The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries Page 11

  Porshnev himself investigated a case of a female Alma who had been caught in the Ochamchir region in the mid-nineteenth century. Hunters captured a “wild woman” who had ape-like features and was covered in hair; for several years in captivity she was so violent that she could not be approached, and food had to be thrown to her. They called her Zana. Porshnev interviewed many old people – one was a hundred and five – who remembered Zana. They told him how she had become domesticated, and would perform simple tasks like grinding corn. She had a massive bosom, thick muscular arms and legs, and thick fingers; she could not endure warm rooms but preferred the cold. She loved to gorge herself on grapes in the vineyard, and also enjoyed wine – she would drink heavily, then sleep for hours. This may explain how she became a mother on several occasions, to different fathers. Her children usually died because she washed them in the freezing river. (Presumably, having half-human characteristics, they lacked her tremendous inherited endurance of cold.) Finally, her newborn children were taken away from her, and they grew up among the people of the village. Unlike their mother, they could talk and were reasonable human beings. The youngest of these died as recently as 1954 (Zana died about 1890). Porshnev interviewed two of her grandchildren, and noted their dark skin and Negroid looks. Shalikula, the grandson, had such powerful jaws that he could pick up a chair with a man sitting on it. Here, it would seem, is solid, undeniable evidence of the existence of “wild men”.

  8

  Christie, Agatha

  The disappearance of the novelist

  In 1926 Agatha Christie was involved in a mystery that sounds like the plot of one of her own novels. But unlike the fictional crimes unravelled by Hercule Poirot, this puzzle has never been satisfactorily solved.

  At the age of thirty-six, Agatha Christie seemed an enviable figure. She was an attractive redhead, with a touch of grey, and lived with her husband, Colonel Archibald Christie, in a magnificent country house which she once described as “a sort of millionaire-style Savoy suite transferred to the country”.

  She was also the author of seven volumes of detective fiction, of which the latest, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, had caused some controversy because of its “unfair” ending. Yet the authoress was hardly a celebrity; few of her books achieved sales of more than a few thousand.

  Then on the freezing cold night of 3 December 1926 she left her home at Sunningdale, in Berkshire, and disappeared.

  At eleven the next morning, a Superintendent in Surrey Police was handed a report on a “road accident” at Newlands Corner, just outside Guildford. Agatha Christie’s Morris two-seater had been found halfway down a grassy bank with its bonnet buried in a clump of bushes. There was no sign of the driver, but she had clearly not intended to go far, because she had left her fur coat in the car.

  By mid-afternoon the Press had heard of the disappearance, and were besieging the Christie household. From the start the police hinted that they suspected suicide. Her husband dismissed this theory, sensibly pointing out that most people commit suicide at home, and do not drive off in the middle of the night. But an extensive search of the area around Newlands Corner was organized and the Silent Pool, an allegedly bottomless lake in the vicinity, was investigated by deep-sea divers.

  What nobody knew was that Agatha Christie’s life was not as enviable as it looked. Her husband had recently fallen in love with a girl who was ten years his junior – Nancy Neele – and had only recently told her that he wanted a divorce. The death of her mother had been another psychological shock. She was sleeping badly, eating erratic meals, and moving furniture around the house in a haphazard manner. She was obviously distraught, possibly on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  The next two or three days produced no clues to her whereabouts. When it was reported that some female clothes had been found in a lonely hut near Newlands Corner, together with a bottle labelled “opium”, there was a stampede of journalists. But it proved to be a false alarm, and the opium turned out to be a harmless stomach remedy. Some newspapers hinted that Archibald Christie stood to gain much from the death of his wife, but he had a perfect alibi: he was at a weekend party in Surrey. Other journalists began to wonder whether the disappearance was a publicity stunt. Ritchie-Calder suspected that she had disappeared to spite her husband, and bring his affair with Nancy Neele out into the open. He even read through her novels to see whether she had ever used a similar scenario. When the Daily News offered a reward reports of sightings poured in. They all proved to be false alarms.

  Another interesting touch of mystery was added when her brother-in-law Campbell revealed that he had received a letter from her whose postmark indicated that it had been posted in London at 9.45 on the day after her disappearance, when she was presumably wandering around in the woods of Surrey.

  In the Mail the following Sunday there was an interview with her husband in which he admitted “that my wife had discussed the possibility of disappearing at will. Some time ago she told her sister, ‘I could disappear if I wished and set about it carefully . . .’” It began to look as if the disappearance, after all, might not be a matter of suicide or amnesia.

  On 14 December, eleven days after her disappearance, the head waiter in the Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, looked more closely at a female guest and recognized her from newspaper photographs as the missing novelist. He rang the Yorkshire police, who contacted her home. Colonel Christie took an afternoon train from London to Harrogate, and learned that his wife had been staying in the hotel for a week and a half. She had taken a good room on the first floor at seven guineas a week, and had apparently seemed “normal and happy”, and “sang, danced, played billiards, read the newspaper reports of the disappearance, chatted with her fellow guests, and went for walks”.

  Agatha made her way to the dinner table, picked up an evening paper which contained the story of the search for herself, together with a photograph, and was reading it when her husband made his way over to her. “She only seemed to regard him as an acquaintance whose identity she could not quite fix”, said the hotel’s manager. And Archibald Christie told the Press: “She has suffered from the most complete loss of memory and I do not think she knows who she is”. A doctor later confirmed that she was suffering from loss of memory. But Lord Ritchie-Calder later remembered how little she seemed to correspond with the usual condition of amnesia. When she vanished, she had been wearing a green knitted skirt, a grey cardigan and a velour hat, and carried a few pounds in her purse. When she was found she was stylishly dressed, and had three hundred pounds on her. She had told other guests in the hotel that she was a visitor from South Africa.

  There were unpleasant repercussions. A public outcry, orchestrated by the Press, wanted to know who was to pay the £3,000 which the search was estimated to have cost, and Surrey ratepayers blamed the next big increase on her. Her next novel, The Big Four, received unfriendly reviews, but nevertheless sold nine thousand copies – more than twice as many as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And from then on (as Elizabeth Walter has described in an essay called “The Case of the Escalating Sales”) her books sold in increasing quantities. By 1950 all her books were enjoying a regular sale of more than fifty thousand copies, and the final Miss Marple story, Sleeping Murder, had a first printing of sixty thousand.

  Agatha Christie divorced her husband (who wed Miss Neele) and in 1930 married Professor Sir Max Mallowan. But for the rest of her life she refused to discuss her disappearance, and would only grant interviews on condition that it was not mentioned. Her biographer, Janet Morgan, accepts that it was a case of nervous breakdown, followed by amnesia. Yet this is difficult to accept. Where did she obtain the clothes and the money to go to Harrogate? Why did she register under the surname of her husband’s mistress? And is it possible to believe that her amnesia was so complete that, while behaving perfectly normally, she was able to read accounts of her own disappearance, look at photographs of herself, and still not even suspect her identity?

  Lo
rd 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.