The disappearance of Agatha Christie
Surrey and Yorkshire, England, 1926
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
In August 1926, a few months after her mother's death, the writer Agatha Christie, then 36 and already well known for her detective novels, was told by her husband, Archibald Christie, that he had fallen in love with another woman, Nancy Neele, and wanted a divorce. On Friday, December 3, 1926, the two quarrelled at home in Sunningdale, in the county of Berkshire, and he left to spend the weekend with friends, in a party that included his mistress. Late that night, Agatha drove away and did not return.
The next morning, her car, a Morris Cowley, was found at Newlands Corner, in Surrey, at the edge of a chalk pit, with its headlights on, some clothes and an expired driving licence inside. The disappearance became news around the world: the Home Secretary pressed the police, a newspaper offered a 100 pound reward, and more than a thousand police officers, thousands of volunteers and, for the first time in a civilian search, aeroplanes combed the region. It was feared that she had drowned in a nearby lake, her husband came to be viewed with suspicion, and the writer Arthur Conan Doyle gave one of her gloves to a medium.
Sources
In the game
Headlights On
Sunningdale, England, Wednesday, December 8, 1926, 9 pm. Five days ago the novelist Leonora Vesey, 36, drove out of her house on a Friday night and has not been seen since.
On December 14, she was found at a spa hotel in Harrogate, in Yorkshire, nearly 300 kilometres from home, registered under the surname of her husband's mistress, as a lady from Cape Town; her husband was summoned and recognised her. Two doctors certified memory loss, and her autobiography says not a word about those eleven days. Explanations remain divided between a dissociative fugue state, a nervous breakdown and a plan to embarrass her husband. The divorce came through in 1928.
