering from the loss of a child in South Africa. During the week she posted an announcement to The Times, which appeared in the newspaper’s personal column on Saturday, 11 December: ‘Friends and relatives of Teresa Neele, late of South Africa, please communicate – Write Box R 702, The Times, EC4’.
When he accosted her at the hotel, the young journalist Ritchie Calder thought that ‘amnesia’, which Mrs Christie flung glibly at him, ‘was much too clinical a word for someone supposedly surprised into conversation, and if, as her doctor later suggested, she had an “identity crisis”, well, by golly, there was no “Teresa Neele” lurking in the self-possessed woman I met.’
Archie Christie arrived in Harrogate at 6.45 p.m. on Tuesday, 14 December, and identified his wife as she walked through the lounge of the hotel wearing an orchid pink dinner gown. She appeared unembarrassed as he walked up to her, merely turning to a group of fellow guests and saying, ‘Fancy, my brother has just arrived’. One of the guests who watched the reunion said later that the Christies then sat down in front of the fire in the lounge, but several chairs apart from each other as though they had been quarrelling. They stayed overnight, not in Mrs Neele’s room but in a suite. Colonel Christie made an announcement to the press:
There is no question about the identity. It is my wife. She has suffered from the most complete loss of memory and I do not think she knows who she is. She does not know me and she does not know where she is. I am hoping that the rest and quiet will restore her. I am hoping to take her to London tomorrow to see a doctor and specialists.
Two doctors, a neurologist and a general practitioner, issued a statement to the effect that Mrs Christie was ‘suffering from an unquestionable loss of memory and that for her future welfare she should be spared all anxiety and excitement.’ In other words, ask no questions.
The press accused Mrs Christie of having planned her disappearance merely to obtain publicity. That was a nonsensical accusation, for she was not only a shy woman who avoided publicity as much as possible, she was also in no need of it. But she was certainly not the victim of amnesia. The week before her disappearance, Agatha Christie had lost a diamond ring at Harrods. She wrote to the Knightsbridge department store from Harrogate, describing the ring and asking that, if it were found, it be sent to Mrs Teresa Neele at the Hydro Hotel. Harrods did, in fact, return Mrs Christie’s ring to Mrs Neele.
In 1980, in a magazine called The Bookseller, a very elderly journalist claimed to remember that, in 1926, on the morning after Mrs Christie disappeared, her publisher Sir Godfrey Collins had told him not to talk to anyone about it, as Mrs Christie was in Harrogate, resting.
The strongest likelihood is that