The alternative position is that she was faking it, even trying to frame Archie for killing her. One is that, in the days after the crash, she was experiencing the specific condition of dissociative fugue – a state brought on by trauma and stress, in which you literally forget who you are. This was the action that would leave her family, friends and the police absolutely flummoxed.įor a long time, people investigating Christie’s disappearance have tended towards one of two positions. She abandoned her car and walked away, out of her old life. Now, she had sloughed off the past like a dead skin. “Up to this moment I was Mrs Christie,” she explains. With injuries from the impact to her head and chest, she walked through the wintry countryside in a dreamlike state. It seems that Christie shocked herself into realising that whatever happened, life was worth living.Īnd so, dazed, distressed, but alive, she got out of her car. Had it not been for the hedge, “the car would have plunged over and been smashed to pieces”. I was flung against the steering wheel and my head hit something.”Ĭhristie’s car was found lodged in a hedge, its front wheels “over the edge of the chalk pit”. The car struck something with a jerk and pulled up suddenly. “When I reached a point in the road which I thought was near the quarry I had seen in the afternoon, I turned the car off the road down the hill towards it. At last, she put into action a vague plan that had occupied her thoughts for the previous 24 hours. I thought about jumping in, but realised that I could swim too well to drown … then back to London again, and then on to Sunningdale. I drove automatically down roads I knew … to Maidenhead, where I looked at the river. “All that night I drove aimlessly about … In my mind there was the vague idea of ending everything. “I just wanted my life to end,” she explained. But her writings about her life have had this novelising tendency all along. What Christie said has the unfortunate effect of sounding like one of her novels, in which the “ loss of memory” plot would feature time and time again. But that’s incorrect, and I’ve pieced together the surprising number of statements she did in fact make about it. Was this true? It’s also frequently said that Christie remained silent about this notorious incident for the rest of her life. It has often been claimed that Christie went into hiding in order to frame her husband for her murder. The death of her beloved mother, and Archie’s unsympathetic response (he didn’t even go to the funeral), had strained their relationship almost to breaking point when Archie confessed that he was in love with someone else – a young woman called Nancy Neele – and wanted a divorce. The couple had moved to a grand 12-bedroom house in Sunningdale, Berkshire, which they named Styles, but Archie was often absent and Agatha was increasingly unhappy there. She herself, she later wrote, was “at the beginning of a nervous breakdown”. Christie’s husband confessed that he was in love with someone else – and he wanted a divorceīut by December 1926, her marriage to Archie Christie was in trouble. There were photos of her in the Daily Mail, a new publishing contract with William Collins and a £500 advance for serial rights to The Man in the Brown Suit that paid for a Morris Cowley car. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, her ingenious masterpiece, had just been published and her literary agent was pushing for a follow-up. It’s a mystery that has obsessed her fans ever since.īy this stage, Christie was already a celebrity. When I told people I was writing about Christie, their first questions were often about the 11 dramatic days in 1926 when she “disappeared” at the height of her writing career, causing a nationwide hunt for her corpse. She sidestepped a world that tried to define her. Despite her gigantic success, she retained her perspective as an outsider and onlooker. When an official form required her to put down what she did, the woman who is estimated to have sold 2bn copies always wrote “housewife”. If the women on the train had asked her profession, she’d have said she had none. It was a public image she carefully crafted to conceal her real self. But she deliberately played on the fact that she seemed so ordinary. Yes, she was easy to overlook, as is the case with nearly any woman past middle age. And then, in the railway carriage, there’s the watchful presence of Christie herself, unnoticed.
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